ABSTRACT
Relatively recent, the interest of French philosophy in the term 'imaginary' originates, in particular, from a disaffection with the notion of imagination, which, up to the mid-twentieth century, indicated the faculty of producing and using images. In his work The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), Cornelius Castoriadis distinguishes an instituting social imaginary, from the instituted social imaginary. Cultural geography also developed notions of 'spatial imaginary' or 'geographical imaginary', to designate representations of the world and of place without, however, the distinction between images and imaginaries being the subject of a specific analysis. Bachelard writes that imagination is a movement while images are forms and the problem is that we focused on forms, forgetting the power of movement. The hypothesis is that recurrent factors exist in the secular appropriation of knowledge, but that these recurrent factors cannot be reduced to a mere phenomenon of global imperialism or post-modernist globalization.
