Book Launch and Roundtable on 'Imagination'

Associate Professor John Rundell and Dr Jodie Heap present a book launch and roundtable on 8 November as part of 'The History, Place and Future of Imagination' events series.

Date and time: Tuesday 8 November, 5.00 - 7.00pm

Venue: Research Lounge, Level 5, Arts West, University of Melbourne

Booking: Eventbrite Registration

Book Launch and Roundtable Panel

The book launch celebrates two recent books on Kant’s and Castoriadis’ work on the imagination with a panel discussion: John Rundell’s Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom (Routledge, 2021), and Jodie Heap’s The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and embodiment in the writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).

Preamble

From a historical perspective, formulations of the imagination emerged from Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonic, Persian and Arabian traditions that have given shape to the way we understand ‘the imagination’. These formulations are the imagination as the conduit between the empirical, the body and cognition; the imagination as functionally necessary yet subordinate to cognition; the imagination as a reproducing ‘mirror’ reliant on external stimuli; the imagination produces images internally and is the source of play, love and eros, fiction and deception; the imagination as the place of protean activity, instincts, unconscious, irrationality and fantasy. These formulations have dominated our understanding and have relegated the imagination as the secondary position as reason’s ‘other’, and/or viewed it as primarily associated with the irrational, love, or aesthetic creativity.

There have been two primary figures who have swum against this tide and viewed the imagination as more extensive and primary than what these formulations might suggest. These figures are Immanuel Kant and Cornelius Castoriadis. It is an open question, however, whether the imagination is as creative as these thinkers might suggest, and indeed in the wake of contemporary culture, as Richard Kearney suggests in his recent work Touch, as well as his seminal earlier work The Wake of Imagination, it is in retreat.

Book Launch and Roundtable

Kant is concerned with some, but not all, of the above formulations, but the fact that he uses the term ‘faculty of the imagination’ indicates that he gives it a pride of place amongst his own formulations as the productive imagination or synthesising creativity. More recently, for the Greek/French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis it is not reason that is the defining dimension of the human condition, but the imagination in its two iterations. Castoriadis follows in the footsteps of Kant and Fichte in emphasising and ontologically positioning the creative power of the imagination in two indeterminate and separate regions of human activity – the psychic realm, which he terms the radical imaginary, and the social one, which he terms the social imaginary.

Against the background of the history of the imagination, the question is raised of whether we should continue to regard – as Kant and Castoriadis have done – the imagination as the defining dimension of the human condition? If so, how can we develop and extend this theme in new directions? How can we encourage new ways of thinking about the place and creative potentiality of the imagination? It is in the spirit of these questions that the book launch and following panel discussion will explore the history, place, and future of the imagination.

Panel participants:

Professor Peter Otto, Professor Peter Murphy, Dr Jodie Heap, Professor John Rundell.

Note: this event continues with a public lecture delivered via Zoom by Professor Richard Kearney on Wednesday 23 November, 2022.

Dr Jodie Heap

Since completing her PhD in 2017, Jodie Heap has continued her research into Western conceptions of the imagination and the imaginary through engagement with the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Contemporary Culture Research Unit in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. As an Associate researcher In the Unit, Jodie has been involved in the ‘Creativity, Critique, Innovation’ Project where she presented a seminar titled, ‘Unleashing the Creative Imagination in the Domains of the Humanities, Science and Art’. Currently, she is involved in the ‘Varieties of Imagination, Creativity and Wellbeing in Australia’ Project where she is completing a book chapter titled, ‘An Imagined Tradition:  Varieties of Imagination in Enlightenment and Romantic Thought’. Her first monograph, The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and Embodiment in the Writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis was published as part of the Rowman & Littlefield Social Imaginaries Book series whose objective is to publish rigorous and innovative research on the burgeoning but heterogeneous field of social imaginaries, on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination, on the other.

Adjunct Professor Peter Murphy

Peter Murphy is Adjunct Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute at James Cook University. He was formerly Professor of Arts and Society at James Cook University. He has also been a visiting academic in Philosophy at the New School For Social Research in New York City, in the Hellenic Language and Literatures Program at Ohio State University, in Communication, Media and Culture at Panteion University, Athens, in Political Science at Baylor University, Texas, in Philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, in Communications and Media Studies at Seoul National University, in Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His major research interests concern the nature of creativity and the imagination. He is the author of multiple publications including COVID-19: Proportionality, Public Policy and Social Distancing (2020), The Political Economy of Prosperity: Successful Societies and Productive Cultures (2020), Limited Government: The Public Sector in the Auto-Industrial Age (2019), Auto-Industrialism (2017), Universities and Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Society (2015), The Collective Imagination (2012) and Civic Justice (2001); the co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004), Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (2009), Global Creation (2010), and Imagination (2010).

Professor Peter Otto

Peter Otto is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne and Executive Director of the Research Unit in 'Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture'. His recent publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes (Romantic Circles, 2013); and William Blake: 21st-Century Oxford Authors (OUP 2018). He is currently completing a book on 'William Blake, Secularisation, and the History of Imagination', while also working on a project, funded by the ARC, on 'Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds'.

Adjunct Professor John Rundell

John Rundell is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University and Principal Honorary (Social Theory) in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was Director of the Social Theory Program at The University of Melbourne between 1998-2014. His research focusses on the problems of the imagination, creativity and modernity. He is the author of Imaginaries of Modernity: Politics, Cultures, Tensions and Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx; the editor of Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays by Agnes Heller, and the co-editor of Critical Theories and the Budapest School; Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity; Classical Readings on Culture and Civilization; Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship; Critical Theory After Habermas: Encounters and Departures; Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy; Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory; and Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity.