Fantasy is the source of all judgement and knowledge

Evidence

Fantasy alone, today consigned to the realm of the unconscious and proscribed from knowledge as a childish, injudicious rudiment, can establish that relation between objects which is the irrevocable source of all judgement: should fantasy be driven out, judgement too, the real act of knowledge, is exorcised. But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses Kant: where Kant grounds judgement in concepts and categories, Adorno roots it in fantasy — a deliberate anti-Enlightenment inversion that also connects to his critique of ‘the castration of perception’ under instrumental reason.
• SEED: Article angle: the rehabilitation of fantasy (imagination) as an epistemic faculty, against the rationalist ban. This is Adorno’s defense of the ‘childish’ as the ground of real knowledge — could open a dialogue with contemporary imagination-and-cognition debates.