Following Wolfgang Iser’s suggestion to conceive of the imaginary, the fictive, and the real as a
‘triad’ in which the fictive can be seen as a ‘casting into form’ of the imaginary by mingling it with the
real, the article first explores the concept of the ‘real’ and understands it (equally) as a casting into
form of this very same imaginary, through which a culture tries to reify its (contingent) constructions
of social reality; it then proceeds to take a look at the ‘imaginary’ itself, which it understands as a faculty,
or a never-ending functional source, of meaning-production apt to provide a continuous impulse
for the permanent creation, and re-creation, of human ‘culture’ as a semiosphere, before it comes back
to the ‘fictive’ and sees it as a (necessary and functional, albeit often evasive) counter-construction to
all those other constructions unabashedly (but necessarily) parading as the ‘real’.