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The Traveller in the Evening

The Traveller in the Evening

By: Andy Wilson
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 Reflections on William Blake, Surrealism, ecology, radical theology and politics.

www.travellerintheevening.comAndy Wilson Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Blake, Castoriadis and the Radical Imagination

    Blake, Castoriadis and the Radical Imagination
    Aug 23 2025
    [Imagination is] that in virtue of which an image occurs in us.Aristotle, De AnimaHistory is essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals doing and representing / saying.Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of SocietyBack in August 2024, I interviewed Joe Ruffell about the revolutionary career of the Greek / French activist, Cornelius Castoriadis, founder of the workerist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who broke with Marxism in the mid-60s in order to develop a theory of political autonomy which increasingly drew on his insights into the central role of the creativity of the producers under capitalism.Castoriadis generalised this insight into arguably the most radical theory of the imagination known to either politics or philosophy, though there are traces of it in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and others. The radicalism and depth of Castoriadis’s idea of the imagination has long been of interest to us here at The Traveller in the Evening as an analogue of Blake’s similarly radical idea of the imagination, according to which “The eternal body of Man is The Imagination /God himself / that is [Yeshua] Jesus.”The overlap and connection between Blake and Castoriadis is suggestive at least, and hints at deeper symmetries. It is the long-term ambition of the Traveller in the Evening to explore these mirrorings and affinities, and to that end we thought it time to follow up on Joe’s podcast interview with a follow-up Q&A with Castoriadis scholar, Stephen Hastings-King, author of Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing.The ultimate aim of such an exploration is to find what support there is in Castoriadis for illuminating how Blake’s idea of the imagination is fuel for more than the plastic arts, but underlies the construction of social reality itself, so that a revolution in the imagination would revolutionise society.Topics discussed: introduction to Castoriadis | the Marxist imaginary | Pattern Recognition Research Collective | Castoriadis vs. fascists and communists in Athens | Zinovievites and syndicalists in the PCI | bureaucratic capitalism or degenerated workers state | Socialisme ou Barbarie formed 1949 | Maurice Brinton, Ken Weller and Solidarity | Castoriadis after Marx | the project of autonomy | wildcatting | 1956 Hungarian uprising | post-Marxism | on the content of socialism | direct democracy | psychoanalysis and the imaginary institution of society | Guy Debord and Jean-Francois Lyotard | democracy and philosophy born together in Greece | Billancourt | interlocked workers councils | auto-nomos | reason and energy, imagination and the instituted imaginary | imagination as the devil | heteronomy as determinism, as Urizen | visions eascape the instituted imaginary | no desire without imagination | magma | society unable to recognise its own auto-institution | the unspoken sets of preconditions that enable desire | hellenophilia, against hellenophilia | Athenian germs | Sparta and Cybele | on Heidegger’s Greek | the so-called Dark Ages | the voice of honest indignation | neither perception nor reason | Wordsworth’s fancy | the unspoken, unformalizable dimension on which those things that are formalized depend | Western philosophy lacks the imagination | relaunching philosophy | aggressively constructing dialogue | autonomy or original sin | human perfection and the Council of Nicaea | church against Galileo | Milton, the light and the dark | Communist Histurians Group, Blake and the Ranters | implosion of the Marxist imaginary | a huge humanizing factor for Western capitalism | diamat dy’in out | competitions for symbolic capital in various academic contexts | the cognitive geography of financeMan is all Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in himWilliam BlakeEnergy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.WIlliam BlakeThis is not the place to discuss Blake’s concept of imagination in detail, except to say that when he describes the imagination as “the body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity,” we are being invited to see the imagination as the primum mobile of mind, the unmoved mover, that which is not determined elsewhere within mind. In this conception, the imagination is at the basis of the totality of mind. This is a scandal to rationalising philosophy, which wants the seat of reason to be within reason itself, not in imagination. In Castoriadis, on the other hand, the imagination is at the root of the entire social imaginary. These two positions may amount in practice to the same thing, or something much the same as far as the implications for politics go.Final Thoughts Before Closing the Meetingfrom Comrade CardanI think we are at a crossroads in history... One path… leads to the loss of meaning, the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy...
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Timothy Morton: Black Opals of Gurgling Negation

    Timothy Morton: Black Opals of Gurgling Negation
    Aug 15 2025
    Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of a series of radical works on Ecology, culminating in last year’s Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology.Andy and Timothy Morton have been talking since Andy interviewed Tim for the Blake Society in March 2024. There was a second interview on the Traveller in the Evening (‘Throwing a Wrench of What the F**k Into the Machinery’), and a feature review of Tim’s book, Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology (‘Retipped Arrows of Desire: Timothy Morton's Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology’). After that, the conversation really got going. The discussion took as points of departure, Tim’s ideas about with Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) and hyperobjects, and the Christian ecology he explored so thrillingly in Hell; and Andy’s reading of Blake, in particular Blake’s emphasis on the imagination, and the possible political uses of the imagination, as imagined by the radical post-Marxist, Cornelius Castoriadis. A significant influence arrived with David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies ("an unanswerable and frequently hilarious demolition of the shoddy thinking and historical illiteracy of the so-called New Atheists”), which they read in tandem, emerging on the other side with an expanded sense of how Christianity cuts through contemporary fascism and its war against empathy, which, with careless accuracy, it calls ‘woke’.Topics discussed: from Houston to Phoenicia and back | making it up as you go along | Vala, animism, OOO | spending time with the cat while throwing toys out of the pram | deleted every week | going blind vs allowing a structure you haven’t yet thought to endure | solid as a rock | saying lovely things | David Bentley Hart | atheist delusions | Gyrus’s drive North | galvanised by George Floyd | objects from the master-slave regime | the thing called a person starts to get deeper | making Christianity dangerous | the Emperor and the forces of nature | how to live the hyperobject | the kryptonite posture towards hierarchy | the war against empathy | the bomb that went off was Christianity | enthralled by the nation | tea and cake with King Charles and traditionalism | Steve Bannon, Jordan Petersen, Alexander Dugin, and the new pagans | KKK, SPQR, wink wink | reeling from my own torture | the lone and level sands | flies all green and buzzin’ | the bacteria that pooped out oxygen | the hierarchy itself is implacable | the mask comes off | working for the man in Buddhism | Stewart Home’s fascist yoga | falling in love with your guru | all the words are corrupted | the most subversive claim ever made | construct yourself | it’s always going to feel a bit ugly | Bullhead, Nipton and hi-tech nothingness | deliver some string beans | when you put the sugar in the tea | something more general than ideology | the primum mobile of thought | the shark social imaginary | Plato’s cave is what it feels like to be a Platonist | a structure of feeling that hadn't hardened into an ideology | wanting to be cute-sounding | a black opal fire.We decided it was time to throw some of the ideas we were developing before the public, not in a structured way, but by continuing the discussion in a podcast for the Traveller in the Evening, so we could see for ourselves where we were at. This is that podcast, hopefully the first of a series. Part two will drop when we think we’ve moved on.The fourth wall between the human subject and everything else evaporates. How to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? How to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theatre on fire? When being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? The play was s**t. We need another play.Timothy Morton, HellThe Christian view of human nature is wise precisely because it is so very extreme: it sees humanity, at once, as an image of the divine, fashioned for infinite love and imperishable glory, and as an almost inexhaustible wellspring of vindictiveness, cupidity, and brutality. Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.Which is, incidentally, the most subversive claim ever made in the history of the human race.David Bentley Hart, ...
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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • Awake! Mark Vernon's Imaginary in the Balance

    Awake! Mark Vernon's Imaginary in the Balance
    Jul 28 2025

    Mark Vernon, (2025), Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, London: C Hurst & Co., 368pp.

    The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible... We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations...William Blake

    The podcast discussion with Mark was hard to edit from almost two hours of recordings, as there were many spontaneous interruptions, often unfruitful, for reasons I try to address here. What remains is a podcast capturing a general introduction to the book from the author’s point of view and the gist of the argument between us, with digressions removed and gaps cauterised as best I could.

    It was not the discussion Mark had anticipated, though I had no way of knowing my approach would surprise him so (the orientation of this site being public, and since he and I had talked previously). I’d hoped to tease out some of the controversial aspects of his reading of Blake, but my questions were not allowed to land, being shrugged off as irrelevant, misinformed, or senseless to his way of thinking. As an old friend of mine used to say, it felt like throwing slices of hot toast into a cooling fridge.

    My normal practice when interviewing someone about their book is to keep it apart from the written review, if for no other reason than that they are created separately and make sense in their own right, so there’s no advantage in having to prepare both for publication before sharing them. In this case, I’m merging the two, hoping my review notes help people make sense of the difficulties in the interview. What follows tries to tie arguments in the podcast discussion to points I would have made in a review. Without this, the podcast would sound like two people talking past each other, without any explanation of why. But first of all, I had to work out this ‘why’ for myself.travellerintheevening.com



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    1 hr and 14 mins
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