Political Imaginaries in Question

Abstract

This special issue of Critical Horizons takes up the problematic of political imaginaries from various angles. In putting political imaginaries into question, the conditions of possibility for “the political” (le politique) and “politics” (la politique) are interrogated, as well as the concrete, contemporary contexts in which they are embedded, and which they, in turn, transform. In light of the ongoing Global Financial Crisis, the continued ecological devastation of the earth, new sites of terrorism (such as Norway), but also the recent upsurge of protest movements around the world (from the socalled Arab Spring, to the Occupy movement), the questioning of existing horizons of political imaginaries are evident and, consequently, call for elucidation. The present special issue begins to articulate a field of responses to this urgent task. The concept of political imaginaries manifests in the first instance as a specific zone within the broader field of social imaginaries, which, in turn, draws from phenomenological strands of French social and political thought. The field of social imaginaries forms a particular constellation within the broader “cultural turn” in the human sciences. Charles Taylor gave broad currency to the term “social imaginaries” in Modern Social Imaginaries. 1 In so doing, he leaned on Cornelius Castoriadis’s earlier elucidations of social imaginary