A Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Culture, Power, Action, World

Abstract

Abstract The conversation begins with reflections on social imaginaries as a crossroads concept, capable of integrating insights from multiple sources; this point is developed through references to the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and followed by comments on Charles Taylor’s hermeneutical realism, as well as on the task of rethinking psychoanalysis. Marcel Gauchet’s approach is noted as the most promising perspective on the latter field. Further discussion deals with the concept of imaginary significations as a key to the theory of culture, and then moves on to two foreshadowed but notably underdeveloped themes in Castoriadis’s work: the symbolic and the problems of theorizing action. Both of them are linked to the phenomenological notion of the world. The final section raises the question of power and emphasizes the affinity of social imaginaries with a relational understanding of power.