Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Thus the act of representation, however brief, must lead to a nonviolent communal division or sharing of the object. (Gans 20; emphasis in original) Thus, representation holds the group together in two interrelated ways: to avoid conflict and to bind together in signifying practice. If we jump a few steps we understand the central position of narrativity and acting. Language makes possible more elaborate practices of representation. Immediately linked to the originary scene is also the concept of desire. Desire arises as the imaginary compensation for the aborted appetitive object. Gans’s definition of desire is “as appetite mediated by the appearance of its object on the scene of representation” (24). The realm of imagination is closely tied to desire as such. The inaccessibility of the appetitive object enhances its importance within the imaginary. The scene of representation is real, but it is also reproduced in the mind of each participant as the origin of what we may call his desiring imagination . The public significance attributed to the object makes his private representation of it a form of imaginary possession that not merely augments its appetitive attraction [...] but radically transforms this attraction into a phenomenon of potentially general significance. (Gans 26; emphasis in original) The scene of representation and imagination serves to accomplish the deferral of appropriation of the appetitive object.”

— Eric Gans, The Phenomenology of Representation, Ritual, and the Sacred in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder · Spring 2017 · Anthropoetics