ABSTRACT
The work of Cornelius Castoriadis is doubly important here because he not only predicated the possibility of politics on the need for autonomy and staunchly rejected any notion of heteronomy, he also understood the creativity of radical politics in terms of poesis. For Jean-Francois Lyotard, political, ethical and artistic creativity emerged from the indetermination of Kantian aesthetics that provided both a means for creating rules and enabling judgements in the absence of criteria, and an object that is representative of 'a call to which thinking has to be sensitive and responsive'. In the face of capitalism's post-war reconstruction and stabilization, the 'tendency' believed the contradictions within capitalism that revolutionaries had traditionally counted on to finally undermine the system could no longer be assumed as part of revolutionary politics. The impossibility of consensus within the group would have only heightened his sense for the radical incommensurability that was to become the focus for Lyotard's future political thought and action.
