Re-Imagining Imagination: from Castoriadis to Kant to Ourselves

John Rundell

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Chapter 3 Re-Imagining Imagination: from Castoriadis to Kant to Ourselves

In: Thinking with Castoriadis: Antipodean Essays

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John Rundell

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 28–59

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004747418_004

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Abstract

The article addresses the idea of the imagination from a radical Kantian point-of-view: radical in the sense of being based on a far-reaching and systematic re-reading of Kant. Scattered across his three Critiques, many lecture series, and numerous essays, Kant often made interesting and illuminating remarks about the nature of the imagination. These, though, were never gathered together and systematically presented in a stand-alone Critique. The article offers Kant’s multifaceted account of the imagination as a parallel and counterpoint to and a pointer beyond Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of the imagination, one that is more fragmented, less systematic than Castoriadis’, and yet, like Castoriadis’ philosophy, a rich vein to mine. The article starts with an overview of the Kantian model of the imagination, outlining Kant’s ideas of the productive imagination, schemata, figuration, and blurring. It then uses this Kantian model and its categories as a steppingstone to explore a post-Kantian model of the imagination that builds on Kant while at the same time introducing a distinctive and original tripartite model of the wild, mundane, and sacred imaginations. The account of the wild imagination grows naturally out of Kant’s discussion of fantasy and wild imaginings; the idea of the mundane or everyday imagination echoes modern social theories of everyday life and social institutions like technology and money. The section on the sacred or transcendent imagination takes Émile Durkheim’s concept of the sacred as its inspiration. The article re-collects key aspects of Kant’s observations and intuitions about the imagination and expands those insights: sketching out how the processes of the Kantian productive imagination can iterate and inscribe themselves (variously) in dreams and irreality, in mundane economies and technologies, and in the socially transcendent collective imaginings of society expressed in art, science, religion, politics, and love.

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Thinking with Castoriadis: Antipodean Essays

Series: Social and Critical Theory, Volume: 35

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004747418

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 21 Nov 2025

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - Social & Political Philosophy
- Social Sciences
  - Sociology & Anthropology

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Chapter 3 Re-Imagining Imagination: from Castoriadis to Kant to Ourselves

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Thinking with Castoriadis: Antipodean Essays

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