The Teaching Imaginary: Collective Identity in a Post-Prefixed Age

Abstract

Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must define its identity, its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the answer to these questions, without these definitions, there can be no human world, no society, no culture for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. The role of imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that, obviously, neither reality, nor rationality can provide. (Castoriadis, 1998, pp. 146 147)