Creativity and the collective Renaissance: A hermeneutic-imaginary approach (for monograph: ‘patterns of social creativity and cultural change’)

This article builds on a powerful statement by Hans Joas regarding creativity, with which he claims ‘the self escapes its bounds and loses itself in pursuit of the forces of sociality that make it up’. To develop this argument, we propose a hermeneutic approach that centres on myths and rituals that narrate how subjective and collective orders are dissolved within the indeterminate ( apeiron). Although this question has been further explored within theoretical frameworks that discuss the death drive, the body without organs, the inoperative community and so on, these approaches do not refer to the subsequent rebirths, which the logos seems incapable of tackling but which traditional wisdom manages to address. The lesson that this ancient wisdom can pass on to sociology is that the communitas can act as the apeiron of the social from which the self and society itself escape their bounds to be reborn.