Situating Castoriadis: Radical Democracy, Political Ontology, and the ‘Turn’ to Imagination

Given that the recent turn to ‘imagination’ in social and cultural thought is not in all cases based on a clearly political outlook, it is recommendable to revisit Cornelius Castoriadis’s path-breaking political account of social imagination. However, even the latter, it is argued, must be confronted with an understanding of politics more in line with the tradition of political realism. In order to fully activate the political potentials of Castoriadis’s thought, he is situated in a larger contextual network of intellectual reference points. By characterizing Castoriadis’s thought as a post-Marxist theory of radical democracy, based on a post-foundational ontology of imagination, Castoriadis is put in dialogue with other neo- and post-Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau, who present us with a more realistic understanding of the political function of imagination.