Since all contributions gathered in this monographic issue of “Ethics & Politics” thoroughly interrogate Castoriadis’ contribution to contemporary philosophy from different perspectives, dwelling on its originality but also its difficulties, grey areas, and contradictions, in these introductory pages I will limit myself to showing how his idea of “human creation” as ontological genesis, with its fruitful aporias, constitutes a retort to the non-existence of the Archimedean point animating the continuous apparition and re-apparition of the “ontological hybris”. In this sense, the philosophical idea of ontological creation could be seen as akin to the Knight’s move. A winning move, at the same time clever and indirect, through which Castoriadis’ thought avoids the opposite pifalls of rationalism and skepticism and invites us to face the human impossibility of finding a universal and necessary foundation for the institution of social norms – without which, however, humanity could not exist.
