The Creative Imagination

Reviews / Votes

Elegantly written and illuminating, Jodie Lee Heap's The Creative Imagination explores the way that the imagination is treated in the monumental philosophical works of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis. As she does this, Heap probes and dissects with great insight the many sides of the imagination: productive, creative, synthetic, antithetical, introspective, social, intuitive, spontaneous, determinate, formative and figurative. -- Peter Murphy, professor of humanities and social sciences, La Trobe University and research fellow, James Cook University Heap proposes a new way of theorising creative imagination. Through engagement with Kant, Fichte, and Castoriadis, she explores the enabling and disabling powers of indeterminacy embedded in subjects and collectives. This is a fascinating study that breaks new ground by returning anew to western philosophy's original inspiration: to think in and through the indeterminate. -- George Vassilacopoulos, senior lecturer in philosophy, La Trobe University Through a forensic examination of the work of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis, Jodie Lee Heap reconstructs the concept of a creative imagination that is both free and embodied, reminding us that indeterminacy and determination must be thought together, that the indeterminate being is always this indeterminate being, and that, if indeterminacy transcends boundaries, it is not, thereby, untethered. -- Jeffrey Klooger, Department of Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology Jodie Lee Heap's well writtenand brilliantly researched book is the first proper account of Cornelius Castoriadis's development of the creative imagination from Enlightenment philosophy, in particular Kant's schematism and Fichte's idealist focus on the incomprehensible. Itraises a political question of how to creatively work on the limits, systemic constraints, ruptures, anomies and paradoxes of determinacy, that any critical thinker needs to ask today. -- Anders Michelsen, associate professor of arts and cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen