of his divine force – the most powerful ‘mana’, which no other man could possess. As a consequence, when the tu’i tonga celebrated the rites of the passage of seasons, his mana was believed to make the women’s wombs fertile and multiply the riches of the sea and the land.
In order for these ancestors, spirits and gods, normally invisible to the human eye, to become present when not incarnated in the body of a man or a woman, carvings, paintings and masks would lend them form and matter. Did not the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, dwell in the Parthenon in a body sculpted by Phidias in the fifth century BCE? Did not Johann Sebastian Bach put his talent to work composing the Saint Matthew Passion (1729) and El Greco his to painting The Holy Trinity (1577) on the altar screen of the Monastery of Saint Dominic in Toledo? And, countless works of art have been dedicated to glorifying the power of the powerful among men; I will choose only one, the Portrait of Louis XIV, painted by Rigaud in 1701, a theological-political representation of the king of France as ‘absolute’ monarch.
But imaginary and symbolic creations are by no means the monopoly of religious and political systems, of kinship systems or of any other social relationship that gives rise to a collective identity and practices that must be manifested and celebrated. They pervade the even-larger domain of artistic works and practices that are meant, above all, to express the personality and inner life of their creators; to express their dreams, their emotions, their anger and their hopes: whether it is Goya’s The Nude Maja (ca. 1797), or Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which proclaims his horror and pain at the massacres committed by Franco’s troops and their German allies during the Spanish Civil War.
And can we forget the novelists, poets, songwriters, playwrights and filmmakers who transport us to worlds that exist only in and through their works? The French poet Paul Verlaine’s famous alliterations, ‘les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne bercent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone’ [the long sobbing of the violins of autumn lull my heart with monotonous languor], reproduce the sound of the long sobbing notes of the violins of autumn. Although everyone knows that the violins of autumn and their sobbing notes have never existed – that they are metaphors, figures of speech – the images and music of these words can inspire feelings in us that suggest the smell of rain and dead leaves associated with the word ‘autumn’. But metaphors are not only the matter of myth or poetry; everyday language is full of them as well. We will return to this. Finally, how could I fail to mention fairy tales – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – illustrated books for children, but also for adults – Mickey Mouse, Tintin and the Temple of the Sun, Tarzan, Japanese manga – and, of course, games – cards, chess, ball games, and so on: play invites the players temporarily into a virtual world that they themselves create when they play by the rules invented so they may confront each other (and have fun doing it). But the game world vanishes as soon as the game is over.
To bring to an end a list that has no possible end, I will mention those symbolic objects par excellence: toys, dolls, stuffed bears, Batman costumes, plastic Kalashnikovs, et cetera. Through them, children multiply their ‘selves’ and explore the imagined and imaginary worlds they have invented, and they do this without ever leaving their room, their apartment or their parents’ garden. Reading this list, one may get the idea that human existence is nothing more than imaginary and symbolic realities. This is by no means the case, but even so, there are men and women who believe they are Napoleon or Joan of Arc. The imaginary seems to have taken them over, and because of this they are no longer able to live like, or with, other people. An effort must, then, be made to make them aware that they are not who or what they imagine themselves to be, that they are ‘really’ someone else, an other. But they can persist in denying or refusing this other within themselves, which is their initial ego. Could Don Quixote, who was not ‘completely’ mad, hear the warnings of Sancho Panza, his valet whom he saw as his squire, when he said that the knights he was challenging or preparing to fight were merely windmills? Is there something in addition to the imaginary and the symbolic that, together with them, makes up human reality? What is the nature of this additional component? And what relationship does it entertain with the imaginary and the symbolic? Are these relations of complementarity or opposition? Or of mutual exclusion? To answer these questions, we will have to analyse what is meant by the words ‘imagine’, ‘symbolise’, ‘believe’, ‘possible’, ‘impossible’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘real’, and so on.
But before getting down to this subject, I must warn the reader that the present book will not be dealing with the ‘imaginary self’ that each of us constructs, unaware that this part of ourselves is imaginary.5 Nor will I examine Lacan’s three fathers hovering over each of us: the ‘real’ father we have, the ‘imaginary’ father we would like to have had, and the ‘symbolic’ father who is the father of no one in particular but is the embodiment, for everyone, of the inner presence of the law that presides over desire, the exercise of our sexuality. These imaginaries are always singular, attesting to a particular life story, but one in which the analyst can decipher the effects of universal unconscious processes.6 These imaginaries that structure the ego but elude its conscious awareness are often the symptoms and symbols of a difficulty in living, a suffering, of which some ask an analyst to help them to become aware and distance themselves.7
Exploring this domain is not the job of anthropologists, however, but the work of psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. As an anthropologist, I will investigate other imaginaries: those of games and of art, where the distinction between what is imaginary and what is not is conscious and experienced; those of the founding myths of religious and political systems, which are shared and believed to be given by the gods, God or reason, but which are not experienced and recognised as imaginary. On the contrary, these are held to be the invisible but ever-present basis of reality, a surreal portion of the real.
Of course, I have often talked with psychoanalysts about the nature and the basis of the hetero- and homosexual incest taboos, as well as about the defining characteristics of human sexuality. I have defined the latter as polymorphous (it is homo- and heterosexual); polytropic (the sexual drive does not distinguish spontaneously between permitted and prohibited persons); generalised, because it is present throughout the body; and cerebralised – in other words it functions as much in reaction to internal representations as it does to external stimuli and results in the disjunction between sexuality-as-desire (pleasure) and sexuality-as-reproduction. But everywhere, sexuality, which is in itself a-social, is placed in the service of and subordinated to the reproduction of social relations and issues which go beyond it and make it into a ventriloquist’s dummy, obliged to testify in favour of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a social order that encompasses and traverses it.8
I will begin by recalling a few self-evident truths about human nature, in other words, a few invariants encountered at all times in history and in all forms of society:
• A human being is an individual – a man or a woman – who is not at the origin of him- or herself but is born of a man and a woman in another generation and from whom he or she has inherited his or her body.1
• He or she is an individual who, during the first years of life, cannot survive without the care and protection of other humans, adults capable of providing these and acknowledging a duty to do so.
• He or she is an individual born in a society they have not chosen, and which
