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Notice here that while Gatens’s feminist interpretation of Spinoza focuses on the specifically human usage of this capacity to imagine, there is nothing within this conception that prevents us from extending Spinoza’s understanding of imagination to all other forms of extension, or, in more contemporary terms, of materiality. Despite the different forms that this idea could take, there is no a priori reason in this ontology to assume that thinking and imagining would be a prerogative of the human. I also want to point out that while Spinoza uses the typically modern concept of imagination, which, in the history of western philosophy, is imbued with humanism, we can certainly reformulate his insights in terms of a theory of the imaginal. In particular, it is with regards to what Gatens called ‘imaginary bodies’, and what I would like to call ‘imaginal bodies’, that we can understand the psychological side of the process of individuation described above. Whenever a body encounters another body, which can be a simple body, like a glass of water, or a more complex one, like another animal, a change in its own constitution will occur. It is in this sense, and in order to keep together what happens at the infra, inter-, and supra-individual level, that the notion of transindividuality becomes particular helpful. 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

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