There is an essay by Blanchot – 'Man at Point Zero' - where he speaks of the desire to return to the origin: the point where art first emerges from non-art, where society emerges from nature, and so on. And he suggests that these attempts are not so much misguided desires for an impossible purity or immaculate conception, but a kind of thought experiment, a strategic hypothesis allowing the thinker or artist to round on and displace the self-evidence of the present. Not then an illusory construct but an imaginary one, Blanchot suggests, but he goes on ‘imaginary, almost according to the meaning given this word by mathematics’. I’m curious to know what this ‘mathematical’ sense of imaginary is.
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