Social Imaginaries and Political Forms. Part I

The problem of the political forms of modernity has undergone a significant revival with the renewal of tensions and conflicts, including violent conflicts, between variant modernizing political regimes, the reemergence of ideological divisions that were thought to have been largely superseded and devoid of consequence, the Covid 19 pandemic re-posing the foundational question of the relationship between the state and civil society, and the continued politicisations of social spheres outside the domain of formal of politics. Of course, from the perspective of global modernity, the problem of political modernity has been ever present and given alternative inflections by instituted, as well as institutiong, divergent social imaginaries. Given these and other current developments, like the ecological crisis and the perpetuation of capitalist models which have deepened social inequalities and generated social-psychological pathologies on a vast scale, this session investigates how the interwined notions of social imaginaries and political forms constitutes an innovative theoretical response to this contemporary constellation. It seeks to determine the extent to which extant conceptions of social imaginaries and political forms, like those of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Charles Taylor, can be extended or need to be revised in order to come to terms with the changes in the symbolic representations of the political, novel social processes of politicisation, the entangling and disentangling of the theological-political, the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, and the corrosion of normative underpnnings of institutions. It likewise asks how the creative power of the imaginary currently infuses mobilisations, resistance, and, possibly, utopian prospects.