A Further Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Political Philosophy, Normative Commitments, and the Creativity of Social Action

The conversation begins with a discussion of political philosophy, a critique of a priori normativist approaches to that field, and reflections on the distinction between politics and the political. It moves on to clarify the place of the political within an ontology of the social-historical; while the pioneering contribution of Castoriadis to such an ontology is acknowledged, the need for a more elaborate theory of creative action, with due allowance for its involvement in historical processes, is emphasized. After some considerations on the role of ideology and utopia within the social-historical context, the conversation moves back to the questions of autonomy, creativity and the imaginary, and underlines the need to theorize autonomy as an imaginary signification in its own right, rather than merely a new attitude to imaginary significations. Implications of that view for the idea of reflective autonomy are discussed, with particular emphasis on confronting the omnipresent temptation of hubris, the condition of value pluralism and the fundamental fact of uncertainty about the future. The conversation concludes with some comments on diagnoses of our times, and a critique of various “postisms” as well as of the attempts to reduce contemporary societies to a single denominator.