Introduction

This book explores 'Decentring Society, Recentring the Subject' and 'Creating Imagination' is indicative of these two directions and the motifs of culture and creativity which inform them. Culture thus became a storehouse of possibilities which could only be unlocked if a critical and distancing attitude was taken to what was available from both the past and the present. This process of referring to the inner authenticity of the work of art also meant the development of the autonomy of culture. Cultural autonomy and differentiation thus entailed the development of what Markus terms autochthony, the determination of the activities in question solely in terms of their own requirements and logics. To rethink the imagination is to question not only the way in which it has been viewed, but also its status and location with regard to reason and some other central categories of the philosophical tradition.