A Cornelius Castoriadis Forum – Journal of the History of Ideas blog

For the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), the creative power of imagination was best described in volcanic terms. Much more than a mental faculty that would store and recombine available images, he argued that the “radical imagination” preceded all distinctions between “real” and “fictitious:” to imagine something meant not only to repeat existing forms but “bursting, emerging, creating, […] explosion, split, rupture – the rupture of what is as such.” Against philosophers’ prejudices which have often reduced the imagination to the model of a (more or less true or false) representation of reality, Castoriadis set out to defend it as an ontological well-spring: a volcano of creative form-making, both for the individual psyche and society as a whole…