ABSTRACT
The main thesis of the text amounts to the suggestion that in modern philosophy the “power of the imagination” was a lens passing all significant considerations. The power of the imagination, since the times of I. Kant, through the times of H. Bergson and S. Freud, to the times of G. Deleuze has defined the very possibility of thinking. Modern history of the imagination has its dynamics, and it is a destructive dynamics. Imagination, which in the times of Kant took on the form of the demiurgic power of calling the world out of nothingness, in Bergson’s times becomes, so to speak, a selector of images of being, whereas in psychoanalytic discourse it is degraded to the position of an ordinary phantasm (Lacan, 1992; Žižek, 1998). In the presented text, the author not only reconstructs three stages of thinking about the imagination – transcendental, immanent and psychoanalytic but considers the impossible look beyond the imagination. The author posits that this is the gaze of death. If this were the case, imagination should not be considered as being “creative” but instead “destructive”, pronouncing its ability to “annul” being, that is, to break away from “what is” and follow the direction of “what does not exist”. In the final fragments, the author reflects on the imagination in times of simulation, in times post-truth and post-reality.
