Department Featured Event: The Terry Lecture. Dirk Setton. The Power of Imagination and the Poetics of True Horror: Hegel with Lucio Fulci.

The talk is dedicated to the attempt at gaining a new perspective on the philosophical notion of imagination, namely by way of critically engaging with post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of fantasy. Eric Santner claims that human fantasy has essentially a defensive function. This idea, however, raises an epistemological difficulty, the solution of which necessitates a rethinking of the concept of fantasy. Such rethinking will be carried out with the help of Hegel’s differentiated analysis of the power of imagination in the Encyclopedia and the illustrious figure of the undead, as it is depicted in Lucio Fulci’s horror classic L’aldilà. The basic idea is to conceive of the power of imagination as a peculiar form of receptivity—an openness to a dimension of practical reality that is often ignored in philosophy.