Power takes the imagination

Abstract

In this article we begin by conjecturing a tension between power and imagination that will become evident starting in May 1968. To delve deeper into this tension, we resort to the analysis of M. Foucault’s disciplinary power and the double categorical distinction private/public, necessary/contingent that H. Arendt will use in The Human Condition to characterize the different sorts of human activity. All this with the purpose of outlining an imagination that will be presented as a revulsive in the face of precarious political action during those years. Subsequently, we review this power-imagination categorical tension in the context of the productive and labor reforms, workerist demands and the emergence of the network society that have occurred in recent decades, and we scrutinize both the colonizing power of the public and contingency on the part of the current capitalism as the limits and possibilities that allow an imagination dedicated to political action.