The imagination works overtime synthesising and weaving together the elements of experience so that it can double over raw experience, distancing it and replacing it with an illusory world in which the cardinal directions that orient being are merely provisional markers, differential appearances subject to, and even inviting, revision. In other words the post-modern world in which we find ourselves inextricably trapped is the very character of the imagination writ large. Can we dig down beneath this, undo the semiotic and aestheticising mind? If our accession to the social, to alterity in this specially mediated form which promises us everything and only everything that we have desired, were the result of agreeing to a faustian contract, so much belief given for so many enriching adventures, so much distraction from our necessary end, so much promise that the real can be domesticated or overcome, then we could hurl in its face its failure to achieve any of these. Not that such a repudiation would be of much significance at the level of all those easily seen-through and merely digressive productions that elicit and enhance desire, but rather of those critical and sublime works which evince deep correlations between the creative soul and metaphysical reality.