Bottici

"In sum, bodies are always necessarily bodies in plural, both social and individual at the same time, because their individuality is always and inevitably a form of transindividuality. But if bodies are always transindividual processes, then we also need a theory that is able to conceptualize our capacity to imagine without falling into the false alternative between theories of imagination as an individual faculty and theories of the imaginary as a social context. And it is precisely at this point that, as I hope I have shown, the concept of the imaginal becomes particularly useful.22

22I have developed the concept of the imaginal as an alternative to theories of imagination understood as an individual faculty and theories of the imaginary understood as a social context, in Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

I would like to list the benefits of such an ontological shift towards transindividuality as the prism through which individuality must be understood. Firstly, instead of elaborating a form of feminism and then having to add ecology as something different from feminism itself, here the two positions are unified from the beginning because, in an ontology of the transindividual, the environment is not something separated from us but, rather, the environment is us — literally something constitutive of our individuality. Secondly, imaginal collective formations such as sex, race, and class are from the beginning conceptualized as constitutive of our individuality, and thus as intimately intertwined". 

Chiara Bottici