In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.

The aim of this article is to show that, in order to understand the new public role of religion, we need to rethink the nexus, often neglected by contemporary philosophy, between politics and imagination. The current resurrection of religion in the public sphere is linked to a deep transformation of political imagination which has its roots in the double process of the reduction of politics to mere administration, on the one hand, and to spectacle, on the other. In an epoch (...) when politics is said to be simply a question of ‘good governance’, of good administration within a neo-liberal consensus, the paradox is that of a lack of political imagination which goes hand in hand with its hypertrophy through the media. This article tackles this paradox, by firstly discussing the nexus of politics, imagination and religion and, secondly, by analysing their contemporary transformations. In conclusion, the thesis is illustrated through the analysis of some contemporary examples. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reassess the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to create images. Although a lot has been written on what we can call the ‘politics of imagination’, much less has been done to critically assess the conceptual link between the two in a systematic way. This paper introduces the concept of imaginal, understood simply as what is made of images, to go beyond the current impasse of the opposition between theories of imagination as (...) an individual faculty, on the one hand, and theories of the imaginary as a social context, on the other. As such, I also argue that the concept of imaginal is the theoretical tool most adapted to capture the nature of the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to produce images. This analysis is finally applied to contemporary politics and it is shown to be able to bring light to many of its paradoxes, including that of a political world full of images, but deprived of imagination. (shrink)

I met Castoriadis only twice, once in Paris in 1979, and then repeatedly in Melbourne in 1991 over the time of the Thesis Eleven Conference on Reason and Imagination. Both these encounters, in different ways, were transformative for me. As it happens, I remember them very well. As the distance risks clouding memory, I take time in this paper to reconstruct and share these stories. They take us back to the world through which we first encountered Castoriadis, as Paul Cardan, (...) via the efforts of London Solidarity and its emblematic hedgehog – small and prickly, doesn’t like being interfered with; known to pop up in ways that might just be revolutionary. This was Castoriadis as I first encountered him, and this was the culture I likely never got past: Socialisme ou Barbarie, en anglais. (shrink)

This article critically considers Castoriadis’ central concept of creation ex nihilo. It does so in two ways. It first draws on recent research to suggest that the historical inauguration of the project of autonomy in ancient Greece - in both its political and philosophical aspects - was more complex and contextually anchored than Castoriadis acknowledges: it did not surge forth out of nothing. Second, it considers the idea of creation from a theoretical perspective. Here the idea of creation as contextual (...) rather than absolute is offered. Within this suggested qualification, two lines of discussion - drawn from the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions - are broached. (shrink)

This essay unpacks Johann Arnason’s theory of culture. It argues that the culture problematic remains the needle’s eye through which Arnason’s intellectual project must be understood, his recent shift to foreground the interplay of culture and power (as the religio-political nexus) notwithstanding. Arnason’s approach to culture is foundational to his articulation of the human condition, which is articulated here as the interaction of a historical cultural hermeneutics and a macro-phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon. The essay discusses Arnason’s (...) elucidation of his theory of culture as a contribution to debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’. It traces its beginnings from his critique of Habermas’s theory of modernity to its development via a trialogue with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. It argues that Arnason's theory of culture moves beyond socio-centric perspectives, and, in so doing, offers a critique of what we might call sociological solipsism. In decentring society/anthropos, a more nuanced understanding of the human condition as a unity in diversity is achieved. The essay concludes with a discussion of some tensions in Arnason’s understanding of culture, and argues for the importance for incorporating a qualitative notion of ‘movement’ in order to make sense of historical novelty and social change. (shrink)