Creativity, the Radical Imagination and the Problem of Action

Raluca Soreanu (UCL)

In international theory, just as in social theory more broadly, we are traversing a crisis in terms of working with and from an actor with a psyche; this is manifested in a variety of ways, starting from plain biological reductionism, and ending with attempts to render the psyche as a more or less sophisticated supercomputer. As a way out of this impasse and as a measure of ethical social and international theory, I propose a de-functionalised conception of the imagination which is not de-coupled from generating emancipatory social forms. Following Cornelius Castoriadis, the radical imagination reveals itself to us as a continuously surging flux of representations, desires, and affects. While Castoriadis insists on the irreducible creativity of the psyche, of society and history, his psychoanalytic understanding of the radical imagination allows us to neither banalize creativity, nor transform it into an attribute of the genius. It is the imagination that renders the very relation of mind to world possible. Finally, I reflect on situations of association and dissociation where new global imaginaries resurface; here, the radical imagination functions as a resource for creating novel social forms and leads to moments of social emergence.

Audio : http://www8.open.ac.uk/ccig/media/audio-for-ccig-forum-21-raluca-soreanu...