The Role of Fantasy

This chapter focuses on fantasy and reaches back to Alexander Kluge's days as an honorary professor lecturing on film and television at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1973. Kluge explains that fantasy is a divided product in the society. He then looks at what Karl Marx has to say about the original concept of labor. Marx mentions it twice, for example, when he explains that a craftsman, when making something like a chair, first forms an image of the chair in his mind and makes a plan before then setting to work with his hands to make this plan a reality. This is an example of the unified path of labor between the activity of the mind and the activity of the hands. Kluge also discusses the imaginative capacity. Sigmund Freud described this imaginative capacity not only in terms of psychoanalytic theory or out of a specific therapeutic interest. Rather, Freud described it and pursued it on account of a general theoretical interest. Freud said that the law of this imaginative capacity exists in people. It is the law of the human mind. Freud said not only that it is influenced by libidinal control and the negotiation of reality, but also that the brain triggers the perception of actual circumstance and then remembers something from the past, a conflict, a desired situation, or a wish. From there, a projection of a concrete action is cast onto the future.