Political theorist John Grant compared Bottici’s approach to the social imaginary to that of Charles Taylor and Michael Warner, arguing that, although her work is an improvement on Taylor’s understanding of the social imaginary as a mere “background,” Bottici fails through her dismissal of ideology in its negative form, resulting in “an abandonment of the very dialectical mode that could have reinvigorated her work.” However, writer and media scholar McKenzie Wark emphasized that Bottici’s philosophy of the imaginal opens the space for thinking about what precedes the division between real and unreal as well as that between the individual and the social, and, as such, it is a welcome contribution to thinking about the destiny of images in a time when the technological transformations of capitalism have tightened the link between politics and the images to such a degree that “they are no longer what mediates our doing politics but rather what risks doing politics in our stead.”