Subjectivity

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0052-3

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images

in regimes of power and subjectivity

Julian Reid1

© Springer Nature Limited 2018

Abstract  The roles of imagination have been largely missed in Foucauldian litera-
tures on subjectivity and constitutive practices of care for the self. His late inquir-
ies into the practices by which the ancients pursued subject-formation have been
situated, largely, within the ongoing debate over the relativity of his philosophical
position on the question of the subject as such. In actuality imagination is crucial, I
argue, for a Foucauldian understanding both of the processes of subjection by which
western regimes have sought to govern human life as well as the practices by which
we can nevertheless constitute ourselves as free subjects. The relationships between
these processes of subjection and practices of freeing up the subject are not binary,
however, and the different functions of imagination in these practices are complex.
Liberating imagination requires, as argued here, hostility to the function of the
image in constitution of the regimes that subject it.

Keywords  Foucault · Imagination · Image · Power · Subjectivity · Self

Introduction

Few thinkers are said to have contributed more to the diminishment of belief in sub-
jectivity as a source of resistance to power than Michel Foucault. Most notoriously,
Foucault is remembered for supposedly pronouncing ‘the death of the subject’ (Hau-
gaard 2002, pp. 157–170). As Lisa Blackman and her fellow editors put it in their
editorial written to mark the launch of this journal in 2008, there is a sense, at the
very least, that Foucault’s work has contributed to ‘a merger of the subject with a

* Julian Reid
reidjulian@gmail.com
1
University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
 J. Reid

general ontology of discourse’ and that his contribution has been overwhelmingly
to foreclose the possibility of subjectivity acting as a viable source of resistance to
power (Blackman et  al. 2008, pp. 8–9). Still today, this view of Foucault tends to
remain and applications of concepts of biopolitics and governmentality from his
later works have done little to remedy the perception (Zukauskaite 2017; Roberts
2013; Mylonas 2013; Shoshana 2012; Binkley 2011).
It is in this context, I believe, that an examination of Foucault’s work on imagina-
tion and his theory of the roles of images in regimes of power and subjectivity ought
to be of great interest. In spite of what he may be thought to have contributed to
the diminishment of subjectivity the fact is Foucault identified imagination strongly
with existential freedom and the images our imaginations are capable of producing
with the relative expression and alienation of that freedom. As such, contextualizing
what Foucault observed on imagination as a specific practice of self-care in pro-
cesses of subject-formation can help in answering broad questions concerning the
relativity of his belief in the subject and its freedoms. As will be argued, imagina-
tion is crucial to Foucault’s work in ways that call for a thorough reevaluation of the
prevailing image of Foucault as a proponent of the subject’s death. Imagination fig-
ures in Foucault’s work as a peculiarly privileged form of experience which reveals
to the subject the conjugated nature of relations between its freedom and its destiny,
its constitutive powers of world making and world destruction, and the movements
of rise and fall by which it choreographs existence.

Foucault and imagination

The roles of imagination, and the centrality of the problems which images have been
said to pose for the subject, have been strangely missed or ignored in critical litera-
tures on the subject and its constitutive practices of care for the self. They receive
virtually no mention in Timothy O’Leary’s otherwise exhaustive study in his Fou-
cault and the Art of Ethics (O’Leary 2002). In fact Foucault’s interest and work on
imagination and images predated his late concerns with ancient practices of care for
the self by some way.1 A concern for theories and phenomena of imagination and
their relations to discourses on subjectivity run throughout Foucault’s thought from
beginning to end. His very first publication, an introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s
Dream and Existence, published in 1954, was itself titled ‘Dream, Imagination and

1
  His interest in the relations between imagination and the image are comparable to but also distinct
from his interest in relations between the visible and the articulable, or ‘seeing and saying,’ which have
been the focus of other discussions. It is relevant of course, also, that Foucault did write, fairly exten-
sively, on visual art. This essay touches on but does not address directly these other conceptual relations
and foci. Doubtless the relations between language and reason in various historical moments, and the
differences between the literary, visual, and conscious or unconscious "psychological" image are also rel-
evant, but will not be explored in detail. To an extent the essay assumes the cross-pollinations of literary,
visual, and psychological images as such and in practices of care for the self. For a much wider treatment
of this problematic and these themes, see Shapiro (2003), and especially a section of the introduction,
‘Hidden Images: Before the Age of Art’ pp. 31–36, as well as the whole of chapter six, ‘Foucault’s Story
of the Eye: Madness, Dreams, Literature,’ pp. 193–216.
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

Existence.’ The insertion of the concept of imagination was not incidental to the
argument Foucault was to make in an extraordinary essay far exceeding the normal
expectations of an introduction to another scholar’s work. ‘The imaginary world has
its own laws, its specific structures, and the image is somewhat more than the imme-
diate fulfillment of meaning’ he argued in a deliberate contestation of the Freudian
approach to dream images (Foucault 1993, p. 35). The essay amounted not only to
a scathing critique of psychological and especially psychoanalytical treatments of
the image and imagination, as well as Sartre’s philosophy of imagination, but also
an argument for a revalorization of imagination as an experience of transcendental
knowledge. In a remarkable passage, he describes how
‘The imagination, in its mysterious cyphers, in the imperfection of its under-
standing, in its half-light, in the presence which it always shows forth only
elusively, points beyond the content of human experience, beyond even the
discursive knowledge we can master, to the existence of a truth which sur-
passes man on all sides, yet bends towards him and offers itself to his mind in
concrete species of images’ (Foucault 1993, p. 45).
Foucault’s biographer, David Macey, in describing this highly neglected text,
argues that it represented a ‘starting point for a project which was either abandoned
or never begun’ (Macey 1993, p. 67). Foucault as we know was not to publish any-
thing again for 7 years. And yet it is wrong to suggest, as Macey does, that the pro-
ject was ever abandoned. The theory of imagination was to remain forever close
to his analytical concerns. In his very first substantial book, History of Madness,
completed in 1960, Foucault, also, and as importantly, located a problematization
of imagination at the center of ‘all classical theories of madness’ (Foucault 2006,
p. 198). Underneath his history of madness lies a profound story concerning the
function of imagination and the image as an object of knowledge in determinations
of the differences between mad and sane forms of subjectivity. This has also gone
largely unaddressed in the critical reception of that history dealing with the roles
of his works on madness in the development of his own thought.2 And in the first
volume of his final major work, The History of Sexuality, there lurks a powerful and
hitherto unexplored assertion of the importance of imagination to modern regimes
of biopower. Regimes more imaginative, he argues, than any other, ‘in creating devi-
ous and supple mechanisms of power’ (Foucault 1990, p. 86). He also wrote and
spoke, at times, alluringly of his own desire for new forms of the critique of power;
forms that would draw on the powers of imagination at the expense of the dull, mor-
alizing, sententiousness which he identified with the state of leftist critique in his
time. ‘The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imagina-
tive scintillations. He would not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the
lightning flashes of possible storms,’ he declared (Foucault 1996, p. 304).
In other words, a concern with imagination runs right through Foucault’s ana-
lytic of power, from its beginnings to its end, as well as being at the center of his

2
  See for example Major-Poetzl (1983).
 J. Reid

concerns when it came to thinking about the method of analysis itself, and thus the
outside of power. The consistency of this concern defies the many methodological
twists and turns which his work otherwise takes over the course of its developmental
trajectory, including his dalliances with both structuralism and hermeneutics (Drey-
fus and Rabinow 1982). Regardless of the differences between the early and the late
Foucault, which doubtless are many, his concern with imagination remained central,
from the very beginning to the very end of his work, to the extent that one must
also recognize the reification of imagination which his work promotes; a reification
which no doubt contradicts the image we are taught to make of Foucault as a thinker
who stressed the historicity of concepts and practices.
Foucault’s relation of imagination and images to his various preoccupations,
ranging from madness to biopower to ancient practices of self-care, is certainly
not accidental. In actuality imagination is crucial, I argue for a Foucauldian
understanding both of the processes of subjection by which western regimes
have sought to govern human life as well as the practices by which we can nev-
ertheless constitute ourselves as free subjects. The relationships between these
processes of subjection and practices of freeing up the subject are, of course,
not binary, and the story of the different functions of imagination in these pro-
cesses and practices is also complex. It is not a question of regimes seeking to
govern the imaginations of their subjects and resistances that depend simply on
an insurrection of imagination, in the manner sometimes simplistically supposed
(Berardi 2012). On the one hand, it can be observed that the West has long since
maintained a deep suspicion towards imagination, and that a good deal of Fou-
cault’s work on the matter is dedicated to revealing the different ways in which
that suspicion is sedimented in the regimes of power and knowledge he analyzes.
On the other hand, his own critique of power functions, by way of method, as a
kind of unmasking. That is to say it is itself immensely fueled by a suspicion of
the image of power, and desire to tear the mask from it, to reveal the true face
of power. The liberation of imagination requires a seemingly paradoxical hostil-
ity to the function of the image in the constitution of regimes responsible for its
subjection.
This latter recognition—the idea that power itself is fundamentally dependent
on a deployment of imagination and the manifestation of a mask—is as impor-
tant for a full understanding of the nature of Foucault’s critique. This applies
especially to the struggles of individuals and collectivities with the powers of
liberalism. The images liberalism manifests of itself, and those with which we
identify, are the sources of our struggle with and against it, Foucault main-
tains. Comprehending liberalism as a regime of power requires that we recog-
nize, firstly, the unprecedented scale of the imagination at work in its develop-
ment, as well, crucially, as the function of its ability to mask itself in hiding
the work of that imagination. Masking plays a crucial role in the political func-
tioning of imagination. Indeed, Foucault explicates this role of the mask in his
essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (Foucault 1998a, b). Foucault’s aims with
respect to liberalism were precisely to unmask it: To tear the mask which hid
the intolerable face of liberalism behind it, and in a certain sense to show us the
reality of its face. But such an approach to the mask of liberalism is not to be
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

confused with the naivete of the historian who seeks the ‘removal of every mask
to (ultimately) disclose an original identity’ (Foucault 1998a, b, p. 371). A mask
does not simply hide that which is true; it also displays, makes an image, and
performs a presence. Even the face itself, beneath the mask, has to be addressed
as a kind of image. The mask of liberalism in other words has to be addressed
as a product, even the fundamental creation, of its own imagination; an expres-
sion of its own way of caring for itself. This is the great paradox of the function
of the image in liberalism. It strips the image from its subjects, demanding that
they care for themselves by telling the truth, living unmasked lives, while caring
for itself through the careful construction of an image which serves as a mask
for itself. Masked, it also unmasks. Does one do justice to Foucault’s aspirations
to ally imagination with critique simply by aiming to strip the mask away from
the subject of power, or is there another possibility? This is a fundamental ques-
tion to be addressed in this article.

Care of the self

The absence of attention to Foucault’s interest in images and imagination is

rather odd. His very last book, the third volume of The History of Sexuality, titled
Care of the Self, opened with an analysis of Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of
Dreams, is itself a book dedicated to the question of how to comport the self
towards the images encountered in dreams (Foucault 1998b, pp. 4–36). For the
Greeks, the interpretation of these particular kinds of images was a ‘technique
of existence’ given that dream images were thought to be ‘signs of reality or
messages from the future,’ the decipherment of which could aid the subject to
live a better life (Foucault 1998b, p. 5). Images encountered in sleep functioned,
according to Artemidorus, either to help us understand better who we are, now
in a present reality, or to forewarn us of some future event. They had we might
well say, both a parrhesiastic as well as prophetic function, in terms of the truths
they were thought to contain. Dream image decipherment, in this sense, was not
simply a hobby, or an expression of a curiosity, for the Greeks, but a practice of
great importance in the management of one’s existence, and for preparing one-
self for events on the horizon (Foucault 1998b, p. 28). Among the many kinds
of dreams the Ancients thought it necessary to undertake the analysis of, sexual
dreams were among the most important (Foucault 1998b, pp. 17–25). For the
ancients dream images of a sexual nature served the function of revealing to the
subject concerned either some element of their present reality or their future that
they really needed to know in order to be able to care for themselves. And in this
sense, all images were as equal as they were innocent. No image could be deemed
so perverted that it could not serve a truth function within practices of care of the
self.
But the nature of the images on which one had to work in order to ‘care for
oneself’ among the ancients was, as Foucault went on to discuss, much broader
than simply dream images. In fact what ‘care of the self’ depended on was a com-
mitment to a life conducted through a permanent examination of the world itself
 J. Reid

as a space of perpetual encounter with images, indeed a construction of the world

itself as a world of images; the world-as-image, and a world in which images are
to be confronted with great caution. There is a conflict over the image, and its
capacities to aid or damage the self, at the heart of Ancient experience, between
those who advocate a power of imagination and those who fear its dangers,
with the latter arousing a culture of suspicion towards images. To some extent
this division embodies that of the Apolline and Dionysiac which Nietzsche dis-
sected in The Birth of Tragedy, and Foucault’s treatment of this division might
well be recognized, as Gary Sharipo has convincingly argued, for its extension of
Nietzsche’s critique (Nietzsche 1993; Shapiro 2003, pp. 201–207).
Foucault identifies a hermeneutics of suspicion towards images with Epictetus,
especially, who urged that we ought not to accept any image without subjecting it
to examination, and should first address the image by saying, ‘hold on a moment;
let me see who you are, and what you represent. Let me put you to the test’ (Epic-
tetus 2008, p. 123). This practice, of subjecting images to tests, was fundamental
to Epictetus’ understanding of how the ‘fight’ against images can best proceed
(Epictetus 2008, p. 121). He credited images with possessing a life of their own,
for ‘they impose themselves on people’s attention with a will of their own’ (Epic-
tetus 2008, p. 212). Our encounter with them is not voluntary. They are a force
with which we must do battle, pitching our own will against theirs. The image
thus is always a source of struggle, for Epictetus. That against which we must
fight, subdue, and score victories against (Epictetus 2008, pp. 121–124). Together
and combined, the world of images comes at us in the manner of a ‘storm.’ ‘Is
there any storm greater than the storm of forceful images that can put reason to
flight?’ he asks (Epictetus 2008, p. 123).
The faculty which Epictetus believed enables us to subject images to tests was,
precisely, reason. Reason is that faculty with which we are ‘armed’ in this battle
against the forces of images (Epictetus 2008, p. 51). It is that faculty which allows us
to make the ‘correct use’ of images, by testing them, and ‘only deploying those that
have passed the test’ in a life spent guarded against the dangers of deception (Epictetus
2008, p. 51). All the tragedies of human life, Epictetus argued, arise from the poor
deployment of images. ‘You take the Iliad; it’s nothing but people’s images and how
they dealt with them’ (Epictetus 2008, p. 67). It was an image that made Paris rob
Menelaus of his wife. And an image that led Helen to run off with him. Fear and anxi-
ety are likewise products of a deception brought on by the faculty of imagination. ‘For
instance, whenever I’m on board ship and gaze into the deep, or look around me and
see nothing but ocean, I’m gripped by terror, imagining that if we wreck I will have to
swallow all this sea. It doesn’t occur to me that around three pints will do me in. So is
it the sea that terrifies me? No, it is my imagination’ (Epictetus 2008, p. 115). Rather
than being overcome by the images our imaginations send at us, we are required, he
argued, to grow and become athletes of the image. Practice reason over imagination
and you will become ‘the real athlete, namely, the one training to face off against the
most formidable of images’ (Epictetus 2008, p. 123). Fundamentally, images are ‘not
in the least to be feared’ but are only superficially frightening (Epictetus 2008, p. 212).
And in our testing of them, the wise spurn and reject them, while the foolish and mad
let them in, conceding to their will and freedom to live within him.
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

The use of images represented for Epictetus ‘the essence of good and evil’ (Epic-
tetus 2008, p. 77). By exercising care in the use we make of images, we come into
contact with our divine nature (Epictetus 2008, p. 92). Interestingly, Epictetus did
not deny this capacity for the utilization of images to animals either. If the don-
key were not able to use images it would not be able to walk. But animals, unlike
humans, he argued, do not possess the ability to reflect on their use of images. If the
donkey were capable of such reflection it would refuse to walk with the load bur-
dened upon it by its human master (Epictetus 2008, p. 92).
A further dimension of the function of the image in practices of care for the self
among the ancients of particular interest to Foucault was its roles in writing, and self-
writing in particular. In the writings of Athanasius, we encounter the idea that writing
itself functions as a practice by which we make an image of our self for our self. By
writing down the actions and movements of our souls we turn those actions and move-
ments into an image we can then bear witness to (Foucault 1997, p. 234). What is
writing to oneself, Foucault asks, if it is not a way of creating within oneself, the gaze
of another? A way of establishing a division within the self itself such that what one
has done and what one has thought can be subjected to that gaze of another whom is,
nevertheless oneself; the subjection of the self by the self to a gaze which allows one
to look down upon the self and establish the subject within the soul; in other words,
the establishment of a form of correspondence between self and subject. What others
are to us each in the context of ordinary correspondence the diary is to the solitary;
the other by whom, in writing to, the solitary is able to establish an intimate but cor-
rectional gaze with (Foucault 1997, pp. 243–247). An imagined self, for the corre-
spondent is always, likewise, fundamentally imaginary in body. Either one is seeking,
through self-writing, to reveal oneself to oneself, or to another. To write in this way,
either to oneself, or to another self, is to show oneself, to make manifest the self, to
project ourselves into the light, and show our face, to a gaze (Foucault 1997, p. 243). A
way, let us say, of reporting on oneself, of broadcasting a face, and an image; writing
as self-broadcasting. And an image of our self which we broadcast into the light of a
gaze which itself is every bit as imaginary as that which we send of ourselves. This is
the delicate fiber optic on which the technology of the self that is writing depends, and
has depended, from the classical age to the present.
Foucault also discussed the practices of correcting one’s image of oneself, which
became integral to care of the self (Foucault 1998b, p. 57). The practices, especially,
by which one learnt to see oneself as both ill and threatened with illness (Foucault
1998b, p. 57). The ways in which, image correction, functioned, in other words to
produce a vulnerable subject. For the subject to care for itself, it was necessary that
it conduct an operation upon the images which it possesses of itself; the ways in
which it sees itself, and presents itself to itself. Vulnerability is today a deeply dis-
cursive property, investing the neoliberal subject as much as it continues to incite a
purported critique of liberalism (Reid 2011). We know also that it is a property he
himself identified with the birth of the modern liberal subject of Homo Economicus
(Foucault 2008, p. 277). But in fact in this last work, he went further than that, to
excavate its origins in classical practices of the care of the self wherein and where-
upon ‘everyone must discover that he is in a state of need, that he needs to receive
medication and assistance’ (Foucault 1998b, p. 57).
 J. Reid

What is original in Foucault’s treatment of the life of images in ancient thought?

We can find the basic claim as to the importance of imagination and the role of
images for classical thought in the work of the historian Pierre Hadot, who it is
said, was greatly influential for Foucault’s late turn to the ancients (Hadot 1997, pp.
195–202). Why should we, in other words, read Foucault to learn this? Why also
did Foucault choose to focus on post-Socratic thought and practice at the expense of
pre-Socratic Greek culture?
The pre-Socratic Greeks spoke of eikon, a term used to describe the painted
or sculpted figurative representations made by artists; the images they created
(Detienne 1996, pp. 108–109). By the end of the seventh century, the nature of the
understanding of such images underwent a fundamental change. No longer inter-
preted as religious signs, so did they come to be recognized as simply human crea-
tions; ‘figurative signs functioning to evoke some external reality’ (Detienne 1996,
pp. 108–109). Suddenly the image belonged to, or was the product of, a human
creator, or artist, ‘situated midway between reality and its image’ (Detienne 1996,
pp. 108–109). In other words the artist’s discovery and assertion of himself as
agent ‘was intimately associated with the invention of the image’ (Detienne 1996,
pp. 108–109). Something parallel occurred in this same period within the field of
poetry, whereby the poet Simonides was able to declare speech to be ‘the image
(eikon) of reality’ (Detienne 1996, p. 108). Conflating the creations of speech thus
with painting and sculpture, Simonides can be seen to have constituted a theory of
the image, whereby the figurative representations made by artists, both painted and
sculpted (eikon) were made to converge conceptually with the linguistic representa-
tions of speech (Detienne 1996, p. 197). Thus was it that the Greeks were first able
to speak of images (eikon) in terms that brought together the wide range of different
forms of representations that still today in English we assume as normal when we
invoke the concept of ‘image.’
But something further was at stake in this conflation of the creations of the art of
speech with the arts of painting and sculpture. Arts of painting and sculpture were
conceived not simply as arts for the creation of images, but also as arts of illusion.
The skill of the painter was considered as defined by his abilities to deceive the
viewer by making things appear real which are not, and by giving the impression
of life where life is not. This was precisely what an image entailed for the Greeks
around this epochal period of the seventh century—the illusion of life and reality
(Detienne 1996, p. 108). Declaring speech to be the image of reality meant, like-
wise, conceiving the art of speech not as a means by which to access reality or locate
the truth, but to create the illusion of the real by making images. Poetry, for Simon-
ides, was precisely this; ‘an art of illusion whose function was to deceive by conjur-
ing up “images”’ (Detienne 1996, p. 116). Deception, in this period, did not have
the negative connotations with which we associate it now. It was seen as a facet
of political skill and indicative of a practical intelligence, associated with wisdom,
even (Detienne 1996, p. 116). It was understood to occur in  situations and spaces
where ambiguity reigns, and where in other words the difference between the true
and the false is unclear, and where image and reality coincide.
The space of the Greek city was understood to be precisely this kind of space, a
space of ambiguity, and thus called for forms of intelligence able to operate amid
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

ambiguity, playing upon the dubious differences between the image and the real.
The poetic skills of Simonides, his abilities to conjure images and deceive an audi-
ence as to the nature of the real, were the prelude to sophism. The sophists were in
turn perceived to be ‘masters of illusion, who presented men not with the truth but
with fictions, images, and “idols,”’ which they persuaded others to accept as reality
(Detienne 1996, p. 117). This period, of and in seventh century Greece, was pre-
cisely the period of the discovery of the arts by which men could act on the imagi-
nations of other men, deceiving them by dint of the images it is possible to make;
a period when nobody still cared for truth, but only for that which is convincing
(Detienne 1996, p. 119).
It was around the end of the sixth century that a form of philosophical thought
was born in Greece that opposed itself to the Sophists and their poetic skills of image
making. While the Sophists were concerned with the uses to be made of images in
order to control and manipulate their external environments, and especially to achieve
powers over others, these new philosophico-religious sects were interested purely in
achieving self-transformation (Detienne 1996, pp. 119–120). And while the poetic
techniques which the sophists employed to achieve their ends were said to mark an
abrupt break from the forms of religious thought and practice which preceded the
advent of sophistry, the new philosophico-religious sects sought to prolong them
(Detienne 1996, p. 120). Indeed the latter sought not simply self-transformation but
salvation. They developed techniques that would in turn constitute rules for living,
recipes for sanctity, rhythms of life, ‘composed of obligations and taboos’ that would
enable the practitioner to purge temporality from his life. This project they ascribed
to themselves opposed itself to the world of sophists, the world that is, of images,
the life of which was defined by fluidity and flow; a life that is perpetually mobile,
shifting in essence, ambiguous in content (Detienne 1996, p. 127). It is a project that
would gather apace in fifth and fourth century Athens, generating the counter-theory
of the image which would reach its culmination in Plato and beyond: a project that
sought to purge the real of its relation with the image. A project which Foucault him-
self would map in opening up the writings on care for the self which inflected the
works of the ancients well beyond Plato, into the Roman era.
When that culture was as rich in ideas concerning the life of images, what was the
cost of that focus? Without treating the pre-Socratic culture of the image, we miss
a fundamental aspect of the post-Socratic one. Consistent to both pre-Socratic and
post-Socratic theories of the image is the idea and understanding that they are things
that deceive. Deception is the main action of an image. Its basic capacity is that of
an ability to deceive. But it is only in post-Socratic conditions that this capacity for
deception is problematized in negative terms. The fear of being deceived runs right
through the Stoic traditions which Foucault unpacked so assiduously. It is present
in Epictetus as much as it is present in Aurelius. But prior to the advent of the age,
Foucault documented there existed a culture of the image in which their capacities
to deceive were celebrated, and in which the human art of deception, through the
skillful manipulation of images was also admired. For the pre-Socratic Greeks, the
deception performed by images was a poetic action. Consider the deception per-
formed on Achilles by the image (eidolon) of his dead friend, Patroclus. The image
of Patroclus visits Achilles in his sleep, ‘hovering at his head,’ only to rise and speak
 J. Reid

to him (Homer 1990, p.561). Stretching out his loving arms, Achilles tries but fails
to seize hold of his friend. ‘Like a wisp of smoke…with a high thin cry,’ this was
an image ‘true, but no real breath of life’ (Homer 1990, pp. 562–563). The image
deceives Achilles. And yet it also, in its deception, instructs. ‘All night long the
ghost of stricken Patroclus hovered over me, grieving, sharing warm tears, telling
me, point by point, what I must do’ (Homer 1990, p. 563). The image, by way of its
deceit, cares for Achilles. Achilles need not care for his self by battling the image,
because the image cares for Achilles. What we moderns have learnt to consider a
hallucination was for the pre-Socratic Greeks a poetic and spiritual experience that
aided its heroes in their darkest hours.
Foucault’s historical analyses of practices of self-care failed to convey these dif-
ferences between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic cultures of image and imagination.
It is only by going back further into the history of the Greeks than Foucault ventured
that we can grasp how peculiar and transformative a revolution in the thinking and
practice of self-care the post-Socratics initiated in their hostility towards the world-
as-image. Before the subject became defined by its abilities to defend itself from
its images, the image was the subject’s greatest weapon. The abilities to deceive,
through a skillful, manipulative, and convincing deployment of images, was the fun-
damental hallmark of what it meant to be a subject for the pre-Socratic Greeks. A
subject defined not chiefly by its capacities for self-mastery but powers over others.
A subject defined neither by its capacities to locate and speak the truth concerning
life and reality, but by its abilities to conjure illusions concerning what is real and of
life; the imaginal subject of antiquity. Without attending to these major differences,
and the conflict indeed between them, we risk losing sense of what was at stake in
the advent of the practices of self-care through which western subjectivity came to
be curated.
Why, then, should we bother with Foucault’s histories of practices of care of the
self? It seems to me that to render them useful we must, not only recognize their
contextual value when brought into contact with our knowledge of pre-Socratic
practices of self-care, but consider how they compare and join up with his analyt-
ics of modern practices and attitudes towards the same ontological stuff on which
modern theories of subjectivity have been based, images. It is with this second aim
in mind that I now turn to Foucault’s historical treatment of madness and the roles of
images and imagination in modern understandings of the sources of madness.

Madness

Imagination has most typically been identified in the modern theory of madness
as the faculty most at risk of being affected by the malady, and thus, that which is
most at risk in its onset. Hallucinations, for Boissier de Sauvages, writing in the
eighteenth century, were ‘sicknesses whose principal symptom is a depraved and
erroneous imagination…errors of the soul occasioned by the vice of organs situ-
ated outside the brain, which allow the imagination to be seduced’ (Foucault 2006,
p. 197). Such ‘troubled and strayed’ journeys of imagination, when coupled with
corporeal disturbances, were said likewise by practically every early modern theorist
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

of madness to be accountable for ‘delirium’ (Foucault 2006, p. 198). But as Fou-

cault stressed in his study of early modern diagnoses of madness, within these theo-
ries, the imagination itself was considered to be innocent (Foucault 2006, p. 232).
Images, in themselves, were not thought to be mad, nor were they in themselves,
thought to cause madness. ‘Madness begins,’ only when a subject ‘lends a value of
truth to the image’ concerned (Foucault 2006, p. 232). Just as the sane subject exer-
cises its sanity by confronting images, limiting them, and interrogating them, so the
mad subject is made mad not by the image in itself, but by ‘turning all that is given
in the image into an abusive truth’ (Foucault 2006, p. 232).
Madness, therefore, was said to entail, a going beyond images, by ‘allowing the
image to take on the value of total and absolute truth’ with the mad subject nev-
ertheless remaining embedded inside the image (Foucault 2006, p. 232). The sane
subject maintains its sanity by stepping outside of the image and perceiving its unre-
ality while the mad subject, by contrast, ‘allows himself to be totally caught up in its
immediate vivacity,’ becoming ‘entirely absorbed in it…inside the image, trapped
within it and incapable of escaping’ (Foucault 2006, p. 232). Sanity, in other words,
is not preserved by divesting oneself of one’s images, but by this act of stepping
outside of the world of the image, subjecting it to reason, with a view to seeing
its limits, while madness entails an act of stepping inside, and looking at the world
from within the world of the image, affirming its truth from within. In the context
however of this decision as to whether to step out or into the image, images, and
the faculty for their production, which is to say, imagination, remain innocent. The
world of imagination, then, we might say, has been conceptualized in the modern
theory of madness, principally, as a space; a space into which one either steps in or
steps out, but the relation with which one cannot avoid. Reason was likewise con-
ceptualized as that technology which enables one to assume the necessary distance
from the world of images.
It is also the case that in History of Madness Foucault examined the role of
images in the doubly pictorial and embodied senses that the concept of image avails
for us, and which makes the question of the relation between pictorial images, exter-
nal to the beholder, and embodied images, internal to their maker, so pressing. For
painted ‘images’ played as important a role in the story he had to tell concerning the
changing ways in which madness has been made sense of within western culture.
At a certain point, in the fifteenth century, he argued, ‘the vocation of the Image’
underwent a change, whereby it was able to show us something different about mad-
ness to that which was then being transmitted through written discourse (Foucault
2006, p. 16). He wrote indeed of the ‘liberation’ of the image and the way in which
it began, then, ‘to gravitate around its own insanity’ in ways that were not the case
in the treatment of madness within language (Foucault 2006, p. 17). Images, in other
words, on Foucault’s account, and in contrast with the language-based theories of
madness which stressed the innocence of images, contain their own insanity; an
insanity which it is their vocation to display, and fascinate us with. Thus was it that
pictorial depictions of madness around this time suddenly became ‘overburdened
with supplementary meanings’ as ‘the world of images underwent a fundamental
change’ (Foucault 2006, p. 17).
 J. Reid

The power of the image also changed, then, such that it no longer tasked itself
with instructing human beings how to think about madness in a critical way, from
the viewpoint of reason, but instead served to fascinate the viewer with the cosmic
powers of madness itself (Shapiro 2003, pp. 207–213). Foucault wrote indeed of the
‘fascination’ that lurked in the pictorial images of madness in this time. In the paint-
ings, especially, of the early Renaissance the significance of the relations between
man and animal took on a different bearing, as ‘it was mankind that began to feel
itself the object of the animals’ gaze, as they took control and showed him his own
truth. Impossible animals, the fruit of mad imaginings, such as those depicted in the
fifteenth century Dutch painter, Dieric Bouts’ Hell, became the secret nature of man
as the animal realm moved out of range of the ‘domesticating human symbolism’
otherwise embodied in linguistic discourses on the relation between man and ani-
mal (Foucault 2006, p. 19). Madness was transformed in such images from being an
object of critical discourse into the truth of the world as such, and ‘a spectacle’ with
which to be fascinated rather than an unfortunate pathology of the mind and body to
be observed from a distance (Foucault 2006, pp. 24–25).
Foucault was dealing here, then, with the surface of contact that existed between the
power of the embodied image, the theory of which, as he also argued, was central to all
thought concerning madness of the classical era, and the power of the pictorial image,
the vocation of which was to tell us the truth of madness, in ways, that only images
themselves can. The exercise of the vocation of which created what he described as a
‘schema of opposition between the cosmic experience of madness in the proximity of
fascinating forms, and a critical experience of the same madness’ as availed to us by
linguistic theories of the phenomenon (Foucault 2006, p. 25). A gap was opened here,
in the experience of madness, ‘that will never be repaired’ he wrote (Foucault 2006, p.
26). Either madness is ‘confined to the universe of discourse’ or it is let loose in silent
images, showing us, silently, the truth of ‘the tragic madness of the world’ (Foucault
2006, p. 26). And yet, as he went on to explain, the modernity of the western experi-
ence of madness would be defined by the ways in which ‘the cosmic, tragic experience
of madness’ would become hidden and suborned by ‘the exclusive privileges of a criti-
cal consciousness’ as ‘the linearity that led rationalist thought to consider madness as
a form of mental illness’ served to mask, and only mask, a form of tragic experience,
which it would never succeed in obliterating; the work of Nietzsche and Artaud being
two singular reminders of (Foucault 2006, pp. 27–28).
The connection between imagination and madness would be explored, again,
when Foucault returned to the subject of modern psychiatry, in the 1970s, and is
evidenced in the lectures given at the College de France, titled Abnormal, between
1974 and 1975 (Foucault 2004). Then, especially he was concerned with the ways in
which a pathologization of imagination in nineteenth century psychiatry connected
not just with madness but sexuality. Foucault would go on, of course, as discussed
in the previous section, to explore the relations between imagination and sexual-
ity much more when he analyzed the ancient theories of the truths to be derived
from images of sex occurring to the subject in its dream life. For the ancients, dream
images of a sexual nature served the function of revealing to the subject concerned
some element of their present reality or their future that they really needed to know
in order to be able to care for themselves. And in this sense all images were as equal
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

as they were innocent. No image could be deemed so perverted that it could not
serve a truth function within practices of care of the self. In the modern era, how-
ever, the imagination became specified as an ‘agent of deviation’ in the activation of
perversions while the image became identified as that which ‘prepares the way for
all the sexual aberrations’ (Foucault 2004, p. 280).
Beneath the conflict between the cosmic and critical experiences of madness, as
well as sexuality, Foucault revealed, a conflict between the image and language: a
peculiarly modern conflict that reflected the historical sedimentation of previous
conflicts between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic cultures of both image and lan-
guage. This was a conflict over the relative truth and power of images. For the image
is not innocent, Foucault averred, in passing judgment upon the modern treatment of
imagination in discourses of madness. The truth of the world as such is delivered up
to us in the form of the image, and no truth-giver can be said to be innocent. It is a
truth that he argued is only suppressed by language, and hidden by the mask which
criticality creates for the subject that performs that suppression. The modernity of
the subject will be decided by its ability to maintain that mask, to prevent its tearing
or slipping, in the face of the attacks upon it by all those who wish to unmask it; by
all those who wish for the reconstitution of a form of subject predicated on practices
of imagination at the expense of the truths told by reason. But can that action of
unmasking be performed without recourse to the very modes of criticality, and the
sententiousness of the critic, which the mask itself of western reason is made of?

The vocation of the image

The depths and complexities of Foucault’s treatments of the vocations of the

image, treatments which range from the beginning to the very ends of his life’s
works, underline the importance of the concepts of imagination, imaginaries, and
images to his philosophy and politics as a whole in ways that have seldom been
recognized in Foucault scholarship to date. An exception to this rule is the work of
Laura Hengehold, whose book The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant
and Foucault has done a great service for our understanding of this importance.
As Hengehold argues, the function of imagination is central to Foucault’s account
of the operations of political power, as well as to the problem of how to resist it
(2007). Not only is it the case, as is by now well known and attested to in Foucault
scholarship, that Foucault argued the state to be a ‘mythicized abstraction’ (Foucault
2007, p. 109), for his theory rests upon an understanding of the state as a product of
schematizations of the imagination (Hengehold 2007, p. 212), as well as being the
objects of ‘imaginary identification’ by those moderns who have sought to shore
up its powers, speak truth to it, seeks shelter from it, occupy it, as well as resist it
(Hengehold 2007, p. 213). Imaginary identification is the act and process by which
‘a person takes stock of her skills and relations as a totality by projecting them onto
an image’ (Hengehold 2007, p. 213). In a sense it is that act by which the vocation
of any given subject is formed. Without it, subjection to the object with which one
identifies cannot take place. In this sense, his entire theory of the process of subjec-
tivation rests upon a claim as to the function of imagination in it. It is the image with
 J. Reid

which we identify that is the source of our subjection. Freeing up individuals and
collectivities from their states of subjection thus requires the ability, on their parts,
to alter the image in ways that bring an end to the reality of their identification with
it. An ability, that is, to see differently.
However there is something else at stake in the function of the concept of imagina-
tion in Foucault’s work which we have yet to touch on and which might in many ways
be his most important contribution to our understanding of its relations to our pre-
sent and the problem of power especially. We are all familiar now with the immense
influence of his theory of biopower and his attack upon the juridical concept of power
which the development of the former concept led to (Reid 2006). ‘Why,’ Foucault
asked, ‘is this juridical notion of power, involving as it does the neglect of everything
that makes for its productive effectiveness, its strategic resourcefulness, its positivity,
so readily accepted?’ (Foucault 1990, p. 86). In this society of ours which, Foucault
argued, in a remarkable passage of The History of Sexuality, ‘has been more imagina-
tive, probably, than any other in creating devious and supple mechanisms of power’
perhaps the crowning achievement of this regime we are faced with has been its ability
to ‘mask a substantial part of itself’ (Foucault 1990, p. 86). No regime has been more
imaginative in creating devious and supple mechanisms of power than this regime he
named biopower. Yes, to comprehend liberalism, as a regime of power, given that it
was liberalism which Foucault was fundamentally addressing in his analysis of bio-
power, requires that we recognize, firstly, the unprecedented scale of the imagina-
tion at work in its development, as well, crucially, as the function of its mask in hid-
ing the products of that imagination. What distinguishes liberalism, above all, is the
scale, depth, and power of its imagination. No regime can rival it on this plane of the
imagination, Foucault says, here in The History of Sexuality. It is not, in other words,
its powers to reason, which distinguishes liberalism. Neither is it its unprecedented
abilities to wage war, use or threaten violence, no matter how important those powers
might be said to be (Dillon and Reid 2009). It is its powers to imagine.
The ascription of deviancy to biopower ought not to be taken lightly. In this for-
mulation, Foucault turns back on biopower the discourse which it itself has used to
pathologize its own subjects of governance. Suddenly, it is biopower itself that is
the deviant. It is biopower itself that hides from the light, masking its true face. And
suddenly it is biopower that is defined by the kind of excess of imagination usually
ascribed to its own deviants. But it is the mask with which it has hidden its own
mechanisms that is, he argued, most indispensible of all. A mask hides, of course. It
prevents us from seeing the reality of the face behind it. But it does more than sim-
ply hide. A mask also presents an image to the world.3
A mask is a special kind of image. It is that which hides an image, but an image
itself it is, nonetheless. An image made upon an image. Masks are often very beau-
tiful. Preferable, certainly, in many cases to the faces they cover. Foucault himself
became notorious, intriguingly, for conducting an interview in 1980 with Le Monde,
behind a mask, ‘The Masked Philosopher’ (Foucault 1996, pp. 302–308). The mask

3
  One could argue that this understanding of the function of the mask in the development of biopower is
foundational to liberalism itself. See, for example, Howard Caygill’s discussion of the function of masks
in the political theory of Hobbes and of Leviathan in particular; (Caygill 1989, pp. 21–31).
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

can also liberate one to say and to speak in ways that an exposed face makes more
difficult. ‘I write so as not to have a face’ he was also known to have said. The mask
frees up, creates a space for the imagination that the prevailing insistence on the
necessity to be true, to show one’s face, would otherwise prevent. ‘The sententious
critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would
not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible
storms’ (Foucault 1996, p. 304).
What Foucault’s theory of the function of imagination in the development of lib-
eral biopolitics opens us up to, then, is an immense paradox. On the one hand, we
have never been confronted with a regime of power so adept in its abilities to imag-
ine new mechanisms of power. Liberalism simply is, most fundamentally of all, a
regime that thrives on the strength of imagination alone. On the other hand, it masks
itself in reason. We do not, ordinarily, credit liberalism with being a theory and prac-
tice of imagination. Indeed it seems to harbor a deep suspicion towards images, in
the same ways that its genealogical forebears, those ancient architects of care of the
self, expressed their fear of images, and their disdain for the dangers an overwrought
imagination could and was said to pose for the subject in question. Again these are
features that reoccur in the modern era, when imagination is diagnosed as the princi-
ple cause of madness. This disdain for imagination is also played out in liberalism’s
own approach to techniques of power. What Foucault described, at the beginning
of Discipline and Punish, in describing the execution of Damiens was precisely a
form of spectacle, which is to say of imagery as modality of power, which would
gradually be exorcized from the armory of liberalism. Liberalism would seem, on a
certain level, to abhor spectacle. Yet this does not undermine its investment in imag-
ination itself as a source of its power. Rather, it emphasizes its mask-like qualities.4
The American literary critic, Lionel Trilling, writing in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, exposed the great paradox of liberal modernity in so far as liberalism ‘in the
very interests of its great primal act of imagination, by which it establishes its
essence and existence—in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement
and freedom and rational direction of human life—drifts towards a denial of the
emotions and the imagination’ (Trilling 1950, pp. xix–xx). The liberal imagination
is overwrought, and in being overwrought, it is not only too powerful, but powerful
in ways that denies the very humans it claims to emancipate the power of imagina-
tion itself.5 In seeking to secure its own imaginary, liberalism was led to prescribe

4
  Though it is outside of the capacities of this short paper, we doubtless require a full and proper gene-
alogy of the liberal imagination and the images and masks it has deployed. Of such images and masks
there are, of course, many. One image with which it would not be irrelevant to start with would be that
of the idle Native American on which the Lockean image of the masterful liberal subject was based. One
would then want to consider how the contestation of that image developed through the deployment of
counter-images, including the ‘noble savage’ of Rousseau and the ‘savage noble’ which Michael Clifford
treats in his excellent genealogy of the modern political subject (Clifford 2001, pp. 1–3). The contem-
porary shift in the liberal imaginary from its investment in security to images of the resilient subject are
also relevant here, and themselves deeply invested in images of indigeneity. See especially (Chandler and
Reid 2018).
5
  Of course Trilling was dealing primarily with literary images and concerned with the effects of liberal-
ism on literary cultures, rather than images indigenous to the imagination as such. However, his analysis
of those effects was generative of claims by no means limited to literature or the literary imagination.
 J. Reid

the limits to imagination as such, and in a fundamental way, pose the capacity for
imagination as a threat to the sanctity of human freedom. In contrast, and in order to
escape the straitjackets of liberal modernity, it is necessary to recover an understand-
ing of imagination as constitutive of the life of the human.6 The extraordinary power
which all humans possess to produce images that take on a life of their own, and yet
which depend on us as much as we depend on them. Images live within us, animat-
ing us as much as we animate them (Mitchell 2005). They are as much an element of
our corporeal experience, our embodiment, as any other bodily attribute may be said
to be. It is in that sense that liberalism, in its promotion of biopower, does immense
damage to the embodied life of its subjects, by posing that very life as the source of
a danger. We are, as the artist Bill Viola, has asserted and emphasized in his work,
‘living databases of images—collectors of images’ which never stop growing and
transforming within us once inside us (Agamben 2013, p. 5). The human is that
peculiar house which images inhabit, and through which images are given time, and
thus life. Without images, the time and psychic life of the human dissipates into the
time and life of the bio human (Dillon and Reid 2009).
Foucault’s aims with respect to liberalism were consistent with Trilling’s earlier
critique. He desired to unmask it: To tear the mask which hid the intolerable face of
liberalism behind it, and in effect to reveal the reality of its face. But his approach to
the mask of liberalism has then to be understood in distinction from that of the his-
torian which he denounces on account of the naivety of its belief in precisely such a
‘true face’ lurking behind a mask (Foucault 1998a, b, p. 371). A mask, as Foucault
well understood, does not simply hide; it also displays, makes an image, and per-
forms a presence. The face itself, lurking behind the mask, also has to be addressed
as a kind of image. The mask of liberalism in other words has to be addressed as a
product, even the fundamental creation, of its own imagination, an expression of its
own way of caring for itself. This is the great paradox of the function of the image in
liberalism. It strips the image from its subjects, demanding that they care for them-
selves by telling the truth, living unmasked lives, while caring for itself through the
careful construction of an image which serves as a mask for itself.7 Masked, it also
unmasks. Does one do justice to Foucault’s aspirations to ally imagination with cri-
tique simply by aiming to strip the mask away from the subject of power, or is it pos-
sible to establish other possibilities?

Footnote 5 (continued)
When he addressed ‘the liberal imagination’ it was clear that he was addressing a much wider and deeper
malaise. He identified in liberalism a project that functions as an attack upon the imagination in the most
fundamental of senses. His essay on the liberalism of Freud illustrates this well, reading as it does, as a
defence of the life of images and the imaginary from the Freudian reality principle. See (Trilling 1950,
pp. 34–57).
6
  Doubtless this is a collective project. See (Bottici 2014), and especially chapter 3, “Toward a Theory
of the Imaginal,” pp. 54–71. Bottici develops the concept of the ‘imaginal,’ on my reading, precisely as a
way of establishing the power of images to make live.
7
  Elements of this critique could also be compared with Bruno Latour’s discussion of the iconoclasm
of ‘modern cults’ of science and art, and thought through with and against his concept of ‘iconoclash,’
designed as it is to make us confront the image-dependence of regimes and practices of iconoclasm. See
(Latour 2010), and especially chapter  2, ‘What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image
Wars,’ pp. 67–97.
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

The answer, I believe, lies precisely in Foucault’s very first published work, the
essay ‘Dream, Imagination and Existence’ which I referred to earlier and which
today is out of print. On the one hand, the essay might well be read to suggest the
possibility of the active, judicious deployment of images by and for critique; critique
as an imaginative act in the sense of its possibility to be an exercising of the exis-
tential freedom of the subject of critique. However, the essay suggests more than
that. For imagination has, Foucault argues there, a double-function. Of constitut-
ing the world of the subject whom imagines, as well as destroying the very same
images that constitute regimes that hold back that world. It is not simply a creative
but an iconoclastic power. As Foucault expresses it, ‘the true poet denies himself the
accomplishment of desire in the image, because the freedom of imagination imposes
itself on him as a task of refusal. The value of a poetic imagination is to be measured
by the inner destructive power of the image’ (Foucault 1993, p. 72).
Throughout history a collective practice has persisted of the confrontation with
images that are perceived to possess a deleterious power, and which literally hold
back the world. Iconoclasm that practice by which media are destroyed with a view
to depriving selected images of life. Today, we must revisit the question of icono-
clasm as a fundamental practice of subject-formation. What political form would
iconoclasm need to take for it to be capable of destroying the life of images that
take our life? The human body, we know, exercises its own inherent forms of icono-
clasm; it endows some images with symbolic meaning and admits them to memory,
while others it destroys and forgets (Belting 2011, p. 21). No body can survive, in
good health, without this power, and the context in which Foucault discusses it in
‘Dream, Imagination and Existence’ is largely psychotherapeutic (Foucault 1993, p.
72). Nevertheless, his use of the concept of iconoclasm opens itself to a political
extrapolation.
Contemporarily the practice of iconoclasm is most closely associated, in politi-
cal terms, with Islamist terrorism, and especially Islamic State (ISIS). Their prac-
tice of deliberately destroying imagery, especially upon archaeological sites, is often
described as medieval, backward, and barbaric. As the art historian, Omur Harman-
sah describes, such condemnations of the group tend to arise in response to media
images distributed by ISIS themselves of their iconoclastic acts. For Harmansah this
indicates something of a paradox or even a contradiction. ‘How is it,’ he asks, ‘that
we are convinced of ISIS militants’ hatred of idols and representations, while we
consume the very powerful images that constantly flow through the global media,
and those videos that have since ironically become some of the most iconic repre-
sentations of contemporary violence against humanity?’ (Harmansah 2015, p. 173).
In doing so we overlook ‘the obvious,’ Harmansah argues, which is ‘ISIS’s relent-
less production of images’ (Harmansah 2015, p. 173). How can this movement that
circulates images ‘relentlessly’ of its own acts of the destruction of images claim to
be iconoclastic? Is this not a contradiction in terms, he asks. In actuality, however,
there is no contradiction in these practices. The iconoclastic practices of ISIS mirror,
perfectly, the iconoclastic powers of the imagination; its dual functionality, in pro-
duction and destruction of images.
In his very recent work, Nymphs, Giorgio Agamben is effectively confronting the
same problem as Foucault in his very first essay; the problem of how to rescue the
 J. Reid

imagination from its condition of present oppression; how to recover time where this
is no time. To understand this, Agamben looks at the class of images described in
psychoanalysis, as mnemic images; obsessive memory images, which in their rec-
ollection, now only survive as nightmares or specters, having lost their meaning,
but terrorizing their subject, in their persistent returning to presence; images that
arrest our sense of time. The arrest of time these images perform is not reducible to
any particular political era or condition. Their appearance is not conditional upon
the hegemony of any political regime, including neoliberalism. But for Agamben,
as for Foucault, this is precisely the point. The confrontation with images that give
no time, with images that lack life, which hold back the worlds of their subject, is
not a politically contingent encounter. It is the fundamental operation through which
the imagination itself acts. The subject itself is decided ‘in the ambiguous twilight
in which the living being accepts a confrontation with the inanimate images trans-
mitted by historical memory’ in order to destroy them and bring itself back to life
(Agamben 2013, p. 35). The imagination requires this confrontation, indeed, in
order for it to act.
Imagination, then, in what might appear superficially to be a paradox, abhors
images as much as it is defined by being the faculty for their production. The truth of
the world anticipates itself in the images which imagination produces. In the contact
which obtains between truth and imagination, and by which worlds are constituted,
the subject experiences the irreducibility of its freedom—its power to make true the
world that the image discloses. ‘It is the originative movement of freedom, the birth
of the world in the very movement of its existence’ (Foucault 1993, p. 51). But in
that same contact, between truth and imagination, and by which a world is consti-
tuted, the subject also experiences destiny—images which signify the expiration of
the image through which its world, in being constituted, will nevertheless comes
to pass. In this latter form of image the subject experiences not simply destiny, but
more poignantly, the tragic nature of its peculiar form of freedom, which can only
lose itself, in the very motion of fallen destruction; ‘from such summits, one returns
only in a vertiginous fall’ (Foucault 1993, p. 62).
Failure to care for the self, refusal of the various arts by which self-care could be
practiced, was the Ancients said, to risk the likelihood of the fall (Foucault 2010,
p. 45). Either one cared for oneself, and in doing so constituted oneself as a sub-
ject which, if not secure, was nevertheless capable of maintaining poise and balance
throughout the exposure to the precarities of life, or one fell ‘like the leaves in the
autumn’ (Foucault 2010, p. 45). Now, that threat of ‘the fall,’ to the subject, which
Foucault himself detailed towards the very end of his life, is exposed for what it is,
mere threat. The fall is positivized by Foucault as part of a set of oppositions at work
in imagination.8 These ‘primitive coordinates’ of the images which imagination pro-
duces, are ontological to human experience, Foucault argues. Thus what we experi-
ence, in imagination, is precisely the working of these oppositions, and the forms
of experience they make possible, for our selves, as worldly beings. Imagination

8
  Here Foucault is very close in argumentation to Bachelard in his analysis of ‘the imaginary fall’ as a
‘truly positive experience of verticality.’ See (Bachelard 1988, p. 92).
Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes…

discloses the nature of the world of the human, the movements it entails, the ascen-
sions by which it manifests care for itself, and becomes a subject, as well as the
descents into abyssal modes and through which it suffers the fall. There is, in other
words, in this analytic of imagination the basis of an entirely different understanding
of the functions of imagination in practices of care for the self to those that Fou-
cault disclosed in his analyses of ancient literatures, and in his histories of modern
medicine. An understanding of imagination not as that faculty which in its freedom
threatens the constitutive practices by which subjects can learn to build themselves
and protect themselves from falling, but as a peculiarly privileged form of expe-
rience which reveals to the subject the conjugated nature of relations between its
freedom and its destiny, its constitutive powers of world making and world destruc-
tion, its movement of rise and fall. It suggests a form of understanding of care for
the self which does not predicate itself on the idea of a subject defined simply by
the motion of rising, but on this double-movement upon a vertical axis of existence
where falling is every bit as integral to human motion as ascension, and in which the
making fall of images is more the expression of imagination than their manufacture.
It suggests, also, in its critical distance from the simple idea of the subject proposed
in dominant discourses on care for the self, throughout western history, from the
ancients to the present, the necessity of an approach to subject-formation which will
treat falling not simply as motion, but as action, within a more complex choreogra-
phy of human subjectivity, whereby, in order to become a subject, one is required to
make fall every bit as much as one learns how to make ascend.9

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Julian Reid  is a Professor and a Chair of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland.
He taught previously at King’s College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and
Sussex University, all in the UK. He is the author and coauthor of The Neoliberal Subject (2016), Resil-
ient Life (2014), The Liberal Way of War (2009), and The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (2006).