figurable

adj

1. Capable of being brought to a fixed form or shape.

   “figurable substrate”

   “Lead is figurable, but water is not.”

   “The differences of impressible and not impressible; figurable and not figurable; mouldable and not mouldable; scissile and not scissile; and many other passions of matter, are plebeian notions, applied unto the instruments and uses which men ordinarily practise; but they are all but the effects of some of these causes following, which we will enumerate without applying them, because that would be too long.”

   “The same is to be said in other respects; matter is not only figurable and extendible, but de facto figured and extended.”

2. Capable of being figural or emblematic.

   “Nox is the daughter of Orcus and so one of the three infigurables; but through reason she becomes the most ancient of the gods, and in this aspect is figurable. She stands for the materia prima, and as a goddess can have a figurable statue, an old woman, wearing black clothes, with black wings of immense extent.”

   “There, it seems to me, is a major axis for research in art history and theory that encounters psychoanalysis: these latent figures hidden by the great works as their secret truth; a latent figure, a sort of figurable latency, the figurable aspect of a painting, a tension in the figure of the work which something decisive may eventually play itself out on the side of the creator.”

   “However, this attempt to distance Jewishness from homosexuals is, I suggest, an implicit recognition that the two identity positions are too proximate and, moreover, that their proximity is figurable in relation to camp — figurable, even, as the “essence” of camp.”

   “And yet, the entirety of Fichte's philosophy may be read as a critique of representation. Indeed, Fichte questions Kant's equation, according to which to know is to represent, and to represent is to make the object “figurable”.”

3. Able to be imagined; conceivable.

   “figurable entity”

   “figurable term”

   “Remember: figuring out the un-figurable is the ultimate oxymoron.”

   “We never fully understand his motivations either, and this is the point: Jimmy's actions, like Kima's, and like most people's, are ouside of easily figurable modes of understanding.”

   “To become figurable –that is to say, visible in the first place, accessible to our imaginations –the classes have to be able to become in some sense characters in their own right.”