Article The mad animal: On Castoriadis’ radical imagination and the social imaginary Lachlan Ross Deakin University, Australia Abstract The following article defines Castoriadis’ concepts of the radical imagination and the social imaginary as a platform for a discussion of some motifs important to Castoriadis: the nature of human subjectivity, the nature of ‘reality’, the role and scope of the human imagination, the importance of freedom, the question of whether or not we are free (i.e. how sick/diminished/vulnerable is the second epoch of autonomy that broke open in/as modernity), and the roles of science, politics and philosophy in human social life. The central work on the radical imagination and the social imaginary is of course more than an arbitrary jumping-off point: this paper argues that understanding these concepts is vital if one is to understand the core elements of Castoriadis’ writings and his broader emancipatory project. Keywords autonomy, Castoriadis, emancipation, radical imagination, social imaginary The problem of understanding Cornelius Castoriadis’ key terms of the radical imagi- nation and the social imaginary is fundamentally the problem of understanding each term as a paradigm of representation in an ontological sense. Representation does not mean here some re-presentation of an independently existing ‘reality’, and neither does it mean a ‘translation’ of what ‘exists’ corporally/materially, though ‘translation’ is closer to what Castoriadis means. To represent is to ‘put into images’, and this must be thought of not as something that we do, but as something that we are. To be the being that puts into Corresponding author: Lachlan Ross, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3125, Australia. Email: lachlan.ross@deakin.edu.au Thesis Eleven 2018, Vol. 146(1) 71–86 ª The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0725513618776710 journals.sagepub.com/home/the