The seminar considers politics in the expanded field by placing imagination at the center of analyses. All too often, scholars reduce the political to a series of logics, systems, orders, and causal mechanisms as if politics followed predictable paths. But politics is not so easily prefigured. Indeed, one might argue that unpredictability, misalignment, invention, and creativity are central aspects of politics that we ought to attend to. Many scholars, activists, and artists have been extending accounts of the political via interesting work on affect, the senses, cultural material analysis, aesthetics, creativity. Recently, many have been focusing explicitly on the issue of imagination itself. The seminar engages works drawn from across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts to consider more carefully the interplay of imagination and politics. Works considered will include classic texts by Sigmund Freud, Paul Klee, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Cage and Rosalind Krauss as well as more recent works by WJT Mitchell, Kristin Ross, Sebastian Smee, Janet Malcom, and Anne Norton. Thematic issues addressed in the seminar will include the relationship between imagination and evidence, abstraction, visuality and empire, the interspecies turn as a source of imaginative insight, and the botanical and political. At several points in the course, students will be encouraged to consider assigned texts alongside works by a variety of contemporary visual artists. The New Schools’ extensive collection of artistic works provides an excellent opportunity to explore imagination through looking as well as reading.