On The Possibilities of Political Action

Published in Social Imaginaries (2017) vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 83-118.
On the Possibilities of Political Action in-the-World: Pathways through Arendt,

Castoriadis, and Wagner.
Erin Carlisle
Abstract: This paper clears a path toward an understanding of political action in-the-world. It
does so by reconstructing Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Peter Wagner’s
respective political social theories with a view to the hermeneutic-phenomenological
problematic of the world. The analysis begins from the recognition of the human condition as
always-already situated in-the-world: both within meaningful and shared world contexts, and
within an overarching yet underdetermined world horizon. Two inherently interconnected
notions of political action emerge from the reconstruction. The first, as world-disclosing or
world-interpreting doing, refers to the political critique that arises through the conflict of
interpretations of the world, which reveals the world as a context of unity in a plurality.
Connectedly, world-forming or world-making action relates to the introduction of novelty
into the socio-cultural and historical field. From this view, political projects rearticulate the
world following the interpretative critique of the instituted pattern of socio-cultural reality.
As I argue, the openness of the underdetermined, overarching world-horizon provides the
precondition for political projects that seek to critically reinterpret and rearticulate the socio-
cultural institution of the world. Still, the approach to political action in-the-world offered in
this paper remains open for development; the thematics of power and the temporality of
doing are avenues for further consideration.
Key Words: political action — world — Hannah Arendt — Cornelius Castoriadis —Peter
Wagner — critique — interpretation
Introduction: Projects of World-Making contra Globalisation
The problematic of globalisation has occupied much of the space of theoretical debate
for the last three decades, at least. Peter Wagner and Nathalie Karagiannis (2007a, p. 3) argue
that, at its worst, globalisation is ‘seen predominantly as an anonymous, actorless process,
against which a defensive reaction is at best possible’. Anthony Giddens (1997, p. 53), and
Zygmunt Bauman (2000, pp. 192-193) following him, depict worldwide modernisation or
globalisation as a ‘juggernaut’ process that destabilises cultural communities through the
intensified exchange of information, migration, and a ‘chaotic, high-velocity, promiscuous
1
movement of financial’ capital (Appadurai 2001, p. 4). Together with the compression of
time and space (Bauman 2005, p. 2), what has emerged from the process of globalisation,
according to these debates, is one world: a ‘single commodity world’ with uniform cultural
symbols and practices (Beck 2000, p. 43, emphasis in original). The globalised world is ‘a
world without borders’ (Appadurai 2001, p. 1): one world, not a plurality of socio-cultural
worlds. Yet, on the other hand, globalisation ushers a condition of worldlessness, as it
atomises individuals and diminishes possibilities of collective agency (Wagner 2012, pp. 62-
63, 170). Rather than one world, the condition of globalisation is also that of no world (Beck
2000, p. 13). Or worse, an un-world; as it ‘invades and erodes’ cultural patterns, globalisation
simultaneously suppresses the possibility of world-formation (Nancy 2007, p. 33; see also pp.
34, 50).
Against these debates, Karagiannis and Wagner propose an understanding of varieties

of world-making, in a reconfiguration of Nelson Goodman’s work Ways of Worldmaking
(1978). For Karagiannis and Wagner, ‘varieties of world-making’ suggests ‘the idea of
diverse projects of giving meaning to the world’ within the horizon of global modernity
(2007a, p. 3). Two elements are at play in Karagiannis and Wagner’s discussion of world-
making. First is the problematic of the world, which is central to the phenomenological
movement, broadly construed; second, the term ‘projects’ in the above quotation implies that
world-making refers to a mode of doing or a form of action. Together, they hint at a notion of
political action considered through the lens of the phenomenological world problematic.
However, Karagiannis and Wagner do not fully elaborate their understanding of the world,
and give only indications of the specificities of world-making qua political doing in the
introductory essay to their co-edited book Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalisation
(2007b). There, Karagiannis and Wagner elucidate the human condition in-the-world in
sketches, mostly in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) and Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]).
That ‘human beings are always in the world, always together and facing each other’ for them
indicates the social situatedness of projects of world-making in-the-world, within a shared
context that provides a unity in plurality (Karagiannis and Wagner 2007a, p. 2). To address
the political—rather than the social or epistemological—dimension of world-making,
Karagiannis and Wagner turn to Arendt. From her work, they draw the idea that the ‘constant
rebirth’ of the world is ‘the characteristic of political action’, and later, they connect this
conception of the political recreation of the world to modes of struggle (Karagiannis and
Wagner 2007a, p. 2). Although Karagiannis and Wagner do not systematically elucidate
2
world-making qua political action from a phenomenological perspective in depth, their essay
opens the possibilities of rethinking political action in its worldhood, as an important riposte
to debates surrounding globalisation and depoliticisation.
Combined with the homogenising and atomising tendencies of globalisation, recent

trends of depoliticisation have led to a withdrawal from modes of political community and a
situation of stifled political creativity (Straume and Humphrey 2010, pp. 18–19). Worse still
is the rise of political indifference (Straume and Humphrey 2010, p. 18), which Cornelius
Castoriadis earlier termed the growing insignificancy of contemporary politics (2011 [1996],
pp. 5–6). Leaning on Castoriadis, Bauman (1999, p. 7) protests that ‘the trouble with our
[Western, contemporary] civilisation is that it has stopped questioning itself’. Politics—or la
politique, as Castoriadis understands it—is characterised by the questioning or interrogation
of the instituted world, which opens the possibility for the collective re-institution or self-
alteration of society through autonomous political doing (Castoriadis 1991, pp. 159-160; see
also Straume 2012, p. 369). This is the kind of politics that each of Bauman and Castoriadis
seek to revive: the collective, self-reflexive critique and self-alteration of the institution of the
world as part of the project of autonomy, which for Castoriadis refers to the explicit and lucid
self-creation of laws (or, nomoi) by and for the society in question (Castoriadis 1991, pp.
164-165).1 In light of the contemporary belief ‘that there is little we can change’ in the
globalised world, and that ‘were we able to make a change, it would be futile’ (Bauman 1999,
p. 1), a novel approach to the possibilities of politics is a crucial task to renew understandings
of political togetherness, agency, and creativity.
This paper clears a path toward a theory of political action in-the-world by

reconstructing Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s respective approaches to political doing,
leaning on the hermeneutic-phenomenological insight of the human condition in-the-world. It
starts by outlining the hermeneutic-phenomenological world problematic. This frames the
reconstructions of Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s works in the subsequent sections. Later,
I bring the notion of political action in-the-world—with its elements of world-interpreting
and world-forming doing—into dialogue with the globalisation debate, noted above. The
understanding of political action offered in this paper presents an alternative to the
globalisation field by elucidating the world-forming and world-interpreting capacities of
human collectivities, as a form of political agency. Yet, as I note in conclusion, further
3
avenues for thought remain open: including the problematic of power, and questions of the
temporality of projects of political doing.
Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Starting Points: The Human Condition in-the-

World
The hermeneutic-phenomenological understanding of the world-horizon provides the

theoretical infrastructure for the notion of political action in-the-world developed in this
paper. The world and the world-horizon are enduring problematics for the hermeneutic and
phenomenological movement, broadly understood (Spiegelberg 1994). Following Eugen Fink
(2005 [1933]), Klaus Held recently argued that the world is the ‘most fundamental theme’ of
phenomenological philosophy (2012, p. 443). The world became a question in its own right
with the third generation of phenomenology: in particular, through the work of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also with Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approaches. In his magnum opus, Being and Time (1967 [1927]),
Martin Heidegger revealed the condition of Dasein as being-in-the-world, which highlighted
the human relation with and an openness to the world (Overgaard 2004, pp. 145–146). In
Heidegger’s wake, the phenomenological movement challenged the idea of an external world
separate to the internal world of the conscious subject, which hitherto prevailed in the so-
called philosophy of consciousness (Ricoeur 1974, p. 9). From this phenomenological
perspective, the world refers to a shared, ‘unifying background component of experience’
(Arnason 2007, p. 23).
Hermeneutical thinkers take this understanding one-step further, toward interpretative

horizons of meaning that pattern the underdetermined but overarching world-horizon. It is on
this basis that Charles Taylor recently argued, ‘phenomenology and hermeneutics belong
together’ (Bohmann, Montero and Taylor 2014, p. 5). Combined with the phenomenological
notion of the world, the hermeneutical element helps to ‘understand how agents are
understanding the world’ through varied modes of social, cultural—and I would argue,
political—doing (Bohmann, Montero and Taylor 2014, p. 5). Furthermore, hermeneutic
perspectives highlight the complex interplay of and conflict between the horizons of meaning
that shape varied socio-cultural worlds (Arnason 2007, p. 23), which, moreover, remain open
to the possibility of creative re-articulation, as underdetermined horizons of meaning.
4
Approaches that intertwine hermeneutics with phenomenology each take different

roads toward the human condition in-the-world; here, I briefly focus on Johann P. Arnason,
Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor. Taking cue from Merleau-Ponty, Arnason contends that
being-in-the-world is ‘the most elementary level of meaning’ (Arnason 2003, p. 90; c.f.
Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945], p. xxii). Arnason brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology into
dialogue with Max Weber’s cultural writings to elucidate a notion of culture as mise en forme
du monde, or, articulations of the world (Arnason 1993, p. 94). As the ultimate horizon of
horizons, the world tout court is a context of unity amidst diverse socio-cultural patterns of
world-interpretation, and varied anthropological articulations of the human condition in-the-
world (Arnason 1992; see also Adams 2011a, p. 74). Ricoeur, in turn, argues that ‘the world
is where we dwell’ (1991, p. 453). Ricoeur elucidates the world as the always-already present
temporal, spatial, yet inexhaustible horizon of interpretative possibilities (Ricoeur 1991, pp.
212–213; Vanhoozer 1991, p. 50). Our being-in-the-world or dwelling-in-the-world is for
Ricoeur constituted through action, the ‘act of inhabiting’ the world (1995, p. 38).
Furthermore, to dwell in the world simultaneously means to belong in it (Adams 2015, pp.
140–141; Ricoeur 1998, pp. 106, 116–117), which points to hermeneutical modes of
understanding and cultural-historical renderings of being together in the world. For Taylor
(1997, p. 120), following Heidegger, language discloses the world. As beings in-the-world
that disclose this world, human beings are therefore ‘language beings’ (Taylor 1997, p.
126)—or, as Taylor phrases it elsewhere, ‘self-interpreting beings’ (1985, p. 191).
These hermeneutic-phenomenological approaches to the human condition and the

world problematic reveal three important points which serve as openings for an
understanding of political action in-the-world. First, human communities understand their
specific situation in-the-world via sociocultural and historical patterns of meaning, which
articulate a broader, encompassing, yet underdetermined world-horizon (Arnason 2003, pp.
227–230). Indeed, ‘to exist, to be “in the world”, is to have a concrete “there”’ in society,
culture, and history (Malpas 2006, p. 47). Such common interpretative spaces of experience
form the preconditions for modes of political togetherness, and furthermore, shape the field
of possibilities for projects of political doing. From this perspective, the world as an
underdetermined horizon of meaning is not only a background of our experience: instead, ‘we
are involved with the world and with others in an inextricable tangle’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002,
p. 528). However, the world constituted via the nexus of history, culture, and society remains
‘open to an infinite number of possibilities’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, p. 527). Hence the second
5
insight concerns the underdetermined character of the world, as an inexhaustible horizon of

meaning. That the world is underdetermined suggests an openness to potentially infinite
possibilities of re-formation through forms of cultural, social, and political doing. Our
condition in-the-world however places limits on these projects: it curtails the possibility of
complete mastery over the world from an Archimedean point outside of the world, which
otherwise reduces the world-horizon to a limited totality. This second insight opens onto the
third. The openness of the world lends to the possibility of diverse, conflicting interpretations,
which clears a space for critique and—by extension—for politics. Despite the potential
conflict between pluralities of perspectives, the world provides a source of unity, as a
common horizon of interpretation and context of experience. Political conflict and action to
bring about change are each premised on the open, underdetermined character of the world.
Yet political action begins from within historical and socio-cultural communities; these
interpretative contexts therefore shape the field of possibilities for political projects. This
hermeneutic-phenomenological understanding of the human condition in-the-world paves the
way for the notion of political action in-the-world developed in this paper, as a novel
approach to political social theory and political phenomenology.
The question of politics has not been central to many phenomenological projects. Yet,
for those that do consider the thematic of politics, the problem of political action per se
remains on the periphery. This brief discussion serves to highlight a gap in the field of
political phenomenology (broadly construed), for a theorisation of political action in-the-
world. Although Bernard Flynn labelled Claude Lefort a ‘phenomenologist of the political’
(Flynn 2012), Lefort does not specifically elucidate a phenomenological understanding of
political action. Rather, Lefort (1986) is predominantly interested in the forms of the political
in modernity—be it democracy, totalitarianism, or bureaucracy. For Patočka, the dual
creation of philosophy and politics in the Athenian polis opened the world to historical
movement and the ‘possibility of authentic life’ (1996, p. 39; see also Ricoeur 1996, p. viii).
Patočka’s approach is an important contribution to the field of political phenomenology, with
connections to both Arendt (Findlay 2002, pp. 97-99; Učník 2010) and Castoriadis’s thought
(Adams 2016). However, like Lefort, political action as such was not at the forefront of
Patočka’s analysis. Instead, Patočka points toward the trans-subjective horizon of historical
movement, and combined ethical and political questions in his elucidations of ‘responsibility’
and ‘care for the soul’ (Patočka 1996). Political thematics similarly underlie each of Taylor
and Ricoeur’s theoretical approaches; however, they do not develop a notion of political
6
action per se. A political project arguably operates within Ricoeur’s analysis of the utopian
pole of the productive imagination, as creative modes of action open the possibility of
sociohistorical change (Ricoeur 1986, p. 16; see also Iakovou 2012, p. 122). Additionally,
while his notion of the conflict of interpretations provides an opening for a hermeneutical
theorisation of political questioning, Ricoeur did not explicitly take this path; the thematic of
political action properly speaking remains submerged in his writings. In his book Modern
Social Imaginaries (2003), Taylor discusses the emergence of the public sphere as a novel
formation of the modern social imaginary, which for him constitutes a common space of
debate between an otherwise diverse collectivity (2003, pp. 85-86). However, for Taylor,
public space is an ‘independent identity from the political’ (2003, p. 86). This suggests that
Taylor distinguishes between the political in the sense of institutional forms, and political
action via public debate. Elsewhere, Taylor contends that critique must be directed toward
the social imaginary narratives that pattern our social world and institutions (Bohmann,
Montero and Taylor 2014, p. 7). Yet, he has not expanded upon this to elucidate a notion of
political action, per se. While Ricoeur, Taylor, Lefort, and Patočka each integrate notions of
political action with broadly phenomenological motifs, their approaches to political action are
less significant for the present analysis, and as such are not treated in this paper.
Instead, the notion of political action in-the-world developed in this paper begins from
Arendt’s political phenomenological theory and advances this project via Cornelius
Castoriadis and Peter Wagner, from the perspective of the hermeneutic-phenomenological
understanding of the human condition in-the-world (as earlier). Although Arendt did not
consider herself as a phenomenologist (see Held 2012, p. 442), her approach to political
action begins from the situation of the human condition in-the-world with others (1998
[1958]). For her, political action inaugurates new beginnings in the world to reshape history
(Arendt 2006a [1963]), as I will show. Where Arendt thinks with and beyond Heidegger’s
understanding of being-in-the-world in her political theory (Hinchman and Hinchman 1984,
pp. 191-197), Castoriadis follows a Merleau-Pontian approach toward the meaningful
condition of human beings in-the-world (Adams 2011). The mid-twentieth century movement
of French phenomenological Marxism2 influenced Castoriadis’s early work, as he elucidated
the problematisation and re-formation of the social-historical world through creative
revolutionary praxis contra the determinism inherent in Marx’s historical materialism (1987a
[1964-1965]). After his re-immersion in ancient Greek philosophical sources, Castoriadis
rearticulated the socialist revolutionary project as the political project of autonomy. For
7
Castoriadis (1991, 1997d), the modern democratic revolutions revived the ancient imaginary
of autonomy, as created in the Athenian polis, as they pursued the explicit self-institution of
society as a modern political project. Wagner (2012) adopts Castoriadis’s understanding of
the imaginary of autonomy and the Greek democratic experience in his elucidation of modern
forms of world-making. As I will later show, Wagner understands world-making as projects
of socio-political transformation that interpretatively critique and creatively reconstruct the
social world.
Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner each turn to the problematic of the world in their
political theories in response to modernity. For Arendt, a revival of properly political action
in-the-world is necessary to counter the condition of world alienation brought about by the
intersecting processes of capitalism, scientism, rationalism, and the individualistic society of
‘the social’ (1998, pp. 38-49, 248-326). The imaginary of autonomy, which orients modern
democratic political projects, for Castoriadis sits in tension with the imaginary of the
unlimited expansion of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, as expressed in modern bureaucratic
capitalist forms (1991, 1997e). In turn, the agency, community, and creativity at the heart of
Wagner’s notion of world-making provides a counterweight to the individualising and
homogenising tendencies of globalisation, noted earlier (Karagiannis and Wagner 2007a;
Wagner 2012, pp. 66-67).
The common thrust between Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s perspectives is thus
an understanding of politics that reimagines the ancient Greek political experience in the
modern context—continuing the dialogue between the ancients and the moderns—and,
furthermore, begins from the recognition of the human condition in-the-world. For each, the
world forms a common space for political action as an underdetermined field of possibilities
that is open to conflicting, plural interpretations, as the precondition for political contestation
as well as socio-political change. One such dialogue between Arendt and Castoriadis’s
notions of creative political action has been undertaken in the field (Straume 2012). This
paper expands on Ingerid Straume’s analysis via the hermeneutic-phenomenological world
problematic, and the addition of Wagner’s political theory. As the reconstructions in the next
section will demonstrate, Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s approaches reveal the
interconnection between interpretative and creative elements of political action. Political
projects disclose as well as interpret the world, which always involves a creative aspect. In so
8
doing, projects of world-forming or world-making creatively re-form and rearticulate the

world through political instituting action.
Political Action in-the-World: Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s Approaches
Two starting points frame the following reconstruction of Arendt, Castoriadis and
Wagner’s projects. The first is an understanding of politics as the collective, autonomous
self-interrogation and self-alteration of the institution of the world, leaning on Castoriadis’s
(1991) notion of la politique. The second is the hermeneutic-phenomenological insight of the
human condition in-the-world. As noted earlier, the underdetermined and open character of
the world-horizon provides the possibility for political debate via the conflict of
interpretations, as well as projects that alter the world through creative political doing. The
world, moreover, provides a context of unity in the face of the plurality of interpretations, as
a source of community. Yet our situation in-the-world means political action cannot assume a
status of mastery over the world; instead, collective projects of political doing give shape to
the broader world-horizon through the rearticulation of institutions and interpretative patterns
of meaning. With this in mind, I now turn to Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s respective
elucidations of political action, which reveals an understanding of political doing in-the-
world that is at once interpretative and creative, each in their own way.
Arendt on the World-Disclosing and World-Forming Dimensions of Political Action
In an interview in 1964, Arendt noted that she was largely disinterested in political
issues in her youth (1994b, pp. 4-5). That is, until her encounter with Nazi totalitarianism as a
German Jew, which fundamentally changed her political indifference. The student of
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Arendt’s thought emerged from the constellation of German
existential phenomenology. Additionally, Karl Marx, St Augustine, and Immanuel Kant were
each key interlocutors for Arendt. The Human Condition (Arendt 1998) is typically taken as
Arendt’s treatise of political theory (see Canovan 1995, p. 99), However, Arendt does not
explicitly theorise politics per se in The Human Condition; one could argue that Arendt’s
oeuvre is itself dedicated to an elucidation of politics in toto. The closest Arendt comes to an
explicit explanation of politics is in her posthumously published essay, ‘Introduction into
Politics’ (2007a).3 There, she contends that ‘at the centre of politics lies a concern for the
world’ (Arendt 2007a, p. 106). She adds, ‘Politics deals with the coexistence and association
of different men … [and] arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships’
9
(Arendt 2007a, p. 93, 95, emphases in original).4 Three important elements operate beneath
Arendt’s thinking here: human relationships and action constitute the world; the world forms
a context of commonality in the difference between human beings; and, the core of politics
involves this common, socio-cultural, and historical space of significance. As I will show,
Arendt elucidates political action as the disclosure of the world via speech and the re-
formation of the world through new beginnings in history and the creation of new
institutions.
Arendt’s develops her incipient notion of world-disclosing action through her essays
in the early 1950s, en route to The Human Condition (1998). A sketch of the notion of
‘understanding’ in her essay ‘Understanding and Politics’ (1994a [1954]) represents her first
step along this path. In reference to the phenomenon of totalitarianism as an event in history,
Arendt relates the act of understanding to a ‘quest for meaning’ that reveals the interpretative
pattern of the past (1994a, pp. 318, 319).5 Understanding discloses the historicity of the
human condition, as the collective origins that give shape to the ‘landscape of human deeds
… and new possibilities’ (Arendt 1994a, p. 320). The notion of origins here stems from
Arendt’s doctoral thesis, later published as Love and Saint Augustine.6 There, she argues that
memory, as a connection to origins, ‘gives unity and wholeness to human existence’ (1996
[1929/1964], p. 56). In ‘Understanding and Politics’, Arendt connects understanding to a
form of imagination; yet the problematic of the imagination—particularly its creative
dimension—remains underdeveloped in this essay, as well as in Arendt’s project more
broadly.7 For Arendt, imagination illuminates the ‘frightening light of truth’ hidden in
historical events (1994a, p. 322), and enables the past to be placed at a distance (1994a, p.
323) whilst simultaneously ‘bridg[ing] [the] abysses of remoteness’ to engender a sense of
belonging, as part of the ‘dialogue of understanding’ (Arendt 1994a, p. 323). The act of
understanding therefore ‘springs from’ this form of imagination (Arendt 1994a, p. 327, n.
22), which reveals the world as a common historical horizon, yet also as a space for plural
interpretations.
The dialogue of understanding—with its latent dimensions of imagination and

interpretation—reappears in another text by Arendt from 1954, ‘Philosophy and Politics’
(1990).8 In this essay, Arendt juxtaposes truth (episteme) and opinion or doxa, the latter of
which for her refers to the articulation of ‘what appears to me’ or, put otherwise, an
understanding of ‘the world as it opens itself to me’ (1990, p. 80). This rests on the premise
10
that ‘the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it’ (Arendt
1990, p. 80). In this formulation, plural and potentially conflicting interpretations of the
world emerge through doxa, yet the same world reveals itself across this plurality, as a
common horizon (Arendt 1990, p. 80). Following Socrates, Arendt elucidates doxa as a
dialogical form of political action that produces bonds of equality between actors through the
exchange—or contest—of opinions oriented toward the world shared in common (1990, pp.
80–84). Arendt returns to these ideas in ‘Introduction into Politics’ (2007a [1956-1959]). In a
lengthy analysis of the meaning of politics as articulated in the ancient Greek polis (2007a,
pp. 114-134), Arendt motions toward two dimensions of political action: beginning (I return
to this), and speaking (2007a, pp. 126–129). As a form of action, speech is revelatory:
‘[B]ecause the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective’,
speech discloses one’s specific standpoint in the world to others (Arendt 2007a, p. 128). Yet
the fundamental point in Arendt’s formulation is not that action reveals or expresses the self,
as some have interpreted The Human Condition (e.g. Buckler 2011, pp. 89–90; Canovan
1995, pp. 132-135; d’Entrèves 1989, pp. 320-322). Rather, actors articulate their view of the
world as it appears to them through speech (Arendt 2007a, p. 129). Arendt argues that ‘to
experience the world as it “really” is’, actors must understand it
as something shared by many people, [which] lies between them, separates and
links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the
extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and
perspectives with one another, over against one another (2007a, p. 128, emphasis
in original).
Speech reveals the world in its diversity, as well as its commonality (Arendt 2007a, p. 129).
Speech is an interactive form of action that necessitates the presence of others who,
moreover, potentially interpret the world differently, as the prerequisite for political conflict.
This understanding of different interpretations of the world arguably underlies Arendt’s
notion of the human condition of plurality. Indeed, for Arendt, ‘Politics is based on the fact of
human plurality’ (2007a, p. 93). This is to say that the coexistence of different yet equal
people in-the-world provides the ground for politics (2007a, p. 93): the plurality of
standpoints opens the world to a conflict of interpretations, as a precondition for critique and
political contestation.
11
As Arendt presents it, world-disclosing action reveals the world as a common yet
plural space, which paves the way for the political struggle between interpretative
perspectives. Yet this notion of world-disclosing doing remains on the margins of Arendt’s
thought when compared with her elucidation of political action as beginnings. Together with
her later notion of foundation from On Revolution (2006a [1963]), Arendt’s understanding of
beginnings refers to the recreation of history via the rearticulation of the common world and
institution of new socio-political forms. Arendt first hints at ‘beginnings' in Love and Saint
Augustine (1996), alongside her remarks on origins (noted earlier); both of which are
associated with Arendt’s incipient philosophical anthropology. Arendt notes Augustine’s
juxtaposition of beginning as principum and initium (1996, p. 55). Where principum refers to
the ‘creation of the universe’ by the Creator (i.e., God), initium concerns the creation of
anthropos into the world, which on Arendt’s reading, is simultaneous to the creation of
human beings into time, ‘together with motion and change’ (1996, p. 55). Arendt extrapolates
the human capacity for novelty via beginnings (as initium) from Augustine’s dictum, ‘In
order that there be a such a beginning, man was created before whom nobody else was’
(Arendt 1996, p. 55), which she reiterates across her trajectory (e.g. Arendt 1994a, p. 321,
1998, p. 177, 2006a, p. 203). Through the capacity for beginnings, human beings are able to
‘enact the story of mankind’. For Arendt, beginnings ‘prevent[s] time … from turning
eternally in cycles … without anything new ever happening’ (1996, p. 55). In this sense, on
Arendt’s reading of Augustine, human beings were created ‘for the sake of novitas’ or
novelty (1996, p. 55). Through her Augustinian conception of ‘natality’, Arendt works
against Heidegger’s (1967, pp. 285–311) formulation of the condition of Dasein as ‘being-
toward-death’. Contrariwise, natality or birth-into-the-world is the ‘the crucial political
moment’ because ‘birth is always in common’ (Bottici 2014, p. 87), and each new birth for
Arendt represents untold possibilities for action and novelty in the world (1996, p. 55, 1998,
p. 177; see also Durst 2004, p. 792).
In The Human Condition, Arendt reiterates the Latin term initium in reference to the
above-mentioned Augustinian maxim, ‘that there be a beginning, man was created before
whom there was nobody’ (1998 [1958], p. 177). Through the condition of initium, Arendt
argues human beings ‘take initiative, [and] are prompted into action’ (1998, p. 177). Arendt
goes on to characterise this form of doing as spontaneous and ‘miraculous’: ‘the fact that man
is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to
perform what is infinitely improbable’ (1998, p. 178). Action is a spontaneous beginning
12
because it is unforced and unpremeditated, without an explicit cause (Arendt 1998, pp. 191-
192). Unlike the teleology inherent in the category of constructive action as ‘work’ (1998, pp.
153–159), the ending of properly political, spontaneous action for Arendt cannot be
predetermined. Through action, actors act into the socio-historical ‘web of human
relationships’ (which is also the world for Arendt: 1998, pp. 52, 182-183). Because action
arises within the realm of history—and indeed constitutes it—‘the actor [or actors] never
remains the master of his acts’ (Arendt 1998, p. 235). As action sets off a chain of boundless
reactions by other actors and events that reverberate through the web of human relationships,
‘one deed, and sometimes even one word, suffices to change every constellation’ (Arendt
1998, p. 190). For Arendt, the capacity for miracles is human, not divine; ontologically
rooted in the creativity inherent to human natality, new beginnings spontaneously alter the
path of history, as if ‘from nothing’ (Arendt 1998, pp. 246-247; see also Ricoeur 1983, p. 72).
From Arendt’s analysis, political action inaugurates new beginnings in the world,
which in so doing opens the common world to possibilities of change. Arendt carries over the
notion of new beginnings from The Human Condition to On Revolution (2006a [1963]);
revolutionary political movements are themselves an example of novel beginnings in the
world and history. However, ‘new beginnings’ transmutes into the mode of world-forming
doing when institutional forms are recreated. In so doing, projects of world-forming doing
reinstitute history and rearticulate socio-cultural understandings. Arendt’s first hint at this
notion is found in ‘What is Authority’ (2006b [1961]), in her discussion of what she terms the
‘foundation’ of the Roman republic. She argues that the moment of foundation represented
‘the beginning of their [Roman] whole history’, as a deeply political event that created the
institutional core of Roman society and culture (2006b, p. 120). The act of foundation shaped
the specifically Roman world and the bonds that formed the web of human relationships,
whilst simultaneously forging an entirely novel historical constellation. Arendt continues
these ideas in On Revolution. There, Arendt characterises foundation as the concurrent
creative institution of a socio-political form and a new ‘story’ (or, history) that articulates a
novel socio-cultural and political world (2006a, pp. 22, 32, 135, 208, 210). This intertwines
the capacity for beginnings with the need to create what Arendt terms ‘lasting institutions’, to
establish the change within the common world and history. Where beginnings engender
uncertainty into the world, the formation of lasting institutions mitigates this contingency.
Yet for Arendt, the characteristics of political action as beginnings and instituting world-
forming sit in tension. The revolutionaries sought to form a new, ‘permanent and enduring
13
reality’ in the world, as a new beginning in history. However, the creative potential for
beginnings inherent within each person born into the world risks the longevity and stability of
this newly constituted institution (Arendt 2006a, p. 224; see also pp. 214-215). Each new
birth in this way represents potential creative beginnings in-the-world. In Arendt’s view,
spaces for political action or beginnings must be instituted into the institution itself, such that
the possibilities of political action remain open for the collectivity to rearticulate the common
world and inaugurate movement into the field of history, while the core foundation of the
common world remains constant (see Arendt 2006a, pp. 224, 227, 245).
From this analysis, Arendt elucidates a notion of political action that reveals the
interconnected dimensions of world-disclosure and world-formation. As Arendt presents it,
collectivities articulate the world as one in common from a plurality of interpretative
perspectives through world-disclosing action. This serves as the precondition for politics for
Arendt, as the conflict of interpretations reveals human plurality in-the-world, which opens
the possibility of seeing and instituting the world differently. In turn, world-forming action
suggests the inauguration of new modes of being together in-the-world, as collectivities
reshape the institution of the world and the web of human relationships, as a new beginning
in history.
Castoriadis’s Early Notion of Political Action: World Interpretation and the Self-
Alteration of the World
Alongside Arendt, Castoriadis was a key voice in twentieth century political social
theory. A philosopher, economist, and practicing psychoanalyst, Castoriadis brought ancient
Greek philosophical sources (especially Aristotle) into dialogue with modern sociological
theory (chiefly Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim), Kantian philosophy, and
Freudian and Lacanian approaches to psychoanalytic theory. Castoriadis’s thought orbits two
key notions in particular: the imaginary creation of a world of meaning, ex nihilo; and, the
political project of autonomy. Both problematics form part of Castoriadis’s road beyond
Marx as he rethought the creativity of praxis (Arnason 1991). On the one hand, Castoriadis
sought to elucidate the imaginary element as the creative dimension of the social-historical.
On the other, Castoriadis recast the socialist project of self-management as the explicit,
autonomous self-alteration of society, the latter of which follows the recognition that society
self-creates its imaginary institutions; they are not given by an extra-social source such as
‘God’ or ‘Nature’ (1991, pp. 162-164; see also Adams 2014). In the second part of his
14
magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society,9 Castoriadis argues that ‘society brings
into being a world of significations and itself exists in reference to such a world’ (1987b
[1975], p. 359). This is to say that society self-creates a world of meaning ex nihilo, from
nothing (see Mouzakitis 2014). As Castoriadis presents it, creation is ex nihilo because it is
‘not derivable, by means of combinatory or in some other way—from the given’ (1997a, p.
104).10
However, Castoriadis’s emphasis on creation ex nihilo sits in tension with his remarks
on societal self-alteration via the political project of autonomy. Politics in the strong sense, as
Castoriadis understands it as la politique, refers to the explicit and lucid self-interrogation and
self-alteration of society (1991, pp. 167–169). This creative effort of self-alteration transpires
through the interrogation of the institution of the world. Creation in this sense is contextual
(Adams 2005), as it emerges through the political conflict of interpretations from a situation
in-the-world. Castoriadis’s writings from the early 1960s—influenced by the field of French
phenomenological Marxism and Merleau-Ponty—indicate the interconnection of
interpretative and creative dimensions in the revolutionary project and praxis, ‘which
transforms the world by transforming itself’ (Castoriadis 1987a, p. 57). The first part of The
Imaginary Institution reveals phenomenological undercurrents (Adams 2011b, p. 230, n. 16),
as Castoriadis notes that the world is formed through human doing (1987a, p. 72). Yet, few
have sought to reconstruct the intersection of (interpretative-creative political) doing and
world from his early writings, following the recognition that Castoriadis increasingly
marginalised the question of doing after 1970 (Adams 2012, p. 30; Arnason 1991, pp. 74, 76;
Klooger 2014, p. 119). While Straume (2012) considered Castoriadis’s understanding of
political creation in dialogue with Arendt and the notion of the common world, she did not
pursue Castoriadis’s analysis of political doing in-the-world as such. In turn, Suzi Adams
(2012) expanded on Castoriadis’s elucidation of doing via the phenomenological world
problematic and Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology, though she focussed on the trans-
subjective level of cultural movement rather than the collective dimension of the political
project, as I do here. In this section, I reconstruct the notion of political doing in-the-world
that emerges from Castoriadis’s writings prior to his ontological turn. In particular, I focus on
the first part of The Imaginary Institution, and connect these insights to Castoriadis’s essays
‘The Anticipated Revolution’ (1993b [1968]), ‘The Imaginary as Such’ (2015 [1968/1969]),
and ‘Technique’ (1984a [1973]). As I will show, Castoriadis’s thought prior to his
ontological turn reveals the intertwined elements of world-interpreting and world-forming
15
doing within the political project, which run counter to his later contentions of creation ex
nihilo.
First, it is helpful to detail Castoriadis’s understanding of the formation of the world

through human doing. Castoriadis intersects ‘doing’ with the creation of meaning and the
institution of the human world in sketches in the first part of The Imaginary Institution of
Society. For him, the ‘historical world is the world of human doing’ (1987a, p. 72, emphasis
in original). This historical world emerges through the radical social imaginary, ‘as this is
manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution … of a universe of
significations’ (Castoriadis 1987a, p. 146, emphasis in original). Castoriadis adds, ‘this is
because doing posits and provides for itself something other than what simply is … because
in it [doing] dwell significations’ (1987a, p. 146, emphasis in original). If ‘doing constitutes
the human universe’, as Castoriadis contends (1987a, p. 381, n.10), creative political doing
can be understood as an explicit project of world-forming action. Castoriadis makes this
interconnection of doing and meaning clear in his brief discussion of the ancient institution of
slavery in The Imaginary Institution. He argues, ‘the institution of slavery marks the
emergence of a new imaginary signification, a new way for society to live, to see itself …’
through its collective articulation of its ‘image of the world’ (1987a, p. 154, emphasis in
original). The institution of slavery—or capitalism, or democracy—is a moment of doing that
creates new imaginary significations, which reshapes the institution of the world and the
articulation of the human condition within this world (Castoriadis 1987a, p. 141). Castoriadis
echoes this understanding of the formation of the world through doing in ‘The Imaginary as
Such’ and ‘Technique’. In both essays, Castoriadis reiterates that the ‘world constitutes itself
as a human world’ through modes of doing (2015, p. 65; c.f. 1984a, p. 240). Over again in his
early writings, Castoriadis interlinks doing with the formation of imaginary significations and
the question of the world. However, Castoriadis notes in the first part of The Imaginary
Institution that the institution of a world of meaning formed through human doing ‘contains
grooves, lines of force … which mark out the possible … indicate the probable and permit
action [as creative doing] to find points of anchorage in the given’ (1987a, p. 79). This world
of meaning, then, is not a closed totality. The interstices form points of contact between the
instituted world and the underdetermined field of possibility that is the world-horizon, which
therefore provide the opening for the articulation of the radical social imaginary, to reform
the institution of the world through political instituting doing (1987a, p. 90; see also pp. 133,
141).
16
As Castoriadis develops it, the world-interpreting dimension of political doing forms

the precondition for the creative world-forming aspect of political action. In this sense,
interpretation and creation are interconnected. Firstly, interpreting doing situates the political
project within a meaningful yet underdetermined context. In a secondary step, the collectivity
relativises the instituted world through critical interpreting action, which places instituted
reality at a distance prior to the creative self-alteration of the institution of the world.
Castoriadis’s initial remarks on the interpretative and creative aspects of political doing
emerge through his critique of Marx’s revolutionary theory in the first part of The Imaginary
Institution. Early in the first chapter, Castoriadis argues that the revolutionary movement
must ‘first understand what [they] want to change’, and later adds, ‘We first have to
understand and interpret our own society. And we can do this only by relativising it’ (1987a,
p. 14, 28, emphasis in original). For Castoriadis, this underscores the lucidity of the political
project, in its self-reflexive examination of the institution of the world. The self-reflective
aspect of political doing necessarily involves an interpretative element. In Castoriadis’s
analysis, the political project directs interpretative critique to both the institution of given
reality and the past (1987a, pp. 21, 28, 34, 39). This self-reflexive interpretation of the
present and past opens the possibility of otherness, as the collectivity places instituted social
reality at a critical distance (or, relativises it), and comes to recognise that they are not
determined to this situation (Castoriadis 1987a, pp. 21, 28). The critical interpretation of the
instituted imaginary gives way to opposition and conflict within society. Castoriadis writes
that as society ‘challenges itself’,
what is internal to society becomes external to it, and this, in so far as it signifies
the self-relativisation of society, placing at a distance and criticising … what is
instituted, marks the initial emergence of autonomy [and its political project], the
first crack in the [instituted] imaginary (1987a, p. 155).
He reiterates this understanding of the interpretative, critical fracture of the institution of the
world via political action in ‘The Anticipated Revolution’. There, Castoriadis reaffirms that
political projects must incorporate an interpretative element, because ‘to transform things …
we have to understand them’ (1993b [1968], p. 125). Through this interpretative aspect of
political doing, the collectivity renders the instituted dimension of the world visible to
problematise it; in so doing, political action triggers fractures in the instituted imaginary, as
it opens the possibility of instituting movement (Castoriadis 1993b, pp. 125-132). In this
17
way, the interpretative and creative dimensions of political action are interconnected. These
cracks in the instituted social imaginary provide the openings for the self-alteration of the
world through creative political doing.
Castoriadis returns to these ideas in traces in ‘The Imaginary as Such’ (2015

[1968/1969]). In that essay, Castoriadis echoes the above-mentioned notion of relativisation.
He argues that imaginary creation involves the preparatory step of placing the real ‘at a
distance’ to detach oneself—either individually or collectively—from instituted reality
(2015, p. 60). The act of detachment or relativisation opens the space for otherness between
the institution of reality (as ‘the real’) and the underdetermined field of possibility (‘the
possible’), to later ‘make the possible exist’ through social imaginary creation (Castoriadis
2015, p. 60, see also p. 65).11
Castoriadis furthers these points in ‘Technique’ (1984a [1973]). There, he argues that
the possibility of doing resides in ‘the fact that brute reality is not fixed but bears within it
immense interstices which allow of movement’ (1984a, p. 240). This echoes his remark
regarding the spaces for creative doing between instituted reality and the field of possibility
in the first part of The Imaginary Institution (noted earlier; 1987a, p. 79). Through instituting
doing, the collectivity opens the institution of reality by differentiating the realm to which
‘nothing can be done’ from that ‘to which some kind of making/doing is possible’
(Castoriadis 1984a, p. 240). On this view, instituting doing does not abolish the instituted
imaginary in its entirety. Instituting doing opens onto the field of possibility, yet leans on the
instituted dimension of the real to reform the institution of the world (I return to this).
Through projects of instituting doing, ‘man is able to insert himself as a real cause in the
flux of reality’ in an effort to alter it (Castoriadis 1984a, p. 240), by placing distance
between instituted reality and the underdetermined space of possibility. This understanding
of world-opening instituting doing might underlie Castoriadis’s closing statement in his first
dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s thought, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’ (1984b [1971]).12
The distance created between instituted reality and the field of possibility through critical-
interpretative political doing ‘is opening, then, in the sense of the work of opening,
constantly renewed inauguration … the spirit of praxis. Or, in other words: the subject [or,
the collectivity] is that which opens’ (Castoriadis 1984b, p. 144). As Castoriadis presents it
in his early writings, the fissures introduced into the instituted world via political critique
18
form the precondition for political creation, by opening the real onto the underdetermined
field of possibilities that is the world-horizon.
Because world-interpreting doing opens the world to the possibility of alteration,

world-forming instituting doing is contextual in character: the imaginary creation of
meaning leans on—indeed, emerges through—the spaces between the institution of reality
and the underdetermined field of possibility. In this sense, aspects of Castoriadis’s early
elucidation of political doing run counter to his later understanding of creation ex nihilo.
Castoriadis notes the contextual character of creative doing in his discussion of the
revolutionary project in the first part of The Imaginary Institution of Society. The
revolutionary project relativises the institution of reality to open the possibility of creation
through political critique. In so doing, the movement of praxis ‘evolves within a concrete
context which conditions it’ (Castoriadis 1987a, p. 76). Castoriadis hints at the ex nihilo
character of creation in ‘The Imaginary as Such’ when he contends that creation via
instituting doing as not ‘at all explainable in terms of pre-given representations’ (2015, p.
64; see also p. 63). However, he contravenes this statement shortly afterwards: ‘instituting
doing … is certainly in part linked to prior representations but also surpasses them in
different ways’ (Castoriadis 2015, p. 64). In this analysis, Castoriadis jumps between an
understanding of the contextual, interpretative character of creation on the one hand, and his
elucidation of creation ex nihilo. Yet the political project, as Castoriadis understands it,
pertains to the explicit self-institution of society through efforts of self-interrogation and
self-alteration. The political project therefore intertwines these creative and interpretative
dimensions within its movement. Political doing begins from a situation within an instituted
reality, which opens the field of possibility through critical interrogation and distanciation
(noted earlier). Furthermore, collectivities interpretatively rearticulate the world-horizon (as
‘the possible’) via political action and give it form through the social imaginary to reinstitute
the human, historical world, in an effort to create something other than what ‘is’ in reality.
From this analysis, the moment of creation is not an ‘absolute rupture’; rather, instituting
doing leans on ‘the available significations (… or institutions in the narrow sense)’, through
which ‘the new meaning can emerge’ (Castoriadis 1984b, p. 137).
If, as Castoriadis argues in the first part of The Imaginary Institution, the objective of
the political project is to ‘transform […] the real’ (1987a, p. 77)—or, as he put it elsewhere,
‘a real attempt at transforming the world’ (1993b, p. 130)—then politics necessarily involves
19
an interpretative element within the moment of creative re-institution. From this analysis of
Castoriadis’s thought, world-interpreting doing refers to the interpretative self-interrogation
of the institution, which opens a critical distance between the instituted world and the
horizon of potential otherness. The opening of the world forms the precondition for political
creation as world-forming doing, which reforms the institution of the world through the
interstices between instituted reality and the underdetermined field of possibility.
Castoriadis’s early thought interconnects doing with meaning and the question of the world:
projects of doing give form to the world-horizon in and through the creative articulation of
social imaginary significations, which, in so doing, reshapes the institution of the world and
the human condition in-the-world. This form of world-altering doing becomes properly
political when undertaken as an explicit and ongoing project of autonomy.
Wagner on the Elements of World-Making as a Political Project: Critique and

Reconstruction
Wagner is foremost a theorist of modernity, working at the crossroads of political

philosophy, historical sociology, and social theory. His understanding of the succession of
plural forms of modernities played out across the modern global context developed
principally through his first major work, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline
(1994), and in encounter with the multiple modernities field (see Friese and Wagner 2000;
Wagner 2012). Wagner understands the successive, plural forms of modernities as common
worlds—‘spaces of experience and interpretation’ (2008)—patterned by the imaginaries of
autonomy and mastery (borrowing the latter notions from Castoriadis; Wagner 2012, p. 22).13
Alongside Karagiannis, Wagner characterised this project of socio-cultural transformation as
‘varieties of world-making’ (2007b). However, the understanding of collective socio-political
action at play in Wagner’s elucidation of plural successive modernities has largely gone
unnoticed. Although Magnus Wennerheg (2010) leant on Wagner’s successive modernities
approach in his discussion of the Global Justice Movement, he did not pursue Wagner’s
theorisation of political action as a form of world-making, per se. Instead, attention remains
focused on Wagner’s theoretical framework and analyses of modernities (for example:
Carleheden 2006, 2010; Møen 2014; Mota and Delanty 2015). As noted at the opening of this
paper, Karagiannis and Wagner hint at the political project that underlies world-making, but
do not fully develop it. Following Arendt, they note that ‘the characteristic of political action’
is the ‘constant rebirth’ of the world through modes of struggle and creative doing
20
(Karagiannis and Wagner 2007a, p. 2). With this in mind, I turn to Wagner’s broader
theoretical project to reconstruct his incipient notion of political action in-the-world. As I will
show, two interconnected elements emerge from Wagner’s thought: the world-interpreting
dimension of critique; and the reconstructive, creative aspect of world-making. Here, I focus
in particular on Wagner’s reflections on the 1968 student movement, and the South African
democratisation project.
The 1968 student movement is an enduring problematic for Wagner. It first appears in
his early work A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (1994), and resurfaces in
two later essays, ‘The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, or, What’s
Wrong with Post-1968 Individualism?’ (2002), and, ‘The Political Form of Europe, Europe
as Political Form’ (2005). Two specific, interrelated insights emerge from his analyses that I
draw specific attention to in this section. First, the interpretative rearticulation of
sociocultural bonds to reform so-called ‘imagined communities’ provides the possibility for
political action. Second, socio-political movements—such as 1968—must comprise an
element of ‘institution building’ or reconstruction, in addition to critique and protest.
Wagner often considers 1968 against other socio-political movements. In Liberty and
Discipline (1994), Wagner juxtaposes the 1848 worker’s movement and 1968, each of which
arose at the cusp of a transformation from one form of modernity to another (from Restricted
Liberal, to Organised, to Extended Liberal modernity). Wagner argued that the 1848 worker’s
movement successfully created a new form of collective identity following the critique of the
bourgeois social institutional form, which effectively altered the form of Restricted Liberal
Modernity through its effort of socio-political transformation (Wagner 1994, pp. 16, 50–57).
However, for Wagner, the 1968 movement did not accomplish such institutional change in
the crisis of Organised Modernity. Through the 1968 project, collectivities reinterpreted their
situation within the instituted world and challenged the established institutional form. In so
doing, the collectivity rearticulated existing social bonds, which Wagner termed ‘the building
of imagined communities’ (Wagner 1994, pp. 143, 187), leaning on Benedict Anderson
(1991; see Wagner 1994, pp. 50, 205 n. 44). According to Wagner, this reforging of common
bonds served as a prerequisite for political action, ‘to make collective action possible’ (1994,
p. 50) through a critical reinterpretation of their shared situation in-the-world. Yet 1968
remained a protest movement: it failed to constitute new socio-political institutional forms
after the fact (Wagner 1994, pp. 141–145, 162–163).
21
Wagner advances this understanding of the rearticulation of sociocultural bonds in his

essay, ‘When “the Light of the Great Cultural Problems Moves on”: On the Possibility of a
Cultural Theory of Modernity’ (2000), co-authored with Heidrun Friese.14 Whereas cultural
linguistic understandings of collective identities root commonality in shared language and
past experiences (as common history), Friese and Wagner argue contrariwise: collectivities
constantly rearticulate shared bonds through interpretative doing in the present. In this sense,
socio-cultural bonds are ‘no longer seen as the mere effect of a pre-existing commonality’
(2000, p. 28), which is to say that cultural belonging is open to ongoing reinterpretation.
Friese and Wagner reiterate this sentiment one year later in a text titled ‘Culture’ (2001).
There, they contend that the reinterpretation of common history in the present is ‘a specific
representation of the past, reworking it with a view to creating commonalities … As such …
it may create the idea of belonging among human beings in the present’ (Friese and Wagner
2001, p. 126). These essays reveal that, for Wagner (with Friese), collectivities continuously
reinterpret their situation in the world to reshape socio-cultural bonds. Expanding on this in
light of Wagner’s reflections in Liberty and Discipline, the reformation of so-called imagined
collectivities gives rise to political critique, as re-interpretative efforts alter the collective
relation to the instituted world, which opens the world to problematisation.
Wagner carries these ideas over to ‘The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of
Politics…’ (2002) and ‘The Political Form of Europe, Europe as Political Form’ (2005).15
The problematic of 1968 resurfaces in both texts. Wagner explicitly states in ‘The Possibility
of Politics’ that ‘critique and reconstruction’ comprise the ‘two elements of a political
project’ (2002, p. 37). With this in mind, Wagner differentiates between the impetuses of the
1968 student movement, as emancipation from, and emancipation for. The interpretative
dimension of critique underscores the push for an ‘exit from’, as criticism is directed against
the instituted order (Wagner 2002, pp. 35, 41). Contrariwise, the reconstructive element
indicates the substantive project of the socio-political movement, in terms of the effort of
emancipation for a projected outcome as articulated by the collectivity; however for Wagner,
this ‘was not accomplished’ by the 1968 movement (Wagner 2002, p. 41). Thus, the purpose
of ‘reconstruction’ in the political project is the creation of a new political form that reflects
the re-articulations of the world. Wagner concludes ‘The Possibility of Politics’ with a
definition of ‘political form’, which he characterises as ‘the relation between the singular
human beings and the collectivity under specific sociohistorical conditions, including power
relations’ (2002, p. 43).16 This closing remark acts as a bridge to his essay, ‘Political Form’
22
(2005). There, Wagner rethinks European political modernity as ‘a narrative of struggle’, in

contrast to other narratives that emphasise liberal democracy or the modern nation state
(2005, p. 60, emphasis in original; see also pp. 51–52). The narrative of struggle points
toward an understanding of the conflict between interpretative articulations and institutional
forms, which engenders sociohistorical transformation (Wagner 2005, p. 60). Once more,
Wagner returns to the problematic of 1968 in this essay, and adds the 1848 worker’s
movements and the 1989/1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to his analysis. Each of these
movements, though under different socio-political conditions, exposed the ‘socio-institutional
configuration’ to critique to demand liberation (Wagner 2005, p. 65). Yet, neither movement
created a ‘viable political form’ that reflected the new interpretative societal self-
understandings which emerged through the political project (Wagner 2005, pp. 66–67). The
deficient outcomes of these political projects aside, Wagner’s analysis reveals a notion of
political doing that intertwines interpretation with creation. The creation of new socio-
political forms develops through a critical reinterpretation of the world, and a rearticulation of
common bonds in the same movement.
Wagner introduces notions of imagination in passing in ‘Political Form’ (2005),

which adds an extra dimension to his elucidation of the elements of critique and
reconstruction within a political project.17 However, Wagner does not pursue the relation
between imagination and political doing at length there or elsewhere across his trajectory. He
hints at three interconnected dimensions of imagination, which appear to operate at the
collective or social level (i.e., not within the faculty of the mind), and are each oriented
toward the world: historicity, reflexivity, and agentiality (Wagner 2005, p. 53). The notion of
reflexivity refers to the capacity to ‘step out of the immediate present’, ‘to imagine other
possible worlds’ (Wagner 2005, p. 53). In turn, Wagner articulates historicity as the
differentiation between the present as it is given in experience, from a common past and a
future that could be otherwise (Wagner 2005, p. 53). Together, these aspects indicate the
temporality of action between past and future; moreover, the capacity for imagination opens
the world as an underdetermined field of possibility. With the idea of agentiality, Wagner
couples the reflexive relation to historicity to action, which, as he puts it, ‘may contribute to
bringing a particular different future about’ (2005, p. 53). Although Wagner does not develop
these insights further than a paragraph in ‘Political Form’, traces of reflexivity, historicity and
agentiality permeate his analyses of South Africa.
23
Where the 1968 movement missed the opportunity to create a new socio-political
form, the South African democratisation project for Wagner was a success. Wagner examines
South Africa’s effort of world-making in a cluster of works after 2010 (2010, 2011, 2012,
2013, 2014, 2015b). On my reading, South Africa is a project of world-making as Wagner
understands it, par excellence. As noted earlier, Karagiannis and Wagner detail the political
aspect of world-making as the ‘constant rebirth’ of the world via political action (2007a, p.
2). The South African democratisation movement did precisely that. The collectivity
rearticulated its common bonds through critical reinterpretation of their shared past, and
struggled against the instituted Apartheid order to reshape their socio-cultural and political
world in light of these novel interpretative patterns (Wagner 2010, pp. 232, 234, 237, 2012,
pp. 162, 164–165, 169).18 Moreover, the South African political project combined the above-
mentioned elements of reflexivity, historicity, and agentiality: the collectivity brought about a
different world and set their future onto a different path by reflexively reinterpreting their
past and present, to reconstruct another South African world from the imagined horizon of
possibilities. Finally, the departure from Apartheid in South Africa was at once a movement
of liberation (as emancipation from) and the creation of a new social world through collective
action toward autonomy, as emancipation for (Wagner 2013, p. 168).
For Wagner, South Africa’s political project accomplished both dimensions of

interpretative critique and the reconstruction of a political form. Additionally, the notion of
the reformation of collective bonds resurfaces in Wagner’s analyses of South Africa. The new
form of community emerged from the collective critique of past and present injustices. This
rearticulated bond was irreducible to former ethno-linguistic or socio-cultural modes of
commonality. Instead, the re-imagined socio-political bonds of equality revealed a ‘current
unity in diversity’ in which pre-existing cultural orientations coexisted within the same world
(Wagner 2012, p. 141, 2013, p. 175). Through the political movement, the collectivity
reinterpreted common bonds and critiqued shared histories of inequality, which rearticulated
the socio-cultural interpretative patterns that shape the South African world (Wagner 2011, p.
494, 2013, p. 167). In light of these new interpretative patterns and the problematisation of
the instituted Apartheid order, the collectivity created a new, democratic political form. In
this respect, the South African political project developed a framework for the institution of a
political form for after the moment of critique had passed (Wagner 2011, pp. 493-494, 2012,
p. 138), unlike 1968. For Wagner, the South African democratisation movement—as a
project of world-making—successfully intertwined the elements of critique and
24
reconstruction as an ‘exercise of collective self-determination [and] political change in the

direction of autonomy’ (2011, p. 493).
Wagner’s analyses of South Africa and the 1968 student movement reveal an account
of political action as world-making that interlinks critical interpretative and creative aspects
of doing. In his thought, the reinterpretation of the present and past gives way to a conflict
between new articulations of the world and the instituted order. The element of critique, as a
world-interpreting form of political action, effectively destabilises the institution of the
world. This simultaneously intertwines the elements of agentiality, historicity, and
reflexivity: the reflexive reinterpretation of the past opens the world to the potential of the
imagination, to articulate other possible futures and forms of the world. To instaurate change
into the socio-political field which reflects these new interpretative articulations of the world,
Wagner stresses the aspect of reconstruction—as creative, instituting doing—as part of the
political project of world-making.
Closing Reflections
At their worst, contemporary approaches to globalisation portray the present world as

a singular, homogenised cultural space inhabited by atomised, isolated individuals with
limited capacities for political agency. As I noted at the beginning of this paper, this view
suggests that the globalised condition is one of worldlessness, or worse, of no world at all
(see Beck 2000; Nancy 2007; Wagner 2012). The notion of political action in-the-world
developed in this paper offers an important counter-point to these debates. First, if the world
were flattened to a singular perspective, political debate would be impossible: the openness of
the world to a conflict between plural interpretations forms the precondition for political
critique, and the possibility of otherness. The world-interpreting or world-disclosing aspects
of political action in-the-world reconstructed from Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s thought
underscores this point. For Arendt in particular, the interpretative disclosure of the world in
speech reveals our situation or place within it (1990, p. 80, 2007a, p. 128). Arendt’s
perspectival notion of world-disclosing political action implies that speech reveals a view of
the world, of which other interpretative points of view are possible; yet each perspective must
be such for someone. In this sense, the world provides a source of unity in plurality. As
Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception, ‘The world is an open and
indefinite unity in which I have my place’ (2002, p. 354). People in-the-world are therefore
not atomised, worldless individuals, as depicted in globalisation debates. Rather, world-
25
disclosing or world-interpreting political action reveals our varied involvement with a shared
space of experience and common horizon of interpretation.
Additionally, the approach to political action in-the-world developed in this paper

highlights that the world, as an underdetermined horizon of meaning, provides untold
possibilities for creation and interpretation. This understanding challenges the image of the
closure of the world portrayed by globalisation theories. As Castoriadis argued in ‘The
Sayable and the Unsayable’, ‘of the world there is always something else to be said’ (1984b,
pp. 132–133). By extension, there is always more to be interpretatively created in-the-world,
too. The inexhaustible and underdetermined character of the world-horizon makes ongoing
re-interpretations and re-articulations of the world possible, which can be pursued as an
explicit, political project. Hence, a theory of political doing in-the-world offers a renewed
understanding of agency and creativity, as human beings are seen as both world-interpreting
and world-forming beings (Adams 2011b, p. 7; Arnason 1992; Malpas 2012, p. 328).
The notion of political action in-the-world presented here emerged through a

reconstruction of Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s work. The analysis leant on both the
hermeneutic-phenomenological world problematic, and a Castoriadian understanding of la
politique as an explicit and autonomous political project of societal self-interrogation and
self-alteration. The reconstruction revealed two, interconnected dimensions of political
action: one notably interpretative, which I termed world-disclosing or world-interpreting
doing; and, a creative aspect of world-forming or world-making political action. Although I
distinguished between these two elements across this paper for the purposes of analysis, they
are necessarily intertwined. From the above, world-interpreting doing is itself creative, as it
opens the possibility of otherness via the conflict of interpretations; in turn, world-forming
doing is interpretative, beginning from in-the-world.
World-interpreting or world-disclosing doing reveals the world as a shared space

where the conflict of interpretations plays out, which forms a precondition for political
creation as alternative articulations of the world, emergent through political critique (Arnason
1992, pp. 256-257). Compared to Castoriadis and Wagner, Arendt’s approach to world-
disclosing action places less emphasis on the creative dimension of interpretation. For
Arendt, world-disclosure through speech pertains more to understanding: to understand our
shared situation in-the-world as one of plurality shaped by common historical experiences.
Alternatively, for Wagner in particular, the critical reinterpretation of the past and the present
26
paves the way for the creative reinstitution of the social world, which sets the course of
history onto a different path. In this, Wagner intersects the aspect of world-interpreting doing
with creative world-making action, which together comprises the elements of a political
project. Although Castoriadis elsewhere dismisses the interpretative element of creation (see
Adams 2005, p. 35), his remarks on the interpretative dimension of the revolutionary project
indicate otherwise. Through world-interpreting political critique, the collectivity places
distance between the instituted world and the field of possibility, which from Castoriadis’s
analysis provides the precondition for political creation.
In turn, the notion of world-forming or world-making political doing that emerges

from Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s works represents a new beginning in the world. As
Arendt presents it, collectivities introduce unpremeditated, spontaneous beginnings into the
world through political action. For Arendt, the subsequent creation of new institutions after
the ‘new beginning’ institutes change into the world and historical field, which, in so doing,
reshapes the web of human relationships and modes of belonging in-the-world. Arendt’s
discussion of the interplay of new beginnings and institutional formation bears similarities to
Wagner’s elucidation of the reformation of the world through world-making projects. In
Wagner’s work, collective political projects—such as South Africa’s democratisation
movement—reinstitute the socio-political world following the shared reinterpretation of the
past. In his emphasis on interpretative patterns, Wagner moves one-step closer toward the
idea of the rearticulation of meaning through political doing than Arendt does; yet, Wagner
does not go as far as Castoriadis. For Castoriadis, projects of doing articulate social
imaginary significations to institute the world-horizon as a human, historical world. From this
analysis, political doing is world-forming in that it reshapes the institution of the world by
articulating the radical social imaginary through the cracks in the instituted imaginary, which
were brought about through political critique. Both Castoriadis and Wagner underscore the
role of the imagination and the imaginary for political creativity, each in their own way.
However, the imagination remains on the margins of Arendt’s thought, alongside the
problematic of cultural meaning.
Specificities aside, each of Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s notions of political

doing in-the-world reveal a form of collective action that interpretatively challenges and
creatively reshapes the shared condition in-the-world. Nevertheless, questions remain, which
point to avenues for further consideration. For one, neither Arendt, Castoriadis, nor Wagner
27
adequately deals with the notion of power in their elucidations of political action. In his
essay, ‘Praxis and Action—Mainstream Theories and Marxian Correctives’ (1991), Arnason
noted that a comprehensive theory of power could take its starting point from the
interconnection of action with meaningful contexts, as the ‘ability to intervene in the world’
to ‘change the course of events’ (1991, p. 65). The approach to political action in-the-world
developed in this paper may provide an initial step in this direction, toward such an
understanding of power. Additionally, the temporality of this notion of politics calls for
further reflection. Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner each placed an emphasis on revolutionary
political projects in their analyses. Leaning once more on Arnason (2016), the question of the
speed of political projects—as slow movement, versus explosive revolutionary moments—
also prompts additional analysis, to consider the relation between time and the longevity of
the outcomes of political change. Both problematics of time and power may further enhance
the theory of political action in-the-world advanced in this paper, which understands political
projects as opening the possibilities of world-interpretation and world-formation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Suzi Adams for her generous comments on earlier
versions of this paper. Thanks also to the anonymous referees, whose considered remarks
helped to further develop and refine the arguments presented here. This research has greatly
benefitted from funding through an Australian Government Research Training Program
Scholarship (2013-2016).
References
Adams, S 2005, ‘Interpreting Creation: Castoriadis and the Birth of Autonomy’, Thesis
Eleven, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 25-41.
Adams, S 2009, ‘Dimensions of the World: Castoriadis’ Homage to Merleau-Ponty’, Chiasmi

International, vol. 11, pp. 111-130.
Adams, S 2011a, ‘Arnason and Castoriadis’ Unfinished Dialogue: Articulating the

World’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 71-88.
Adams, S 2011b, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, Fordham University Press,
New York.
28
Adams, S 2012, ‘Castoriadis and the Non-Subjective Field: Social Doing, Instituting Society
and Political Imaginaries’, Critical Horizons, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 29-51.
Adams, S 2014, ‘Autonomy’, in S Adams (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts,

Bloomsbury, New York, pp. 1-12.
Adams, S 2015, ‘On Ricoeur’s Shift from a Hermeneutics of Culture to a Cultural

Hermeneutics’, Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 130-153.
Adams, S 2016, ‘On the Significance of the Ancient Greek “Polis” for Patočka and
Castoriadis: Philosophy, Politics, History’, in F Tava and D Meacham (eds.), Thinking
After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, Rowman and Littlefield, London, pp. 217-
236.
Althusser, L 1979, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary

Societies, Ink Links, London, pp. 225-237.
Anderson, B 1991, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, Verso, London.
Anderson, P 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, New Left Books, London.
Appadurai, A 2001, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, in A

Appadurai (ed.), Globalization, Duke University Press, pp. 1-21.
Arendt, H 1989, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, University of Chicago Press,

Chicago.
Arendt, H 1990 [1954], ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 73-
103.
Arendt, H 1994a [1954], ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’, in

J Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and
Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace and Co, New York, pp. 307-327.
Arendt, H 1994b, ‘What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter
Gaus’, in J Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and
Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace and Co, New York, pp. 1-23.
29
Arendt, H 1996 [1929/1964], in JV Scott and JC Stark (eds.), Love and Saint Augustine,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Arendt, H 1998 [1958], The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Arendt, H 2006a [1963], On Revolution, Penguin Books, New York.
Arendt, H 2006b [1961], ‘What is Authority?’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises
in Political Thought, Penguin Books, New York, pp. 90-141.
Arendt, H 2007a, ‘Introduction “into” Politics’, in J Kohn (ed.), The Promise of Politics,
Schocken Books, New York, pp. 93-200.
Arendt, H 2007b, ‘Socrates’, in J Kohn (ed.), The Promise of Politics, Penguin Books, New
York, pp. 5-39.
Arnason, JP 1989, ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’, in G Busino (ed.), Revue

européenne des Sciences Sociales, vol. 86, no. XXVII, pp. 323-337.
Arnason, JP 1991, ‘Praxis and Action—Mainstream Theories and Marxian Correctives’,

Thesis Eleven, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 63-81.
Arnason, JP 1992, ‘World Interpretations and Mutual Understanding’, in A Honneth (ed.),

Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 247-268.
Arnason, JP 1993, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber: an Unfinished Dialogue’, Thesis Eleven,
vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 82-98.
Arnason, JP 2003, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions,

Brill, Leiden.
Arnason, JP 2007, ‘The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patocka’s Critique and Recovery of
Metaphysics’, in S Adams (guest ed.), Special issue: ‘Post Phenomenology’, Thesis
Eleven, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 6-26.
Arnason, JP 2016, ‘Revolutions, Transformations, Civilizations: Prolegomena to a Paradigm

Reorientation’, in JP Arnason and M Hrubec (eds.), Social Transformations and
30
Revolutions: Reflections and Analyses, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p.

Chapter Three.
Bauman, Z 1999, In Search of Politics, Polity, Oxford, UK.
Bauman, Z 2000, Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge [England].
Bauman, Z 2005, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Beck, U 2000, What is Globalization?, Polity, Cambridge, UK.
Beiner, R and Nedelsky, J 2001, Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and
Arendt, Rowman & Littlefield, New York.
Bohman, J 1990, ‘A New Phenomenological Marxism’, Human Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp.
163-172.
Bohmann, U, Montero, D and Taylor, C 2014, ‘History, Critique, Social Change and
Democracy: An Interview with Charles Taylor’, Constellations, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 3-
15.
Bottici, C 2014, Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Columbia
University Press, New York.
Breckman, W 2013, Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Democratic Theory,

Columbia University Press, New York.
Buckler, S 2011, Hannah Arendt and Political Theory: Challenging the Tradition, Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh.
Canovan, M 1995, Hannah Arendt: a Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge UK.
Carleheden, M 2006, ‘The Transformation of Our Conduct of Life: One Aspect of the Three
Epochs of Modernity’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 55-75.
Carleheden, M 2010, ‘The Imaginary Significations of Modernity: A Re-Examination’,

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 51-70.
31
Castoriadis, C 1984a [1973], ‘Technique’, trans K Soper and MH Ryle, in Crossroads in the
Labyrinth, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 229-259.
Castoriadis, C 1984b [1971], ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, trans K Soper and MH Ryle,
in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 119-144.
Castoriadis, C 1987a [1964-1965], ‘Part 1: Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, trans. K

Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, UK, pp.
7-164.
Castoriadis, C 1987b [1975], ‘Part 2: The Social Imaginary and the Institution’, trans. K
Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, UK, pp.
165-373.
Castoriadis, C 1991 [1989], ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in DA Curtis (ed.), Philosophy,

Politics, Autonomy, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 143-174.
Castoriadis, C 1993a [1978], ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’,
Thesis Eleven, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1-36.
Castoriadis, C 1993b [1968], ‘The Anticipated Revolution’, in DA Curtis (ed. and trans.),
Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings Vol. 3, Vol. 3, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 124-156.
Castoriadis, C 1997a, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 49, no. 1, pp.
99-116.
Castoriadis, C 1997b [1989], ‘Done and To Be Done’, in DA Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis
Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK, pp. 361-416.
Castoriadis, C 1997c [1978], ‘The Discovery of the Imagination’, in DA Curtis (ed.), World
in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 213-245.
Castoriadis, C 1997d, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in D Curtis (ed.),
World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the
Imagination, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. pp.84-107.
32
Castoriadis, C 1997e, ‘The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized

Conformism’, in DA Curtis (ed.), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society,
Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 32-45.
Castoriadis, C 2011, Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis,

Continuum, London.
Castoriadis, C 2015 [1968/1969], ‘The Imaginary as Such’, trans. JP Arnason, Social

Imaginaries, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 59-69.
Durst, M 2004, ‘Birth and Natality in Hannah Arendt’, in A-T Tymieniecka (ed.), Does the
World Exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht,
pp. 777-797.
d’Entrèves, MP 1989, ‘Freedom, Plurality, Solidarity: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action’,

Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 317-350.
Findlay, EF 2002, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in
the Thought of Jan Patočka, SUNY Press, Albany.
Fink, E 2005 [1933], ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and

Contemporary Criticism [1933]’, in R Bernet, D Welton and G Zavota (eds.), Edmund
Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Routledge, London, pp. 177-
241.
Friese, H and Wagner, P 2000, ‘When “the Light of the Great Cultural Problems Moves on”:
On the Possibility of a Cultural Theory of Modernity’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 61, no. 1,
pp. 25-40.
Friese, H and Wagner 2001, ‘Culture’, in A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not
all that is Solid Melts into Air, Sage, London, pp. 117-127.
Giddens, A 1997, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Goodman, N 1978, Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis.
Heidegger, M 1967 [1927], Being and Time, trans. J Stambaugh, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
33
Held, K 2012, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of the Political World’, in D Zahavi (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, pp. 442-459.
Hinchman, LP and Hinchman, SK 1984, ‘In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s

Phenomenological Humanism’, The Review of Politics, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 183-211.
Hull, MB 2003, Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Routledge, London.
Iakovou, V 2012, ‘To Think Utopia With and Beyond Paul Ricoeur’, in TS Mei and D Lewin
(eds.), From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of Ricoeur’s
Thinking, Continuum International, New York, pp. 113-135.
Kaplan, GT and Kessler, CS 1989, Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom, Allen and
Unwin, Sydney.
Karagiannis, N and Wagner, P (eds.) 2007a, ‘Introduction: Globalization or World-Making?’,

in Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, Liverpool University Press,
Liverpool, pp. 1-13.
Karagiannis, N and Wagner, P 2007b, Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization,

Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
Klooger, J 2014, ‘Legein and Teukhein’, in S Adams (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis: Key
Concepts, Bloomsbury, New York, pp. 117-126.
Kohn, J 2007, ‘Introduction’, in J Kohn (ed.), The Promise of Politics, Schocken Books, New
York, pp. vii-xxxiii.
Kompridis, N (ed.) 2014, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, Bloomsbury, New York.
Lefort, C 1986, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy,

Totalitarianism, Polity, Cambridge, UK.
Malpas, J 2006, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Malpas, J 2012, ‘Heidegger, Space and World’, in J Kiverstein and M Wheeler (eds),
Heidegger and Cognitive Science, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 309-342.
34
Merleau-Ponty, M 1973, Adventures of the Dialectic, Northwestern University Press,

Evanston.
Merleau-Ponty, M 2002, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C Smith, Routledge, London.
Møen, A 2014, ‘Interpretations and Critiques of Modernity’, Theory and Society, vol. 43, no.
5, pp. 581-587.
Mota, A and Delanty, G 2015, ‘Eisenstadt, Brazil and the Multiple Modernities Framework:
Revisions and Reconsiderations’, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp.
39-57.
Mouzakitis, A 2014, ‘Creation ex Nihilo’, in S Adams (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis: Key

Concepts, Bloomsbury, New York, pp. 53-64.
Myers, E 2013, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, Duke
University Press, Durham.
Nancy, J-L 2007, The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization, trans F Raffoul and D
Pettigrew, SUNY Press, New York.
Nedimović, S 2007, ‘Being to the World: An Inquiry into Philosophical Implications of

Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought’, PhD Thesis, European University Institute,
Florence: <http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/7033>.
Overgaard, S 2004, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World, Phaenomenologica,

Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
Patočka, J 1996, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, J Dodd (ed.), trans. EV
Kohák, Open Court, Chicago.
Piccone, P 1971, ‘Phenomenological Marxism’, Telos, vol. 1971, no. 9, pp. 3-31.
Rancière, J 2013, The Politics of Aesthetics, G Rockhill (ed. and trans.), Bloomsbury,
London.
Ricoeur, P 1974, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Northwestern

University Press, Evanston.
35
Ricoeur, P 1983, ‘Action, Story and History: On Re-reading The Human Condition’,
Salmagundi, no. 60, pp. 60-72.
Ricoeur, P 1986, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, GH Taylor (ed.), Columbia University
Press, New York.
Ricoeur, P 1991a, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, MJ Valdés (ed.),

Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York.
Ricoeur, P 1995, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, in LE Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Paul

Ricoeur, Open Court, Chicago, pp. 3-53.
Ricoeur, P 1996, ‘Preface’, in J Dodd (ed.), trans. EV Kohák, Heretical Essays in the
Philosophy of History, Open Court, Chicago, pp. vii-xvi.
Ricoeur, P 1998, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, in JB Thompson (ed.), trans. JB

Thompson, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, pp. 101-128.
Scott, JV and Stark, JC 1996, ‘Rediscovering Hannah Arendt’, in JV Scott and JC Stark
(eds.), Love and Saint Augustine, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 115-211.
Spiegelberg, H 1994, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, Second

Edition, Phaenomenologica, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.
Straume, IS 2012, ‘A Common World? Arendt, Castoriadis and Political Creation’, European
Journal of Social Theory, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 367-383.
Straume, IS and Humphrey, JF 2010, ‘Introduction’, in IS Straume and JF Humphrey (eds.),

Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism, NSU Press, Norra
Vallgatan, pp. 9-24.
Taylor, C 1985, Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Human Agency and Language, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Taylor, C 1997, Philosophical Arguments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Taylor, C 2003, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham.
36
Učník, Ľ 2010, ‘Human Existence: Patočka’s Appropriation of Arendt’, in Phenomenology

2010: Selected Essays from Asia and Pacific: Phenomenology in Dialogue with East
Asian Tradition, vol. 1, Zeta Books, Bucharest, pp. 409-433.
Vanhoozer, KJ 1991, ‘Philosophical Antecedents to Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”’, in D

Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, Routledge, London, pp.
34-54.
Wagner, P 1994, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, Routledge, London.
Wagner, P 2002, ‘The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, or, What’s
Wrong with Post-1968 Individualism?’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 31-45.
Wagner, P 2005, ‘The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form’, Thesis Eleven,
vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 47-73.
Wagner, P 2008, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of

Modernity, Polity, Cambridge, UK.
Wagner, P 2010, ‘Towards a World Sociology of Modernity’, in Hans. Joas and B Klein
(eds.), The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for
a Global Social Science, Brill, Leiden, pp. 227-239.
Wagner, P 2011, ‘Violence and Justice in Global Modernity: Reflections on South Africa
with World-Sociological Intent’, Social Science Information, vol. 50, no. 3-4, pp.
483-504.
Wagner, P 2012, Modernity: Understanding the Present, Polity, Cambridge, UK.
Wagner, P 2013, ‘The Modernity of New Societies: South Africa, Brazil, and the Prospect for
a World-Sociology’, in DK Stoeckl and PDM Rosati (eds.), Multiple Modernities and
Postsecular Societies, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, pp. 163-180.
Wagner, P 2014, ‘World-Sociology Beyond the Fragments: Oblivion and Advance in the
Comparative Analysis of Modernities’, in SA Arjomand (ed.), Social Theory and
Regional Studies in the Global Age, SUNY Press, Albany, pp. 293-312.
37
Wagner, P 2015a, ‘Interpreting the Present: A Research Programme’, Social Imaginaries,

vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 105-129.
Wagner, P 2015b, ‘Modernity and Critique: Elements of a World Sociology’, in BM Bringel

and JM Domingues (eds.), Global Modernity and Social Contestation, pp. 21-35.
Wennerhag, M 2010, ‘Another Modernity is Possible? The Global Justice Movement and the
Transformations of Politics’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11, no. 2, pp.
25-49.
Zerilli, LMG 2005, ‘“We Feel Our Freedom”: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of
Hannah Arendt’, Political Theory, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 158-188.
Author Biography
Erin Carlisle is a doctoral candidate in the discipline of sociology at Flinders University in

Adelaide, Australia. Her research critically compares Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis,
and Peter Wagner’s theoretical projects to develop a theory of political action in-the-world.
Address: School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide
5001, South Australia. Email: erin.carlisle@flinders.edu.au.
Notes
1
Aesthetic and ethical understandings of politics have come to dominate the field of political social theory in
recent decades. Yet this turn to the aesthetic and ethical often blurs the distinction between politics as a form of
action, and moral-ethical politics or political aesthetics. In regard to the aesthetic understanding of politics, see
Jacques Rancière (2013 [2000]) and Kompridis (2014). The ethical turn in democratic theory refers to the moral
and normative dimensions of politics and questions of justice, which often lean on Emmanuel Levinas or
Jacques Derrida. For a discussion of this latter form of political theory, see for example Myers (2013). In
contrast to these ethical and aesthetic notions, the approach to politics taken in this paper follows a Castoriadian
understanding of la politique and the project of autonomy. As I noted in the body of the text, this emphasises the
collective interrogation and self-alteration of society as a project of autonomous political action.
2
‘Phenomenological’ or ‘Western Marxism’ refers to variants of post-Marxist theory borne from the so-called
‘crisis of Marxism’ as characterised by Louis Althusser (1979). The naissance of ‘Western’ or
‘Phenomenological Marxism’ centred on the tensions between Marx’s earlier, more revolutionary theorisation
of praxis on the one hand, and the development of determinist Marxist scientific economic theory in the
nineteenth century, on the other (Anderson 1976, p. 92). Although the term ‘phenomenological Marxism’ is
contested, it generally pertains to the work of Merleau-Ponty, Georg Lukàcs, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean-Paul
Sartre. Merleau-Ponty’s approach to phenomenological Marxism influenced Castoriadis’s thought in particular.
See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s essay ‘“Western” Marxism’ in Adventures of the Dialectic (1973, pp. 30-58).
For a discussion of phenomenological Marxism, see Bohman (1990), Breckman (2013), and Piccone (1971).
3
Jerome Kohn, the editor of the book The Promise of Politics, dates this unpublished manuscript by Arendt
from between 1956 and 1959 (see Kohn 2007, p. xvii). Arendt’s reflections on politics in this piece are
38
contemporaneous to The Human Condition (1998 [1958]), and prefigure her analysis of revolutionary political
action in On Revolution (2006a [1963]).
4
Arendt’s use of the male-gendered use of ‘men’ and ‘man’ in her writings is, in my view, out of step with
contemporary scholarly parlance. I follow Margaret Hull’s (2003, p. 5) method in this paper: unless it is a direct
quotation, I employ gender-neutral terms when paraphrasing Arendt’s work, where appropriate.
5
In contrast to Castoriadis and his notion of social imaginary significations, Arendt does not explicitly develop
a theory of meaning in her theoretical project. I cannot undertake a reconstruction of her theory of meaning here
due to limitations of space; this task may be taken up at a later point.
6
The editors of Love and Saint Augustine note that, although her doctoral thesis was written originally in 1929,
Arendt revised the work before its eventual publication in 1964. See Scott and Stark (1996, pp. 115, 154-155).
7
Arendt’s thought arguably contains incipient notions of the creative imagination, which, in my view, have not
been fully elaborated in relation to the question of politics. Space does not permit to expand on this in depth
here. Arendt’s most direct remarks on the imagination appear in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
(1989), and it is from this work that many have debated Arendt’s understanding of the faculty of the imagination
(see, for example, Beiner & Nedelsky 2001; Kaplan & Kessler 1989; Zerilli 2005). However, the political
dimensions of the creative imagination as expressed through ‘spontaneous’ action for Arendt remains little
remarked in the literature, and indeed remained underdeveloped by Arendt herself (see, for example Arendt
2007, p. 113). Arendt did not elucidate the creative element of the imagination to the extent that Castoriadis did.
On this thematic of the creative dimension of the imagination, a dialogue between Arendt and Ricoeur would
prove fruitful. One attempt to flesh out Arendt’s notion of imagination has been undertaken by Svjetlana
Nedimović. In her doctoral thesis (which was supervised by Peter Wagner), Nedimović presented an excursus
on Arendt’s notion of imagination as it emerged through her (unfinished) theory of judgement, in dialogue with
Heidegger and Castoriadis (see esp. chapter five: Nedimović 2007, pp. 154-178).
8
This essay appears in an expanded form as the chapter titled ‘Socrates’ (2007b), in the edited collection of
Arendt’s essays, The Promise of Politics. In the editorial introduction, Kohn notes that ‘Socrates’ is comprised
from lecture material that Arendt developed in 1954, titled ‘Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and
Thought after the French Revolution’ (Kohn 2007, p. viii). There is a slight variance in the prose between the
essay ‘Philosophy and Politics’, published in Social Research, and the version published as ‘Socrates’.
Nevertheless, the discrepancy does not interfere with the present reconstruction of Arendt’s notion of
understanding.
9
The Imaginary Institution of Society comprises two parts. The first part, ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’
(1987a) consists of essays originally published in Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1964 and 1965. The second
part, ‘The Social Imaginary and the Institution’ (1987b) was written in the early 1970s, before the two parts
were brought together and published in French in 1975 (and later in English in 1987).
10
In his lengthy reply essay, ‘Done and to be Done’, Castoriadis contends that ‘social-historical creation (as
well as, moreover, creation in any other domain), if it is unmotivated—ex nihilo—always takes place under
constraints (it does not occur in nihilo or cum nihilo)’ (1997b [1989], p. 370, emphases in original). With this
move, Castoriadis appears to recast creation as, at least partially, contextual. Despite Castoriadis’s hint at the
conditioned character of creation, he flatly dismisses the hermeneutic element of creation (see 1997b, pp. 363-
364) in a veiled response to Arnason’s hermeneutic re-interpretation of Castoriadis’s notion of social imaginary
significations (see Arnason 1989).
11
Aristotle’s distinction between actuality and potentiality lingers in the background of Castoriadis’s thinking of
the real and the possible in ‘The Imaginary as Such’ (Castoriadis 2015). For Castoriadis’s discussion of this
Aristotelian distinction, see his essay ‘The Discovery of the Imagination’ (1997c [1978]).
12
Castoriadis’s second dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s thought is titled ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the
Ontological Tradition’ (1993a [1978]). Whereas ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’ reads as a homage to
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the second text indicates Castoriadis’s withdrawal from dialogue. For a
discussion of Castoriadis’s encounter with Merleau-Ponty, see Adams (2009).
13
Wagner draws the idea of the imaginary signification of autonomy from Castoriadis. It has formed part of
Wagner’s theoretical framework for understanding modernity since his first work, A Sociology of Modernity:
Liberty and Discipline (1994, pp. 13-14). Wagner has not fully clarified his reinterpretation of Castoriadis’s
notion of imaginary significations (Carleheden 2010, pp. 52-53). See Carleheden (2010) for a critical reflection
on Wagner’s appropriation of Castoriadis in his theoretical framework of modernity.
14
This essay was published in a special issue of Thesis Eleven, which was a Festschrift on Arnason’s thought.
On my reading, this co-authored essay with Friese, ‘When the Light of Cultural Problems…’, marks a critical
moment in Wagner’s trajectory: it reveals the first indications of a hermeneutical turn in Wagner’s project. Due
to limitations of space, I cannot detail Wagner’s dialogue with Arnason’s thought in full here, nor can I
reconstruct the contours of Wagner’s hermeneutical shift in this paper.
15
Wagner’s essay ‘The Possibility of Politics…’ featured in a special issue of Thesis Eleven—their 68th—on the
1968 student movement, which Wagner co-edited with Paul Ginsborg, Luisa Passerini, and Bo Stråth.
39
16
Following this rather explicit definition, an understanding of power appears to hold an important place in
Wagner’s understanding of political forms or institutions. However, he does not systematically pursue a
theorisation of power in that essay, nor across the remainder of his trajectory.
17
Wagner often shifts between the terms ‘imagination’ and ‘imaginary’ in his work without clarifying whether
the notions operate at either—or both—the faculty of the mind and/or at varied levels of sociality. For example,
in his essay ‘Interpreting the Present: A Research Programme’ (2015a, p. 113), Wagner notes that ‘the human
faculty of imagination can institute different worlds’ and then adds that ‘worlds can be the imaginary point of
reference for action’. It appears that Wagner understands the imagination as operative within and through the
social level. Nevertheless, I have remained true to the way Wagner uses the notion of imagination in ‘Political
Form’ in my brief discussion of imagination here.
18
In his emphases on the self-reflexive collective reinterpretation of South African interpretative patterns (or
‘societal self-understandings’), the South African project of world-making appears as an inward-focussed or
closed process. Thank you to the anonymous referee for this insight. On my reading, this is for two reasons,
which I cannot develop in full within the scope of the present paper. First, it remains unclear whether Wagner
fully considered the influence of external or foreign sociocultural narratives upon the South African uptake of
the democratic political form and its concomitant notions of equality and inclusion. This raises a second,
connected question, which becomes significant for Wagner’s own grappling with the phenomenological world
problematic. Following Arnason (1992, 2003), the overarching world-horizon provides a space for intercultural
contact. Indeed, the world-horizon makes such an intercultural dialogue (vis-à-vis the sharing of democratic
social imaginaries, for example) possible. A closer consideration of this aspect of the hermeneutic-
phenomenological understanding of the world-horizon in particular might open the otherwise ‘inward’
appearance of the South African project of world-making in Wagner’s analysis.
40

On The Possibilities of Political Action

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

On The Possibilities of Political Action

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Published in Social Imaginaries (2017) vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 83-118.

On the Possibilities of Political Action in-the-World: Pathways through Arendt,

Introduction: Projects of World-Making contra Globalisation

Against these debates, Karagiannis and Wagner propose an understanding of varieties

Combined with the homogenising and atomising tendencies of globalisation, recent

This paper clears a path toward a theory of political action in-the-world by

Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Starting Points: The Human Condition in-the-

The hermeneutic-phenomenological understanding of the world-horizon provides the

Hermeneutical thinkers take this understanding one-step further, toward interpretative

Approaches that intertwine hermeneutics with phenomenology each take different

These hermeneutic-phenomenological approaches to the human condition and the

insight concerns the underdetermined character of the world, as an inexhaustible horizon of

doing, projects of world-forming or world-making creatively re-form and rearticulate the

Political Action in-the-World: Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s Approaches

Arendt on the World-Disclosing and World-Forming Dimensions of Political Action

The dialogue of understanding—with its latent dimensions of imagination and

First, it is helpful to detail Castoriadis’s understanding of the formation of the world

As Castoriadis develops it, the world-interpreting dimension of political doing forms

Castoriadis returns to these ideas in traces in ‘The Imaginary as Such’ (2015

Because world-interpreting doing opens the world to the possibility of alteration,

Wagner on the Elements of World-Making as a Political Project: Critique and

Wagner is foremost a theorist of modernity, working at the crossroads of political

Wagner advances this understanding of the rearticulation of sociocultural bonds in his

(2005). There, Wagner rethinks European political modernity as ‘a narrative of struggle’, in

Wagner introduces notions of imagination in passing in ‘Political Form’ (2005),

For Wagner, South Africa’s political project accomplished both dimensions of

reconstruction as an ‘exercise of collective self-determination [and] political change in the

At their worst, contemporary approaches to globalisation portray the present world as

Additionally, the approach to political action in-the-world developed in this paper

The notion of political action in-the-world presented here emerged through a

World-interpreting or world-disclosing doing reveals the world as a shared space

In turn, the notion of world-forming or world-making political doing that emerges

Specificities aside, each of Arendt, Castoriadis, and Wagner’s notions of political

Adams, S 2009, ‘Dimensions of the World: Castoriadis’ Homage to Merleau-Ponty’, Chiasmi

Adams, S 2011a, ‘Arnason and Castoriadis’ Unfinished Dialogue: Articulating the

Adams, S 2014, ‘Autonomy’, in S Adams (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts,

Adams, S 2015, ‘On Ricoeur’s Shift from a Hermeneutics of Culture to a Cultural

Althusser, L 1979, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary

Anderson, B 1991, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Anderson, P 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, New Left Books, London.

Appadurai, A 2001, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, in A

Arendt, H 1989, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, University of Chicago Press,

Arendt, H 1994a [1954], ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’, in

Arendt, H 2006a [1963], On Revolution, Penguin Books, New York.

Arnason, JP 1989, ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’, in G Busino (ed.), Revue

Arnason, JP 1991, ‘Praxis and Action—Mainstream Theories and Marxian Correctives’,

Arnason, JP 1992, ‘World Interpretations and Mutual Understanding’, in A Honneth (ed.),

Arnason, JP 2003, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions,

Arnason, JP 2016, ‘Revolutions, Transformations, Civilizations: Prolegomena to a Paradigm

Revolutions: Reflections and Analyses, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p.

Bauman, Z 1999, In Search of Politics, Polity, Oxford, UK.

Bauman, Z 2000, Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge [England].

Beck, U 2000, What is Globalization?, Polity, Cambridge, UK.

Breckman, W 2013, Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Democratic Theory,

Canovan, M 1995, Hannah Arendt: a Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Cambridge

Carleheden, M 2010, ‘The Imaginary Significations of Modernity: A Re-Examination’,

Castoriadis, C 1987a [1964-1965], ‘Part 1: Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, trans. K

Castoriadis, C 1991 [1989], ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in DA Curtis (ed.), Philosophy,

Castoriadis, C 1997e, ‘The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized

Castoriadis, C 2011, Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis,

Castoriadis, C 2015 [1968/1969], ‘The Imaginary as Such’, trans. JP Arnason, Social

d’Entrèves, MP 1989, ‘Freedom, Plurality, Solidarity: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action’,

Fink, E 2005 [1933], ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and