Abstract
Twentieth-century Greco-French philosopher, economist, psychoanalyst and activist
Cornelius Castoriadis offers a creative new conception of imagination that is uniquely
promising for social justice. Though it has been argued that this conception has one
fatal flaw, the latter has recently been resolved through a creative dialogue with dance.
The present article fleshes out this philosophical-dancing dialogue further, revealing
a deeper layer of creative dialogue therein, namely between Castoriadis’ account of
time and choreography. To wit, he reconceives time as the self-choreography of the
sociohistorical, in which performance the sociohistorical plays two dancing roles simultaneously,
both choreographer and choreographed dancer. More precisely, as interpreted
by Castoriadis in a late essay, the creation and emergence of forms in time
consists of a poetic “scansion” or “scanning” of time. Thus, the sociohistorical is both
choreographer and dancer, poet and reader, reinterpreting the poetic text of time as
the music for its evolving dance.