The Time of the Snail: Castoriadis, Zapatista Autonomy and the Radical Imaginary Today

The article explores how the radical imaginary of autonomy, along the lines defined by Cornelius Castoriadis 50 years ago, is today revitalized and expanded by the Zapatista practice of autonomy. To understand such a reactivation, it looks at the original Zapatista institution of time. It shows how, through concrete practices and institutions that evoke the slow-pace and spiral shell of the snail, Zapatista autonomy brings about a political temporality that challenges the predominant ‘non-time’ of neoliberal capitalism and infuses the project of autonomy with a radical democratic and indigenous imaginary. Revisiting the radical imaginary in light of the Zapatista ‘time of the snail’ pushes Castoriadis’s analysis further by broadening its scope beyond its original Western ‘germ’. This critical update is not one-sided. Zapatista temporality can be also better understood in terms of Castoriadis’s idea of an autonomous ‘public time’ illuminating their radical aspiration that ‘another world is possible’.