Water and Dreams (On the Imagination of Matter)

Author: Barthes (USA), translated by Gu Jiachen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-10-01
Features: This is an important theoretical work on Barthes' poetics, novel and engaging, with significant influence in Europe and America. Based on the four elemental substances of "fire, water, earth, and air," he employs imagination and new theoretical insights, combined with his extensive knowledge of natural sciences, to establish a poetics of dreams. He points out that the philosophical theory of imagination should first examine the relationship between material causality and formal causality. The image of poetry is also a material. Water is not only dispersed but also a series of images recognized in the fleeting moments of imagination, and it is both a carrier of images and the primal source of their formation. Any poetics should embrace the various compositions of material essence, and it is precisely this arrangement through the fundamental elements that should strongly reveal the soul of poetry.