Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books)

Product Information

J. Childers/G. Hentz eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 152

Smith, Philip. 2005. Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The lifeworld is a different matter. I tend to think that it was a transitional concept, and that we can now do without it. Husserl did not invent it, but his use of it became the main inspiration for later reformulations, sometimes with a very different thrust (think of the interpretation of the lifeworld in Habermas’s theory of communicative action). Husserl was trying to build a bridge between transcendental phenomenology and history; I think that this problem has now been neutralized – on the one hand by the post-transcendental turn of phenomenology and the focus on the world, on the other by Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social-historical. In short, we now have conceptual resources that make the lifeworld redundant.

Table of Contents

Steger, Manfred B.; James, Paul (2013). " 'Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies' ". Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. 12 (1–2): 17–40. doi: 10.1163/15691497-12341240. It can, of course, be argued (it has been my opinion since I first read The Imaginary Institution of Society) that Castoriadis exaggerated both the importance and the affinity of Freud’s thought to his own, by imposing the creative imagination – unmentioned by Freud – as a key to understanding the latter’s work, and that – at the same time – his treatment of Freud was rather heavy-handed. Or, as Marcel Gauchet put it in a recent conversation: Castoriadis annexed Freud rather than interpreting him, and this was a way of downplaying the connection to Bergson. I think both parts of the statement are correct; not that the link to Bergson has gone quite unnoticed, but it certainly deserves stronger emphasis and closer examination.

Marcus, George E. (1995-04-01). Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226504445. Flichy, Patrice. The Internet Imaginaire. Translated by Liz Carey-Libbrecht. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007 [2001].As one would expect, other debates have occurred in connection with Taylor’s use “transcendence” as part of the theoretical tools for his narrative, which I am not mentioning because they fall beyond the scope of my study.

Strauss, Claudia. "The Imaginary". Anthropological Theory vol. 6 issue, 3 September 2006, p.322–344. Bellah RN (2005) What is axial about the axial age? Eur J Sociol 46:69. doi: 10.1017/s0003975605000032 Steger, Manfred B., 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Marcus, G.E. Technoscientific Imaginaries. Late Editions Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. With contributions by Livia Polanyi, Michael M.J. Fischer, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Paul Rabinow, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Gary Lee Downey, Diana and Roger Hill, Hugh Gusterson, Kim Laughlin, Kathryn Milun, Sharon Traweek, Kathleen Stewart, Mario Biagioli, James Holston, Gudrun Klein, and Christopher Pound. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press.One of the principal concerns of The International Journal of Social Imaginaries is the issue of modernity, especially the possibility of multiple modernities as recently suggested by Shmuel Eisenstadt. We are also interested in how the labyrinths of meaning and power through imaginaries unfold in distinct regions of the world. One interesting case is East Asia during World War 2, especially Japan in its unique modernization process. How did modernity arise in Japan and how was it received by its intelletuals? The Kyoto School, a school of philosophy that arose in connection with the Dept. of Philosophy at the Imperial University of Kyoto in the decades preceding and during the war, and which gave birth to a number of major modern philosophers rom the 1920 even up to the 60s, has been noted—quite infamously—for its participation, along with other intellectuals, in a number of published round-table discussions and symposia, critiquing modernity. Well-known today, in particular, are two such meetings: the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium of 1942 organized by the Bungakkai journal and the ‘The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan’ symposia of 1941–42 organized by the Chūōkōron journal. In her article, ‘“Overcoming Modernity,” Overcoming What?: “Modernty” in Wartime Japan and its Implication,’ Atsuko Ichijo examines the Zeitgeist of the period that was behind this questioning of ‘modernity’ in connection with what these intellectuals meant by ‘modernity’ and its ‘overcoming.’ She suggests that Eisenstadt’s notion of ‘multiple modernities’ may be helpful in understanding the motives of these intellectuals. Burgess, H. (1958). Enterprise in education: The story of the work of the established church in the education of the people prior to 1870. London: National Society. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Domingues’ essay is longer than readers can usually expect. The gravity of the topic justifies the length. Also deservedly longer than usual is Alice Pechriggl’s ‘Gender Between Imaginary Institution and Cultural Incorporation: Revisiting the Concept of Anaclisis From Freud to Castoriadis.’ Pechriggl approaches layers of the gender imaginary through a re-examination of Freud’s notion of anaclisis (or leaning on). Seeing in Castoriadis’ elucidation of the ‘effective imaginary’ a co-location of gender identity, she connects this level of the psyche to gendered social relations and representations instituted in the wider social imaginary. Finding the boundary between inner psychic and societal layers is difficult to say the least; it is a speculation analogous to theology’s attempts to separate body and soul. Understanding this problem through reference to anaclasis, but also trying to determine the means to counteract it, Pechriggl pinpoints a social imaginaries perspective on widely debated issues of gender, bodies, representation, and politics. How the ‘broken unity’ of the psyche conditions the creation of the social world is her topic, and she finds the formation of the self is complex and never total or finished. Likewise, gender does not exhaust socialization, as social science research and social theories of the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and religion have suggested. Finishing with a discussion of the binarism of socially instituted gender identities, a question left untouched by Castoriadis not to mention Freud, Pechriggl ventures into the terrain of intersex and transgender experiences of being. She does so by pointing to the benefits of a Castoriadian understanding of the interrelation of body and psyche, instead of fashionably casting gender as a biopolitics.