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By engaging with the notions of indeterminacy and embodiment within the writings of Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte and Cornelius Castoriadis, this book addresses and brings to the fore the significance of the creative imagination as an ontological source of human creation. Principally inspired by Castoriadis’ revolutionary elucidation of the imagination and the imaginary, this book actively contributes to this neglected line of enquiry by exposing deep lines of continuity and rupture both within and between the writings of Kant, Fichte, and Castoriadis. Beginning with Kant’s hesitation in describing the productive imagination as a creative and embodied power of the soul, this book traces these lines of continuity and rupture through Fichte’s innovative depiction of the creative imagination as an ontological power of creation and through Castoriadis’ radical extension of this idea into the social-historical realm. Given the notions of indeterminacy and embodiment actively inform these lines of continuity and of rupture, this book contributes to the landscape of thinking by proposing the creative imagination must be envisaged an embodied power of the human soul.
This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory. It critically interprets the shifts in his ontology by reconsidering the ancient problematic of human institution(nomos) and nature(physis), on the one hand, and the question of beingand creation, on the other.Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos has played no substantial role in the development of Western thought. The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this by elucidating the social-historical as the region of being that eludes the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced in his 1975 magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society.With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis's thought that occurred during the 1980s. The author argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of ontological creationbeyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift toward a general ontology of creative physis
Offering a vital reflection on the unity and diversity of the modern world, this important new book connects with the current debate on multiple modernities and argues that this notion can only be properly understood in a civilizational context. Johann Arnason presupposes the idea of modernity as a new civilization with its specific social imaginary, centred on strong visions of human autonomy but open to differentiation on institutional and ideological levels, as well as in changing historical contexts. The book begins by connecting this perspective to a distinctive framework of social theory, centred on the differentiation of economic, political and cultural spheres. Arnason goes on to deal with Communism as the most important alternative version of modernity, and with East Asian developments as a particularly complex and instructive case of interacting modernities. The book concludes with reflections on globalization theory and ways of reformulating it in light of the civilizational approach.
Why are women so frequently targeted with hate speech online and what can we do about it? Psychological explanations for the problem of woman-hating overlook important features of our social world that encourage latent feelings of hostility toward women, even despite our consciously-held ideals of equality. Louise Richardson-Self investigates the woman-hostile norms of the English-speaking internet, the ‘rules’ of engagement in these social spaces, and the narratives we tell ourselves about who gets to inhabit such spaces. It examines the dominant imaginings (images, impressions, stereotypes, and ideas) of women that are shared in acts of hate speech, highlighting their ‘emotional stic...
One of the most challenging questions of today concerns how human activities threaten the conditions for our very own existence. With one crisis leading into the next, the need for socio-political change is necessary and desirable, yet so hard to imagine in practice. At the heart of the matter is a deeper crisis of the socio-political imagination. To understand how a society produces and changes itself, Ingerid S. Straume points to historical and contemporary institutions and the imaginaries they embody, and argues that the key to social creativity is found in the reflexive potential of institutions, especially politics and education. Neoliberal rationality, on its part, has become dominant ...
Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent o...
Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Agon of Interpretations explores the challenges and possibilities of critical intercultural hermeneutics in a globalized world. Editor Ming Xie and writers from eight countries on five continents not only lay out the importance of critical hermeneutics to intercultural understanding but also probe the conditions under which a hermeneutics that is both intercultural and critical can be possible. The contributors examine and define critical intercultural hermeneutics as an emerging field from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, including phenomenology, critical theory, sociology, object-oriented ontology, and pragmatism. The essays combine philosophical argumentation with historical and intellectual inquiry. Together, the contributors to The Agon of Interpretations demonstrate the value of critical intercultural hermeneutics for enabling intercultural communication, engagement, and understanding.
Chiara Bottici’s influential work on imaginal politics has provided a rich theoretical framework and incisive critical analysis with which to engage the contemporary world. Rethinking the image as a pictorial space of political activity located between the poles of the creative imagination of the self and social imaginary significations of the social collective, her work has provided a critical new resource not only in the academy, but for activists as well. This collection of essays by leading scholars debates Bottici’s account of imaginal politics from inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from critical theory and political philosophy, to psychoanalysis, and sociology. It provides the first systematic and interdisciplinary engagement with the imaginal field. The book is a must-read for all scholars interested in debates on the political, social transformation, social imaginaries, and the imagination, and will appeal to researchers and graduate students across a wide variety of disciplines as well as activists and politically-engaged readers.
This book examines Cornelius Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social imaginary within human societies, assessing how strict dichotomisation between autonomous and heteronomous modes of institution hinders further insights into the creative capacities of social imaginary, while also imposing limits on Castoriadis’s own assessment of the ‘partially’ autonomous situation of modern societies.
Historical Imagination defends a phenomenological and hermeneutical account of historical knowledge. The book’s central questions are what is historical imagination, what is the relation between the imaginative and the empirical, in what sense is historical knowledge always already imaginative, how does such knowledge serve us, and what is the relation of historical understanding and self-understanding? Paul Fairfield revisits some familiar hermeneutical themes and endeavors to develop these further while examining two important periods in which historical reassessments or re-imaginings of the past occurred on a large scale. The conception of historical imagination that emerges seeks to ad...