Political Imaginaries in Question Content Type Journal Article Pages 5-11 Authors Suzi Adams, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia Jeremy C. A. Smith, School of Education and Arts, University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Ingerid S. Straume, University of Oslo Library, University of Oslo, Norway Journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory Online ISSN 1568-5160 Print ISSN 1440-9917 Journal Volume Volume 13 Journal Issue Volume 13, Number 1 / 2012.

In the past few years, several democratic governments have published their National AI Strategies (NASs). These documents outline how AI technology should be implemented in the public sector and explain the policies that will ensure the ethical use of personal data. In this article, I examine these documents as political texts and reconstruct the political imaginary that underlies them. I argue that these documents intervene in contemporary democratic politics by suggesting that AI can help democracies overcome some (...) of the challenges they are facing. To achieve this, NASs use different kinds of imaginaries—democratic, sociotechnical and data—that help citizens envision how a future AI democracy might look like. As part of this collective effort, a new kind of relationship between citizens and governments is formed. Citizens are seen as autonomous data subjects, but at the same time, they are expected to share their personal data for the common good. As a result, I argue, a new kind of political imaginary is developed in these documents. One that maintains a human-centric approach while championing a vision of collective sovereignty over data. This kind of political imaginary can become useful in understanding the roles of citizens and governments in this technological age. (shrink)

Hierarchy has been a central concern of work on the modern political imaginary. The need to elucidate hierarchy’s deeper sources and its legitimations were some of the motivations behind Cornelius Castoriadis’ development of the notion of the imaginary. The work of Claude Lefort on the political imaginary similarly commences from a critical analysis of the hierarchical form of bureaucracy and its place in the constitution of totalitarian political regimes. In a different vein, Charles Taylor’s (...) conception of the imaginary details a long-term process of the erosion of preceding forms of hierarchy and their justifications. In the contemporary period, the opposition to hierarchy has penetrated organisations and institutions that had previously been shaped by it, like the family, the capitalist firm, the school, and the political movement. Despite the potentials that these initiatives suggest of a change in the political imaginary, it will be argued that forms of hierarchy have, to varying degrees, been reconstituted and that the problem of hierarchy appears in new ideological forms, both with respect to institutionalised power and the legitimating justifications for how things are organised. The critique of hierarchy was once associated with the radical democratic imaginary, however, there have recently been perverse mobilisations. (shrink)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary (...) to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory's current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski's pragmatism and the wider 'practical turn', the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and (...) political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary's reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation's injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe political is changing its shape. Ideologies are no longer stable, but instead build hybrid combinations. Populism is getting popular. In addition, there are new forms of political exper...

This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary foregrounds the ways (...) in which all social and political formations are already constituted by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The article proceeds as follows: the first two sec... (shrink)

Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism follows in the path blazed by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, where politics is seen as a mode of freedom; the possibility for individuals to consciously and explicitly create the institutions of their own societies. Starting with such problem as: What is capital? How can we characterize the dominant economic system? What are the conditions for its existence, and how can we create alternatives?, the articles examine the central institutions of modern (...) Western societies, market capitalism, representative liberal democracy, and science. To elucidate the problem of depoliticization, the authors engage a number of thinkers from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen to Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Stanley Kubrick. -/- . (shrink)

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable expansion in the use of ‘imaginaries’ as a guiding concept in and beyond political theory. But the proliferation of this term has gone largely unchecked by critical investigations into its deployment. To correct this I address the work of Charles Taylor, Michael Warner and Chiara Bottici, each of whom has written influential texts on imaginaries and the sites of imaginaries. Interestingly, their reliance on imaginaries does not compel them to do (...) away with older modes of thinking such as ideology critique and dialectical thought. Yet what remains of these enduring modes has been sanitized, their radical commitments scarcely pursued. I proceed by conducting an immanent critique of each author’s work, revealing troublesome pre-critical and instrumentalist features that lead to political phenomena being misrepresented or going unidentified entirely. In addition I elaborate modes of dialectical thought and ideology critique that avoid these difficulties and produce the types of critical insights absent from these texts. (shrink)

: María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and (...) genres. (shrink)

The social thought of Castoriadis and Lefort address Old World constellations. Yet both are positioned in a critical relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and pose questions about power, the political and citizenship relevant to different civilizational settings. Two political philosophies that emerged in the era of revolutionary critique are examined in this paper alongside Castoriadis and Lefort. Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of republic and empire and Simon Bolivar’s creed of independence were American visions that connected with the (...) class='Hi'>political imaginary. Each set down traditions open to interpretation and mythologisation. Both invoked an older rivalry of two images of the New World, as American or as Colombian, which was really a rivalry of Spanish and British Empires and their civilizational influences. Where earlier republican visions developed at the cusp of virtue and interest cultures had posed a particular range of questions about democracy, civic constitution and independence, American states now contained democratic and authoritarian potential. Even though Castoriadis and Lefort did not make these American contexts the centre of their work, each conceive the political and politics in ways that are relevant to American modernities. A key argument put in this paper with respect to Castoriadis and Lefort is that Castoriadis’s conception of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary finds a strong case in the North American revolution. (shrink)

This article examines the link between oligarchy and the notion of representative democracy, which for Castoriadis also implies the bureaucratisation of society. However, in an argument with and against Castoriadis, one has to decipher modern oligarchies before launching into a radical critique of the principle of representation. There is a diversity of representative democracies, and the complexity of modernity comes from a mixture of oligarchy, representation and democracy. Even though the idea of democracy has evolved, we do not live under (...) representative democracies but under liberal oligarchies. Direct democratic procedures and representative elements can sometimes be gathered in order to create new forms of political commitment. The main problem is avoiding a concentration of powers, which cannot create the conditions for the emergence of democratic institutions. (shrink)

María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.

ABSTRACTModern democratic societies are contradictory societies. They are grounded on normative premises, which are not fully realized in practice. Non-democratic practices have been tolerated in d...

Volume 33, Issue 5, September 2019, Page 452-461.

Cornelius Castoriadis understood history as a self-creating order. In turn, he elaborated history in two directions: as the political project of autonomy, and as the ontological modality of the social-historical. On his account, history as self-creation was only possible through the interplay of social (or political) imaginaries and social doing. Although social imaginaries are readily situated within the non-subjective field, non-subjective modes of doing have been less explored. Yet non-subjective contexts are integral to both the “doing” and “ (...) class='Hi'>imaginary” dimensions of the human condition, and form the preconditions for concrete varieties of social and political action and politics (as la politique), more generally. The present paper begins to clear a path to reflect on social doing in its non-subjective aspects; as such, it is preparatory rather than programmatic. After briefly reviewing the field of “social imaginaries”, it reflects on Castoriadis’s elaboration of “praxis” and “teukhein”. It then considers Johann Arnason’s culturological reconfiguration of Castoriadis’s approach, and Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology of the movement of human existence as different ways of engaging with the problematic of doing, instituting society and political imaginaries. Despite a gradual subordination of “doing” to “signification” in Castoriadis’s philosophical elaborations, “social doing” as a non-subjective modality does not disappear altogether from his thought – especially and explicitly in respect to the phenomenon of instituting society as a political project – and remains a point of recurring intrusion into his more explicit theoretical concerns. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state’s political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation (...) can be understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages – with particular reference to Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact.Abbreviations: Biennale: Venice Art Biennale; DAC: Department of Arts and Culture; For thirty years: For thirty years next to his heart, by Sue Williamson; TRC: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; US: United States of America. (shrink)

Astonishment that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of any insight, unless it is that the idea of history from which it comes is untenable.And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?In 1940 the exiled German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin warned that fidelity to a vision of history as (...) progress risked normalizing the remy-thologization of politics.1 Recent events have underlined the urgency, both for thought and for action, of rejecting the same unphilosophical astonishment in our own time. In the face of political... (shrink)

This stimulating, ambitious interdisciplinary study, as its subtitle indicates, links seventeenth-century and modern concerns: a relationship between Milton and modernity is indicated in the titles...

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins (...) by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language. (shrink)

In this essay, Kim Niewolny, current President of AFHVS, responds to the 2020 AFHVS Presidential Address given by Molly Anderson. Niewolny is encouraged by Anderson’s message of moving “beyond the boundaries” by focusing our gaze on the insurmountable un-sustainability of the globalized food system. Anderson recommends three ways forward to address current challenges. Niewolny argues that building solidarity with social justice movements and engendering anti-racist praxis take precedence. This work includes but is not limited to dismantling the predominance of neoliberal-fueled (...) technocratic productivism in agricultural science and policy while firmly centering civil society collective action and human rights frameworks as our guiding imaginary for racial, gender, environmental, and climate justice possibilities for sustainable food systems praxis. She concludes by exploring the epistemic assertion to push beyond our professional and political imaginaries to build a more fair, just, and humanizing food system. (shrink)

This paper considers the relationship between institutions and the “sexual imaginary,” understood as the set of affective and imaginative resources that produce certain forms of sexual subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Moira Gatens, I argue that institutions play an important role in shaping sexual imaginaries. Historically, institutions have been sites in which unjust sexual norms have been reinforced and legitimized. I analyse the growing trend of consent education at Australian universities to explore how institutions may (...) also represent potential sites for contesting and reimagining these norms. Feminist critiques of consent suggest that consent education may in fact reproduce a narrow and conservative vision of sexuality, one that aligns with the neoliberal politics of the contemporary university. This paper contributes to these critiques by exploring how both the neoliberal university and consent theory are premised on a distorted vision of the subject as a rational, disembodied being. I argue that transforming dominant sexual imaginaries requires recognizing and interrogating both how desire permeates institutional spaces and the role of desire in ethical sexual relations. (shrink)

The article presents a theoretical discussion and sociological analysis about the tensions in the building of social sex/gender relationships that are at the basis of the exclusion of women within the political field. It shows contents in dispute in the production of politics, considering the weight that categories play in the relations at a global level and in the school, the attributions inside the system sex/gender, the significations in politics, and the modes in which it is subjectified, resisted and (...) confront different logics to understand life and politics, considering the conceptual distinctions between Bíos and Zoé. This discussion allows the analysis of the imaginary institution within systematic difficulties and obstacles of political and legal kind during the post dictatorship in Chile, where based on arguments about the sex/gender system, the exclusion of women from the political field is established, limiting the development of politics that valorizes cultural diversity and human rights, accentuating discrimination and social exclusion. These shape the discussion over the modes in which the political field for women is configured, recovering the possibilities of conflict as an opening of that horizon. El artículo presenta una discusión teórica y análisis sociológico acerca de las tensiones en la construcción social de las relaciones sexo/género, que fundamentan la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres. Se distinguen los contenidos en disputa en la producción de la política, considerando el peso que tienen las categorías en juego en las relaciones a nivel global y en el espacio de la escuela, las atribuciones dentro del sistema sexo/género, las significaciones de la política, y los modos en que se subjetivan, se resisten y se confrontan diferentes lógicas para entender la vida y la política, teniendo como base las distinciones conceptuales entre Bios y Zoé. Esta discusión permite analizar la institución del imaginario en el marco de las dificultades sistemáticas y obstáculos de tipo político y legal durante la post dictadura en Chile, donde sobre la base de argumentos propios del sistema sexo/género, se establece la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres, limitando el desarrollo de políticas que pongan en valor la diversidad cultural y los derechos humanos, acentuando la discriminación y la exclusión social. Estos dan forma a la discusión sobre el modo en que se configura el campo de lo político para las mujeres, recuperando las posibilidades del conflicto como apertura de este horizonte. (shrink)

Culture has been at the core of many recent developments in the social sciences, particularly after the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. This has also been seeping into discussions about the relation between culture and politics. The present paper proposes a specific theoretical approach in this respect. It mobilizes Castoriadis’s concept of the ‘imaginary’, as well as those of ‘collective subjectivity’ and ‘social creativity’. It also makes use of the rich case of ‘populism’, more generally, and Peronism, more specifically, so as (...) to make clear its workings in a sociological strategy that unfolds in both the theoretical and the empirically-oriented domains. The paper offers an alternative to Alexander’s and Laclau’s approaches to culture and politics. (shrink)

In the face of enduring crisis phenomena, quantitative evidence of the renewed salience of socio-economic agendas advanced by radical right populist parties calls for more qualitative research work and in-depth case studies. The present paper aims to contribute to filling this gap through a cultural political economy (CPE) investigation of the Italian League (Lega) party that foregrounds its socio-economic positioning by reconstructing the party’s ‘economic imaginary’. The suggested synergy between CPE and a critical discourse analysis of the League’s (...) practical argumentation in the 2013 and 2018 electoral manifestos points to a composite economic imaginary that prioritizes: 1) production (vs financialization); 2) support of internal demand; 3) lowering of fiscal pressure; 4) protectionism and 5) welfare. The analysis shows how, under Salvini’s leadership, the party’s practical argumentation in EU matters has become constitutive of its overall political strategy and so exacerbated the claims at the core of the respective economic imaginary. In this vein, the League’s Euroscepticism has also polarized the relationship between the party’s socio-economic and socio-cultural stance, thus urging to go beyond the focus on economic imaginaries and sketch out a CPE research agenda on the League’s more encompassing struggle for hegemony in the Italian political economy. (shrink)

Genetic testing has become a vehicle through which basic constitutional relationships between citizens and the state are revisited, reaffirmed, or rearticulated. The interplay between the is of genetic knowledge and the ought of government unfolds in the context of diverse imaginaries of the forms of human well-being, freedom, and flourishing that states have a duty to support. This article examines how the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States governed testing for Alzheimer’s disease, and how they diverged in defining potential (...) harms, benefits, and objects of regulation. Comparison before and after the arrival of direct-to-consumer genetic tests reveals differences in national understandings of what it means to protect life and citizenship: in the United Kingdom, ensuring physical wellness through clinical utility; in the United States, protecting both citizens’ physical well-being and freedom to choose through a framework of consumer protection; and in Germany, emphasizing individual flourishing and an unburdened sense of human development that is expressed in genetic testing law and policy as a commitment to the stewardship of personhood. Operating with their own visions of what it means to protect life and citizenship, these three states arrived at settlements that coproduced substantially different bioconstitutional regimes around Alzheimer’s testing. (shrink)

The relationship between the imaginary and the political has many aspects and it is not possible to address them all in this paper. We will choose to focus on the relationship between myth and national idea, on the one hand, and myth and political ideologies on the other. Before considering these questions, we will first present the work of Gilbert Durand from his articles “Le social et le mythique” and “La cité et les divisions du royaume” ; (...) then we will focus on the study of the two axes announced. This paper thus emphasizes the importance of the imaginary in politics and society. We will conclude with the current development, particularly in Western Europe, where myth no longer plays its unifying role for society. (shrink)

In 2017, Bruce Clarke proposed that Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope, and later adapted for twenty-first century environmental discourse by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, is a vital resource in the cultivation of a “planetary imaginary” which attends to “our systemic entanglements”. Contemporary forms of Gaia discourse, Clarke argues, are “fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch”. In an era marked by scalar and communicative disjunctions, (...) Clarke’s claim is significant. Whilst ultimately he deviates from Stengers and Latour, arguing that neither addresses “the cybernetics of Gaia” and... (shrink)

This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their (...) historical and political complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law. (shrink)

This article argues that proliferation of prefixes like ‘neo’ and ‘post’ that adorn conventional ‘isms’ have cast a long shadow on the contemporary relevance of traditional political ideologies. Suggesting that there is, indeed, something new about today’s political belief systems, the essay draws on the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ to make sense of the changing nature of the contemporary ideological landscape. The core thesis presented here is that today’s ideologies are increasingly translating the rising global imaginary into (...) competing political programs and agendas. But these subjective dynamics of denationalization at the heart of globalization have not yet dispensed with the declining national imaginary. The twenty-first century promises to be an ideational interregnum in which both the global and national stimulate people’s deep-seated understandings of community. Suggesting a new classification scheme dividing contemporary political ideologies into ‘market globalism’, ‘justice globalism’, and ‘jihadist globalism’, the article ends with a brief assessment of the main ideological features of justice globalism. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 88-94.

Multiple modernities has emerged as the post-Huntingtonian paradigm in the study of secularism and religion, and the concepts ‘imaginary’ or ‘ verstehen’ are the most common candidates guiding research aiming to articulate this multiplicity. This article revisits Shmuel Eisenstadt’s original ‘Multiple Modernities’ thesis, Charles Taylor’s concept ‘imaginary’ and Max Weber’s ‘ verstehen’, and offers concise examples on how they are put into practice in the current literature on secularism and religion. I argue that the original Eisenstadt thesis is (...) built upon interactions of modernities, and the ‘imaginary’ and ‘ verstehen’ analytics eliminate from sight non-isomorphic relations between ideas and actions, despite the ample presence of both interactions and non-isomorphic relations in the politics of secularism and modernity. Turning multiple modernities into an exercise in typologies of non-interacting modernities articulated in isomorphic relations between ideas and actions produces new kinds of post-Huntingtonian culturalism. I finally sketch a comparative politics of new meanings as the counter-hypothesis to which ‘imaginary’, ‘ verstehen’ and non-interacting typology analytics of modernities have to respond. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Omul politic intre mit si ratiune - o analiza a imaginarului puterii Alfa Press, Cluj, 2000, traducere de Mihaela Calut, 170 p.

Analyses the social imaginary of undoing, repair and return underpinning the international norm of restitution-makingApproaches restitution not just as a legal norm of property return, but as a social imaginary and a cultural-psychoanalytic 'scene' of undoing, repair and returnBrings together philosophic-political, socio-legal and cultural-psychoanalytic approaches to the study of restitutionOutlines a heterogeneous and multifaceted idea of restitution emergent in modernity, and looks at the peripheries of the modern restitutive tradition in the search for alternatives and counter-traditionsThis book (...) takes a unique approach grounded in political and cultural discourse to develop a political theory of restitution. Challenging assumptions about restitution in the Western legal and political tradition, where it has become nearly synonymous with reacquisition and where legal studies focus on material objects and claims to their ownership, Zolkos argues that the development of restitutive norms has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty, and excavates the restitutive tradition's mythical-religious substrate. Bringing together texts from within and outwith the Western canon of political theory and philosophy, including the writings of Grotius, Durkheim, Freud, and Klein, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book undertakes a dual task: reading literary texts as a political theorising of restitution, and reading political or sociological texts as literary narratives with distinctive 'restitutive tropes' of repair, undoing and return. (shrink)

This article considers aspects of the social imaginary underlying early Russian realist thought and narrative by exploring two canonical novels from the 1840s, Ivan Gončarov’s Obyknovennaja istorija and Aleksandr Gercen’s Kto vinovat?, in light of Vissarion Belinskij’s activist reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. The Russian texts are read symptomatically against their western counterparts as illustrating the intriguing transformations that dominant European models of narrative and sociality undergo as they migrate to Russia.

How to integrate artificial intelligence technologies in the functioning and structures of our society has become a concern of contemporary politics and public debates. In this paper, we investigate national AI strategies as a peculiar form of co-shaping this development, a hybrid of policy and discourse that offers imaginaries, allocates resources, and sets rules. Conceptually, the paper is informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, the sociology of expectations, myths, and the sublime. Empirically we analyze AI policy documents of four key players in (...) the field, namely China, the United States, France, and Germany. The results show that the narrative construction of AI strategies is strikingly similar: they all establish AI as an inevitable and massively disrupting technological development by building on rhetorical devices such as a grand legacy and international competition. Having established this inevitable, yet uncertain, AI future, national leaders proclaim leadership intervention and articulate opportunities and distinct national pathways. While this narrative construction is quite uniform, the respective AI imaginaries are remarkably different, reflecting the vast cultural, political, and economic differences of the countries under study. As governments endow these imaginary pathways with massive resources and investments, they contribute to coproducing the installment of these futures and, thus, yield a performative lock-in function. (shrink)