The Power to Assume Form: Cornelius Castoriadis and Regimes of Historicity [1 ed.] 9781666918045, 9781666918052

Citation preview

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The Power to Assume Form

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The Power to Assume Form

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Cornelius Castoriadis and Regimes of Historicity

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Sean McMorrow

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Names: McMorrow, Sean, author. Title: The power to assume form : Cornelius Castoriadis and regimes of historicity / Sean McMorrow. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020124 (print) | LCCN 2023020125 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666918045 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666918052 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Castoriadis, Cornelius, 1922-1997--Criticism and interpretation. | Imagination (Philosophy) | History--Philosophy. | Philosophy, Modern.  Classification: LCC B2430.C3584 M39 2023  (print) | LCC B2430.C3584 (ebook) | DDC 128/.3--dc23/eng/20230629  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020124 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020125

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

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Introduction: Recommencing the Project of Autonomy



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Chapter 1: The Imaginary Institution of Anthropos: Articulating the Regions of Human Subjectivity

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Chapter 2: The Institution of Societies and the Social-Historical World: Historicity and Ontological Form

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Chapter 3: The Social Imaginary, Power and Historicity: The Political Dimension of Societies

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Chapter 4: Autonomy and Social-Historical Regulation

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Conclusion: The Shift from Liberal-Democratic to NeoliberalAuthoritarian Regimes of Historicity

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Chapter 5: Liberal-Democratic Regimes: The Institutional Conditions of Depoliticisation

Bibliography Index

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About the Author



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Introduction

Recommencing the Project of Autonomy

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The most significant contribution that is hoped to be achieved by this book is to present the insightful and fertile theorisation of historicity offered by Cornelius Castoriadis, and to do so in a way that points to some limits and aporias raised in this work. I remain in full agreement with Jodie Heap, who recognises that one of Castoriadis’s greatest legacies is the continued push to depose determinacy as a ‘hypercategory’ of the Western philosophical tradition.1 This book explicates Castoriadis’s position on the ontological power of the radical imagination, giving full weight to the indeterminacy this bestows to human life and societies. The central thread that is taken up, then, asks how and to what extent modern societies establish a mode of institution that provides them with their particular form of novelty, coherency and reproduction. On this issue, Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity addresses two fundamental questions. Firstly, What is it that holds a society together? Or, in other words, ‘What is the basis of the unity, cohesion, and organised differentiation of the fantastically complex web of phenomena we observe in any existing society’?2 Secondly, What is it that brings about other and new forms of society? A question that asks how we are to understand the way ‘the multiplicity and diversity of societies’ contributes to an ‘alteration of the given social order that possibly leads to a (sudden or not) end of the “old order” and the establishment of a new one’.3 In short, these questions contemplate what role is assumed by political regimes in modern societies, particularly in their contemporary form. These questions also lead us toward a critical and important theme in Castoriadis’s work in which he considers modern political regimes in light of an emergent autonomous mode of historicity (a different relation to historicity, to be sure). Modernity, he argues, emerges out of the deeply embedded heteronomy of human societies, a mode of historicity which Castoriadis treats in strictly dichotomous terms with the emergence of autonomy. In fact, as he argues, ‘the very history of the Greco-Western world can be viewed as the history of the struggle between autonomy and heteronomy’.4 It must be stressed that, even though Castoriadis 1

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articulated a clear dichotomy between these two modes of historicity, he diagnosed the emergence of autonomy within European modernity as only partial. This book will explicate the tension between these modes in order to describe the ‘partially’ autonomous status of modern political regimes, the main purpose of which is to develop the critical depth of Castoriadis’s work and to show how his theoretical perspective remains an insightful framework to analyse the significance of the deepening depoliticisation of contemporary ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes and their shift towards increasingly authoritarian modes of governance. Throughout the following chapters, it will be necessary to explicate Castoriadis’s framework, so that we can assess the idiosyncratic conception of heteronomy and autonomy that he introduces into his theorisation of historicity. Some brief explanation will help to position the aim of this book. Firstly, it must be said that Castoriadis offers a framework that allows us to understand society as a mode of self-institution, which is to say that the political community creates and institutes itself. In Castoriadis’s view, the fundamental characteristic of heteronomy is that this characteristic of self-creation, and the mode of self-institution in general

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in the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed up to the present time – almost all of them – we find, institutionally established and sanctioned, the representation of a source of the institution of society that only can be found outside of this society: among the gods, in God, among the ancestors, in the laws of Nature, in the laws of Reason, in the laws of History. In other words, we find imposed upon individuals in these societies a representation to the effect that the institution of society does not depend upon them, that they cannot lay down for themselves their own law – for that would mean autonomy – but rather that this law already is given by someone else.5

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Heteronomy is, then, a mode of self-institution that is occulted from itself, it is a mode of self-occultation, which denies that the creative capacity to produce society in fact has its source within the political community. Autonomy, therefore, is viewed by Castoriadis as ‘the first time we see any being whatsoever explicitly call into question, and change through explicit action, the law presiding over its existence’, leading the political community to assume a different mode of self-institution. An autonomous society, then, would be oriented towards the endless interrogation and lucid determination of society considered on the basis of its self-creating capacities.6 While Castoriadis interrogated the autonomous potential of modern political regimes in great detail throughout his life, his insistence on the partial and interstitial status of this emergent project of autonomy warrants further treatment, especially

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given that this project has assumed new dynamics in the twenty-five years since his death. In taking up this task, I will follow a certain line of commentators on Castoriadis’s work that have noted the exigency of assessing a conception of historicity based on a dichotomy between autonomous and heteronomous modalities.7 Most pressing, in this respect, is to consider in more detail what the transition of the project of autonomy into an autonomous society entails (what weight is to be given to subjective or objective process, for instance), and of course what it means if this project is to be considered as waning in the contemporary situation (what the capacity is for an effective and practical instauration of autonomy within a society dominated by heteronomous modes of instituting power). All this is raised without even mentioning the substantive content of this project, which is in any case a matter for the political community, as will be seen. Further to this, notwithstanding such considerations, it is important to consider the inverse, which, as Jeff Klooger suggests, must contend with an inadequate description of heteronomous societies Castoriadis’s work:

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Even if we grant that the concept of heteronomy concerns only the most general institutional and cultural characteristics of a society, so that there is room within the framework of heteronomy for indefinite diversity, we find that the observable diversity of societies does in fact concern these very characteristics. Castoriadis’ conception of heteronomy involves collapsing this diversity into a model based on societies whose institutional structure is of a ‘traditionalist’ type. Where societies diverge from this model, Castoriadis focuses on those aspects which most easily fit within the model: in particular, the most conservative expressions of the institutionalised religious traditions of the societies in question.8

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This does not seriously compromise Castoriadis’s description of either heteronomy or autonomy, but, rather, it points to the fact that it is worth considering how these tendencies may exist in tension and produce political conditions that overwhelmingly push societies in a given direction. Furthermore, as Klooger proposes, ‘we must acknowledge that there emerge in societies other than Greece and the West projects of transformation which alter the form and meaning of heteronomy within those societies’, even if we do not consider such as ‘autonomous’ in the ‘Castoriadean’ sense.9 The specificity of the Greco-Western project of autonomy, however, is undeniable, and the emphasis that Castoriadis gives to it remains the strongest contribution of his work; hence why it is central to the analysis of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes that will follow.

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The term ‘regimes of historicity’ requires a comment, given that it has been popularised in recent scholarship by François Hartog, who evokes the term as ‘simply a way of linking together past, present, and future, or of mixing the three categories, in the same way that one talks of a “mixed constitution” in Greek political theory (combining elements of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, one of which was always dominant in practice)’.10 According to Hartog this term ‘cannot be observed directly’ and can only be ‘constructed by the historian’, it is ‘an artificial construct whose value lies in its heuristic potential’, which is an unsurprising formulation given that he is himself a historian.11 While Hartog presents some important features of a presentist orientation within contemporary European societies, he uses the term ‘regime of historicity’ as ‘a category (without content), which can elucidate our experiences of time‘ but does not consider the substantive modes of instituting power that incessantly shift the orientation of these regimes of historicity.12 My use of the term differs in that it is not a construct of the historian, neither do I regard it to be a heuristic measure in the style of a Weberian ideal type, but rather ‘regimes of historicity’ reflect the forms of instituting power established by the political community. The use of the term in this book is derived instead from work developed by the group associated with the 1970s French journals Textures and Libre; the key figures of these journals being Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Robert Legros, Pierre Clastres, Marc Richir and Miguel Abensour. While this term owes an obvious debt to Hegelian scholarship, Castoriadis departs from Hegelian influence regarding it ‘eminently comprehensible as the crowning achievement of human thought’s attempts to overcome its limitations and rest in unity and enclosure’, ultimately, however, he argues that it should be refused given that ‘this fantastic enterprise ignores exteriority, it ignores that there is thought and the other of thought, science and the object of science, human doing and its works, the history of humanity and the chaos in which this history arises and which was not predestined to produce it’.13 I develop the notion of ‘regimes of historicity’ in close relation to Castoriadis conception of the social imaginary, which reacts against the tendency of ‘reinteriorisation’ (erinnerung) prevalent in the Hegelian system, and emphasises instead a mode of institution that is oriented by an incessant force of alterity that takes into account the simultaneous ‘madness’ and ‘creativity’ of the human imagination in the domain of societies and their history. The notion of a ‘regime of historicity’ also holds another referent, the idea of a political regime, which raises the idea of politeia particularly as it is derived from Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy. The political regime is a specific aspect of a broader ‘regime of historicity’, it does not simply refer to the role and function of the State but, rather, it refers to the dominant mode of instituting power organising societies; the orientation of a political regime is to set the limits and constraints of historicity itself.

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To this end, and in order to present the central critique of Castoriadis’s work upon which the argument of this book is constructed, the unique influence of his Marxist heritage must first be understood. The roots of Castoriadis’s Marxism were established in Greece where he was drawn to the Greek Communist Party (KKE) at an early age. Impressed by the Trotskyist thesis of the ‘Revolution Betrayed’ he aligned himself with the Archeio Marxismou (Marxist Archive) group, under the influence of Agis Stinas.14 Stinas had espoused the view that the revolutionary theory of Marx formulated a vision for the establishment of a ‘perennial revolution’ through which societies would be able to consistently rejuvenate themselves. It is this idea that can arguably be seen to be at the core of the ‘revolutionary element’ in Marx’s work that Castoriadis inherited from Stinas, and which remained with him in everchanging forms throughout his life. This vision, according to Stinas, proposed a dissolution of the nation-state model, reflecting an almost anarchistic perspective of revolution intended to supersede the orthodoxy of Soviet internationalists.15 Upon emigrating to France following the Dekemvrianá events of the Greek civil war, Castoriadis set out to promote his Stinas-inspired reading of Marx within the French Trotskyist movement.16 He formed an intellectual tendency with Claude Lefort (the Chaulieu-Montal tendency) and introduced a critique of Russian bureaucracy at the third congress of the French Trotskyist party, Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), in 1946. Castoriadis and Lefort argued that even the Trotskyist revisions concerning the Russian state, considered as a degenerated workers state, fell short of recognising the reality of the social regime in Russia. Their critique was grounded in the conviction that Russian bureaucracy was in fact privileging an exploitative class, imposing an institution of oligarchic power, which, ultimately, rendered obsolete the revolutionary beacon that the Trotskyists still persisted to see in Russia. The Chaulieu-Montal tendency gained a reasonable following that eventually led to the formation, in 1948, of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which became a loose intellectual organisation concerned with issues of workers’ self-management and the social composition of communism. The organisation published pamphlets presenting a progressive critique of such issues, and the organisation viewed its origins as a break from all the shades of red that Trotskyism had become. Castoriadis’s experience with Socialisme ou Barbarie can be characterised as a period of confrontation with Marxism that led him sever his theoretical ties to Marxism. In doing so, he pursued a more radical understanding of social transformation, emphasising historical contingency based on autonomous action, rather than the more structural explanations common to Marxism at the time. This confrontation progressed through a variety of phases, which can be characterised by two distinct breaks. Firstly, it led to a disavowal of Marxism: the Trotskyist line was abandoned due to the factions’

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inability to recognise that the bureaucratic-capitalist structure of the Soviet state, with all property owned by the Statist-bureaucracy, had institutionalised an exploitative managerial class. The Socialisme ou Barbarie group pursued a non-partisan project of worker’s self-management, which for Castoriadis was an early formulation of his understanding of autonomy. Secondly, the critique undertaken by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group led Castoriadis to also revise his theoretical ties to Marx, which involved not only a re-evaluation of Marx’s economics, something he undertook while employed as an economist at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; 1948–1970), but a revision of the deeper anthropological premise of Marx’s work.17 Despite his appreciation of Marx’s attempt to theorise the relation between economics and historicity, Castoriadis undertook a thorough critique of the conceptual foundations of Marx’s work in order to show that Marxian economics (and its underlying theory of historicity) fundamentally did not work. His critique aimed to supplant Marx’s theoretical and philosophical account of history, shifting emphasis from the productive power of labour to the creative role of the imagination, in order to revive the vision of a ‘perennial’ mode of ‘revolution’; a vision, arguably, instilled in him through the close friendship with Stinas. What Castoriadis rejected was Marx’s view of society as guided by pre-determined and productive historical processes. The impetus of Castoriadis’s critique can also be seen to have coincided with a deeper interest in the cultural and subjective features of the political dimension of historicity.18 The significant theoretical developments of Castoriadis work emerged following his break from Marxism, which can be clearly discerned in the second section of his first major work The Imaginary Institution of Society; first published in 1975.19 It will be shown that his Marxist heritage is a noteworthy context that provides his subsequent work with its militant character. This revolutionary element was reconceptualised as a project of autonomy, which became the central theme of Castoriadis’s work following his break with Marxism. This is evident in the way that Castoriadis theoretically formalised autonomy within his theorisation of historicity, and also the way he came to reframe his critique of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes in terms of a broader crisis of Western culture. He applied his theory of historicity to an analysis of ‘crisis’ by proposing that since the mid-twentieth century Western societies have sat at a crossroads between the development of a radical democratic project inspired by a particular ‘autonomous’ mode of politics (a vision perhaps rooted in his Marxist heritage) or a regression into an ‘heteronomous’ mode of institutional conformism and servitude (the latter exemplified as the orientation of capitalism and technoscience). He proposed that heteronomous societies do not produce individuals oriented toward the pursuit of autonomy and that the laws that constitute society are vested with

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a transcendental reference, from which Dominque Bouchet has surmised, ‘follows all of the representations and significations about the world and the human condition‘; in other words, Castoriadis regarded the prevalent mode of political institution in the history of human societies to be essentially religious.20 In Castoriadis’s analysis, as Bouchet suggests, ‘a radical distinction is introduced historically with the emergence of democratic societies’.21 Castoriadis argues that heteronomous institution has been the overwhelming norm shaping the historicity of human societies, which is a position that rests on his assertion that autonomous modes of institution are rare exceptions in human history. In fact, as previously inferred, Castoriadis identifies only two moments where he considers this to have occurred, ‘first in ancient Greece, as far as we know, and was redeveloped later, with some completely new features, in Western Europe starting at the end of the Middle Ages’.22 Further to this, he attests that ‘the break that occurred in Greece and began again in Western Europe resides in the fact that inherited representations, and ultimately the very notions of truth and reality, were questioned’, whereas for heteronomous societies it is considered that ‘what is true is what conforms to the established modes of representation’.23 Angelos Mouzakitis reflects on this distinction, noting that we should not risk oversimplifying things because ‘Castoriadis paints a complex picture of human affairs where the struggle between autonomous and heteronomous elements, arguably between truth and “untruth” is never settled once and for all’, and yet despite this there seems to be a clear affinity in his work between autonomy as an opening onto ‘truth’ which subsequently presents heteronomy as the ‘self-concealment of the instituting power inherent in the social-historical‘ (i.e., the concealment of ideology from the ‘truth’ of the political community’s ‘creative power and the autonomy and responsibility ensuing from this’).24 This framing of historicity in terms of two distinct modes, between autonomy and heteronomy, sets up a strong dichotomous motif throughout Castoriadis’s entire theoretical framework. It will be argued that he insisted on maintaining this distinction throughout the entirety of his work in order to maintain the ‘revolutionary element’ he found in Marx, and yet, this itself says nothing of the novel and immense theoretical framework that he established to maintain such a commitment. I will undertake a critical assessment of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity in order to emphasise its strong heuristic value in assessing the contemporary situation of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes. This, of course, like any other theoretical framework, means facing what Heap identifies as Castoriadis’s own series of aporias, antinomies and contradictions, which she views as being imposed, ‘in part, intentionally through his overt acknowledgement of the limits of his own ontology and in part, unintentionally through his attempt to elucidate the ontological implications of the radical imaginary’.25 Further to

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this, I share her position, that ‘the figure of the radical imaginary covers over at times the source of the radical seed of indeterminacy underlying human creation, which is the unfolding of the works of the radical imagination – the unfolding of which occurs at the level of the corporeal, the psychical and the social-historical’.26 My concern in this present work mainly emphasises the latter, which is to say the unfolding of the social imaginary as a mode of cultural articulation (which is not always and necessarily heteronomous, if it is not autonomous, as Castoriadis would appreciate) and its status as the source of radical imaginary. Further to this, my engagement with Castoriadis’s work concerns how we are to understand the role of instituting power in the process of this unfolding, to see that it operates at the level of affirming/denying the capacities of new creations ‘surging forth’ from the radical imaginary.27 While this concern can be seen to exceed what Castoriadis would conventionally view as a concern for the project of autonomy, namely, that what matters for him is the collective capacity to question and alter the fundamental laws of society. I take up this concern because, despite the fact that cultural articulations of the world (its unfolding) are not always actively and explicitly questioning the laws and foundations of society, it allows us to consider the contemporary conditions upon which such autonomous questioning emerges and, importantly, that this is also an embodied experience of autonomous subjectivity. In this sense, the critical assessment of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity in this book does not dismiss his reflection on the project of autonomy or his critique of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes, but it is rather oriented towards viewing the situation of both from a different angle: the capacity for cultural articulations of the world to contribute to the project of autonomy within the present regime of instituting power. This perhaps touches a nerve in the broader reception of Castoriadis’s work has seemingly witnessed a split between political and philosophical interpretations of Castoriadis’s work, the latter of which regarded to have deradicalised the intentions of his work, or, as Christos Memos has pointed out, this split could be regarded on the basis of critical and noncritical grounds.28 The intent of my critique (and, indeed, Heap’s) is not to deradicalise Castoriadis’s work but, rather, to embrace it critically, and in this respect, I share the same approach as Memos, whose purpose is ‘to elucidate, explore and bring back to the surface Castoriadis’s lost anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism and radicalism, without neglecting the limitations, confusions and ambiguities of his intellectual endeavour’.29 The focus of this book is Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity, it is not therefore an appraisal of the project autonomy and its attendant democratic regime, as much as the latter is a key elaboration of his theorisation. It is worth noting, however, that in order to explore the role of cultural articulation within processes of historicity the strict dichotomy imposed between autonomy and heteronomy may at times have

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to be relativised. This is a consequence of some limits and aporias embedded in their paradigmatic political definition, which is demonstrated most succinctly by Castoriadis in the following formulation: ‘What is autonomy? It’s when the one may at each moment say: is this law just? Heteronomy is when the question shall not be raised’.30 This is not essentially problematic for Castoriadis, particularly if there remains an emphasis on the opening of culture to its self-instituting power;

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I have no problem with, so to speak, softening to an extent the edges of an opposition I present as sharp, given that I want to highlight something. I want to shake people up. I want to make it understood that man is not by divine right, a democratic being; that democracy was a creation and a conquest of history; that it’s constantly in danger; and that furthermore it’s in process of going away.31

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Castoriadis’s work presents much deeper insights into the social dimension of human self-institution, which is what make the terms of its heteronomous and autonomous tendencies a matter of political exigency. At the very least, there are two requirements that the project of autonomy should maintain: a collective attempt ‘to open the way as much as possible to the manifestation of the instituting imaginary’ and a collective demand ‘to introduce the greatest possible reflectiveness in our explicit instituting activity as well as in the exercise of explicit power’.32 With this in mind, and before outlining the orientation of this book, it seems important to address two major criticisms of Castoriadis’s conception of historicity that will be broached: the apparent Greco-European status of autonomy and the cultural-hermeneutic critique of radically creative self-institution. Firstly, it could be argued that Castoriadis’s view of autonomy remains somewhat (Greco-)Euro-centric, and that he constructs a spurious European exceptionalism that frames autonomy in terms of a specific formulation of autonomy that is relative to the cosmological scaffolding of its given social-historical context. Remembering that his autonomy, on his account, raises questions such as: ‘the laws are changed deliberately; [and] questions are posed overtly; [i.e.] Are our laws just? Are our gods true? Is our representation of the world right?’33 By privileging a certain type of radical questioning over other questions concerning the articulation and implementation of institutional power – questions that are also prevalent in so-called heteronomous societies – it could be proposed that Castoriadis remained indifferent to other projects of social and political self-alteration (both conscious and unconscious).34 In fact, Castoriadis is candid about the fact, admitting that he only ever talks of ‘the movement of autonomy within the segment of universal history that is the Greco-Western segment’.35 He is very specific about the role of the ancient Athenian polis in relation to both the project of

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autonomy and the potential for a democratic regime arising from the movement of European modernity: on both accounts the Greek precedent is simply a ‘germ’ that can aid their propagation of what remains as modern Europe creating for itself modern Europe. Castoriadis is clear that he ‘never set the Athenians up as a model’, nor has he ‘claimed that nothing politically important has been done since their times’, but rather that ‘Greece is important for us in that some forms developed there give us or are susceptible to giving us food for thought, and in the political field in particular, they show us that some democratic forms of governing are possible and feasible’.36 What is important to consider is how a given social-historical context will recreate such precedents in accordance with their own imaginary. What is specific about the precedents ancient Greece, then, when Castoriadis talks of the democratic regime of ancient Greece, is that ‘that they never stopped thinking about this question: What is it that the institution of society ought to achieve?’.37 There is, however, a certain normative implication that Castoriadis proposes to originate with this ‘germ’: in short, that ‘radical political questions as well as radical philosophical questioning are raised’.38 Bouchet has even suggested that Castoriadis’s dichotomisation of historicity stems from the fact that ‘he [could not] conceive a discourse about autonomy that [was] not at the same time an affirmation of the democratic project’.39 Even though his theoretical framework rests on the notion that the institution of all human societies is fundamentally autonomous, in that they are all essentially ‘self-instituting’, Castoriadis argued that it is only in democratic societies that ‘politics’ proper can emerge, so that people can claim to make their own laws and consider ‘society’ to be a product of their own self-institution. What supports this position is Castoriadis’s underlying anthropological framework based on the creative imagination of the subject, which will be addressed further in what follows. Secondly, and perhaps the most significant critique of Castoriadis’s work considered in this book, concerns the cultural-hermeneutical position shared by both Johann Arnason and Suzi Adams.40 This critique proposes that Castoriadis often seems to reduce the ‘world’ to its ontological status, ‘to a particular creation of each social-historical formation, and thus seems to privilege the constructivist “world-making” capacity of the social-historical’.41 Arnason and Adams have proposed a pathway to bypass Castoriadis’s emphasis on this ontological status, which is reflected in his dichotomous conception of historicity. They highlight the phenomenological problematic of the world in Castoriadis’s work in a way that allows them to foreground the significance of cultural articulation, which they argue should be considered as the creative mode of historical experience. For them, ‘the problematic of “culture” – as an autonomous element of the human condition, neither reducible to the “social” nor to an aspect of the “social” – is to be approached

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hermeneutically’.42 A culturological approach therefore deepens Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity because it takes into account the reception and recreation of the ‘social imaginary significations’ that are capable of being questioned. Conversely, Adams notes that Castoriadis’s ontological bias seems to draw a picture of autonomous creations emerging from a ‘worldless vacuum’.43 In Adams’s view, Castoriadis ‘could not fully reconcile the ontological creativity of the social-historical with the phenomenological insight that we are always already in-the-world’.44 Arnason, on the other hand, points to the limitations inherent in Castoriadis’s portrayal of historicity, which are themselves constructed due to Castoriadis’s ‘overriding interests in the emphatic conception of autonomy [which] led him to neglect the more general problem of reflexivity and the varying directions it could take in difference historical settings’.45 The reflexivity to which Arnason alludes will be explored in relation to metacontextual modes of historicity, which is a line of inquiry that exists in Castoriadis’s work only in embryonic form. I do not contend that Castoriadis’s work should be revised into a hermeneutical method – in fact, he rightly distanced himself from such methodologies to emphasise his position on the creative capacities of the political community (which such traditions had served to deny) – but rather the phenomenological-hermeneutical perspective is exclusively reserved for an analysis of how established forms of instituting power shape the regimes of historicity that are operable in a given society. The theme will be developed further in order to emphasise the tendency of ontological openness in processes of socialhistorical alteration; this tendency constituting a promising line of thought in Castoriadis’s work, which asserts that ‘it is historical creation that makes autonomy exist as openness rather than as closure’.46 This line of enquiry will also be pursued in what follows, to account for how Castoriadis considers the ontological dimension of institutions, represented through the symbolic dimension of social life, and its status as the source reflective and creative cultural articulation of social-historical existence. In the first chapter, it will be shown that one of Castoriadis’s major insights is that the social imaginary is understood in terms of a creative capacity to bring into being something ‘other’ than what is given by historically determined processes, and as such it is a conception that Castoriadis developed to overcome the inadequacy of Marx’s conception of historicity and to revise the deeper anthropological premises of Marx’s work. The cultural articulation of institutions is theorised by Castoriadis as a creative feature of the social imaginary and also, importantly, the capacity for culture to shape institutional contexts creatively is inextricably bound by the forms of power established by institutions. I will outline how Castoriadis developed his theoretical reformulation of historicity in an attempt to move beyond Marxist frameworks. In fact, Castoriadis’s adherence to a revolutionary perspective will be traced

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throughout this book and will be shown to have contributed to the way that he developed his theory of historicity. Castoriadis’s schematic approach to the ontological foundation of societies delivers a response to the questions concerning what holds societies together and what brings about other and new forms of society, which articulates how the creative capacities of cultural articulation can alter its institutional form. This capacity to alter institutional form is founded upon an anthropological (qua psychoanalytic) account of human existence that emphasises the characteristics of radical imagination of the subject and the radical imaginary of society. The radical imagination and its collective manifestation, the radical social imaginary, brings with it the capacity to create, reproduce and alter social-historical forms of existence. This is the footing of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity, and for this reason it will also be outlined in the first chapter. This will establish the main theme within Castoriadis’s work presented in this book: that cultural creativity is not bound by ontological principles so much as it is regulated by institutional power. The second chapter will elaborate this theme within Castoriadis’s work, in order to point to a particular aporia within his reworking of ontological characteristics of institutional form. It will be shown in this chapter that Castoriadis’s emphasis on the ontological foundation of institutional form overshadows the extent to which cultural heterogeneity can be regarded as the source of creative openness to the world. This chapter therefore interrogates Castoriadis’s theoretical framework of historicity in order to show how he theorises the relation between the ontological context of institutions and the heterogenous cultural articulations of the social-historical world. This interrogation will serve to outline the ontological framework that Castoriadis develops in order to account for how societies maintain a cohesive self-image, despite the fact that they institute themselves through a temporally creative and heterogenous mode of historicity. The chapter will therefore show how this framework also leads to the construction of his dichotomous view of historicity, by which Castoriadis asserts that the autonomous mode of institution advances a mode of reflexivity that is capable of incorporating radically new forms of cultural creativity. It will be proposed that maintaining a strict dichotomy between these two modes of historicity served his intent, because this allowed him to emphasise the revolutionary features of autonomy: as I will demonstrate, this distinction emphasised a paradigmatic difference between autonomous and heteronomous modes of historicity, which viewed them as institutional contexts whereby cultural heterogeneity is subject to constraints of ontological closure or openness in differing ways. In the third chapter, I will argue that there is a latent method of institutional analysis within Castoriadis dichotomous vision of these modes of historicity, whereby the incorporation of cultural heterogeneity and new forms of cultural

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creation is perhaps privileged as a feature of autonomous institution and undervalued in heteronomous contexts. This formulation is perhaps suitable for the political exigency of the project of autonomy; however, it can become a limitation to uncovering the capacity for cultural articulations of the world to contribute to the project of autonomy within the present regime of instituting power. What remains the issue across these formulations is the role of the political dimension of social-historical institution. This chapter will explore his conception of the social imaginary, which provides deep insight into the political dimension of historicity that accounts not only for the instituting power of cultural creativity but also the collective power of self-alteration. I will examine the dichotomous motif that runs throughout Castoriadis’s entire theoretical framework in order to show how he considered the political to be an aspect of power contingent upon a central tension between instituted forms of power and the radical instituting power of the social imaginary. This chapter shows that Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity develops a strict distinction in the operation of instituting power between autonomy from heteronomy modes of institution. On the one hand, there needs to be a more subtle analysis of political creativity in heteronomous societies, and on the other, in societies where autonomy has begun to emerge there needs to be further consideration of how the creative capacities of dominant social imaginaries serve to regulate cultural heterogeneity. It is on this point that the issue of the partial emergence of autonomy in Greco-Western societies and their modern political regimes becomes pertinent and requires further attention. This argument is made in order to develop an analysis of an aspect of instituting power that was never extensively explored in his work, which relates to the political dimension of the social imaginary as the locus of implicit power. It will be argued that this is a power derived from the cultural level of established institutional contexts (as contrasted to the social or political operations of power). An argument will be made that implicit power must be distinguished from the structures of explicit power (both of which are conscious forms of power), in order to show how established institutional contexts are reinforced at the cultural level in ways that implicitly open up or close off participation to those who are heterogenous of the dominant social imaginary. Castoriadis did not spend much time developing this aspect of instituting power perhaps because it complicates the strict distinction he made between autonomy and heteronomy that served his revolutionary understanding of radical social transformation. This chapter, then, constitutes my attempt to rectify the limitations of Castoriadis’s view of regulative operations of power that focus mainly on explicit self-limitation (in the autonomous sense) or its deferral to self-occultation (in a heteronomous mode). By developing the characteristics of the implicit cultural articulation of instituting power, it can be possible to account for the complex interrelation of heteronomous and autonomous

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tendencies, which will be necessary to examine the partially autonomous nature of contemporary ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes. In the fourth chapter, I will develop the culturological line of thought foreshadowed in Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary, which hinges on the implicit dimension of instituting power. I will consider the cultural dimension as an implicit field of power that opens up a way to understand how the regulative role of the political dimension contributes to the social reproduction of institutional conditions and, importantly, how capacities to alter institutional conditions are hierarchically instituted. This considered in close relation to the ‘Castoriadean’ framework, which will be used to interpret how historicity is shaped by regulative regimes instituting power. Two major questions arise from the application of an implicit cultural dimension to this framework: firstly, there is the question of how social imaginary articulations can become dominant and acquire a capacity to alter institutional conditions in accordance with their interests, and secondly, the question of how dominant social imaginary articulations are able to maintain the institutional conditions that render their reproduction (which, ultimately, concerns the regulation of cultural heterogeneity and creativity). I will draw from Castoriadis’s view of historicity as a ‘perpetual flux of self-alteration’, through which the political community articulates its laws in accordance with heterogenous cultural articulations of the world.47 What this view reveals is that a political community ‘can only exist by providing itself with “stable” figures by which it makes itself visible, visible to and for itself as well, in its impersonal reflexivity, which is also a dimension of its mode of being; the primordial “stable” figure here is the institution’.48 This understanding of what constitutes a ‘mode of historicity’ is what ‘holds a society together’, and in this respect ‘what brings about other and new societies’ is a question of the shaping of specific political regimes through which a community draws its capacity to alter itself. In this chapter Castoriadis’s reflections on the capacity for the political community to engage in processes of institutional self-alteration is explored in order to consider how the autonomous capacity to ‘open up’ participation in the shaping of institutions is always implicitly regulated by established modes of instituting power. It is through a description of this tendency that Castoriadis’s work ultimately allows us to recognise ‘regimes of historicity’ as structural processes of institutional legitimation that are both explicit, implicit and unconscious. This will establish the basis for an examination (in the following chapter) of the State form as an autonomous regulative mechanism of institutional legitimisation. In the final chapter my development of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity will be applied to an analysis of the inherent, and yet intensifying, trend of depoliticisation in ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes. It will be argued that depoliticisation in ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes must be analysed as an

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implication of their partially autonomous character (granted that they can in no way be considered democratic). This stands as contrary to Castoriadis’s argument that depoliticisation constitutes a retreat from autonomy (in which he diagnosed as a regression into heteronomous mode of institution). In fact, it will be shown how the State form serves as an implicit mechanism for the hierarchical ordering of autonomous instituting power – a mechanism derived historically from postmonarchical power – and provides liberal-democratic regimes with the institutional conditions that have led to the establishment of oligarchical political regimes. Further to this, it is argued that that the political regimes of these societies are maintained through implicit modes of instituting power that privilege dominant social imaginary articulations (i.e., liberal values, nationalisms, etc.) in a way that creatively reproduces and reinforces oligarchical conditions. Ultimately, this chapter, however, proposes that the ‘partial’ openness of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes means that the dominant social imaginary articulations are contestable but, in fact, also able to reinforce their legitimacy by regulating the cultural capacities to participate in the institutional processes that shape social-historical contexts. Ultimately, the ‘liberal-democratic’ State form, organised upon the political principle of representative proceduralism, is seen to be the basis for an implicit reinforcement of dominant social hierarchies, which stands in contradistinction to the illusions of democratic autonomy presented by the ‘liberal-democratic’ ideology. These considerations will be explored throughout this book in order to pinpoint some of the limits and aporias involved in a theoretical framework that was developed by Castoriadis in his attempt to preserve a commitment to revolutionary social change that had informed his prior engagement with Marxism. Ultimately, my reading of Castoriadis’s framework aims to present the unique way in which he shows historicity to be a regulative institutional regime that involves an immanent mediation between the ontological fertility of cultural creativity and historically instituted forces of power. What is significant to note, relating to the development of Castoriadis’s work proposed in this book, is that the emergence of an autonomous dynamic within the historicity of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes is concomitant with a depoliticising mode of instituting power that primarily concerns the regulation of the cultural articulations of this autonomy. It will be argued that the political regimes of liberal-democratic regimes are inherently authoritarian because they are structured upon depoliticising modes of instituting power. This argument has been developed alongside the work of Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, who have similarly engaged in the task of developing some of the limitations within Castoriadis’s work for the purpose of furthering the central project of cultivating autonomous communities. In this regard, I share the same position as them on a particular limitation that must necessarily be surpassed, whereby it is seen that ‘Castoriadis inadvertently enacts the formal

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closure of the power of instituting he assigns to the autonomous collective’.49 The limits to Castoriadis’s framework of historicity resides in the fact that he did not fully consider the implications of how established forms of political power maintain their dominance by regulating the relative openness and closure of cultural capacities to alter an institutional context. What appeared as heteronomous to him in contemporary societies is the imposition of a dominant regime of regulatory power, which is still ‘partially’ autonomous in the sense that it is a regime that lucidly regulates its self-critique, even though it ultimately depoliticises, the heterogenous cultural capacities that aim to alter its established institutional form. This analysis will conclusively shows that depoliticisation is in fact a structural component of liberal-democratic regimes. In particular, it is the ‘liberal’ characteristics of these regimes that will be seen to provide an implicit context that sustains the regulative mode of instituting power in these societies. Further, it will be shown how the ‘liberal-democratic’ State, organises itself based on representative-procedural mechanisms that establish the institutional conditions for an oligarchical structuring of instituting power that ensures its reign. It will therefore be shown that these regimes, in the form of the State, structure oligarchical conditions in a way that simultaneously regulates its self-alteration, institutes hierarchical processes of political legitimation and, importantly, reproduces dominant forms of instituting power that depoliticise the ‘open’ political contestation through which these regimes are made ‘partially’ autonomous. The strongest social imaginary visions emerging out of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes in the contemporary period largely reflect desires to control historicity and to implement authoritarian modes of self-institution. My concluding point with regard to depoliticisation in ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes will be that the shift towards neoliberalism has facilitated the conditions upon which new authoritarian visions have emerged, and that this situation paradoxically reflects the ‘partially’ autonomous character of these societies, in that these regimes rely on heterogenous sources of creation that aim for a radical transformation of society; this development, ultimately, signals a shift towards newly configured regimes of historicity.

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NOTES 1. Jodie Lee Heap, 2021, The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and Embodiment in the Writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD), x. 2. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1984, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, in Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (14–16 September 1981), Paisley Livingston (ed.) (Anma Libri, CA), 148.

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3. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary:’, 149. 4. Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK), 88. 5. Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK), 133. 6. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Imaginary Significations’, in A Society Adrift, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York), 57. 7. See Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, 2018, (Un)Willing Collectives: On Castoriadis, Philosophy and Politics (Re.Press, Melbourne, Australia); Jeffrey Klooger, 2009, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Brill, Leiden); Karl E. Smith, 2009, ‘The Constitution of Modernity: A Critique of Castoriadis’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 4: 505–21; Alice Canabate, ‘Entre hétéronomie et autonomie: Réflexions sur l’imaginaire instutuant et sur les pratiques de l’écologie politique associative’, Cahiers Castoriadis, no. 8, Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles; Stathis Gourgouris, 2013, ‘Confronting Heteronomy’, Cahiers Castoriadis, no. 8, Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles; Michel Vanni, 2006, ‘Imaginaire et invention sociale-historique: entre autonomie et hétéronomie’, Cahiers Castoriadis, no. 1, Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles. 8. Klooger, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy, 273. 9. Klooger, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy, 273 10. François Hartog, 2015, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experience of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (Columbia University Press, New York), xv. 11. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xvi. 12. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xvii. 13. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2002, Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique: Séminaires 1986–1987 (la création humaine I) (Seuil, Paris), 388. 14. Agis Stinas’s real name was Spyros Priftis. He was Castoriadis’s political teacher, mentor, and life-long revolutionary interlocutor. 15. Stinas’s view had ruffled feathers closer to home, in Greece, amongst the hyper-nationalist sentiment within the KKE. The position of Stinas was also, however, disputed within Trotskyist circles such as Archeio Marxismou. What is important to highlight is that Castoriadis had internalised Stinas’s position, and in doing so he maintained in his thought the element of a ‘perennial revolution’ that Stinas drew from within Marx’s theory See Vrasidas Karalis (ed.), 2014, Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Brill, Leiden, Holland). 16. The Dekemvrianá (the December events; 13 December 1944 – 11 January 1945) was a watershed moment for leftist militants in the Greek civil war. The KKE covertly diverted the actions of the Organisation for the Protection of the People’s Struggle (OPLA) away from the anti-occupational activities of the National Liberation Front (EAM) and turned to assassinating dissident comrades and factional Marxists. This kind of targeted violence by the KKE was at once a mortal threat to Castoriadis and a nail in the coffin for any hope that the communist movement in Greece could be anything other than the installation of a totalitarian state identical

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to the Russian oligarchy. It was this situation that catalysed Castoriadis’s decision to exile himself from Greece and to pursue a scholarship from the Institut de France. He left alongside a number of other dissident artists and intellectuals, embarking for Paris on the RMS Mataroa. 17. Alongside these theoretical developments there were also historical events that provided led Castoriadis to abandon Marxism, in particular the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 (whose significance was reinforced by the events of the Prague Spring in 1968). In these events Castoriadis found confirmation of the totalitarian-bureaucratic character of the Soviet regime; retrospectively this also came as confirmation of his long-held intuition concerning the kind of regime that would have been installed in Greece during the Stalinist coup d’état of 1944. See Castoriadis, 1990, Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Interview Cerisy Colloquium, 7 (unpublished transcript). 18. Evidence of the increased interest in cultural and subjective concerns can be seen in his later Socialisme ou Barbarie essays; for instance, in these essays one can find his early engagement with psychoanalytic ideas, as with his claim that the psychosexual dimension of the individual must be taken into account in whatever is ‘done or thought’ in the political domain. See Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, in World in Fragments, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Stanford University Press, Standford, CA), 173. 19. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK). 20. Dominique Bouchet, 2007, ‘The Ambiguity of the Modern Conception of Autonomy and the Paradox of Culture’, Thesis Eleven, no. 88, 34. 21. Bouchet, ‘The Ambiguity of the Modern Conception of Autonomy and the Paradox of Culture’, 34. 22. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Imaginary Significations’, in A Society Adrift, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York), 57. 23. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 58. 24. Angelos Mouzakitis, 2010, ‘What is Knowledge? Castoriadis on Truth, Signification and Symbolism’, Cahiers Castoriadis, no. 6 (Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles), 49–50. See also Sophie Klimis, Philippe Caumières, and Laurent Van Eynde (eds.), 2010, ‘Castoriadis et la question de la vérité’, Cahiers Castoriadis, no. 6, (Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, Belgium). 25. Heap, The Creative Imagination, vxii. 26. Heap, The Creative Imagination, vxii. 27. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Done and to be Done’, Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Blackwell Press, Oxford, UK), 369. 28. Christos Memos, 2014, Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique and Radical Alternatives (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK), 1–6. 29. Memos, Castoriadis and Critical Theory, 5. 30. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2020, Democracy and Relativism: A Debate, trans. John V. Garner (Rowman & Littlefield, London), 65. 31. Castoriadis, Democracy and Relativism, 39.

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32. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1991, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 172. 33. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 58. 34. I will explicitly address the mode of autonomous institution that is specific to liberal-democratic regimes. There is a growing amount of scholarship that addresses the various modes of institution whose autonomous characteristics are contextualised within their specific social contexts, for instance, see Shmuel N. Eisentadt (ed.), 2002, Multiple Modernities (Transaction Publishers, New York). 35. Castoriadis, Democracy and Relativism, 26 36. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2007, ‘What Democracy?’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 119 37. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, 123. 38. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 58. 39. Bouchet, ‘The Ambiguity of the Modern Conception of Autonomy and the Paradox of Culture’, 34. 40. This criticism of Castoriadis’s work was first proposed by Johann Arnason and developed in a fragmented way across his writing, this position was then taken up by Suzi Adams and developed in a more formalised fashion. See Johann P. Arnason, 1989, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, Thesis Eleven, no. 22 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA); Suzi Adams, 2011, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (Fordham University Press, New York). 41. Suzi Adams, 2013, ‘Castoriadis, Arnason and the Phenomenological Problematic of the World’, in Ingerid Straume and Giorgio Baruchello (eds.), Creation, Rationality and Autonomy (Nordic Summer University Press, Copenhagen, Denmark), 78. 42. Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, 116. 43. Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology, 78. It is worth noting that the image of a ‘worldless vacuum’ corresponds to the premise that the social-historical world is autonomous because it emerges from ‘undifferentiated chaos’. Indeed, Castoriadis considers this onto-cosmology to be at the basis of ancient Greek creation of the polis. See also Angelos Mouzakitis, 2013, ‘Chaos and Creation in Castoriadis’s Interpretation of Greek Thought’, in Straume and Baruchello (eds.), Creation, Rationality and Autonomy, 33. 44. Adams, ‘Castoriadis, Arnason and the Phenomenological Problematic of the World’, 95. 45. Johann P. Arnason, 2007, ‘Imaginary Significations and Historical Civilisations’, in Christine Magerski, Robert Savage, and Christiane Weller (eds.), Moderne begreifen, (Druck und Verlagshaus Frankfurt am Main), 99. 46. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 57. 47. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 204. 48. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 204 49. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, (Un)Willing Collectives, 12.

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Chapter 1

The Imaginary Institution of Anthropos

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Marx set an agenda for politically militant thought leading into the twentieth century by challenging preconceived understandings of human praxis in a way that foregrounds the dynamics of historicity within a society. This was an agenda oriented towards a political mode of praxis, succinctly summarised in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, in which he states that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’.1 The primacy that Marx attributes to praxis reflects his attempt to discern a theory of historicity through a broader philosophical account of the human condition.2 One of the enduring aspects of Castoriadis’s work is that it internalises Marx’s emphasis on praxis and equally seeks to comprehend the potential for a social transformation that would lead towards the political emancipation of human societies. Like many mid-twentieth-century European Marxists, Castoriadis held a tendency to be suspicious of inherited modes of thought, identifying the mainstream philosophical tradition of Western thought as facilitating a suppression of the openly creative potential of their corresponding societies.3 He found that Marx offered an exemplary step towards the demystification of inherited thought, however he also came to consider Marx’s search for the ‘guarantees’ of revolution as a mistaken attempt to understand political praxis and its anthropological basis.4 Having said this, Castoriadis maintains a life-long appreciation of Marx and his work remained an enduring influence on Castoriadis, visible in his persistent and almost militant confrontation with historical reality, which he argues is ‘explicitly inscribed in Marx’s work and bound up with its most profound meaning’.5 21

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Ultimately, what Castoriadis appreciates in Marx’s work is the attempt to theorise social transformation as a question of history and that it goes so far to argue that any intervention is therefore necessarily political. According to Dick Howard, the continuity of Marx’s themes within Castoriadis’s work as reflected in his commitment to confronting historical reality is evident in his emphasis to adopt ‘an immanent critical-historical engagement whose results cannot be separated from its theoretical premise’.6 Central to both of their theoretical projects is an attempt to understand how the historicity of societies is shaped by the mode of its institution, with emphasis on either its economic or political dimension, and to extrapolate from this how it is possible to intervene in the world. Yet, Castoriadis’s project led him to undertake a critique that would be formally distanced from Marx’s theory and philosophy of history. Castoriadis developed his account based on a recognition of the underlying teleological tendencies that underpin Marx’s philosophy of history. What is more, at the anthropological level, Marx’s conception of the social character of human ‘species-being’ (Gattungswessen)7 is reformulated by Castoriadis in order to show that anthropic being is not pre-determined by historical processes but is, rather, self-reflexive and open to ‘the question of the human being in its innumerable singularities and universalities’.8 The consistent position that Castoriadis draws from Marx’s work relates to what can be called its ‘revolutionary element’. This is most evident in Castoriadis’s emphasis on the third thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that and that it is essential to educate the educator himself . . . the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice’.9 The important aspect of Marx’s thought (drawn itself from his reformulation of Hegel) is that it is through the historical process that people and society change ‘anthropologically’, which is to say that that they are able to ‘change their mores and sociopsychical organisation, and also change the (formal) institution of society’.10 The contentious problem for Castoriadis, then, is that he finds Marx’s attempt to scientifically expound concrete dynamics of causation for the process of historical self-transformation, and on this issue he finds Marx’s response to be lacking. It would seem that Marx attempts to find in his present situation ‘all of the elements required for the solution’ to this problem, which only serves to confound such a solution within its incessant presuppositions, therefore confronting this issue from within a ‘vicious’ circle.11 However, this circle is not so ‘vicious’ in the way that it has been understood, because historical transformation (and its consequent anthropological alterations) cannot be grounded in any fixed logic of causality: ‘we can neither “explain” nor “predict” it, because it is not determined; it, rather, is determinant’.12 This is a

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crucial point for Castoriadis, in which he claims that Marx ‘proves unable to see its creative character’, rather, in his view, history should be considered a ‘circle of historical creation’.13 In making this claim, Castoriadis turns in an entirely new direction, formulating a philosophical framework based on the creative character of historicity. Central to this is a unique theory of the subject outlined in this chapter. This new direction was intended to surpass the limitations inherent to Marx’s thought, and to retrieve the ‘revolutionary element’ from its perceived impasse. This chapter will aim to show how Castoriadis reoriented the question of revolutionary praxis in terms of a more general anthropological theory that situates the political dimension of society as a constitutive attribute of human subjectivity and its historical mode of being. It will be shown that how he came to view it as necessity to break with Marx’s conception of history and philosophy. On the surface, the necessity of this break reflects the historical fate of Marxism as a counterpoint for political organisation; Marxism became highly fragmented in the mid-twentieth century as factions were increasingly splintering on account of competing interpretations of Marx, which only served to stultify the potential of political organisation inspired by his philosophy.14 The first section will outline Castoriadis’s specific critique of Marx. At a deeper level, however, it will be shown that Castoriadis’s critique reveals Marx’s philosophy of history to be based on a conceptual impasse that positioned history as a productive dimension that shapes society in a teleological sense, therefore closing off the revolutionary potential that he had attempted to emancipate via calls to political action. The second section will outline the conceptual approach developed by Castoriadis to rehabilitate the ‘revolutionary element’ of Marx’s work; this approach will be shown to revolve around Castoriadis’s novel theorisation of the social-historical, which requires explication of his conception of institution and the imagination. This novel theoretical framework saw the introduction of an ontological turn in Castoriadis’s thought, where historicity came to be theorised as the ceaseless institution of imaginary creation; as opposed to a Marxian style ontology that rests on a materialist teleology of history. The third section of this chapter will outline this ontological turn, which involves a radical rethinking of subjectivity that draws explicitly from psychoanalysis and phenomenology, (and also, perhaps less explicitly, post-Kantian philosophy), in order to present a complex theoretical framework that situates the role of the imagination within the historical transformation of societies.

Chapter 1

BEYOND MARX

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The impetus for Castoriadis to critique Marx was not due to an outright dismissal of the fundamental questions addressed by Marx but rather the way that Marx addressed them. The critique that Castoriadis undertook, at its core, involved a rigorous interrogation of the conceptual faults within Marx’s theory and philosophy of history, which, in turn, inspired an original reflection on historicity. The critique was first presented in his thesis on ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, originally published in the final issues of Socialisme ou Barbarie, before the dissolution of that group. It was subsequently developed and published as the first section of Castoriadis’s defining theoretical work ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’; a preliminary critique of Marx’s economic theory also appeared in a slightly earlier essay, titled ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’.15 His critique follows a reading of Marx’s proposal for a materialist conception of history that foregrounds technical production as the primary force driving the economic dimension of historical processes.16 Castoriadis argued that this materialist conception of history was developed by Marx in a way that outlined a crude historical determinism, and the implications of this he argued can be dissected into three distinct levels.17 Firstly, Marx introduces the development of technology as the motor of history and attributes to it a cumulative autonomous evolution; this idea builds a mechanistic conception of history that entertains a false teleology of finality. Secondly, Marx attempts to submit the totality of history to categories that have a sense only within capitalist society (and further still, only in developed occidental countries), whilst the application of these categories to previous forms of social organisation raises more problems than it solves. This point characterises Marx’s materialist conception of history as a perspective that is shaped by a specific historical context but that is presented as if the historical situation of capitalist societies is the de facto situation of human history as a whole. Lastly, the materialist determinism implicit in Marx’s theory of history is based on the hidden postulate of a human nature that is considered as essentially unalterable, whose predominant motivation would be economic.18 Castoriadis locates the material determinism of Marx (and Marxism) in the import of the Hegelian dialectic, which is essentially the import of an historical rationalism that is given a strong economic content. This point reflects the fact that Marx’s theory of history is based on a rationalist philosophy and in this sense, as Castoriadis observes, ‘it provides itself beforehand with the solution to all the problems it poses’.19 It gives rational content to a preconceived human substance that can be mastered through historical progress. The solution in Marx’s thought comes in the form of a revolutionary project, imbued with a messianic political agent that addresses the situation of the

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capitalist world, defined by an economic rationalist account of the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ that are resolved through forging a revolutionary path of historical progression. Johann Arnason observes that Castoriadis was acutely aware of the role that the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ played in Marx’s theoretical impetus, in as much as Marx wanted to ‘reconstruct a systemic self-destructive logic which would lead to a social revolution’.20 The crude determinism inherent in Marx’s theory of history was put to work in order to reconstruct a rational historical projection, that which was to become the path towards communism. Arnason also notes that this messianic agenda was taken up throughout the Marxist lineage in a way that characterises the ‘contradictions’ of capitalism as clearly separating progressive and regressive historical tendencies: in this formulation, ‘the progressive dynamics of the forces of production that become more and more social, and the regressive blockage due to the persistence of private property’.21 Castoriadis claimed that the implied dialectic was, however, based on a fundamental flaw in Marx’s theory that subsumed value-forms of labour power into a category of exchange-value.22 Through his reconstruction of classical economic theory, despite his claims to be transcending it, Marx still positioned human labour as a commodity – by reading labour as the substance of society, the production of history and the essence of human being itself. The economic dimension came to be given absolute primacy within human development and was therefore regarded by Marx and his progenitors to be the motor of history.23 Further to this, labour power is seen as the fuel of this motor, reduced to being a solvent of historical (and technological) equivalence, which, given the right engine, will awaken the human faculties that originally lie sleeping in ‘productive man’. Marx therefore insists that a substantial ‘transformation of man into “producer” completely awakens the dormant faculties and actualises the telos of man’, which in Marx’s later work seems to be the essence of its species-being (Gattungswessen).24 The fundamental flaw in Marx’s work that was recognised by Castoriadis is that there is no unified value-form of human labour from which to judge exchange-value in a way that presupposes historical tendencies. In fact, as he says of Marx’s theory, ‘value and its substance (as well as the rest of its grandeur), far from being determined, are rather nebulous enigmas and . . . this situation is profoundly anchored in the antinomic character of the thought of Marx’.25 The prevalent antinomy in Marx’s thought is identified by Castoriadis as a theory of labour that ‘modifies everything and modifies its very self constantly’, while it is at the same time ‘thought under the category of Substance/Essence’.26 According to Marx, even though human labour is thought under the category of substance and essence, it is also seen as a category of potential – an idea he links to Aristotle’s notion of dunamei – that offers the potential for anthropological transformation through

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historical production; labour is therefore reified by Marx in order to endow it with an historically productive power that harbours the capacity to overcome the social conditions of capitalism. This opened up a central paradox in Marx’s thought, which can be traced back to the tension between the influence of Hegelian rationalism and his concomitant desire to draw a reading of Aristotle, on equivalence, towards a theory of economic determinism. Castoriadis shows that Marx in fact makes his theoretical and philosophical claims about history from within the capitalist image of the world. This means that the substantial content Marx gave to his examination of historicity was judged on the basis of a capitalist logic, as such he comes to judge history through the lens of what Castoriadis came to define as ‘capitalist significations’.. Castoriadis recognised that the impossibility of transforming labour power into a commodity was a ‘contradiction of capitalism’ much more fundamental and enigmatic than the confrontation between technological progress and institutionalised class domination. As Arnason points out, the false dialectic of Marx’s historical materialist thinking, itself rooted in the antinomic character of Marx’s thought, was exposed by Castoriadis in recognition that ‘the capitalist project aiming to transform labour power was contradictory in itself’.27 Marx was unconsciously caught in this more fundamental contradiction within his thinking on capitalism, which saw him constantly modifying everything according to the primacy of economic production. It is precisely within this mode of economic determinism that Marx’s thought committed to an anthropological claim, which proposed that the development of human society unfolds through the primal essence of human labour. Castoriadis therefore, rightly, acknowledges that according to Marx’s anthropological vision ‘capitalism is historically and philosophically privileged’.28 Castoriadis recognised that the rationalising tendency of capitalism to exemplify the primacy of the economic set the course for the rationalist myopia of Marx’s system and set up an implicit deterministic and teleological conception of historical emancipation. Dick Howard proposes that the implication of Castoriadis’s critique exposes a limit to the revolutionary element of Marx’s thought: ‘for a theory to be revolutionary, both its relation to history and the nature of the historical world must become explicit’.29 As such, the antinomic and capitalistic implications of Marx’s work leave no room for historical indeterminacy, especially as this would relate to non-economic dimensions of societies and must, therefore, be abandoned. Castoriadis viewed the faults of Marx’s theory as contributing to the degeneration of the revolutionary element that it had helped to spur, most acutely in the proceeding generations of Marxism. This view was increasingly validated as Marxist orthodoxy became regimented in dogmatic organisations and Statist parties, and also given that the historical reality of capitalism became increasingly harder to reconcile with its Marxist interpretations; this was, in

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fact, a key insight that was put forth by the Socialisme ou Barberie group. Castoriadis’s response was in direct opposition to the Marxist belief in the working class as the revolutionary subject of history and in the messianic class of the communist utopia, which was in many seen to be farcical even before the events of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 (and by the Prague Spring of 1968, his association with Marxism was entirely abandoned). He aimed instead to recommence the revolutionary element that attracted him to Marx and to reformulate his theoretical work in a way that foregrounds the potential for a radically autonomous intervention into a society’s mode of social-historical institution. In Castoriadis’s reformulation, the revolutionary project was not delivered through a messianic agent of history, it became an inherent character of history itself. Castoriadis dismantled the Hegelian inspired teleology of Marx’s theory of history and in turn formed a theory that regards historical transformation as an ontologically creative process that is shaped primarily through the political dimension of societies. By stepping beyond Marx’s work, Castoriadis was confronted with problems that concern how the historical dimension is implicated in the political constitution of the modern world. Arnason proposes that Castoriadis approached the historical problematic through a synthesis of his critique of Marx’s ‘contradictions’ of capitalism with the Weberian theme of bureaucracy.30 Castoriadis had in fact discovered Weber in his early years and his reading of him had been heavily influenced by prewar Greek neo-Kantians – particularly Konstantinos Despotopoulos, who had placed particular emphasis on the conceptual role of ‘ideal types’ in Weber’s thought.31 Yet, Castoriadis’s reading of Weber was achieved through Marxist veils, which early on was particularly inflected with the Trotskyist strain of Marxism.32 Arnason claims that Castoriadis saw the subsumption of labour power under capital, ‘as a particular case of a more general logic which manifests in the organisation and division of bureaucratic labour’.33 As far as this corresponds to the historical reality of the time, Castoriadis was acutely aware of an increasingly defining pattern within the revolutionary workers’ movements, a pattern that he characterised as a ‘degeneration’ into bureaucratic movements. This pattern of bureaucratic degeneration can be characterised through the following developments: the voluntary delegation of power to the leaders of the movements based on the grounds of political expertise and the tendency to confer decision-making power amongst levels of the bureaucratic apparatus on the grounds of specialisation – both of these developments serving to foster apathy and marginalise critical attitudes.34 In Castoriadis’s view, the reality of the situation was that the capitalist rationalisation replicated in Marx’s work had planted the seeds for the revolutionary element of Marxism to become hierarchised. Further to this, Marxism was at a loss to explain the historical tendencies that had informed

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the hierarchic bureaucratisation shaping the reality of socialism (in both its Soviet and Western forms). His engagement with the theme of Weberian bureaucracy was taken up in order to provide an alternative to Marx’s theory of value-form, and this provided an opening to a more culturological understanding of the historical problematic. His transition to the Weberian theme of bureaucratisation entailed a critical examination of the role that rationalisation plays, not merely as an organisational dynamic of society but as a culturological dynamic that is shaped by power. It was through Weber’s argument about the existence of an intimate kinship between rationalisation and bureaucracy that Castoriadis discovered a notion of rationalisation that provided practical support for his revision of Marx’s ‘contradictions of capitalism’. Castoriadis understood Weber’s theory of rationalisation in the sense that society was a conglomerate body of ‘rationalising’ subjects, and therefore the ‘logic’ that capitalism supposedly imposes on society is open to a condition of in-finite rationalisation. It is in this reading of Weber that Castoriadis discovered the practical conditions from which capitalism would ‘escape its internal contradictions’.35 The culturological approach that Castoriadis then adopted became crucial to stepping beyond Marx and directed his reflection towards ontological questions that begin to privilege the historically contingent character of social institution that has its basis within the cultural dimension of human subjectivity. Castoriadis developed his social theory of the imaginary institution of society as a consideration of the contingent condition of these historical tendencies, re-conceptualising Marx’s notion of value-form in order to foreground the indeterminate character of political power. In doing so, he intended to preserve the revolutionary element spurred by Marx, which meant formulating a project that contributes to a perennial, non-hierarchical, transformative praxis that is consistent with the unfolding of political modernity. This was to be a theory of society that stresses how human societies institute their world through a culturally indeterminate, and yet politically determining, capacity for self-alteration; a theory of history as creation. It will be shown that his most novel and radical idea is that human imagination brings the social-historical sphere into existence as a perpetual project of self-definition. Castoriadis’s conceptualisation of the deep complicity between the imagination and history completely abandons Marx’s insistence on a substance/essence driven historicity, and in its stead, he develops a thoroughly political conception of cultural creation that attempts to present simultaneously a theory of historicity and a practical explanation of the potential for social transformation.

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It is important to stress that Castoriadis insisted on the necessity of breaking with Marxism in order to salvage a political philosophy that would be able to account for social-historical transformation. Axel Honneth identifies this move within a more general lineage of critical theorists in the twentieth century who shared the same impulse ‘to preserve the practical-political intentions of Marx’s work by means of a determined abandonment of its central basic assumptions’.36 In Castoriadis’s case, this resulted in an attempt to ‘rescue for the present its practical core, the idea of a revolutionary transformation of capitalism’.37 As Johann Arnason argues, Castoriadis’s ‘thought remains to some extent “Marxomorph”, that is to say it carries traces of a prolonged encounter with Marx, and of the need to engage this adversary on his own ground’.38 Castoriadis’s work can perhaps best be viewed as ‘Marxisant’, in that it was driven by an incentive to theorise the potential for a revolutionary transformation of capitalism, as was the case with Marx. To be clear, this prolonged encounter did not remain Marxist in character. Rather, Castoriadis constructed a novel anthropological theory that emphasises political praxis as a predominant feature of human subjectivity. This new theoretical approach to the questions outlined by Marx was presented systematically in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1974), in which Castoriadis sets himself an almost programmatic theoretical framework that would become the basis for the subsequent development of his work throughout the rest of his life. What Castoriadis theorised as the ‘imaginary institution of society’ is highly original and, for the sake of guidance, this section will provide some qualifying discussion; firstly, I will briefly outline the introduction of a novel conception termed the ‘social-historical’ that rethinks the relation between society and history, which – secondly – will be followed by a brief sketch of his theory of ‘institution’, which – thirdly – will be shown to have been given new meaning in the context of Castoriadis’s philosophical conceptualisation of the role of ‘imagination’ within societies. Before outlining Castoriadis’s unique theoretical framework, however, it is worth situating his abandonment of Marx in the historical and social context of his time. Hans Joas and Honneth have spoken of a particular trend in the early 1970s where critical engagement with the questions raised by Marx involved a broadened theoretical approach, more in line with the tradition of philosophical anthropology. In their view, ‘those who were not ready to accept the existing form of Marxism as the full realisation of its inherent potential saw grounds enough for believing that an anthropological approach

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might be necessary for elaborating an interpretation of Marxism that was adequate to the present historical period’.39 Castoriadis was very much situated within this context and, more specifically, his shift away from Marx can be viewed as somewhat à la mode alongside many of his Parisian contemporaries, who have since been loosely regarded under the category of French post-Marxists.40 It is significant to note that the post-Marxist development of Castoriadis’s thought did not draw influence from the structuralist trend in France that had been a common path of addressing anthropological questions but, rather, he addressed these questions through a novel synthesis of disciplinary approaches – namely, drawing from psychoanalysis, phenomenology (particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose importance in the development Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity will be outlined in the following chapter), history (particularly that of ancient Greece) and later developments in the life sciences. Castoriadis’s post-Marxist turn was a direct attempt to move beyond what he saw as an impasse in the way that Marx conceived the relation between society and history. As was discussed in the previous section, this new direction in his work involved a rejected Marx’s view of a praxis that operates through a logic of pre-determined and productive historical processes. A new conception of praxis was put forward that is situated in relation to the ontological dimension of society; this is a vision of praxis that emphasises the creative capacity of societies and positions history itself as the domain of political action. The notion of the social-historical was developed in order to overcome the distinction between society and history; Castoriadis develops this notion in correspondence with the following interrogative questions: What is it that holds a society together? And, What is it that brings about other and new forms of society? In his view, society and history are inseparable and can only be thought together: History is the self-deployment of society in time; but this time is, in its essential characteristics, a creation of society, both as historical time and in each particular case as the time of this particular society with its particular tempo, significant articulations, anchorages, prospects, and promises.41

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According to Castoriadis, temporality has wrongly been thought of as a separable historical dimension ‘within’ or ‘through’ society. By contrast, his conception of the social-historical proposes that history is society itself and, vice versa, that society is history.42 Society and history are seen as constitutive of anthropic being more generally and, in a more specific sense, the social-historical is conceived as the ontological mode of anthropic being. The mode of being of the social-historical should, therefore, be understood as a specifically anthropic temporality, viewed as the ‘advent’ of a collective

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human world that ‘comes from nothing and out of nowhere’.43 The social-historical is considered as the privileged domain of anthropos; it is the orientation of anthropic being in the form of society, which is also to say that it is the form through which ‘society is self-deployment in time and space’.44 Angelos Mouzakitis has pointed out that Castoriadis’s discussion of this term is ‘guided by the need to attain a conception of time that could do justice to the fundamental connection between society and history, the latter being thought of in terms of creation’.45 The social-historical, for Castoriadis, is inseparable from time precisely because time is creation and, more specifically, it is creation ‘in and through social-historical doing’.46 This formulation equates creation with praxis in the sense that social action involves the capacity to create new forms of social-historical existence, which corresponds to what Castoriadis refers to as the capacity for ‘otherness-alteration’.47 The question concerning the relation of historicity to ‘other and new forms of society’ is addressed within this formulation of a society’s creative temporality. The question concerning ‘what holds a society together’ became an even more pressing concern for Castoriadis in light of this understanding of social-historical creation. In response to this question Castoriadis emphasised the necessity for society to be considered as the self-deployment of its institutions in their ‘totality’, which means that societies necessarily entail the ‘creation of a simultaneously ordered ‘natural’ and ‘social’ multidimensionality proper to each and every society’.48 The ‘order’ (i.e. “totality”) that takes shape through the self-deployment of society is key to addressing ‘what holds society together’, and, in response to this question, Castoriadis developed a unique theory of social-historical institution. The institution of society is defined by Castoriadis in its broadest and most radical sense: it is the institution of ‘norms, values, language, tools, procedures, and methods of dealing with things and doing things, and, of course, the individual itself both in general and in the particular type and form given to it by the society considered’.49 An instructive point put forward by Castoriadis’s conception of institutions is that they do not determine historical processes, but rather they produce a ‘totalising horizon’ that sets into place the ‘mode of being of the social-historical’, which is what grants a reflexive indeterminacy to the institutional conditions of a society and, as Mouzakitis points out, ‘allows it to put itself into question, to put into question the very “laws of its existence”’.50 This reference to the ‘laws of existence’ is expressed by Castoriadis in a general anthropological sense corresponding to the ‘institution’ of anthropic being in the form of a society. On the basis of this claim, Castoriadis is proposing that the self-reflexivity of the social-historical mode of being can therefore be understood as a capacity for the self-institution of its own laws. However, Castoriadis also argues that society imposes ways of

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thinking and acting on individuals, ‘social-historical patterns are imposed on the psyche’, which Arnason maintains is a crucial aspect of ‘what holds society together’.51 Arnason further proposes that the role of the social-historical in the formation of individuals is a core element of Castoriadis’s theory of institution: Institution produces, in conformity with its norms, individuals that by construction are not only able but bound to reproduce the institution. The ‘law’ produces the ‘elements’ in such a way that their very functioning embodies, reproduces, and perpetuates the ‘law’.52

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Defined in this way, it is possible to discern one of the features of social-historical being in its homogenous appearance as what Castoriadis called ‘instituted society’, which is succinctly summarised in his expression that ‘we are all, in the first place, walking and complementary fragments of the institution of our society’; however, and importantly so, we are not determined by ‘instituted society’.53 In Castoriadis’s theory of social-historical institution, a tension therefore exists between society as instituted and the instituting capacity of society. These two terms, the social-historical domain and its institution, are central to Castoriadis’s thought and became especially so after his critique of Marx, as they served to reorient the entirety of his philosophical and political projects away from Marx’s historicism towards one based on the imaginary creativity of a community. In what would have been his second major philosophical treatise, L’elément imaginaire (a work that remained unfinished until his death), he worked to fully develop a claim that had been present since The Imaginary Institution of Society, that the entire inherited tradition of Western thought has continuously suppressed recognition of the role of imagination.54 Castoriadis’s critical exposition of the imagination deviates from the traditional modes in which it was explored throughout the history of Western philosophical thought. Even though he credits the discovery of the imagination to Aristotle, Castoriadis claims that it never took right of place as a central element in Aristotle’s philosophy of the subject, nor would it subsequently be attributed its decisively radical role in what would later take shape within Western metaphysics.55 His claim is premised on the notion that the imagination is a source of alterity, and that it is a source for ‘othernessalteration’ with endless potential to rupture established forms of social order, as well as posit new forms of social-historical existence; or, as he phrased it, imagination is the source of a ‘positive rupture of already given determinations, of creation not simply as undetermined but as determining, or as the positing of new determinations’.56 Castoriadis sees that giving the imagination such a definition unsettles a firmly ingrained tradition in Western thought

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to give ontological privilege to a notion of being that rests upon a determined substance or property. He, therefore, confronts the tendency of Western metaphysics to subordinate the creative aspects of the imagination to a particular characteristic of being that idealises what it is ‘to be’ as such. In this respect, Castoriadis considers the history of mainstream Western philosophy to be ‘the elaboration of Reason, homologous to the positing of being as beingdetermined, or determinacy (peras, Bestimmtheit)’.57 Castoriadis claims that human being is not simply the domain of determinable modes of existence but that being human necessarily involves a radical imaginary capacity to create new social-historical modes of existence out of an indeterminate relation with the ‘otherness-alteration’ of its being. His claim is that it is the imaginary that alters the historicity of societies by virtue of its capacity to bring new forms of social existence into being. This claim rests on the proposition that this capacity of the imaginary was never given its proper definition through the notion of a creative imagination and that the inherited tradition of philosophical thought is marked by the suppression of an historical contingency that is opened up through the potential of imaginary creation. Ágnes Heller attributes significance to the fact that Castoriadis turned to Aristotle in order to reorient his philosophical approach towards the imaginary dimension of social-historical transformation. Heller considers Castoriadis to be neo-Aristotelian. In her view, neo-Aristotelians do not share any common theoretical positions, but rather they share a unique temperament in that they are fiercely independent thinkers that hold a predisposition to Aristotle’s work rooted in their political or philosophical radicalism; in Castoriadis’s case this involves his Marxist heritage.58 Heller considers the way that Castoriadis theorises praxis as a capacity of the imaginary dimension of human societies to be ‘authentically Aristotelian’, particularly in that ‘praxis is understood as autonomous activity proper, [and] at the same time as [a] creative activity’.59 Curiously, however, Vrasidas Karalis has identified another distinct influence in the way that Castoriadis formulated his ideas about praxis, namely his early engagement with Despotopoulos (a neo-Kantian), whose ‘idea about the “cultural creativity” of the human mind and his belief in human autoteleia’ is distinctly similar to Castoriadis’s understanding of autonomy.60 Castoriadis describes the cultural capacity for imaginary creation as the poietic dimension of societies, to which he contrasts the practical (i.e. functional) dimension of preestablished social-historical institutions. This reflects a fundamental distinction in Castoriadis’s work between cultural creativity and the enaction of institutions in their established mode, which is evident when Castoriadis describes the social-historical domain as ‘a socially sanctioned symbolic network in which a functional component and an imaginary component are combined in variable proportions and relations’.61 From Arnason’s perspective, Castoriadis views culture as the synthesis of a ‘complex of relations’,

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which means that creative capacity of cultural articulation is ‘irreducible to [the] shared norms or intersubjective understandings’ that make up the established institutions.62 This distinction introduces a dichotomous element to Castoriadis’s theory of the imaginary institution of societies, and one that is reminiscent of the Aristotelean distinction between praxis and poiesis. Honneth also picks up on the strong Aristotelean influence that undergirds Castoriadis’s shift away from Marxism, particularly in the way that Aristotle’s distinction (where ‘poiesis aims at producing a product external to itself, [and] praxis is realised in its own performance’) is radicalised ‘beyond its character as performance, praxis is characterised both by a particular form of action-orienting knowledge, as well as by an immanent reference to the autonomy of the individual’.63 In other words, Castoriadis introduces the creative (poietic) capacity of the imaginary as a potential revolutionary source for praxis. This new sense that Castoriadis gives to the distinction between praxis and poeisis is crystallised in his definition of culture: We shall call culture all that, in the public domain of a society, goes beyond that which is simply functional and instrumental in the operation of that society. In other words, culture concerns all that, in this society, pertains to the imaginary strictu sensu [in the strict sense], to the poietic imaginary, in as much as this imaginary dimension is embodied in works and in pattern of behaviour that go beyond the functional.64

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Arnason shows that in Castoriadis’s definition of culture there is a ‘strong emphasis on the interrelations that constitute the social field, and [these interrelations] are only in part identifiable with norms and rules’.65 Castoriadis views the cultural dimension as made up of heterogenous articulations of the world and various interpretations of the instituted symbolic forms that structure societies. In Castoriadis’s view, the ‘complex of relations’ that shape the conditions for cultural creativity reflect a social-historical fact, that ‘all actual and factual relations are not causal’, instead, social institution occurs vis formandi, through a ‘power of formation’ that incorporates the culturally creative imagination of the collective as a source of ‘otherness-alteration’.66 Castoriadis defines his particular use of the notion vis formandi with respect to the idea that human being is its mode of creation, although it is not the creation of ‘matter-energy’ but instead the cultural creation of social-historical ‘forms’.67 The unique element of Castoriadis’s theory of institution is that this ‘power of formation’ has its source in the creative imagination, rather, coming from elsewhere to determine the ontological conditions of human existence. The vis formandi potential of imaginary institution is precisely the instituting capacity of the collective creative imagination to institute its social-historical

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mode of existence. This aspect of social-historical institution will be explored in more depth within the next section of this chapter, which will then lead to the main contention of the chapter, that Castoriadis conceives of the political dimension of society on the basis of this instituting power of formation. HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL-HISTORICAL BEING

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But, how do human societies establish a social-historical world through their own institutional activity? Who is the human subject with this cultural capacity to create its own history? What is specific to anthropic being that it may take the form of a human subject? These are some of the questions that arose for those who abandoned the Marxist paradigm in search of a new conception of political praxis. Honneth and Joas recognise that the practico-political impetus of post-Marxism involves the construction of ‘a theoretical model of human praxis in such a way that the independence of social conditions was neither denied nor reified, but could be recognised rather as the product of social action’.68 Post-Marxism cannot be defined by a distinct methodological approach; however, a common feature of ‘postMarxist’ thinkers can be discerned on the basis of their attempt to incorporate various discursive accounts of political praxis into an anthropological theory of the human subject.69 Castoriadis’s shift beyond Marx shares this feature, which he directed towards a theoretical project that explores the ontological conditions of human subjectivity. This turn is reflected in his critical engagement with discourses as diverse as philosophical anthropology, the life sciences, phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the latter two being of significant importance for his culturological revision of the relation between the human subject and society.70 Castoriadis constructs a theory of political praxis that is based on a novel conception of human subjectivity, which considers anthropos as a living being (le vivant) endowed with an imaginary capacity to create itself as social-historical being.71 This theoretical approach can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary debates concerning the conceptual status of the biopolitical. Even though biopolitical considerations are typically seen as originating from a lineage passed on by Foucault, Castoriadis’s contribution to a theoretical understanding of the ontological conditions of the biopolitical is less appreciated; he can, in fact, be considered a direct theorist of the biopolitical. As will be shown in this section, he outlines the particular type of living being that grounds human subjectivity and elucidates the radically creative ontological capacity of the human imagination as a specific feature of human nature. Castoriadis makes clear that the ‘essence’ of human nature is simply its ‘capacity’ of imaginary creation, in the sense of ‘making be

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other forms of social and individual existence’ as new historical creations – a reticent reformulation of the notion of species-being in Marx’s early work.72 This is a mode of praxis that evokes the political dimension of society within the very process of anthropogenesis and not – as with Marx – at the level of technical and economic production.73 In order to describe the radically formative nature of human subjectivity, Castoriadis identifies the specificity of anthropic being in terms of a central axis: a transversal (‘horizontal’) level that situates human being within nature and in relation to other living beings, and the ‘vertical’ transcendence of the human subject as a social-historical mode of being beyond merely intersubjective relations. In other words, his line of enquiry centres on the problem of theorising the precise conditions of human subjectivity in relation to the political dimension of social-historical existence. It is important to remain cognisant of the fact that Castoriadis shifts to this axis in order to relocate the Marxist concern for revolutionary praxis from a primarily societal concern to a more thoroughly anthropological problematic. Honneth has recognised that this viewpoint shifts from a philosophy of praxis based on Marx’s concern with ‘the structure of intersubjectivity’ to a mode of praxis that is articulated in ontological terms, the latter of which takes into account ‘the creative dimension of social action’.74 In what follows, I will address three key considerations that are crucial for understanding Castoriadis’s theoretical construction of the ontological dimension of human being and the role of political praxis in this process: (a) the fundamental distinction between living being and anthropic being, (b) the specifically anthropic nature of the creative imagination developed through his psychoanalytic theory and (c) the central claim that human beings both are created by and create themselves as a social-historical mode of being. Castoriadis develops a complex schematic to outline his theory of human subjectivity and its continuity with nature. This schematic is based on a distinction between (a) various regions of self-organisation that determine the human subject and (b) the largely indeterminate capacity of human subjectivity to alter itself by creating other ‘social and individual’ forms of existence. The constitution of the human subject involves a poly-regional complex of ontological sources, in which ‘we are dealing with a multiplicity of regions, and even levels, of being, all of which come under the title of the for-itself’.75 These regions of the for-itself (pour-soi) correspond to the following categories: the living being, the human psyche (as the subjective origin of the imagination), the social individual and society (as the social-historical domain that is specific to anthropic being).76 Each of these regions correspond to meta-functional levels of the human subject, however this schematic stratification of poly-regional self-finalities is not put forward

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in search of a determining feature of human being, it cannot account for the activity of human subjectivity. Rather, this schematic is posed by Castoriadis in the sense that human existence is, for him, always posed: ‘as a question and as a project’ for human subjects to grapple with in the context of their own social-historical niche.77 The political dimension of human subjectivity inaugurates itself on the basis of a radical self-reflexivity, which allows the human subject to put itself into question as a subject of ‘historical creation’.78 HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL-HISTORICAL BEING: LIVING BEING

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Castoriadis identifies the region of the living being as the originary source of the ‘for-itself’ (pour-soi) characteristic that underpins subjectivity.79 He qualifies the for-itself characteristic of living being as taking shape by way of three principle features: ‘the living being is for-itself insofar as it is self-finality, insofar as it creates its own world, and insofar as this world is a world of representations, affects, and intentions’.80 These three principles are absolutely central to life bringing itself into existence, and according to Castoriadis, it is on the basis of these principles that the living being is able to organise and constitute a world as its own world (son monde propre), and to define its own world within its own limits, the latter of which are visible only as a horizon onto the world tout court.81 The for-itself therefore signifies being as the functionality of one’s own ends and in accordance with one’s own needs, it is its own self-finality, and towards this end the triadic principles of self-organisation (representation/affect/intention) are what shape the world of a living being.82 What is significant about situating this triadic principle at the level of living being is that it introduces the most basic schematic of the imagination into forms of life. This schematic of imagination at this level refers to the psyche/soma. As Heap notes, it is at this level that Castoriadis demonstrates his first intuition of the radical character of the imagination, ‘associated with the Aristotelian concept of the first imagination and the Kantian concept of the transcendental imagination’,83 which presents itself through a ‘perpetual, truly Heraclitean, flux of representations cum affects cum intentions’.84 It must be stressed that at this level there is no natural ‘information’ that the living being receives in giving form to such a flux but, rather, for the living being ‘certainly “there is” something “outside”, there is X’, this is important because ‘the proper world of the species is not given – nature does not contain “information”, as such, waiting to be gathered. On the contrary, information is “created” by the for-itself in “its own manner of doing so”’.85 This X is indescribable without it passing through psyche/soma

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in order to perceive this ‘something’ for-itself, initiating the base schema of imagination. Heap notes that Castoriadis draws from Fichte on this point, ‘as such, the living being does not passively perceive the external world but creates for itself its own proper world in response to the Anstoss of the world. The living being is to be conceived, therefore as ‘self-creation’ as a living form that is self-constituting’.86 What is out there in the world is perceived as ‘mere shock, Anstoss . . . as soon as anything more could be said about it, it would have already entered into the play of “subjective” determinations’.87 On this point, Heap rightly points out that ‘Castoriadis’s introduction to the necessity for an “elementary” form of imagination in the region of the living being reveals the vis formandi pertaining to the human condition must include a corporeal domain of formation and of creation’, and as such the world assumes its enigmatic status.88 Castoriadis insists that there must be some characteristic of the world tout court that makes it possible for a living being to be able to organise a world for-itself. If we are to step already into the paly of subjective determinations, it is worth highlighting this point with reference to Castoriadis’s consideration of language, whereby, ‘whatever autonomous power may be attributed to language (to thought) in the organising of the world, still the fact that the world is spoken (thought) proves that it is. organisable’.89 He develops this consideration to say, that ‘the organisation of language is always based upon the organisation of the world, for it necessarily rests on what is invisible in the visible’ (here paying dues to Merleau-Ponty, as will be discussed in the following chapter).90 Language, however, is a social-historical institution, and before broaching that aspect of being it is necessary to consider in what way the living being rests on the ‘invisible’ ‘outside’. What Castoriadis’s point demonstrates is that the world tout court is organisable and that the needs of a living being must function in accordance with the indifferent reality of an impartial nature. Castoriadis names this indifferent level of nature upon which the subject forms itself, the first natural stratum.91 The ‘for-itself’ of human subjectivity is related to the first natural stratum in such a way that the ‘organisability’ of the world becomes the basis of an ‘ensemblistic-identitarian’ (i.e. ensidic) logic that, according to Castoriadis, concerns ‘everything that can be constructed and built up starting from the principles of identity, contradiction, the excluded third or nth (n here being finite), and from the organisation of anything given, by means of univocally defined elements, classes, relations, and properties’.92 It is on this point that Castoriadis introduces his psychoanalytic theory of the subject. There is a necessity for the living being to ‘lean-on’ the first natural stratum by functioning in relation to the natural limits of its organisability, Castoriadis calls this a relation of ‘leaning-on’ (étayage) nature, considering the Freudian concepts

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of Anlehnung and anaclasis together, this term is intended to describe the parameters upon which self-finality can be organised through an indifferent world.93 The acknowledgement of this relation is gleaned from the fact that any form of organisation that is able to constitute itself, for-itself, cannot come into existence without the basic condition that ‘the “material” through which they “form” did not already include in itself the ‘minimal form’ of being formable’.94 The natural world that the living being ‘leans on’ is presented, ‘throughout its successive strata, as organisable, and, finally, that it is not just anything nor does it exist in just any manner. But this also suggests that what appears as organised is inseparable from what organizes it’.95 According to Castoriadis, the necessity of leaning-on nature is therefore presupposed by the fact that there is an extensive quality of the world that allows it to become, both, perceptible and representable and it is on the basis of this quality that a living being can only bring itself into existence by making the world meaningful for-itself. This is the originary condition of the living being as a subject: that functionality is translated into subjective processes that attribute sensorial (perceptible) and representational value as a necessary component of the physical, chemical and biological propensities of any organism. Here we are talking of the very basis for the emergence of life through the schema of the imagination.96 What is relevant for the present discussion is the fact that the living being is subject to its own reality as it organises its world as meaningful on the basis of the triadic principles of self-finality: ‘everywhere there is the for-itself there will be representation and image, there will be affect, there will be intention’.97 The overarching subjective schema of the living being, which constitutes a reality for-itself on the basis of these triadic principles is the corporeal imagination. The living being conceived as a subject refers to its capacity to process what is meaningful for-itself in accordance with the natural stratum and the complexity of its multiple ontological regions. This definition of the subject, particularly in its affective and intentional faculties, is suitable for all types of living beings (plants and animals alike), as the central premise involves a functional adherence to mainly bio-ontological regions; it is a schema that is discernible from the region of intra-species relations (i.e. sexuality) right down to the singular-cell level of an organism. The significant idea presented by Castoriadis is that the form through which anthropic being ‘leans-on’ nature and produces its own mode of self-finality is the social-historical institution. The fundamental anthropological claim made by Castoriadis is that, as living beings, the emergence of human life is an altogether new mode of being, precisely because the subjective processes that attribute sensorial, representational and intentional value have been defunctionalised by the radically creative capacity of the human imagination.

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One would assume that if the subjective processes of human beings (as living beings) are not functionally determinate, as Castoriadis maintains, then it would follow that human beings would be ‘mad’, degenerate, animals, and that they would be ‘radically unfit for life’.98 However, while this may be true from the perspective of the living being, this fatalistic notion does not take into account the region of the psyche as the genesis of the creative and defunctionalised human imagination.99 The idea of a defunctionalised imagination is put forward in order to demonstrate a caesura of the human imagination from its biological functionality. Castoriadis locates this caesura within the psyche of human subjects, who are ‘biologically non-functional in order to be ‘functional’ from another point of view’, that is, the ‘functional’ viewpoint of the social subject who is shaped by the institution of society.100 The psychoanalytic aspect of this idea is present in the observation that the human psyche can be defined via the domination of representational pleasure over organ pleasure, which is regarded by Castoriadis as a ‘massive conversion, co-originary with humanity’.101 The source of representational pleasure for the psyche is the social-historical region of being, which corresponds to the institution of society as a specifically anthropic mode of being. Castoriadis takes up the psychoanalytic insight that regards the psyche to be the seat of differential formative capacities within the human subject, yet he gives this a phenomenological bent in that it also involves a twofold embodiment of the imagination: a corporeal imagination through which the body ‘creates its sensations’ and a radical imagination, the emergence of ‘defunctionalised’ (social) meaning as an ‘incessant flux that is at once representational, intentional and affective’.102 The radical imagination is a novel conception that was developed by Castoriadis in order to account for the unique imaginary trait that subjects human beings to an ‘incessant flux’ of ‘representations, affects and desires’ that introduces an intimate source of ‘otherness’ and therefore ‘alterity’, as opposed to the largely functional imaginary trait of the living being, corresponding with the corporeal imagination, which is either ‘reproductive or simply combinatory (and usually both)’.103

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HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL-HISTORICAL BEING: RADICAL IMAGINATION OF THE PSYCHE It must be stressed that the formative capacity of the radical imagination to a certain extent still depends on the corporeal imagination, even if it only exists as a ‘floating debris of the animal’s functional “psychical” apparatus’.104 However, the human subject is dominated by its radical imagination, and is dependent on it to create its world according to social-historical meaning.105 Before discussing the significance of the latter, it is necessary to outline

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Castoriadis’s theorisation of the psychic region of the subject, so that it is possible to grasp the relation of the radical imagination to social-historical dynamics. Castoriadis remains adamant about the radical characteristic of the originary schema of the imagination emerging through the living being. This provides the strata of the psyche with an ‘originary’ schema of representations, affects and intentions, which enacts the ‘moment of creation in the psychic process’.106 As Heap has made clear, ‘Castoriadis defines this initial representation as an “originary phantasmatisation” of the radical imagination, or more precisely, of the defunctionalized dimension of the radical imagination – a “primal representation (Ur-vorstellung)” which, as through its very presence, enables the drive to “attain psychical existence”’.107 Heap proposes that the significance of Castoriadis’s major contribution to psychoanalysis, the domination of representational pleasure over organ pleasure, introduces some salient and transversal features of the human psyche, namely: the autonomisation of the imagination, the autonomisation of affect and the defunctionalisation and autonomisation of desire.108 By indicating that the implications of the human psyche’s defunctionalisation amounts to a relative autonomisation, she points out that ‘the human psychical sphere still retains psychical mechanisms dependent on “ensidic logic” because the capacity of all living beings to organize and create for themselves a world of their own world requires the capacity to perceive and order the ensidic elements of the world’.109 Further to this, Heap elaborates Castoriadis’s claim that within this originary schema of imagination, there is a distinction between conscious and nonconscious perception;

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Nonconscious is given form through the radical, albeit creative interplay or, to draw on Fichte, a form of wavering between the two dimensions of the radical imagination. The defunctionalized dimension of the radical imagination creates ‘starting from nothing at all [à partir de rien]’ or creates ex nihilo and the corporeal dimension of the radical imagination creates from something, from the X. Both dimensions play a role in the ontology of the primal subject because representation, perception and sensation are indissociable. As the psyche’s object is unrepresentable, the interplay between the two dimensions of the radical imagination can only ever be presentified as an indeterminate core of pleasure – a core that is vaguely conscious only in the sense that it is felt as pleasure. This is the realm of the human Nonconscious, which, at an ontological level, is simply the expression of figuration in its most primal and unthinkable form.110

A significant point regarding Castoriadis’s contribution to psychoanalysis is that with the emergence of the human psyche a fundamental distinction occurs at the level of psyche/soma: ‘in order to begin to act, the psyche must be affected by a somatic impulse, what we call instinct in animals and drive in humans. These two domains, the somatic and the psychic – and on

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this, Freud is uncompromising, and justly, in my opinion – are perfectly heterogeneous’.111 the domination of representational pleasure over organ pleasure therefore emerges through ‘a bursting of man’s animal psychism under pressure from the inordinate swelling of the imagination’, which still retains ‘a considerable amount of debris from the ensidic logic regulating the psychism as an animal psychism’.112 From this position, nonetheless, another crucial issue arises regarding the degree of closure that is presumed by the autonomisation of the human psyche and its dominant orientation towards representational pleasure. To explain the dominance of representational pleasure Castoriadis proposes his version of the psychoanalytic theory of socialisation. He proposes that the subject undergoes a triadic phase, which brings the psyche out of its ‘monadic core’ and into the social-historical world as an individual that is fabricated by it. In order to outline the triadic phase, we can begin with the provisional definition given to the original status of the psyche as radical imagination: ‘the psychical monad is a forming-formed, it is formation and figuration of itself, figuration figuring itself, starting from nothing. It is, to be sure, an ‘aspect’ of the living body or, if one prefers, it is this body as forming/self-forming, as figuring/self-figuring for itself’.113 Here Castoriadis places the ‘swelling of imagination’ into the context of the Freudian notion of primary narcissism, in the sense that ‘the psyche never does anything other than to dilate the sphere which it is, which it figures as itself, all the while figuring itself as occupying the centre of this sphere’.114 What the triadic phase initiates is a separation within the psyche itself, ‘the great enigma here as everywhere, and which will always remain so, is the emergence of separation. A separation that will lead, for the individual, to setting up a private world and a public or common world, which are distinct and yet interdependent’.115 This introduces a polarity between the radical imagination, with its basis in the ‘monadic core’, and the social-historical world, which brings with it a social imaginary of its own (in the sense of its ‘collective’ and ‘anonymous’ capacity to radically institute new and other forms of subjectivity – this latter pole in particular will be elaborated in the following chapters). As self-forming/self-figuring, the subject is caught up in ‘the irresistible tendency of the psychical monad to close in upon itself’, it creates for itself a unitary form of representation that knows only the undifferentiated pleasure of self-referentiality.116 This monadic closure will be ruptured in the triadic phase due to ‘the relation to the other and to others (a relation which is always and at the same time “a source of pleasure” and “satisfying” as well as “a source of unpleasure” and “disturbing”)’, which is imposed through a series of breaks inflicted on the psychical monad by means of which the social individual is constructed as divided between the monadic pole,

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which always tends to lock everything up and to short-circuit it in order to carry it back to an impossible monadic ‘state’ and, failing to do so, to its substitutes, hallucinatory satisfaction and phantasising – and, on the other hand, the series of successive constructions by means of which the psyche has in each case succeeded more or less in integrating (that is to say, it has represented, affectively invested and connected by means of tending towardss or through an intention) whatever was imposed on it.117

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It will be useful to briefly outline each instance of the triadic phase so that the significance of the subject and its relation to the social-historical world is made clear and the stakes of its institution can be discussed in detail. The first phase is initiated by the originary scheme of imagination, which is established at the stage of infancy. As discussed so far, this originary schema involves the creation by the radical imagination of a dominant primal (‘canonical’) representation of pleasure as being one-self, tying together psyche/soma under the direction of the monadic psyche. Following the psychoanalytic approach, pleasure itself must be understood in the form of ‘satisfaction’ that responds to a ‘need’, and it is in this sense that Castoriadis revises the Freudian notion of primary narcissism to propose that the ‘the canonical “response” to need is hallucination and phantasmatic satisfaction; it occurs in and through imagination, and in an undetermined manner’, and therefore when ‘satisfaction’ occurs, ‘it is represented as the manifestation, confirmation, restoration of the initial unity of the subject’.118 It is here that Castoriadis remains fervently Freudian, finding in the context of infancy the canonical representation is structured around the ‘need’ and its ‘satisfaction’ that comes in the form of hunger and the breast (or its equivalent) as its relative object. In this instance ‘the availability of the breast simply re-establishes, to begin, the monadic state; it can be “lived” at this period only in terms of the representations and the schemata available to the subject’, which is to say ‘only through the radical imagination’, and it is for this reason that ‘the breast can only be apprehended as the self: I am the breast, Ich bin die Brust’.119 This initiates the unity of the monadic psyche based on a core pleasure that ties the psyche/soma together through its canonical representation, on the somatic level, ‘the appeasement of need is understood by the psyche – in the normal case – in its own language as restoring the unity and the proto-affect indissociable from it’, and the psychical component ‘the “delegation through representation” of the somatic process of need and of its satisfaction will be a restoration of unity; this is where the psyche will seek its pleasure to begin with – and, in a certain way, in the unconscious it will eternally seek its pleasure there’.120 The implications of this phase is that it produces within the subject an omnipotence of the psyche, ‘capable of reproducing this pleasure

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all alone, by reproducing the corresponding representation, hallucinating or phantasising the breast’.121 The second phase is initiated by an introjection of the other into the monadic psyche. The critical instance of this phase, as Heap makes clear, considers this introjection to involve an ‘incorporation into the subject of a “second sense” – as an awareness of the relative otherness of the object’.122 This is the first point of socialisation encountered by the subject, in which it is argued that ‘somatic need and the presence/interference of the other, more generally the mother [figure], leads to a more or less violent rupture of this singular or monadic condition, compelling the infant to enter a process of socialisation – that is, humanisation, in a secondary and more powerful sense’.123 What is significant to note is that Castoriadis emphasises the necessarily violent rupture of the monadic core that launches the process of socialisation. This violent rupture takes place when ‘the original narcissistic cathexis [of the canonical representation of the breast/object] is accordingly fractured leading to the creation of a new cathexis’, and yet, as Heap points out, ‘the emergence of this new cathexis is invested in an imaginary object’.124 At this stage, the object of this new cathexis is not yet the figure of the mother as such, but a more primal response to the ‘absent breast’ which shatters the core pleasure maintaining the closure of the monadic psyche. Here Castoriadis highlights the meaning of this new object, as the ‘bad’ breast, ‘the absent breast is the negation of meaning or a negative meaning, in so far as it is the break-up of the monadic closure – in so far as it is a hole in the subjective sphere, the ablation of an essential part of the subject’.125 This ‘unpleasure’ that comes with this ‘absent breast’ takes the form of a new object, one produced through the radical imagination after having ruptured the monadic core of the psyche. The significance that this object imparts involves the formation of an otherness as well as the subject’s nascent encounter with reality. The violence imposed by this ‘second sense’, however, becomes an co-constitutive feature of the psyche, ‘it is because the first schema is perpetuated as the condition and presentification of all signification, it is because everything is always lived by the psyche in terms of the indistinguishability of I-world-sense – pleasure’, which initiates the omnipotence of the psyche, ‘that the absence of the breast can become a figure, more precisely: a constitutive component of the “object” in its alternation with the latter’s “presence”’.126 Castoriadis insists that this kicks off a process of complexification of subjectivity within the psychic apparatus, whereby ‘an “outside” is created so that the psyche can cast off into it whatever it does not want, whatever there is no room for in the psyche, non-sense or negative meaning, the breast as absent, the bad breast’.127 A second schema of the imagination is therefore introduced that initiates a figuration of ‘virtual non-being’ at the edges of representation, and

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introduces into subjectivity a series of divisions – that is, pleasure/unpleasure, self/non-self, yes/no, reality/negation, possible/actual, identity/otherness – ‘and the figure-ground schema begins to be posited as the general articulation of a “consciousness” and a “perception” in their embryonic state’.128 It should also be noted that in this process there is also a division of libido that maintains the omnipotence of the psyche, this division ‘has a positive relation of cathexis with the subject and the good breast and a negative one with the ‘outside’ and the bad breast that is to be found there’.129 Leading to perhaps the most important point related to Castoriadis’s framing of this second phase, which is that this ‘consciousness’ and ‘perception’ also consists of an articulation of the world outside itself. However, at this stage, this representation of virtual non-being, and what will become the ‘world’ and ‘object’, remains a projection of the radical imagination. The third phase initiates the subject’s entry into the significance of the social-historical world. So far, the subject is still bound to representations of its own imagination, and it is with this third stage in the socialisation process that the subject constitutes a ‘real’ object that exist in ‘reality’ separate from itself. A new schema of the imagination emerges with the constitution of ‘real’ objects, and ‘this real object can appear only once the good breast and the bad breast begin to coincide for the subject, once the two imaginary entities appear as connected to a third entity which is the ground of both of them’.130 In other words, ‘the two distinct and opposing quasi-objects of the preceding phase, the good and the bad breast, become the same to the extent that they are posited as depending on the same person’; from this viewpoint, ‘the other is constituted necessarily in ambivalence’ because it holds the power to dictate either instance. Castoriadis affirms the Freudian position that ‘this constituting of the object as real can only be achieved at the moment when the fact that the object “belongs” to a “person” is actually apprehended . . . hence, it is constituted as real only at the moment when it is truly “lost”, in so far as it is placed once and for all within the power of someone else’.131 Even more decisive for the subject, in fact, are the consequences on the pre-established omnipotence of the psyche which sees the constitution of its ‘reality’ imposed upon by the autonomy of another, generating a figural counterpoint for an omnipotence of the other;

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[W]here did the infant get a signification of omnipotence, and the capacity to endow it in addition with this overwhelming excess in relation to all that is real? The fact that this signification leans on the actual relation that develops around the breast does not contradict, but rather reinforces what I have said about it. Imaginary omnipotence with respect to the breast, which the infant imputed first to himself, and would have liked to continue to impute to himself afterwards, he is finally forced to place somewhere else, in another; this means. first and

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foremost that he can constitute another only by projecting onto the latter his own imaginary schema of omnipotence’.132

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Castoriadis suggests that, as yet, ‘no one has drawn all of the consequences that ensue from the omnipotence the infant imputes to the other’, which has its origin in the fractured omnipotence of the monadic psyche, and given this situation ‘the subject can grasp the other only by means of the sole schema available then and always to it, this since it draws this out of itself – the schema of omnipotence’.133 The other can become ‘real’, only if the monadic psyche is stripped of its omnipotence, ‘that is, if it is limited’ by the significations that are attributed to such a reality, and ‘for the child, this signification is ascribed, precisely, by the other’.134 Castoriadis makes clear that the subject can only be stripped of its omnipotence, ‘if it signifies itself as not being the source and the master of signification (and of values, norms, and so on)’, and further still, this stage leads to another essential development, which holds that the master of signification is not simply the other, but that its source is ‘other’ of the other.135 This stage does not require a ‘real’ third person – the ‘father’, for instance – ‘if this third person is simply the other of the other, source and master of signification in his turn, if omnipotence is, then, simply shifted onto another support’, then it is only necessary and sufficient ‘that the other be able to signify to the child that no one among all those he might encounter is the source and absolute master of signification. In other terms, it is necessary and sufficient that the child be referred to the institution of signification and to signification as instituted and not depending on any particular person’.136 Heap outlines the process by which ‘the bringing in of this third entity into the psyche is an activity that involves an original act of presentification by the subject’, consequently, ‘the imposition of this third entity introduces into the primal subject the significations of the realm of the social imaginary’.137 This third entity therefore brings the social-historical ‘world horizon’ into view for the subject. As such, she therefore points to the most crucial moment of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic theory, which shows how ‘the socialisation of the psyche can only ever begin in the presence of another social individual – as a bearer of the social imaginary significations specific to a social-historical world’.138 This is an important point because it opposes the image of the individual as a tabula rasa that is endowed with a limitless autonomy to act on the basis of every representation, affect, or desire that it sees fit to act upon; this would, of course, revert the subject back into the state of monadic psyche, seriously jeopardising the subject’s chance for survival in the world. The most pertinent feature underlining the social individual is that – due to its defunctionalised state – human beings can only exist as social-historical subjects and can therefore only constitute themselves in relation to their cultural context, which is to say, following on from the

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definition of culture discussed in the previous section, that an individual acts in relation to an imaginary context that is shaped by the heterogenous cultural articulations of the social-historical world. This final stage of the triadic phase therefore seemingly imperils the human subject in a ‘clash’ between self and other, which initiates a schematic scaffolding that Heap refers to as ‘the creation and the embodiment of three imaginary worlds – the embodied self, the embodied other and the embodied realm of the social imaginary’.139 Klooger suggests much the same, arguing that one of the crucial implications of the triadic phase is that it introduces a conflictual dynamic into the psyche, ‘the conflict involved here is not a conflict between the psyche and the soma, it is a conflict between one psyche/ soma – that which Castoriadis calls the psyche – and others’.140 Castoriadis develops the framework that is established by the triadic phase in order understand that the process of socialisation is dependent on the formative power of the social-historical world which exists ‘beyond’ the psyche. Heap argues that Castoriadis, again, draws from Fichtean themes, whereby the ‘psychical phase of maturation involves a ‘clash’ between two histories – a clash between the history of the psyche of the primal subject and the history of the social-historical world’.141 This clash is viewed as ‘productive/creative’, in that the social-historical world and its forms of instituted meaning are imposed on the monadic psyche, and it is this process that ‘producescreates’ the social individual; social-historical institutions impose on the monadic psyche ‘a mode of being which the psyche can never generate out of itself’.142 In fact, we exist as individuals only so far as we have been fabricated by social-historical institutions; it is in this sense which Castoriadis proposes ‘we are all, in the first place, walking and complementary fragments of the institution of our society’.143 As such, Castoriadis describes the individual as a ‘socially functional’ region of the subject that takes shape through the institutions that it embodies (i.e. family, language, education, etc).144 It is therefore a stabilising region, allowing the subject to negotiate between the instituted form of society and its psyche (understood to be in a constant state of radical flux of imagination, which is nevertheless based on its past experience145). What institutions impose on the psyche is meaning whose origin is not the psyche itself but, rather, the social imaginary that is constituted by ‘an anonymous and indefinite collectivity of individuals who coexist in and through the institution’.146 This meaning (consisting of social imaginary significations) are sublimated by the subject in a ‘process by means of which the psyche is forced to replace its own or private objects of cathexis, including its own image of itself, with objects that exist and have value in and through their social institution, and to make them for itself “causes”, “means”, or “supports” of pleasure’.147 Castoriadis demonstrates that the meaning ‘society presents and imposes on the psyche is the world of things, of others, reality,

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work, means, ends, and so on’; however, he also insists that the meaning ‘society gives to the psyche is, from a certain standpoint, the exact opposite of the primary meaning that the psyche seeks, namely to remain self-enclosed and enjoy the flux of its phantasms’.148 A social individual therefore must posit itself in a way that is both contextually meaningful and temporally oriented within the institutions of society—that is, within instituted society. It is important to point out Castoriadis’s insistence on the fact that, ‘the social-historical institution alone brings identity into being’, which means that the human subject must conform to a large extent with the institution of society;149

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[the social individual is]a speaking entity that has an identity and a social state, conforms more or less to certain rules, pursues certain ends, accepts certain values, and acts according to motivations and ways of doing things which are stable for its behaviour to be, most of the time, foreseeable for other individuals.150

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Here, we arrive at the penultimate consequence of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic theorisation of the subject: ‘only the institution of society, proceeding from the social imaginary, can limit the radical imagination of the psyche and bring into being for it a reality by bringing into being a society’, and ‘only the institution of society can bring the psyche out of its originary monadic madness’, which also means that it is society that produces/creates ‘individuals who are able and who want to continue the fabrication of social individuals’.151 At this point it is worth noting that the contentious issue taken up by Castoriadis (the essentially political question that will be the focus of the following chapters) concerns how societies produce individuals that ‘want’ to continue fabricating individuals in the form established by its institutions, or indeed, how they produce individuals that ‘want’ to take up new forms of social-historical existence. What’s more, how do the subjects of a given social-historical context attain the capacity to effectively establish the institutional conditions that reflect such a ‘will’?

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Before addressing the question of social-historical institution proper, it is necessary to point out a potential limitation to Castoriadis’s theory of socialisation, which has potential implications for his subsequent theorisation of the social imaginary as the basis of historicity. This limitation concerns Castoriadis’s insistence on the primary status of the psyche as being oriented

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towards its own omnipotence. Despite the important contribution he makes to theorising the schematic incorporation the omnipotence of the other through processes of sublimation, it can be argued that he did not draw the consequences of this aspect of socialisation wide enough, particularly concerning the degree of closure that is presumed by the monadic autonomisation of the human psyche. Castoriadis’s position is that the triadic phase for the monadic psyche ‘amounts to a violent break, forced by its “relation” to others, more precisely, by the invasion of others as others, by means of which a “reality” is constituted for the Subject’.152 There has been some criticism raised concerning the characterisation of socialisation as a strictly violent process of monadic rupture. The issue arises when theorising the extent to which the monadic psyche is oriented towards its self-referential closure after separation is imposed by an ‘other’ and the social-historical world is sublimated by the individual; in other words, the issue relates to extent to which the radical imagination of psyche is bound by a degree of closure/openness to otherness. Joel Whitebook points to a tension in Castoriadis’s conception of the radical imagination arising from his attempt to supplant Freud’s theory of unconscious phantasy, giving to the former much more autonomy in its capacity of phantasy formation (and its ensuing historical creation). He suggests that the (radical) imagination is ‘much less rooted in the biological-corporeal, and therefore much more spontaneous, for Castoriadis, than it is for Freud’,153 and as such ‘Castoriadis wants to assert “the relative independence and autonomy of phantasising” vis-à-vis the real. Everything turns, of course, on how relative autonomy is understood’.154 This leads Whitebook to assess the stakes faced by Castoriadis in working out this relative autonomy, finding in his work some sympathies with the Freudian and Marxist adherence to the ‘real’ in realising the radical capacities of imagination, he proposes that Castoriadis’s main challenge centred on how he would be able to ‘maintain the degree of independence for the radical imagination required by his theory of historical creation without losing its moorings in the real altogether’.155 Whitebook suggests that ‘Castoriadis never, however, adequately theorises that element within the psyche that ‘lends itself’ to socialisation’, and that he had perhaps under-theorised the capacity of the psyche to meet the needs of sublimation required of an individual.156 The sticking point for Whitebook comes with Castoriadis’s theorisation of the implications following the violent rupture of the monadic psyche, as it endures the life-long processes of socialisation, leading, therefore, to an overemphasis on the monadic pole of the radical imagination. An example of Castoriadis’s position can be seen in the following passage: there must always exist, an unassailable enmity of the psychic core against the processes of socialisation it must necessarily undergo, as well as an

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outmaneuverable obsession formed by this constellation of primary narcissism, egocentrism, omnipotence of thought, hatred of the other and the tendency toward the destruction of the other (to the extent the other stands opposed to our desires or is simply just other), and the tendency to recede into an imaginary universe.157

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This is not entirely misguided given that the monadic pole of the psyche is a decisive source of individuation, which can be seen as ‘a kind of Aristotelian prime matter which cannot be exhaustively informed by the socialisation process and therefore resists complete absorption into the common world (kosmos koinos) it “assures the individual a singular identity”’.158 The contentious aspect lies in the way that Castoriadis portrays the extent to which ‘the monadic pole exerts a “tendency towards unification” over the rest of psychic life’, which attributes a strong degree of asociability to the psyche.159 This tendency towardss ‘unification’, or, ‘closure’, is a monadic tendency that is given definition by Castoriadis in two distinct psychical instances: unconscious and conscious. At the unconscious level ‘the demand for complete unification continues to “reign in the fullest, rawest, most savage and intractable manner”’, and in this respect, ‘the monadic pole attempts to “short circuit” all difference “in order to carry it back to an impossible monadic ‘state’ and failing to do so, to its substitutes, hallucinatory satisfaction and phantasising”’.160 At the conscious level, or, the socialised aspect of the psyche that is shaped by processes of individuation, ‘the unifying intention of the monadic pole is enlisted to synthesise the manifold of contents emanating from the outside into the relative unity of experience’.161 What Whitebook argues is that this emphasis on the imposition by society onto the psyche, which kickstarts these monadic tendencies within the processes of individuation, only a presents a limited account of the psyche and its relation to society, and he takes issue particularly with the following formulation from Castoriadis: the institution of society, which is indissociable from the institution of the social individual, is the imposition on the psyche of an organisation which is essentially heterogeneous with it – but it too, in its turn, ‘leans on’ the being of the psyche (and here again the term ‘leaning on’ takes on a different content) and must, unavoidably, ‘take it into account’.162

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Here Whitebook identifies the limitation resulting from a strict emphasis on the monadic polarity of the psyche, ultimately proposing that ‘the thesis is incoherent: if the heterogeneity between psyche and society were as complete as Castoriadis suggests in these, his most extreme formulations, the socialisation process would not simply be violent, it would be impossible’.163 Whitebook’s argument therefore follows that a tension between the ‘heterogeneity thesis’ and the way that Castoriadis applies the notion of

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‘leaning-on’ (Anlehnung/anaclisis) to the psyche’s relation to society – by strictly emphasising the monadic pole, he can’t have it both ways. This is because, as Whitebook has shown, while pushing the essential heterogeneity of the psyche and society he also stands firm on the undeniable fact that society itself ‘leans-on’ the being of the psyche, and ‘this would mean that there is already something immanent in the monad upon which socialisation can lean, that is, it is not the absolute other of society’.164 In other words, it is argued that Castoriadis does not sufficiently develop an account of the features of the psyche that counter the tendencies towards unification and closure that are characteristic of the monadic pole. Castoriadis clearly emphasises the degree to which the psyche is bound by a tendency towards closure, and as a result the capacities of the psyche to be open to otherness remain undertheorised. This position is clearly evident when he remarks that If the new-born infant becomes a social individual this is to the extent to which it suffers this break while at the same time managing to survive it – and this, mysteriously, almost always happens. In fact, when one considers this process closely, one is struck much more by the exceedingly small number of its failures than by their existence.165

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It can be argued that Castoriadis’s surprise here is largely due to the limitations he has imposed on the monadic psyche itself, conceiving it as caught within an all-pervasive form of closure, and emphasising the affective response of its rupture as being strictly violent. This presents a limited conception of socialisation whereby the subsequent process of sublimation can only emphasise the splitting of the subject into an ensuing bipolarity. Castoriadis affirms this positions in stating that ‘the common result of these two histories is the emergence of the social individual as the always impossible and always realised coexistence of a private world (kosmos idios) and of a common or public world’.166 Such a conception therefore seemingly portrays an image of psychical experience that infers cohabitation between an interior (monadic) world and the sublimated social-historical world, which is clearly evident in Castoriadis’s discussion of the institution and sublimation of inequality:

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For, an institution of society which institutes inequality corresponds much more ‘naturally’ – though the term here is completely misplaced – to the exigencies of the originary psychical core, of the psychical monad which we carry within us and which always dreams, whatever our age, of being all-powerful and at the centre of the world. Of course, this feeling of all-powerfulness and of centredness in relation to the universe is not realisable; a simulacrum of it can be found, however, in a petty power and in a centeredness relative to a petty universe. And it is obvious that a fundamental correlate of the exigencies of the individual’s

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psychical economy is created, invented by society precisely under the form of social hierarchy and inequality.167

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This is a prime example of the heterogeneity thesis pointed out by Whitebook. It is clear that Castoriadis’s emphasis on the omnipotence of the psyche, which includes its strong tendency towards closure, can only lead him to portray sublimation in terms of a correlation between two psychical instances that are reduced to the originary moment of violent rupture – arguably, bracketing aspects of additional embodied experiences of social-historical conditions. While there is no question that the originary process of socialisation involves a degree violent rupture and warrants focal attention regarding the subject’s constitution of ‘reality’, there must be further acknowledgement of something immanent in the monad upon which socialisation can lean. Such acknowledgement has been made by Karl Smith who – drawing from Marcel Gauchet’s work on the unconscious – proposes that ‘the originary psyche is better understood as always already open to the discourse of the other’.168 Smith similarly questions the intrinsic hostility between the psyche and society that is implied in what he calls the ‘violence hypothesis’. The position taken by Smith on this question follows that, ‘given that the psyche must be formed, must be socialised by its own processes of sublimating the social-historical, we must also allow that the relationship between the individual and society, between self and other, is also embraced, desired, nurtured, etc’.169 It is worth pointing out that this idea can be seen in Castoriadis’s ‘less extreme’ moments, where he shows that once the individual ‘is definitively constructed, the intention, the tending-towards, the “desire” of the psyche themselves undergo an essential alteration in their mode of being. Intention becomes the intention of modification the real and of the real – and this will henceforth support the action of the individual in all its forms’.170 However, taking into account the point that Smith draws from Gauchet, if we are to follow Castoriadis’s model of an ‘undifferentiated state’ of the monadic psyche leading into ‘progressive differentiation of individuality’, we therefore assume a transition from ‘an original closure of the psychic monad to an opening to reality’: Why, then, is it necessary that the impact of the socialising and acculturating processes that open the monad up are considered exclusively from the point of view of psychical closure?171 Castoriadis is shown here to be resolutely Freudian, given that ‘Freud’s most original contribution was to show the indestructible persistence of this primordial closure within the human psyche’.172 Gauchet’s argument is that the polarising model advocated by Castoriadis, which assumes the ‘undifferentiatedness’ of the psyche ‘against its opening’, is misguided. Instead, there is ‘an original openness of the human psyche with regard to reality’ which assumes ‘an original differentiation of individuality’, and it is important to acknowledge

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that these features of the psyche ‘coexist with hallucinatory closure and with the blurring of personal boundaries’ evident in the what is regarded as the monadic polarity.173 The crucial intervention made by Gauchet is to suggest that we need to rethink the meaning of polar states of closure and openness within Castoriadis’s theory of the psyche, in order to show that they are not primordially given, in fact, Gauchet argues, ‘there is no primal undifferentiated condition’: ultimately, he proposes, that ‘we are dealing with a dialectic of two dimensions, and with their interaction in a constructive process whose stages are successive compromises between openness and closure’.174 Therefore, both Gauchet and Smith present us with a new direction to theorise the immanent potentiality of the psyche upon which socialisation can lean. Smith, on his part, pays due to the need for the psyche to create ‘for-itself’ its own world, but acknowledges that this process is possible due to features of the psyche that are ‘also already being-for – and beingwith-others – at least to the extent that the other is always already required to provide the materials and conditions for the formation of the psyche as self’.175 Gauchet, similarly, proposes that the polarity needs to be shifted from a strict distinction between closure and openness, towards an understanding of socialisation as a ‘permanent process of self-production, characterised by constitutive polarities’.176 This shift displaces the emphasis on the closure of the psyche and, instead, considers the contribution of both polarities to the concerns of subject: ‘we are permanently torn between being absent from the world, which grounds the possibility of an objective world for us, while at the same time opening up the prospect of our own death, and being at the centre of the world, without which we would not be capable of lending a subjective meaning to it, without which the world would not exist for us’.177 The polarity, for Gauchet, therefore exists as a tension through which the subject constitutes a form of selfhood that, ‘caught up in a permanent instituting process, exists only through the openness to the question of its being’.178 For the moment, it is important to highlight that an acknowledgement of the openness of the psyche only serves to deepen the Castoriadis’s ‘discovery’ of the radical imagination, after all, as Smith makes clear, ‘the capacity to make sense of one’s experiences – especially those involving interactions with the other and, under normal circumstances, to differentiate representations arising from the encounter with the world from those freely created by the radical imaginary – is a defining characteristic of the socialised psyche’.179 There remains a bias in Castoriadis’s theorisation of the psyche towards its asociality and, yet, there are also signs of ‘a less extreme formulation’ emphasising how the process of socialisation is ‘indissociable from the process of psychogenesis or idiogenesis, and from a sociogenesis or koinogenesis’.180 In this formulation, Castoriadis maintains the polarity of the psyche, but only so far as proposing that society imposes on the psyche ‘a mode of being which

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the psyche can never generate out of itself’, which then leads him to begin developing a counterpoint whereby ‘the psyche alters itself and opens itself to the social-historical world, depending, too, on its own work and its own creativity’.181 It is the capacity of the psyche to be open to the social-historical world that comprises the most fertile aspect of Castoriadis’s theory of the radical imagination, and, yet, at the level of the psyche it remains undertheorised. Castoriadis’s emphasis on the closure of the monadic psyche provides a one-dimensional view of the socialisation process. To Whitebook’s mind, the inherent openness of the radical imagination hints at the existence of a potentiality immanent in the psyche ‘which not only “lends itself to” socialisation but which can “support and induce it” as well’, and as such he wonders why Castoriadis would not develop this aspect of the psyche with reference to the notion of Anlagen (which would, in turn, theoretically support the relative autonomy of the radical imagination).182 In fact, he suggests two reasons why Castoriadis would not develop this aspect of the radical imagination; firstly, he points to an apparent hostility towards American psychoanalysis (in particular, the importance of Anlagen in ego psychology) within the French psychoanalytic tradition; the second reason is perhaps more to the point, which proposes that Castoriadis’s commitment to ‘the monadic starting point’ became something that ‘he apparently feels he has to defend in a radical form in order to defend, in turn, the autonomy and creativity of the radical imagination’.183 I am more sympathetic to this second reason and am willing to speculate somewhat further; looking into the inner logic of Castoriadis’s theoretical framework, I would suggest that Castoriadis portrays this ‘more extreme’ image of the psyche in order to support a dichotomisation between tendencies of closure and openness in the psyche, which can then be contrasted at the level of social-historical institution, namely heteronomous and autonomous modes of institution. This point becomes significant, as will be seen, as he develops his theory of subjectivity in its social-historical dimension. In fact, Heap has also intuited as much, when she argues that, ‘in the attempt to elucidate these final regions of being [the “individual” and “society”], Castoriadis succumbs to his own form of deterministic hierarchy. In principle, by conceiving the realm of the imaginary as purely psychical, rather than accounting for the possibility that the imaginary is given form through one’s own embodied and corporeal experience of the social-historical’.184 This perspective helps to recast Castoriadis’s theory of socialisation in order to include a more developed account of the psychical characteristics of being open to the world. Further still, this account offers a way to rethink the psyche’s predisposition to representational pleasure as directed towards ends that are purely omnipotent, and to consider in finer detail the relative autonomy of the psyche – its radical imagination – as also always grappling with its openness to the social-historical world.

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HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL-HISTORICAL BEING: SELF-REFLECTION AND MODES OF SOCIAL-HISTORICAL INSTITUTION

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At this point, we reach the level of being specific to the social-historical world proper, which is to say that it is necessary to explicate how Castoriadis situates the institution of society within his schema of human subjectivity. This is necessary because not only does social-historical institution establish the processes of socialisation and constitute the psychical point of tension within the subject, but it is also the focal point of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity which will be the focus of the following chapters. So, given that the rest of this book deals exclusively with the social-historical dimension, the final discussion of this chapter will focus on the leaning of society upon the psyche and the extent to which society institutes limits on human subjectivity. Leading on from the previous discussion, the most significant aspect of Castoriadis’s theory of socialisation is that he considers the process of sublimation as having tiered implications. He proposes that sublimation ‘is nothing other than the psychogenetic or idiogenetic aspect of socialisation, or the socialisation of the psyche considered as a psychical process’ and, despite the habitual overemphasis on its monadic condition, it is important to highlight that Castoriadis insists that ‘this process can only take place by means of essential conditions which are rigorously external to it’.185 This externality is the social-historical institution, which socialises the individual, and involves the taking up ‘by the psyche of forms, eide, which are socially instituted and of the significations which they convey, or, in other words, the appropriation of the social by the psyche through the constitution of an interface between the private world and the public or common world’.186 Gourgouris has pointed to the family as a typical institution involved in the process of socialising an individual, or put another way, the institution involves ‘a kind of socially arranged self-alterity . . . which essentially does nothing but provide the socially signified objects for cathexis and indeed enforce this cathexis’.187 Here, Gourgouris points to an essential feature of social-historical institution, in that it brings to the psyche a set of significations (i.e. forms of meaning) replete with requisite ‘representations, affects and intentions’ to be internalised and, then, enacted by the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the human subject is determined by social-historical institution in an unconditional sense, in fact, there is a reversibility at play in Castoriadis’s formulation in which he states that ‘the psyche cannot be reduced or confined to society and society cannot be confine to the psyche’ because, ‘even if the socialised subject is almost nothing but successive layers of socialisation . . . there is nothing within the human unconscious

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that can produce institutions’.188 Here we enter the depths of Castoriadis’s anthropology, which presupposes that ‘there must be a society in existence, so that these inept and insane beings can survive and become human, and there is nothing in the human unconscious capable of producing the basic characteristics of every society, that is, institutions and imaginary significations’.189 The social-historical institution is a level of being that is specific to the collective experience of human societies and, yet, the existence of society, its form and composition, can only come into being in a way that ‘leans-on’ the psyche. Castoriadis outlines society’s leaning-on the psyche, in a passage that also makes inference to the immanent sociability of the psyche:

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The only thing one can say is that there must be some sort of correspondence between the demands of the psyche and the demands of society. This correspondence is reduced to the fact that institutions and social imaginary significations must offer meaning to the socialisable psyche; that is, they must create for the psyche a daily world where distinctive things and distinctive human beings exist, where all these are combined and intertwined, and where, for the socialisable subject itself, life and even death have a meaning.190

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While this correspondence seems quite straight forward, here lies the critical juncture of Castoriadis’s theory of human subjectivity, which must account for the co-constitutive relation between the individual and society. The point of reversibility lies within the capacity for self-reflection, which allows the human subject to bring the radical imagination of its psyche into relation with the social imaginary of the collective. Before closing this chapter, it is therefore necessary to outline Castoriadis’s conception of self-reflection and point to its implications for his theorisation of historicity, namely its operation in autonomous and heteronomous contexts; which will be explored in length in the following chapters. Firstly, it must be noted that self-reflection is considered in a more active sense that what would be considered under the notion of reflexivity, or self-referentiality, the latter of which refer to affirmations relating to the functional status of the subject. Rather, ‘in reflectiveness we have something different: the possibility that the activity proper to the “subject” becomes an “object”’, but not simply an object derived from functional status, but an ‘object’ for-itself, ‘the self being explicitly posited as a non-objective object or an object that is an object simply by its being posited as such and not a by nature’.191 It is due to the possibility of reflecting on one-self as ‘non-objective object’ that one becomes conscious of the potential of its otherness, and therefore a scission occurs that generates internal opposition within consciousness (i.e. thought), and ‘two possible points of view – therefore also the possibility of putting oneself into question’.192 These points of view can be understood, from one

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side, as the self in relation to its cathected objects (i.e. the individual in its sublimated form), and, from the other side, as a representation of ‘oneself not as an object but as representational activity as a non-object object’ which only the radical imagination is able to provide.193 In this sense, Castoriadis argues that ‘it is a matter of seeing a double and seeing oneself double, and of acting as acting activity’.194 What’s significant about this formulation, as Heap suggests, is that ‘the subject is not that which is given but is made and is in the process of making themselves through the activity of reflectiveness and through deliberative action motivated by will’.195 This presents a clear picture of the temporal orientation of the human subject, and points to the fact that its activity is not only functionally oriented towards its own ends, but that it is also motivated by its potential otherness; which can be understood as a relation between a representation of itself as a ‘non-objective object’ and the possibility of being something ‘other’ than itself. Castoriadis’s principle of reversibility suggests that this motivation to establish a relation to something ‘other’ is oriented towards the social-historical institution, which is formed in order to the demands of the psyche. It is through self-reflection that the human subject is able to be oriented towards ‘other’ forms of social-historical existence, and indeed grants the subject with the capacity to create new forms of being for-itself. In fact, it is through these capacities that human subjectivity attains its political character. At the level of the social individual, Castoriadis want to highlight that putting oneself into question is also to place the institutions of society into question; it is the capacity to rupture instituted meaning and to break up the closure of the hitherto prevailing instituted society and open up a space where the activities of thinking and politics lead to putting again and again into question not only the given forms of the social institution and of the social representation of the world but the possible ground for any such forms.196

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And yet, at the collective level, the capacity of the human subject to engage in self-reflection, which in turn gives rise to ‘the possibility of putting oneself into question’, becomes a nascent characteristic of a ‘radical instituting power’ of the collective, which goes under various names in Castoriadis’s lexicon – ‘collective anonymous, radical, instituting, and constituting imaginary’ – and can be understood in objective terms as the social imaginary.197 The fundamental role of the social imaginary, in Castoriadis’s terms, is aligned with the orientation of society ‘to bring the psyche back, by force, to “reality” and to reinsert it in a milieu in which there are other individuals and there are things that are “really” things’.198 Human subjectivity is therefore oriented towards ‘the question of its being’ through a social imaginary, which emerges as an instituting temporality to the extent that it is oriented towards the praxis of

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its self-reflection. In this sense the social imaginary arises as an orientation towards ‘otherness and the perpetual orientation of otherness’, which in plain terms can be understood as an imaginary capacity to reflect ‘collectively’ on the instituted forms of society and to ‘collectively’ propose ‘other’ forms of social-historical existence.199 Castoriadis is referring here to the instituting power of the ‘collective’ that can itself be intuitively perceived: ‘when we take into account the amazing heterogeneity of social forms we observe in history, we discover, yet again, the creativity of this radical instituting social imaginary’.200 The parallels to the radical imagination of the psyche should not be understated, because in many ways the social imaginary is considered to be the social-historical equivalent, it is the radical imaginary of the collective, and as with the subject a polarity is envisaged between the closure and openness of social-historical institution. It is therefore worth pointing out that despite the fact human subjects encounter the world in the form of instituted society, there remains a more ‘radical’ instituting power of formation (vis formandi) within collective subjectivity that allows us to bring ourselves into being ‘as a question and as a project’ of social-historical significance. The main parallel that Castoriadis draws between the psyche and the social-historical level is this tension between closure and openness. Smith points directly to this parallel, whereby ‘society also experiences this tension between openness and closure, a particular society’s position on this continuum being typically internalised by its subject-members’.201 The challenge Castoriadis set for himself in suggesting such a parallel is that he must account for the link between the psychical and social-historical dynamics that manifest this tension. He offers an answer to this within the subject’s capacity for self-reflection, insisting that the conditions for thought upon which self-reflection is based is to a large extent cathected from the established social-historical institution. In other words, and as Gourgouris proposes, the relative openness and closure of the subject’s self-reflective capacity is reflected in the ‘decisive difference between a sublimation in a heteronomous institution of society and a sublimation in an institution that enables selfreflection’, the latter of which being characteristic of an autonomous institution of society.202 Castoriadis explains that this capacity is only possible if the following conditions are met; on the subjective level ‘one must have the effective capacity to put into question by means of reflection hitherto cathected objects (even if they are, at the limit, simply rules for thought) and to come to conclusions based on the results of this reflection. This boils down to saying that one must have the capacity to put instituted objects into question’, which at the ‘objective’ level amounts ‘to the mode and the content of the social institution of these objects’ being posited in such a way that they open to questioning.203 As Castoriadis would have it, ‘genuine reflection is therefore, ipso facto, a challenging of the given institution of society, the putting

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into question of socially instituted representations’.204 The contentious issue in Castoriadis’s formulation is that he provides quite a strict and dichotomous view between two modes of social-historical institution – between heteronomous and autonomous societies – which leads him to insist that the capacity for ‘genuine’ self-reflection is impossible in the former and characteristic of the latter. For instance, he proposes ‘genuine’ reflection that questions the institution of society is impossible in a heteronomous society, because ‘it is psychically inconceivable for one to say, the law is unjust’, when they have been socialised such that ‘others who have already been raised in this way have educated [them] to adopt this attitude’.205 An autonomous mode of institution would, rather, socialise subjects with an attitude towards cathected objects that introduces a self-reflective stance, and therefore opening up the possibility to question instituted forms of law, rules, their truth and so forth. As discussed, this mode of self-reflection begins at the subjective level – with the positioning of the self as a non-objective object of questioning – and, yet, its ‘genuine’ capacity is achieved at the level of questioning the objective status of instituted forms. This formulation is contentious because it repeats the strict polarity between closure and openness hinges on the capacity for self-reflection at the level of the self to find its ‘genuine’ object of questioning at the origin of the institution. The tension that arises at the subjective level is that, despite its self-reflective capacity, the subject is socialised into a society that ‘is established, each time, in closure, closure of its logic, closure of its imaginary significations’.206 This means that socialisation does not only impose on the individual its mode of survival as a social individual, but that it also imposes on the individual a mode of social-historical reproduction. This point is made clear by Castoriadis: society fabricates individuals by imposing both of these forms of closure on them; it therefore fabricates, first and foremost – and exclusively, in the overwhelming majority of societies – closed individuals, individuals who think as they have been taught to think, who evaluate likewise, who give meaning to that which society has taught them has meaning, and for whom these manners of thinking, of evaluating, of imposing norms, and of signifying are by the very construction of the psyche unquestionable’.207

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This closure is seemingly at odds with the very anthropological feature of the radical imagination, and, further still, it denies the capacity for self-reflection that would be oriented towards a ‘genuine’ mode of questioning which would lead to the creation of new social-historical institutions. This poses a problem for Castoriadis, which he concedes that ‘from the moment that there is language, it becomes possible in every human society to pose questions’, his

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solution is to propose that ‘these questions always remain limited in import, and cannot go beyond, or even attain, or intend, that which for society, for the tribe, are what we might metaphorically call the axioms of its social institution, its rules of inference, and its criteria for making deductions’.208 What, then, happens to the radical imagination and its capacity to bring about ‘other’ and ‘new’ forms? Castoriadis argues that the social-historical institution, in its objective form, dominates the capacities of the subject, ‘through this social fabrication of the individual, the institution subjugates the singular imagination of the subject and, as a general rule, lets it manifest itself only in and through dreaming, a phantasying, transgression, illness’.209 It is on this point that Castoriadis presents quite a strict account of social-historical closure, alongside an account of socialisation that implies a rigid form of repression, psychoanalytically speaking. Ultimately, his theory suggests that ‘everything occurs as if the institution had succeeded in cutting off communication between the subject’s radical imagination and its “thought”. Whatever it might imagine (whether it knows it or not), the subject will think and will make/do only what it is socially obligated to think and to make/do’.210 Further still, this leads Castoriadis to proclaim that ‘this rigidity of sublimated cathexes is characteristic of almost the entirety of human societies – and it can be said that it is the best characterisation, from the psychoanalytic point of view, of their heteronomy’.211 In his view, the ‘more society is heteronomous, the less of the individual there is’, and therefore ‘genuine individuation begins when societies broach a movement towards autonomy’.212 Autonomous societies, he claims, produce ‘individuated individuals, not exemplars of a tribe or nation’, they are therefore ‘individuating societies’ in that they produce individuals capable of a self-reflective mode of questioning open to an incorporation of radical imaginary ‘otherness’ into ‘new’ forms of social-historical institution. Whereas ‘heteronomous and traditional societies are not individuating. They are uniformising, collectivising’, and, as such, they produce individuals that exist only within the ‘axiom’ of a social imaginary closure, leading only to a reproduction of the established social-historical institution.213 It is here that we see the tension between openness and closure as differing modes of social-historical institution, which forms the basis of his dichotomous conception of heteronomy and autonomy. The subjective capacity for self-reflection is therefore situated in the conditions of a particular mode of social-historical institution, or, in other words, a specific regime of historicity. There remains some ambiguity in Castoriadis’s theorisation of this dichotomy at the social-historical level. Notably, the distinction is given following the fact of the originary autonomous self-institution of human societies, which pertains to the fact that they are always in the process of reflexively instituting themselves. This will be explored in depth in the following chapters, however, it must be pointed out

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that Castoriadis insists that an ‘almost necessary condition for the existence of the institution such as it has been created, such as we have known it till now, is that it affirms its own inalterability in order to stabilize itself; that, as product of the creative activity of society, it gives itself an origin external to society, attempting thus to avoid alteration’.214 Castoriadis demonstrates this ‘almost necessary’ condition of institutional closure in terms of a mode of heteronomy specific to religiously instituted societies, in which ‘the self-occultation of society, the misrecognition by society of its own being as creation and creativity, allows it to posit its institution as out of reach, escaping its own action’.215 This mode of institution allows a society ‘to instaurate itself as heteronomous society in a cleavage, itself henceforth instituted, between instituting society and instituted society, in the covering over of the fact that the institution of society is self-institution, or self-creation’.216 If this selfoccultation, or ‘covering over’, of the autonomous self-institution of society is a result of the conditions and limits imposed on the subjective capacities of the social imaginary to recognise its own self-instituting activity, then its institutional mode is essentially determined and the ‘instauration’ of autonomy can only be conceived as a rupture of its closure. The strict conception of dichotomous modes of self-institution is presented in terms of the requisite autonomous capacity of self-reflection, which Castoriadis proposes ‘can take place, therefore, only when accompanied by an upheaval in, and a fundamental reshaping of, the entire social-historical field’.217 Castoriadis affirms his reasoning for such a strict conception, given that ‘the appearance of reflection implies the simultaneous and reciprocally conditioned emergence of a society where no sacred (revealed) truths exist any longer and where it has become psychically possible for individuals to put into question both the foundation of the social order (possibly to reaffirm it, should that be one’s response) and their own thought’.218 Gourgouris supports Castoriadis’s position, outlining the subjective implications of autonomy, whereby;

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autonomy signifies an alteration of one’s relation with the ‘discourse of the Other’. It signifies an altered relation (an other relation) with one’s Unconscious, which would ensure that the unlimited powers of the psyche’s radical imagination emerge through the terrain of the Ego, an Ego that knows that its power to alter itself (and its world) springs in fact from this interminable source. This is the work of self-reflection, the process of putting oneself into question, which lays the corner stone for the project of autonomy.219

Gourgouris touches upon the deep significance of Castoriadis’s theoretical work, which identifies social-historical institution as a mode of self-alteration – a regime of historicity – whose stakes are the recognition of its own creative capacities. This project of autonomy, therefore, is to recognise the power of

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self-institution inherent not only within the capacity of the human subject’s radical imagination, but in the instituting power of the social imaginary that puts its social-historical institution into place. The ambiguity that arises in Castoriadis’s theorisation relates to the fact that it is not clear to what extent there lies a conditional ‘necessity’ of institutional closure, and further to this, to what extent the radical capacity for the social imaginary is open to rupture this closure and fundamentally reshape the entire social-historical field. Many questions can be raised regarding this cleavage of instituted and instituting dynamics, leading to further questions concerning the characteristics of closure (in autonomous societies) and openness (in heteronomous societies) in the processes of self-institution. A few questions can be intimated here, if we can reframe Whitebook’s line of questioning to the social-historical level, and ask the following: To what extent can Castoriadis’s theory of historical creation maintain the relative independence and ‘autonomy’ of the social imaginary without losing its moorings in the established institution? And, on the contrary: What degree of closure is the social-historical institution capable of imposing on the social imaginary such that its radical capacity is threatened (or, repressed)? The following chapters will consider how Castoriadis addresses these challenges in the development of his theorisation of historicity. It seems that his theorisation of social-historical institution as a tension between openness and closure is only limited if a dichotomy between heteronomy and autonomy is strictly upheld in psychical terms. Indeed, it will be useful to elucidate some of these ambiguities relating to the closure and openness that are implied at the level of social-historical institution, because it is clear that Castoriadis does not uphold the strict version of this dichotomy in all instances, particularly when he considers its political dimension. Indeed, if he had done so, then it would be difficult for him to ascertain the ‘partially autonomous’ status that he attributed to contemporary modern societies. NOTES

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1. Karl Marx, 1975, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Penguin Books, Middlesex, UK), 423. 2. Marx’s critique of Hegel involves such an attempt to identify praxis as a capacity of human subjectivity, which he believes remains suppressed in the Hegelian system: “Hegel has merely discovered the abstract, logical and speculative expression of the movement of history. This movement of history is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, it is simply the process of his creation, the history of his emergence” (Marx, Early Writings, 382).

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3. This suspicion is very clearly articulated in the position of György Lukács for whom the inherited tradition of Western philosophy is simply interpretive and sets historical reality at a distance, therefore achieving little more than a contemplative stance. See György Lukács, 1971, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), 83–222. 4. Castoriadis, 2007, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, Standford, CA), 114. 5. Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK), 10. 6. Dick Howard, 2002, The Specter of Democracy, (Columbia University Press, New York), 87. Axel Honneth identifies the continuity of a Marxist praxis in Castoriadis’s work in a more critical sense, see Axel Honneth, 1986, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Castoriadis’ Theory of Society’, Thesis Eleven, no. 14, 62–78 7. See Marx, Early Writings, 327–30. This social character is regarded by Marx to be determined by the production of life through estranged labour: ‘his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his being [Wesen], a mere means for his existence’ (Marx, Early Writings, 328). 8. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1989, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, Thesis Eleven, no. 24, iss. 5 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 5. 9. Marx, Early Writings, 422; the omission of the second sentence on social division mirrors Castoriadis’s reference in his discussion of the third thesis, which is addressed not only by recourse to the fact that history proved Marx wrong in his formulation of such a revolutionary class, but that he misses what Castoriadis considers to be the ‘circle of historical creation’ which has produced radically new ‘anthropological types’, and in ways that are not beholden to the economic dimension as Marx would assume. See Castoriadis, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, 112–16. 10. Castoriadis, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, 113. 11. This problem – as it is well known – is in no way confined to Marx’s approach, or even to Hegelian philosophy, but is a feature of philosophy inherent within the Western tradition. See Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 222. 12. Castoriadis, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, 113. 13. Castoriadis, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, 114. 14. See Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Why I am No Longer a Marxist’, in A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York). 15. See Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society; Cornelius Castoriadis, 1988, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, in Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, 1955–1960: From the Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis). 16. The technical dimension of production is central to Marx’s political anthropology: ‘Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of

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his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them’. (Karl Marx, 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [Penguin Books, Middlesex, UK], 493 [fn. 4]). 17. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 29. 18. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 54. 19. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 41. 20. Johann P. Arnason, 2015, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber’, Social Imaginaries, vol. 1, iss. 1 (Zeta, Bucharest, Romania), 136. Arnason is of the impression that Marx experimented with various ways to understand and apply a vision of this self-destructive logic, the most refined of which he sees in the Grundrisse. It is interesting to note Arnason’s suggestion that Castoriadis read the Grundrisse after the formulation of the main lines of his critique of Marx. 21. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, 137. 22. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1978, ‘From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us’, trans. Andrew Arato, Social Research vol. 45, no. 4 (The New School for Social Research, New York), 671–72. 23. Marx critiques the major thinkers of classic economics (i.e. Ricardo, Smith) on the basis of their naïve equivalencies of labour value. As a progressive correction to classical economic theory Marx recognised that the abstract nature of value-forms are based on social exchange values. 24. Castoriadis, ‘From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us’, 683. 25. Castoriadis, ‘From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us’, 674. 26. Castoriadis, ‘From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us’, 684. 27. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, 137. 28. Castoriadis ‘From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us’, 684. 29. Howard, The Specter of Democracy, 88. 30. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, 137. 31. Konstantinos Despotopoulos was related to a circle of Greek Neo-Kantians that revolved around Constantine Tsatsos and involved liberal sociologist Panayiotis Kanellopoulos and Platonist philosopher Ioannis Theodorakopoulos. This group formed an influential publication entitled Archeion Philosophias kai Theorias ton Epistimon (Archive of Philosophy and Theory of Sciences). See Karalis, Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, 10–11. 32. Karalis, Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, xv. 33. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, 137. 34. These arguments form crucial points in essays that reflect his transitional period, they are ‘Recommencing the Revolution’ (1964, published by Socialisme ou Barbarie) and ‘Self-Management and Hierarchy’ (1974, written in collaboration with Daniel Mothé); both essays appear in, Cornelius Castoriadis, 1993, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 1961–1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis). 35. Castoriadis, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, 273 and 312 (fn. 54). 36. Honneth, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology’, 62. 37. Honneth, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology’, 62.

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38. Arnason, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, 143. 39. See Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 1988, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. Raymond Meyer (Cambridge University Press, New York), 3. 40. See Warren Breckman, 2013, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (Columbia University Press, New York). 41.Cornelius Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Social-Historical: Mode of Being, Problems of Knowledge’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 34. See als: Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 170; Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.)(Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)., 5–6. 42. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 170–76. 43. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 195. 44. Castoriadis, ‘The Social-Historical’, 34. 45. Angelos Mouzakitis, 2014, ‘Social-Historical’, in Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, Suzi Adams (ed.) (Bloomsbury, London), 94. 46. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 197. 47. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 195. 48. Castoriadis, ‘The Social-Historical’, 34. 49. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, World in Fragments, 6. 50. Mouzakitis, ‘Social-Historical’, Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, 94. 51. Johann P. Arnason, ‘Institution’, in Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, 102. 52. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary’, 7. 53. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary’, 7. 54. Castoriadis’s thesis regarding the discovery (and subsequent suppression) of the imagination, in its fundamental role for human being and as the ontological condition of the social world, involves a lineage of thinkers: namely, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Castoriadis claims to liberate the social and historical implications of the human imagination and in doing so also formulates a critique of the ‘inherited tradition’ of Western thought as one that repeatedly suppresses the radically creative character of the imagination (in an ontological sense) in favour of thinking being as ‘being-determined’ and relegating the imagination as a secondary feature of this deterministic condition. A more detailed discussion of Castoriadis’s conceptualisation of the imagination will be seen further in this chapter. 55. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1994, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds.) (Routledge, London), 136. It is significant to note that John Rundell identifies Fichte as an influence on Castoriadis’s conception of the imagination as a primary aspect of anthropological self-constitution. See John Rundell, 2013, ‘Re-reading Fichte’s Science of Knowledge after Castoriadis: The anthropological imagination and the radical imaginary’, Thesis Eleven, iss. 119 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA). 56. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, Thesis Eleven, no. 36, iss. 1 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 1.

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57. Castoriadis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, 1. 58. Ágnes Heller, 1989, ‘With Castoriadis to Aristotle; From Aristotle to Kant; From Kant to Us’, in Giovanni Busino (ed.), ‘Pour une philosophie militante de la démocratie: Autonomie at autotransformation de la société’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, vol. 27, no. 86 (Librairie Droz, Geneva), 161. Heller identifies a number of twentieth-century philosophers that she considers to be neo-Aristotelian, these include: Hannah Arendt, Alisdair MacIntyre and Michel Foucault. Castoriadis does question this label, arguing that he doesn’t know why ‘Heller labels “neo-Artistotelean” an author who began his reflection with a rejection of the central category of Aristotelean ontology. What I do know is that it is not from reading Aristotle or Kant that I got the idea of thinking the imaginary institution of society; rather, my thinking of the latter led me to reread with another regard Aristotle or Kant’ (Castoriadis, 1997, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis [ed.] [Blackwell Press, Oxford, UK], 374). 59. Heller, ‘With Castoriadis to Aristotle’, 164. 60. Karalis, Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, 13. 61. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 132. 62. Arnason, ‘Institution’, 102. 63. Honneth, 1986, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology’, 67. 64. Castoriadis ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, The Castoriadis Reader, 339–40. 65. Arnason, ‘Institution’, 102. 66. Castoriadis, ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, 342. 67. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 149. 68. Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 3–4. 69. On the philosophical level there are three factors that can be seen to contribute a considerable influence on the work of post-Marxists: an engagement with the work of Freud, Heidegger, Husserl and Nietzsche, the import of ancient Greek thought, and a revision of the Kantian legacy. However, these influences were also utilised for the purpose of theorising the human subject in relation to a variety of positivist, materialist or empirical discourses; such as linguistics, biology, semiotics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, and so on. 70. Previous to becoming a practicing psychoanalyst in 1973, Castoriadis was briefly associated with Jacques Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris, before he aligned himself with a splinter of that organisation that formed the Quatrième groupe (O.P.L.F. –Organisation psychanalytique de la langue française). The Quatrième groupe was formed by Piera Aulagnier, François Perrier, and Jean-Paul Valab rega; all had been original board members of École Freudienne de Paris yet had disputed Lacan’s practical methodology and insisted on a ‘third way’ between the Lacanian school and the original psychoanalytic organisation, the International Psychoanalytical Association. 71. While the origin of the term ‘biopolitics’ emerged as an organicist and racial concept of social thought, the term is now commonly debated according to the definition given to it by Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures. See: Michel Foucault, 2008, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France

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1978–1979, Arnold I. Davidson (ed.), trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK). 72. The following passage from Marx highlights this resonance: ‘productive life is species-life. It is life-producing life. The whole character of a species, its species character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man. Life appears only as a means of life’ (Marx, Early Writings, 328) 73. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, Thesis Eleven, no. 49 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 103. 74. Honneth, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology’, 66. 75. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 10. 76. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 11. 77. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 5. 78. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 11. 79. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 10. See also, Cornelius Castoriadis, 1990, ‘Pour-soi et subjectivité’, Daniel Bougnoux, Jean-Louis Le Moigne and Serge Proulx (eds.), Arguments pour une méthode (Autour d’Edgar Morin) (Seuil, Paris), 118–27. 80. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments, 148 (emphasis added). 81. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 140. See also Castoriadis, 1997 ‘Done and to be Done’, The Castoriadis Reader, 366. 82. Castoriadis, ‘State of the Subject Today’, 13. 83. Jodie Lee Heap, 2021, The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and Embodiment in the Writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD), 164. 84. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 327. 85. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 145. 86. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 173. 87. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 145. 88. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 177. 89. Castoriadis, 1984, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), 125. 90. Castoriadis, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, 126. 91. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 229–37. 92. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, World in Fragments, 256. ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 268. 93. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 186. Castoriadis uses the Freudian notion of Anlehnung as a way to by-pass the Kantian problematic. He situated the psychoanalytic schema at the juncture of the natural and human world in order to situate the imagination as the source of anthropogenesis. It is not within the bounds of this book to pursue the issue any further, other than to comment that contemporary quantum physics is testing the limits of our understanding of the for-itself as the constitution of reality. 94. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 140.

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95. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 233. 96. See: Kalevi Kull, 2009, ‘Vegetative, Animal, and Cultural Semiosis: The Semiotic Threshold Zones’, Cognitive Semiotics, iss. 4 (de Gruyter, Berlin). This conception of the emergence of life reflects the programmatic definition of semiosis as the condition of life that is central to the field of biosemiotics, while this book does not delve into this issue, it is worth pointing out that the potential insights that Castoriadis’s work can contribute to this field. After all, Castoriadis held a sustained interest in these questions evident with his involvement in the Centre Internationale d’Etudes Bio-Anthropologiques et d’Anthropologie Fondamentale (CIEBAF) and his participation in a number of les Colloques Cerisy conferences addressing such issues (notably the 1981 conference on ‘L’auto-organisation, de la physique au politique’). 97. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 146. 98. Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 1; Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary’, 6. It is significant to note that this anthropological image of the ‘mad, degenerate, animal’ is a common feature of postwar German philosophical anthropology, and interestingly this literature was also concerned with developing a concept of ‘institution’; see Arnold Gehlen, 1988, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (Columba University Press, New York). 99. Castoriadis ruptures the traditional philosophical approaches that emphasise natural regions of being and instead privileges the sociocultural (i.e. social-historical) region as the rudimentary source of self-definition for anthropic being. 100. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 18. 101. Castoriadis, The State of the Subject Today’, 19. 102. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, World in Fragments, 178. 103. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 138. 104. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 20. 105. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 20–21. 106. Castoriadis, 1984, ‘Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul’, Crossroads in the Labyrinth (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), 25. 107. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 177; See Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 286–87. 108. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 179. 109. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 179. 110. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 194. 111. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, in Stathis Gourgouris (ed.), Freud and Fundamentalism: The Psychical Politics of Knowledge (Fordham University Press, New York), 154. 112. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 263 113. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 300. 114. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301. 115. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301. 116. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301. 117. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301–2. 118. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 302.

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119. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 302. 120. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 121. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 122. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 199. 123. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 156. 124. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 199. 125. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 126. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 127. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 128. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 303. 129. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 304. 130. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 304. 131. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 304. 132. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 305. 133. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 304. 134. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309. 135. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309. 136. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309. 137. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 199–200. 138. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 198. 139. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 198, 200–201. 140. Klooger, 2009, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy, 107. 141. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 197. 142. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 300. 143. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary’, 7. 144. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 36. 145. See Castoriadis, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, 183. 146. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309. 147. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 264. 148. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 157. 149. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 204. 150. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments, 155. 151. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309. 152. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301. 153. Joel Whitebook, 1997, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche: Habermas and Castoriadis on the Unconscious’, (eds.) Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), 176. 154. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 176. 155. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 176. 156. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 181.

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157. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 163. 158. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 178–79. 159. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 177–78. Indeed, the psychic subject constitutes reality in relation to a broad spectrum of self-referential meaning that draws from the unconscious, ranging from what can be perceived as the depths of madness to highly valued forms of reason. 160. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 177–78. 161. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 177–78. 162. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 298. 163. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 180. 164. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 180. 165. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 301. 166. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 300. 167. Castoriadis, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’ Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy; 134–35. 168. Karl E. Smith, 2005, ‘Reimagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad’, Thesis Eleven, no. 83 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 7. Interestingly, Gauchet regards Castoriadis’s work as ‘the best systemization of orthodox psychoanalytical theory’ and perhaps too attached to the exigencies of the Freudian model (Marcel Gauchet, 2002, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, Thesis Eleven, no. 71, November: 4–23 [Sage, Thousand Oaks], 10). 169. Smith, ‘Reimagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad’, 11–12. 170. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 314. 171. Marcel Gauchet, 2002, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, Thesis Eleven, no. 71, November: 4–23 (Sage, London), 10. 172. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 10. 173. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 10. 174. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 10. 175. Smith, ‘Reimagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad’, 9. 176. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 7. 177. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 8. 178. Gauchet, ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, 7. 179. Smith, ‘Reimagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad’, 9. 180. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 300. 181. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 300. 182. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 181–82. 183. Whitebook, ‘Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche’, 181–82. 184. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 201. 185. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 311–12. 186. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 311–12. 187. Stathis Gourgouris, 1997, ‘Philosophy and Sublimation’, Thesis Eleven, no. 49, May: 31–43 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 35. 188. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 156.

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189. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society, 156. 190. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 156. 191. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments, 158. 192. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 158. 193. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 268. 194. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 268. 195. Heap, The Creative Imagination, 201. 196. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary’, 17. 197. Castoriadis, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, 173. 198. Castoriadis, 1 ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, 181. 199. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 369. The conception of social imaginary was never elaborated further than this definition to create something ‘other’ than what exists. However, in the context of the field of power that grounds instituted society and this instituting capacity, the political dimension of social imaginaries, can be seen to have a strong resonance with forms of both dominance and resistance within societies; this point will be explored in the fourth chapter, in order to define depoliticisation in the context of dominant forms of instituted power. 200. Castoriadis, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Understanding the Genesis of Society’, 157 201. Smith, ‘Reimagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad’, 13 (fn. 6). 202. Gourgouris, ‘Philosophy and Sublimation’, 36. 203. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments, 165. 204. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 267. 205. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments, 165. 206. Castoriadis, Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 264. 207. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 264. 208. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 265–66. 209. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 264. 210. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 264. 211. Castoriadis, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, 165. 212. Castoriadis, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, 190. 213. Castoriadis, ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, 191. 214. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, World in Fragments, 328. 215. Castoriadis, 1997, ’Institution of Society and Religion’, World in Fragments, 327–328. 216. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, World in Fragments, 327–328. 217. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 268. 218. Castoriadis, ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, 268. 219. Gourgouris, ‘Philosophy and Sublimation’, 39.

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Historicity and Ontological Form

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Society, according to Castoriadis, is a domain of ontological world-creation, ‘which is not predetermined and which superimposes on the chaos a cosmos, a world that is organized and ordered somehow or other’.1 The question of how the institution of society organises and orders the social-historical world is ‘somehow or other’ will be the focus of this chapter. It is the specific explanation that Castoriadis gives of social-historical institution that leads to a unique perspective on historicity. The image of world-creation evoked by Castoriadis’s theory of social-historical institution is inspired from ancient Greek thinking, in particular the pre-Socratic vision that ‘it is out of the total void that the world emerges’.2 What Castoriadis grasps in this vision is, both, an understanding of anthropogenesis that renders the institution of a society as necessary, and an admonition that societies are only ever a thin veil covering over (recouvrant) ‘the Chaos, the Abyss, the Groundlessness’ of being.3 Because social-historical institution is groundless – in that it is not reducible to any predetermined level of being – it must therefore be considered as the ‘emergence of a new ontological form’.4 Castoriadis describes this form of society as the self-creation of a community that is born of its own self-definition or, to put it in more theoretical terms: society is a mode of onto-genesis that takes its form as eidos. The idea of society as eidos is offered by Castoriadis as a way to explain that social-historical institution necessarily involves the formation of a world through which a community defines itself and takes shape as a society: For it is one in the same thing to say that society institutes the world in each case as its world or its world as the world, and to say that it institutes a world of 73

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significations, that it institutes itself in instituting the world of significations that is its own, in correlation to which, alone, a world can exist for it.5

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Eidos is therefore a concept used by Castoriadis to refer to the institution of a social-historical world, through which a community organises around practices, norms and laws that structure the ‘form’ of society, ‘in the full sense of the term (union of the organisation and the organised)’.6 This social-historical eidos is a specifically anthropic form of being that is shaped in its own self-image and created under the principle of its own form. Castoriadis believes that the self-creation of a society reflects heterogenous cultural articulations of the world, which are based on the human capacity to place the constitutive principles of their own self-institution (which is to say the ‘organisation’ of society) into question. Self-institution therefore operates on the basis that a society presupposes its own origin, as the ‘the advent of a ‘form’ (eidos) that explicitly alters itself qua form’.7 This chapter will examine how Castoriadis comes to theorise the self-institution of social-historical form through one of his most important theoretical developments: his novel conception of the social imaginary. As discussed in the previous chapter, Castoriadis attempted to analyse the ontological construction of a society in order to move beyond the teleological aspects of Marx’s understanding of historicity. A central concern for Castoriadis in developing a fresh understanding of historicity was to present the temporal dimension of social-historical institutions in a way that emphasises how the institution of a society involves an ongoing articulation of the social-historical world that is being instituted. This concern presents a phenomenological approach to the question of ontology and forms the basis of a theoretical project that attempted to outline human existence as a creative mode of self-institution. Johann Arnason provides one of the most detailed interpretations of the phenomenological perspective developed by Castoriadis, showing how ‘social imaginary significations serve to articulate an ontological framework’, and how the cultural articulation of significations form a symbolic milieu that express specific institutional significance.8 The relationship between institutional form and heterogenous cultural articulations of the world is proposed by Castoriadis to produce a tension that initiates ‘the essential historicity of significations’.9 The social imaginary plays a significant institutional role in this theorisation of historicity, particularly in the sense that it is seen to ‘ground’ institutions within a ‘totalising’ context encompassing the heterogenous articulation of the significations that constitute them. This ontological view of self-institution situates the particular creations of social-historical meaning within the institution of a broader totalising context, or in Castoriadis’s terms: this means that ‘society exists in positing the requirement of signification as universal and as total, and in positing

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its world of significations as what can satisfy this requirement’.10 Here again, Arnason pinpoints the relevance of Castoriadis’s work to broader intellectual traditions, in remarking that ‘Castoriadis takes up again the question of the relationship between institutions and collective representations – clearly posed but only partly answered by Durkheim and Mauss – and links it to a broader perspective on ‘the meaning of meaning”’.11 In attempting to provide a fresh understanding of historicity Castoriadis developed a complex ontological schema that emphasises the radical capacity of communities to institute societies that are based on creative interpretations of the world. This chapter will interrogate how Castoriadis develops this schema, which, to put it in his lexicon, links the cultural formation of significations with a broader totalising context of the social imaginary. This will, in turn, show how the institution of society is framed in relation to the social-historical world. It will be pointed out in this chapter that Castoriadis emphasises the radically creative aspects of historicity in relation to ontology, over a thoroughly cultural interpretation of this creativity; while the latter perspective has been developed by Arnason in his hermeneutical critique of Castoriadis’s work. I will argue in this chapter that this leads Castoriadis to dichotomise modes of historicity between those that either tend towards ‘closure’ or ‘openness’. This dichotomous distinction will be shown to be implausible precisely because these two modes of historicity are considered by Castoriadis to be opposed on ontological rather than cultural grounds. It is important to be clear that Castoriadis’s work is situated within in a specific lineage of phenomenological thought that moves from Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This lineage is most evident when one considers how Merleau-Ponty – referring to Husserl – talked of the phenomenological task that aims for an ‘ontological rehabilitation of the sensible’.12 This is precisely the impetus for Castoriadis to develop his conception of the ontological constitution of the social-historical world. The rehabilitation of sensibility in the context of the social-historical is significant because it led him to develop his conception of the social imaginary as an active in the formation of the world and its ontological features. The social imaginary will be shown to provide a homogenous and ‘totalising context’ through which the institution of a society is represented in accordance with the broader significance of the community’s encounter with the world; the final section of this chapter will outline how, in a variety of ways, Merleau-Ponty’s work contributed significantly to Castoriadis’s privileging of ontological considerations of the social-historical world. It will be argued that Castoriadis develops an overly ontological conception of historicity, which (despite his intentions) over-emphasises institutional modes of closure over that of openness. This will be shown to have limited some core insights into the political nature of historicity provided by his theoretical project. Ultimately, this

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chapter will argue that his dichotomous theorisation of historicity stands in contradiction with his more radical conception of historicity as a mode of creative self-alteration. I will propose that it is instructive to relativise the dichotomy constructed by Castoriadis and to instead develop the notion of the social imaginary in a way that provides an explanation for both the constituent ground of institutions and the capacity for a community to engage in a creative mode of self-alteration. THE SELF-ORIGIN OF THE SOCIAL-HISTORICAL WORLD

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The theme of the social-historical world raises the idea that societies contain a ‘totalising’ dimension whose central dynamic, as portrayed by Castoriadis, is ‘the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and history in the making’.13 It is the dynamic of this ‘history in the making’, in tension with existing institutional forms, which Castoriadis most clearly sets out to describe throughout his work, and in doing so he developed what constitutes his most original contribution to social theory: the notion of the social imaginary.14 The social imaginary consists of an overarching symbolic horizon that reflects the cultural dimension through which the social-historical world is articulated. It is through this horizon that the social imaginary opens up the capacity for a society to reflect on how and why it is instituted in the way that it is. This social imaginary horizon can be viewed as consisting of a complex web of significations, or, put another way, it is a field of instituted symbolic meaning. Because the social imaginary consists of the instituted meanings and the capacity to articulate these meanings ‘otherwise’, it can also be considered the domain of history, particularly in the sense that it is ‘in the making’; ‘since history exists only because humans communicate and cooperate in a symbolic milieu’.15 It should be noted that the social imaginary is not simply limited to an explanation of the ontological conditions of a society, rather, this particular aspect is accounted for by Castoriadis in his consideration of the formation of social-historical institutions as an eidos within the social imaginary. An eidos is regarded as the ‘universal’ and ‘unifying’ feature of social-historical institution: ‘it is the universal that governs the particulars which are relatively indifferent to it; the form is determined/determining, it is in itself something universal’.16 It reflects the ‘totalising’ context of institutions that have their basis in collectively instituted symbolic form. This is to say that the eidos of a society is not produced by intersubjective relations, but rather it is a mode of ontogenesis that emerges from a collectively instituted representation of the world; in other words, it is the self-representation of society that is reflected

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in its own institutions.17 This section will outline Castoriadis’s theorisation of social-historical form, in order to show how he develops a perspective on the ‘totalising’ dimension of societies that will, in turn, become the basis for his interpretation of a society’s mode of historicity. Castoriadis views the eidos of a society to be the ‘creation of a world correlative to social imaginary significations and dependent upon these significations’.18 This eidos is instituted as an overarching and totalising symbolic context through which the social-historical world is articulated and represented. Even though Castoriadis affirms that, through the lens of eidos, ‘everything that is presented to us in the social-historical world is inextricably tied to the symbolic’, he is careful to point out that our experience of the world is not reducible to it.19 While instituted forms of symbolism are, of course, grounded in the imaginary capacity to bring symbolic meaning into existence, he insists that our experience of the world is not limited to the symbolic, but rather the capacity to institute an eidos is made possible through the creative and, ultimately, inexhaustible articulation of ‘open-ended’ significations from which forms of symbolism emerge. Castoriadis explains the ‘open-ended’ status of significations based on the fact that their articulation is inexhaustible and that they ‘denote nothing and connote just about everything’ that is expressible in the social-historical world.20 Take, for example, the symbolic status of ‘natural law’ that can only be expressed and therefore instituted through the articulation ‘second-order’ significations, all of which refer to the generalised form that represents ‘natural law’ (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, loop quantum gravity, etc.). What is significant about Castoriadis’s theorisation of instituted form is that he makes a clear distinction between the heterogenous cultural articulations that constitute the symbolic dimension of a society and the ‘totalising’ context of a particular eidos that is instituted through this symbolism. This is the reason why, despite the fact that there are ontological differences between articulations of a social-historical world, significations are easily conflated with their instituted symbols. This also speaks to the complexity and transmutability of the social-historical world, in the sense that it is instituted with reference to many particular forms meaning (which are subject to open-ended articulation). Castoriadis understands that the social-historical world, in the form of its eidos, is constituted through the collective ‘choice’ of symbolism that is instituted as an expression of the various significations created within societies. This ‘choice’ demonstrates the ontological groundlessness of an eidos, because ‘we are not dealing with symbolism in general, but always with a specific symbolism, and its specific symbolism, and its specificity is due to its grounding in the imaginary’.21 It is the imaginary – or, more specifically, the social imaginary – element of the institution that exercises over an eidos the capacity to alter its ‘universal’ choice of symbolism. This is a capacity

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that is ultimately a collective ‘choice’ to institute a particular social-historical form that represents a broader articulation of the world. The eidos of a society is an instituted form of symbolism that organises the culturally heterogenous articulation of the world and institutes the laws of society in relation to its ‘totalising’ context. This context, ultimately, depends on establishing forms of instituting power that represent ‘institutional choice’; in this regard, the political dimension of societies are central to Castoriadis’s ontological theory. The ontological grounding of an eidos therefore depends on instituting ‘social imaginary’ significations in symbolic form. It is Castoriadis’s contention that the institution of an eidos determines a ‘set of possibilities and impossibilities’ for social-historical existence, despite the fact that he outlines the incessant character of its delimitation.22 A social-historical eidos provides the ‘totalising’ context through which society is instituted, yet, for Castoriadis, the ‘possibilities and impossibilities’ that are determined by an instituted eidos do not exhaust the imaginary potential for these determinations to be altered and for new determinations to arise. The social imaginary ‘choice’ of its eidos is not reducible to what is already determined through its significations (such is the role of symbolism in structuralist anthropology) and it is not deducible or producible through the determining logic of such significations (such as it with the ‘cunning of reason’ in Hegelian philosophies of history). Rather, the universality of an eidos is said to be ‘defined starting from the moment the form is posited’.23 This formulation suggests the exact kind of self-finality that Castoriadis seems to be arguing against, most specifically with respect to functionalist/ structuralist accounts of historicity. However, it is important to highlight that in Castoriadis’s account the ‘universality’ of an eidos is only ever ephemerally instituted. The imaginary element of institution opens up a capacity for ‘the positing of new determinations, and of other determinations, ones not reducible to what was already there, not deducible and not producible starting from what was already there’.24 What is inferred by this formulation is that an eidos is the instituted form of a social imaginary mode of ontogenesis. The ceaseless institutional creativity of the social imaginary leads to the continual emergence of ‘new determinations’, of other ‘types’ of significations, or new ‘eide’, which are not considered by Castoriadis to be an elaboration of a preexisting eidos. Implied within this idea is that the institution of an eidos determines a society’s mode of historicity: History is ontological genesis not as the production of different tokens of the essence of society but as the creation, in and through each society, of another type (form-figure-aspect-sense: eidos) of being-society which is in the same stroke the creation of new types of social-historical entities (objects,

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individuals, ideas, institutions, etc.) on all levels and on levels which are themselves posited-created by a given society.25

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Castoriadis stresses the social imaginary capacity to institute new eidos of society, while the ever-present eidos consistently lends society its totalising cohesion. The core idea presented by Castoriadis’s ontological theory is that, in and through social-historical form, a community is ceaselessly engaged in the ex-nihilo creation of the society itself. It must be stressed that the idea of creation ex-nihilo is not taken up by Castoriadis in order to signify an indeterminacy that would be inherent to the institution of a social-historical eidos. In fact, the opposite is true, as Castoriadis views this concept as a complement to an ontologically deterministic vision of eidos, regarding the former as a signal of the creative capacity of the social imaginary.26 Here lies a crucial point of interpretation of Castoriadis’s work because, in my view, the way that he develops his conception of creation ex-nihilo at the basis of his theory of historicity leads him to overstate the role of ontological determination (understood as an eidos that determines a ‘set of possibilities and impossibilities’). This argument is central to the critique of Castoriadis’s work that I will pursue in the following chapters: that instituted form is not bound by ontological principles, so much as it is established through institutional power. Creation ex-nihilo, according to Castoriadis, means that creation is the positing of ‘new determinations’, which are posited as ‘arbitrary’, in the sense that they account for ‘the emergence of new forms, eidoi, therefore ipso facto the emergence of new laws – the laws appertaining to these modes of being’.27 Given that the creation of a social-historical world necessarily involves the institution of a society, Castoriadis also accounts for the plurality of social-historical worlds that are each necessarily based on their own particular eidos. Castoriadis proposes that the social-historical specificity of each society must exist in what he calls ‘its cognitive closure – or, even better, its closure of meaning – its own world’.28 Angelos Mouzakitis has made clear that the claim of creation as ex-nihilo involves a rejection of what Castoriadis viewed as the traditional philosophical and theological idea that social-historical creation is simply a repetition or reproduction of what is ontologically given.29 This rejection is made clear by Castoriadis in his qualification that ‘creation ex nihilo’ is neither ‘in-nihilo or cum nihilo’, reinforcing both his critique of structural anthropology and Hegelian versions of historicity (particularly that of Marx).30 In both instances, his critique revolves around the idea that if creation is subordinated to what is given in being, then any alterity arising from human creation can only be understood as an incarnation of difference that is either a subordination to, or an extension of, what is already instituted. Social-historical creation would, then, merely be an iteration that follows

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teleologically from what is originally given within institution – which is to say that the social-historical world would be totally confined within an ontological closure. It should be pointed out that Castoriadis not only levels his critique of ontological determinism against mainstream traditions of Western philosophical thought, but he also historicises this form of determinism as an institutional mode of ontological closure by translating it into the instituting logic of religious and traditionalist societies themselves.31 In fact, ontological closure is the basis of what Castoriadis regards to be a strict dichotomy between two distinct modes of historicity: the heteronomy of religious and traditionalist societies exemplified by total ontological closure and the autonomy of democratic societies defined by a mode of institution that is ontologically open to alteration through the institution of ‘new determinations’. The ontological closure of the social-historical world plays a central role in Castoriadis’s theory of historicity and is a key theme in his political interrogation of social-historical institution. What he views as being ontologically closed is the eidos of the world as such, which is to say that ‘the signification imposed on the world (and on society, which institutes itself by positing itself as part of the world it institutes) is in its essence “arbitrary”’.32 This arbitrary characteristic of institutions corresponds to the ‘set of possibilities and impossibilities’ that are said to be determined by a specific eidetic formation. Behind the idea that ontological closure is a definitive characteristic of social-historical world creation lies the basis of Castoriadis’s fundamental anthropological claim that society is the product of its own origin. The closure of social-historical ontology is seen by Castoriadis as an originary circle of self-creation that ‘presupposes itself’ as its own origin.33 This circularity means that the ceaseless instituting activity of a society necessarily involves an ongoing self-definition of its social-historical world horizon, and vice versa. Fabio Ciaramelli provides a succinct interpretation of the ontological (and temporal) circularity that is implied by Castoriadis’s vision of human creation: ‘the origin from which it draws its essence is originary – that is to say, not derived, in turn, from another origin – only on the condition of being origin of self, self-creation’.34 Creation ex-nihilo is therefore understood to be a principle of self-determination, a self-closure of human existence within the telos of its own creation. This self-originating telos accounts for the mode of historicity in and through which a society institutes itself as its own world, and because historicity is self-originating, societies are therefore only seen to determine themselves reflexively – an idea that will be returned to in the third section of this chapter. With the notion of creation ex-nihilo, Castoriadis theoretically redefines the arbitrary role of ontological determinism within social-historical institution, turning the notion of creation from a teleological principle into a creative capacity to determine society anew. Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity, however, must account for the creative capacities

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of a society that are shaped by established forms of instituted symbolism, rather than proposing that creation is merely the capacity to determine new instituted forms and, therefore, a new eidos of society. SELF-ALTERING HISTORICITY: SOCIAL-HISTORICAL CLOSURE AND METACONTEXTUAL ONTOLOGY

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So far in this chapter, I have discussed Castoriadis’s claim that historicity is driven by a self-originating mode of (ex-nihilo) creation. This discussion has shown that the social-historical world (eidos) ‘does not have its genuine, essential origin in something that would be external to it, it has no end other than its own existence as society positing these ends’.35 This mode of self-origination, that is consistently positing its own ends – or, ‘presupposing’ its own telos – forms the basis of Castoriadis’s understanding of historicity. The crucial point that has been put forward regarding historicity is that societies are oriented towards the determination of their own ends and that, according to Castoriadis, this implies that human creation tends towards ontological closure. This idea that a society ‘tends towards’ enclosing itself within its own self-creation is justified by Castoriadis on the following grounds: ‘every question of the why and wherefore of signification is already situated in a space created by signification and can be formulated only if this space is presupposed as unquestionable’.36 What this means is that the selforiginary creation of a specific eidos necessarily posits the limit of the ‘possibilities and impossibilities’ of its social-historical existence. This position is supported by Castoriadis’s theorisation of the subject and the process of socialisation whereby the mode of social-historical institution imposes upon an individual its ‘axiom’ for thought. It would be a mistake to over-ontologise the axioms of closure, because this would confine any articulation of ‘human existence’ within the strictures of the established social-historical institution of the world. This is precisely where Castoriadis introduces a tension with the radical imagination and the radical instituting capacity of the social imaginary, which is capable of incorporating what is ‘other’, or ‘outside’, the established axioms of the social-historical institution. In this respect, there is a tension between the self-institution of society and the capacity to alter its self-instituted form. This section will outline the ontological schema of selfinstitution that Castoriadis establishes in order to present his understanding of historicity as a mode of self-alteration. However, in doing so, I will also show that a subtle dichotomy emerges in the development of Castoriadis’s work. This is evident as a schematic division between two principles that imply opposing institutional tendencies: one directed towards closure, the other towards openness. It will be shown that Castoriadis formulates these

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principles in order to theorise two distinct and dichotomous modes of historicity: heteronomy and autonomy. Ultimately, the implications of this dichotomous schema will be shown to have limited his exploration of the political dimension of social-historical institution of the world. In Castoriadis’s view, a mode of historicity ‘tends towards ontological closure’ and can therefore be understood as the deployment of an institutional logic that corresponds to the collective articulation of a society. This collective articulation represents the ‘totalising’ context that incorporates the various cultural significations that make-up a particular social-historical context and institutes a specific self-definition of society. In other words, the institution of a society involves the deployment of a specific way to make sense of the world that corresponds with established forms of symbolic significance. To say, as Castoriadis does, that the institution of a society (as eidos) ‘does not have its origin in something external to it’, means that the source of significance from which a society defines itself emerges from its own social-historical creations: its significations. Because the institution of eidos forms a specific symbolic network that involves a complex organisation of plural significations, Castoriadis also proposes the rather paradoxical notion that ‘institutions cannot be reduced to the symbolic but they can exist only in the symbolic’, which is to say that – despite the capacity to determine new forms of significance – an institution is impossible outside of its second-order symbolism.37 In effect, Castoriadis argues that the institutional forms of society are framed within the ontological context of significance that emerges culturally within a society. This is not to say that significance is only derived from an encounter with self-created meaning, that would be entirely solipsistic but, rather, a community encounters the world through its specifically instituted mode of understanding the world, and makes sense of itself by shaping its existence as a social-historical world. The institutional tendency towards ontological closure is understood by Castoriadis to be constituted by two deeper ontological principles that shape the existence of the social-historical world:

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[A social-historical eidos]is both of an absolute necessity, when one remains within it, and of a radical contingency, when one is on the outside. This amounts to saying that social signification is both beyond and on the other side of necessity and contingence – it is elsewhere. It is at the same time metanecessary and metacontingent.38

These two features, metanecessity and metacontingency, are the two key ontological principles that correspond to the schematic division in Castoriadis’s work between two institutional tendencies of closure and openness. Castoriadis interprets the two metacontextual principles – metanecessity

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and metacontingency – in a mutually complicit fashion in order to present a ‘general’ ontology of social-historical symbolism (the metanecessity of ‘what is each time particular, every relation and every assemblage of things’) that is complimented by a ‘special’ world-creating ontology (the metacontingency of ‘what “contains” and renders possible the totality of relations and assemblages’).39 This configuration of ontological duplicity is extremely intricate, involving a framework that is dense with neologisms, so I will provide a preliminary explanation, followed by a broader discussion of the need to relativise these key ontological principles in order to develop Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity. ‘General’ ontology refers to the instituted symbolic dimension of an eidos that encompasses the rational structure and logical elaboration of the social-historical world. It can be considered as an interior dimension of social-historical institution, lived as a mode of existence from the perspective of metanecessity. An eidos is structured on the basis of what Castoriadis calls ensembliste-identitaire (i.e., ensidic) logic.40 He first developed the idea of the ensidic dimension in The Imaginary Institution of Society, in order to account for the necessity in which a ‘society must define its “identity”, its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs, its desires’.41 Mats Rosengren has pointed out that this notion of ‘ensidic thinking’ or ‘ensidic logic’, is premised on a kind of thinking and logic based on the idea that ‘all aspects of being are specific differentiations of a determined original element, an element that therefore should be considered to constitute the unity, identity or essence of these aspects of being’.42 In this sense, a society’s self-definition is metanecessary, because the image that a society possesses of itself and of the world within which it defines itself is arbitrary and sets logical limitations on the ‘possibilities and impossibilities’ of social-historical existence; I am referring here to a society’s instituted ‘self-image’ that is posited in relation to the culturally articulated horizon of its ‘world-image’. This ‘general’ ontology is ‘totalising’ because it provides a context that corresponds to the appearance of society as instituted. It therefore refers to the definition of a self-identity that is brought into existence on the basis of instituted form (eidos). Castoriadis stresses that the social-historical institution itself can exist only as a ‘norm of identity’ that is self-reflexive and that societies understand themselves in relation to their own self-origin, ‘for it [society] can exist only by being itself what it decrees as having to be: the identity of the norm with itself which is posited by the norm so that there can be a norm of self-identity’.43 In this description of the normative dimension of ontology, it is possible to grasp how Castoriadis views the anthropogenic character of institutions, through which a norm becomes the ‘law’ that presupposes itself as a ‘law’ or, in Castoriadis’s words: that ‘“there are laws” is the law that is presupposed by every set of laws’, or put in another

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way, ‘“the law must be obeyed” is the first law, without which there would be no law – and which is not a law, since it is empty if laws do not exist’.44 The normative dimension of institutions can therefore be seen to form institutions on the basis of a metaneccesity, that is, the necessity to structure institutions on the basis of self-definition. The tendency towards closure is clearly expressed within this principle of metanecessity, which, as Rosengren points, Castoriadis regards to play an essential institutional role in ‘keeping chaos and disintegration at bay’, because institutions ‘have a tendency to close themselves, establishing their specific ways of functioning as immutable laws – and thus presenting themselves as necessities and unalterable realities’.45 The tendency of societies to keep themselves enclosed within the confines of their ontological self-definition, without opening themselves to a self-reflective mode of institution, is the basis of Castoriadis’s description of heteronomous institution; I will return to the discussion of heteronomy after explaining the other metacontextual principle that comprises his ontology. The present point, however, should be highlighted that Castoriadis presents the principle of metanecessity as shaping an institutional dynamic that informs a society’s mode of historicity, and without this principle in place, ‘there can be no human world, no society, no culture – for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos’.46 The principle of metanecessity that sets social-historical institution into place offers an explanation of the thoroughly ontological structure of societies. Castoriadis emphasises how institutions are established in a way that consolidates the cultural articulation of significations that shape the world. The ontological structure of societies, however, does not explain the capacities of cultural creation that Castoriadis looked to emphasise following his abandonment of Marxism. The cultural articulation of significations introduces a completely new institutional dynamic that leads to the most promising direction of Castoriadis’s theory of historicity. He argues that because significations are instituted into a definitive ontological form of existence, this instituted form should then in principle have a hold over everything that presents itself and could ever present itself to a society (i.e., metaneccesity); however, he also argues that ‘this hold, however, is always partial and always precarious’.47 This latter aspect points to the crucial development of Castoriadis’s theoretical project. The instituted form of society is precarious precisely because the self-origin of institution is essentially groundless and exists as an attempt to weave form from chaos. If the metanecessity of ‘general’ ontology responds to the necessity of negating chaos, then there must also be a principle of metacontingency, reflecting a ‘special’ ontology, which responds to the evolving challenges posed by the precarious groundlessness of instituted form.

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The ‘special’ ontology of metacontingency accounts for the capacity of a society to define itself in relation to something beyond its self-institution (an ‘elsewhere’). It therefore must be understood as a capacity to incorporate into its mode of self-definition, something ‘other’ than what it institutes itself ‘to be’ (both a spatially and temporally). This ontological principle proposes that the ‘general’ ontology is not fixed but is rather an image of ‘instituted society’, which will be seen in later chapters to reflect how institutional power structures the formation of an eidos. ‘Special’ ontology is an expression of the historicity of a society, as a ‘mode of relation holding together the components of a totality’.48 So, even though metanecessity ‘should’ set the institution in place as ‘fully’ determined (i.e., ensidic), its partiality is a consequence of a society’s temporal encounter with a social-historical world that is self-reflexive and therefore contingent upon what it presents to itself. Gourgouris points out that the temporal mode of institution inevitably leads to an ‘interweaving’ articulation of its significations that can never lead to an ontological singularity that would enclose a society within a particular self-definition, and in his view, this ‘does indeed make human experience incalculable, unformalisable, and unreproducible – in Castoriadis’s term, magmatic’.49 The notion of magma signifies the contingent nature of ‘special’ ontology, which provides an opening for contingent responses to specific questions of self-definition, such as: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want? What do we desire? What are we lacking?50 I should note that the term ‘special’ is best expressed as the capacity to ‘specify’ the institutional orientation of a society, which consists of the heterogenous cultural articulations that make up a social-historical context. Or, in other words, it is the ‘institutional choice’ that a community makes in order to articulate how society should be shaped according to its time and place in the world. ‘Special’ ontology explains how the institution of society also configures society’s relation to a broader world context that is experienced as an ‘over-arching horizon’.51 Castoriadis’s conception of a ‘special’ ontology emphasises a contingent instituting capacity based on experiencing something ‘elsewhere’, or ‘other’, than what is ontologically defined for itself. Metacontingency therefore provides an ontological openness, that demonstrates the capacity to alter the metanecessary logic of instituted forms that compel instituting activity towards the closure of an eidos on itself. The contingent nature of social-historical institution implies that new determinations emerge from instituted forms (eidos) of society and alters their previously established mode of social-historical existence. The emergence of new ontological creations irrevocably alter social-historical eidos in such a way that, by nature of the radical otherness of these newly created significations, preceding eidetic forms cease to exist. New forms of symbolism are

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built on the ruins of previous symbolic edifices and specifies the significance of their materials, or as Castoriadis put it, ‘the old enters the new, but with the signification given it by the new’.52 This is the fundamental dynamic upon which Castoriadis constructs his ontological theory of historicity. Not only does he propose that human history is fundamentally creative, but also that ontological destruction is an essential consequence of ontological creation, that creation entails destruction, which is the theoretical basis of Castoriadis’s notion of historicity as a mode of self-alteration. This is an idea that Adams has summarised quite simply: history is, in fact, ‘the creation and destruction of forms that for Castoriadis will elucidate time and its “arrow”’.53 This leads to the idea that social-historical institution is nothing but a temporally creative mode of anthropogenesis. Here we arrive at the more resounding line of Castoriadis’s conception of historicity, which exceeds a merely psychical and ontological formulation: if social-historical institution is to be characterised as temporally self-altering, there must be an opening to otherness that exceeds the logic of its closure. Instituted form must therefore be contingent upon its reception of otherness. Because Castoriadis situates self-alteration as the central dynamic of historicity, and yet still maintains that institutional form is driven by an ontologically determined tendency towards its own closure, he must therefore be seen to be posing the following question: How are new determinations incorporated within a society if historicity is already enclosed in its specific instituted form? It is in response to this question that Castoriadis highlights the institutional role of the social imaginary dimension of a community, and in doing so he offers his unique contribution to philosophical thought. The social imaginary is developed by Castoriadis in order to conceptualise how a community engages its ‘special’ ontological capacities, which takes into consideration an encounter between instituted forms of society and culturally heterogenous articulations of these forms. From the perspective of a community’s understanding of its instituted self-image, this encounter with instituted form is experienced either in terms of an engagement with ‘other’ forms of meaning than those that have been self-determined (i.e., the ontological forms of ‘other’ societies), or, with experiences of ‘otherness’ that emerge from the culturally creative capacities of the community itself; both of which propose new forms of social-historical existence to be institutionally incorporated into the self-image of a society. For Castoriadis, these encounters with ‘otherness’ are framed around experiences that exceed already determined ‘norms of identity’ that form the ‘totalising’ institution of a society. In this sense, the institutional role of the social imaginary is to translate a society’s relation to the world and to incorporate sources of otherness into ‘new determinations’ of instituted society. Social imaginary creation is therefore metacontingent precisely because it ‘specifies’ new determinations in relation to an already

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established social-historical context. It is on the basis of this view that Castoriadis can be said to view social-historical existence from the perspective of ontological closure. I would argue that this warrants an overemphasis by Castoriadis on this ontological schema, particularly in the sense that a society’s encounter with the world (including its own) can lead to ‘new determinations’ only if these determinations are instituted within the self-originary logic of the society considered. In doing so, he risks underemphasising the heterogenous sources of creation shaping the social-historical world and the fact that ontological determination, as it relates to the institution of society, is subject to processes of instituting power that foreground the most dominant of these heterogeneous sources (I will develope the implications of this consideration on Castoriadis’s conception of self-altering historicity in the following chapters). The key ontological principles presented in this section express the primal tension of historicity – raised in the previous section – that suggests that social-historical institution involves a radically creative mode of historicity that is enclosed within its own mode of self-originary creation. This tension resides in the fact that the creation of new determinations can only be instituted through ‘metacontextual’ processes that intersect with already established ways of understanding the world (and of society within it); which is to say that ‘new’ determinations are always historically bound by what is already instituted. The idea that historicity is confined within its own metacontextual processes is summed up by Castoriadis in the sense that ‘every symbolism is built on the ruins of earlier symbolic edifices and uses their materials’, in which case new determinations are incorporated within previously established forms of meaning that, in turn, alter the edifice of society as a whole.54 The elsewhere of signification, mentioned above, highlights an opposing institutional tendency, that of social-historical openness, which allows a society to ingest ‘sources of otherness’ and to alter itself by instituting radically new determinations; this is the basis of Castoriadis’s idea that historicity is a mode of self-alteration. The dichotomous division between the tendency towards closure and the creative mode of self-alteration, therefore, needs to be relativised within the aforementioned metacontextual processes of historicity. The fact that Castoriadis maintains the distinction between instituted form and the radical creation of new form (when promoting a dichotomy between heteronomous and autonomous modes of historicity), ultimately, limits Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity. In this respect, he is unable to see exactly to what extent institutional power is not driven by tendencies towards closure, but that the tendency towards closure is a similarly creative mode of institution (this will be argued in the following chapter). I will now turn to a description of these tendencies in order to show how Castoriadis emphasised the ontological features of this paradox, so that

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he was able to construct a dichotomous perspective on historicity that hinges on the tendency towards closure. I will then go on, in the final section, to relativise this dichotomy by emphasising, instead, the social imaginary, and therefore political, context of this institutional tendency towards closure. DICHOTOMOUS MODES OF HISTORICITY: THE RELATION OF A SOCIETY TO THE WORLD

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So far, I have established that Castoriadis regards the institution of a society to be a self-creation of a singular social-historical eidos, which is bound by a ‘specifying’ social imaginary that presents the cohesion of its ‘component parts’ and delivers an overarching world-orientation for a specifically defined self-image of society. Yet, when this theory of social imaginary institution is construed as a mode of historicity, Castoriadis emphasises an ontological distinction that leads to a dichotomous opposition that can be characterised on the basis of a dual ontology. Castoriadis outlines the capacity of a community to institute new forms of social-historical existence (eidos), which is a creative capacity that is placed in tension with the institution of an arbitrary self-definition of society that tends towards an ontologically closed articulation of the world.55 The implications of this tension are characterised by Castoriadis in the emergence of opposing institutional dynamics that constitute oppositional and dichotomous modes of historicity; between an openly self-altering mode of autonomous institution and an ontologically closed mode of heteronomous historicity. This section will outline how the ‘metacontextual’ principles outlined in the previous section are developed by Castoriadis into dichotomous modes of historicity, which subsequently emerge as a central theme of his work that I will proceed to relativise. The aforementioned paradox proposed by Castoriadis’s metacontextual ontology proposes that the world is ‘generally’ instituted within the context of a society’s ‘self-image’, while, simultaneously, society is ‘specified’ within the context of broader cultural articulations of the world. This places Castoriadis in the position of privileging either one side of the paradox over the other when explaining the institutional dynamics of historicity. I argue that Castoriadis overwhelmingly privileges the determination of ontological form that is represented by the former dynamic, rather than the latter (which is reserved for creation ex nihilo), and therefore preserving in his theory the potential for revolutionary rupture that characterises his work as post-Marxist. This can be seen in the way that Castoriadis insists that it is only through the self-defined institution of social-historical eidos that a world-image can be constituted. The implication of this position is that institutions are seen to presuppose the context in which a society’s ‘self-image’ is ‘contained’.56 In

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other words, the ontological paradox resides in the self-origin of the institution. This paradoxical ontological duplicity is therefore intimately reciprocal, or, as Castoriadis prefers, ‘tied together’ through a mutual relation (lier ensemble): ‘this tying together of the origin of the world and of the origin of society always has to recognise the specificity of society without interrupting the homogeneity of the world’.57 The importance of the ‘world-image’, as a catalyst of ‘special’ ontology, is that it is a source for the creation of ‘other’ significations that open up interstices within the closure of ontological identity. This tying together is therefore an essentially creative relation that opens up a capacity to alter the instituted eidos. It is a dimension of signification that incorporates otherness into the fold of ontological self-determination, as a source of self-originary meaning that does not come from an instituted identitary logic, but from ‘elsewhere’, from the broader horizon of the world. Ultimately, the world-image is ontologically open and, as such, it is the source of the heterogenous cultural articulations of signification that opens historicity to its mode of self-alteration. The metacontextual principles of institution direct the emergence of each creative articulation of the world-image, which according to Castoriadis’s ontological schema, in turn, alters the self-image of society (i.e., eidos). The heterogenous cultural articulations of the world are therefore seen to alter the historically instituted symbolic forms of a society. In this respect, the institutional transformation enacted through self-alteration must accord with ‘the homogeneity of the world and of society’.58 This is to say that there is a necessity for a specific form of society to be instituted in accordance with cultural articulations of the world horizon. This necessity can be equally understood in terms of the need to establish ‘the homogeneity of being from the point of view of signification’.59 The representation of this homogeny within the self-image of a society becomes the decisive point where Castoriadis privileges the ontological modality of instituted society and establishes a dichotomous construction of two distinct modes of historicity. In providing a critique of Castoriadis’s homogenising tendencies, Arnason has picked up on the paradoxical character that lies at the heart of this self-altering dynamic of historicity. He argues that Castoriadis’s emphasis on the distinction between these dichotomous modes of historicity ignores the hermeneutical dimension of social-historical institution, particularly in its more subtle modes of self-altering contingency. Arnason, instead, views historicity from the perspective of civilisations and places greater emphasis on the metacontextual processes of self-alteration; as opposed to Castoriadis’s focus on the singular and homogenising eidos of differing societies. Taking cues from Merleau-Ponty, Arnason proposes that ‘civilizations can be understood as historically situated and historically developing configurations of the human condition’.60 This approach very clearly

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deemphasises the privilege given by Castoriadis to the ontological dimension of institutional determination as defined by the singular eidos of a society; I will return to a discussion of the influence of Merleau-Ponty on Castoriadis. I don’t intend to focus on the civilisational dimension outlined by Arnason, but rather his interpretation of Castoriadis’s work is helpful for bringing into focus the political dimension of historicity. The importance of Arnason’s critique of Castoriadis that I want to foreground is the mode of institution which ‘involves multiple and diversifiable relations to the world’ that are not reducible to configurations of successively morphing and ontologically enclosed self-images.61 Arnason’s hermeneutic critique of Castoriadis’s theory of historicity stresses that the social imaginary is a field of cultural articulation that is ontologically open, whose instituted dimension is the primary source for creativity, and whose tendency toward closure is predominantly a concern of the political dimension of instituted power; which is to say, that he proposes a mode of historicity that is not defined on the basis of the principle of ontological closure.62 Further to Arnason’s reading of the interpretive field of social imaginary creation, I will propose that this hermeneutic dimension should also take into consideration the implications of political power that shape the social imaginary capacity to alter societies; I will advance this argument in the following chapter. By emphasising an ontologically derived dichotomy resulting from two distinct modes of institution, which are seen to be guided by two distinct ontological tendencies (closure and openness), a bifurcation emerges in Castoriadis’s work between two oppositional modes of historicity. One dedicated to the revolutionary vision of social-historical transformation (heavily indebted to the idea of a dichotomous bifurcation of historicity) and the other considers the social imaginary capacity for self-alteration. The first formulation proposes that the ontological capacity to initiate a mode of self-alteration is only possible in the mode of an incessant surge of radically new social imaginary creations, which means that historicity is a process that successively ruptures ontological closure. The other formulation proposes that social-historical institution is engaged in a mode of self-alteration that reflects an ongoing self-definition of society that is open to the heterogenous and culturally defined articulations of the world. In the former interpretation, the power of the social imaginary to creatively shape the social-historical world through (open) metacontextual processes is neglected; particularly absent in this approach is the capacity of both tendencies towards openness and closure to contribute to creative modes of historicity. The latter formulation, however, offers some promising steps in this direction. Instead, Castoriadis focuses on the capacities of ‘genuine’ self-reflection in institutional processes, which makes the dichotomy between two distinct modes of historicity – heteronomy and autonomy – the central theme of his theoretical

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work and political project. Without maligning the importance of this political project for contemporary societies, there is perhaps more work to be done to develop an understanding of how metacontextual processes of self-institution incorporate heterogenous articulations of the world, and therefore contributed to the self-altering movement of historicity. Castoriadis’s distinction between heteronomy and autonomy was initially premised on an exercise of historical-comparative sociology that set out to define democracy as an exception to the norm when it comes to the variety of political modes of institution that have been implemented by societies throughout human history.63 His investigation into the specificity of modern modes of institution (particularly the specificity of ‘Western’ societies, and the way that they have been informed by an ancient Greek democratic heritage) led him to propose that the mode of institution common to all other previous societies is one of heteronomy. A heteronomous society is defined by Castoriadis as a mode of institution that is enclosed and dominated by its instituted forms of symbolism. It is a mode of institution that vests instituted symbolism with an authorial power that accounts for the origin and grounding of institutions, in which case ‘the source and foundation for the law, as well as for every norm, value, and signification, are posited as being transcendent to society itself’.64 The origin of heteronomous societies are taken to be ‘transcendent in the absolute, as in monotheistic societies, and transcendent, in any case, relative to the effective reality of living society (as in the case of archaic societies)’.65 Castoriadis develops this conception of heteronomy alongside the ontological theory of social-historical institution that I have previously outlined, however it is important to step through just how he does this in order to explicitly outline how he ‘over-ontologises’ heteronomous modes of historicity. Castoriadis argues that a society is instituted on the basis of heteronomous modes of historicity when the ‘source and foundation’ (i.e., self-origin) of its institution is posited as ‘transcendent to society’. Heteronomy is seen to conflate the origin of society with an image of the world and presupposes a homogenous and unitary ontology from this source. It is a mode of institution whereby the self-image of society is not only tied to the world-image but is subsumed by the latter. According to Castoriadis, this conflation of the ontological origins of society with a transcendent ontology of the world denies the self-creative capacities of social-historical institution: heteronomous institution entails ‘the positing of an extra-social source for the institution (and for signification), therefore the occultation of the self-institution of society, the covering over by humanity of its own being as self-creation’.66 Given that I have outlined – in the previous chapter – the fundamental anthropological claim that human existence is presupposed by the self-institution of the social-historical world, it makes sense that Castoriadis insists this

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transcendent ‘extra-social’ signification is itself a ‘self-instituted’ creation. In his view, heteronomous institution involves a fundamental denial of self-originary creation, whereby ‘everything occurs as if the ground where the creativity of society is manifested . . . had to be covered over by an imaginary creation arranged in such a way as to allow society to conceal what it is to itself’.67 For Castoriadis, then, heteronomy is a negative mode of institution where everything occurs as if society must negate itself as selfinstituting society. So why does Castoriadis claim that heteronomous modes of historicity are overwhelmingly dominant throughout human history? The discussion undertaken so far in this chapter provides a way to answer this question: the institution of heteronomous signification acquires its mode of ontological dominance precisely because such signification is instituted on the basis of absolute necessity. The instituted symbolism that established the foundation of a heteronomous society becomes the basis of generalised norms that enclose the specific self-image of a society within a predetermined definition. In this conception of heteronomy, Castoriadis displays his bias toward the ontological parameters of social-historical institution, by emphasising the form of institutional origin as being completely derived from the representation of ‘extra-social’ significations:P

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And this representation aimed, and still aims, at quashing the process of calling the existing institution into question; it locks in, as a matter of fact, its closure. In this sense, these societies are heteronomous. For, they are enslaved to their own creation, their law, which they posit as intangible, as it proceeds from a qualitatively other origin than living men and women.68

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Castoriadis’s insistence on the heteronomous enslavement of existence to instituted forms of signification emphasises the ontological dominance of institutions, and as such, he views life in these societies as enclosed within the interior logic, the metanecessity, of the significations that form such determinations. Castoriadis proposes that ‘such an assignment of its source and its foundation goes hand in hand with a closure of signification’, and that ‘the word of God, or the arrangements bestowed by the ancestors, are taken to lie beyond discussion and to be established once and for all’.69 It will be argued in the following chapter that the ‘closure of signification’ that Castoriadis refers to within heteronomous modes of institution are not so much ontologically predetermined, this is overstated in his work, but rather that institutional forms of dominance are politically enforced and serve to regulate the cultural articulation of certain significations. Before making this point, however, it is necessary to show in the remainder of this chapter that it is necessary to relativise this dichotomous conception of historicity.

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Firstly, it is important to point out that the heteronomous representation of a society’s origin is said to be tied to ‘extra-social’ symbolism in such a way that a society’s ‘self-image’ is completely derived from a specifically defined ‘world-image’. The self-origin of society is delegated to a representation that grounds this origin within a fundamental characteristic of the world within which societies exist (i.e., religious laws, ancestral laws, historical laws, natural laws, etc.). Gourgouris has provided an explanation of this dynamic, by showing how the negation of self-originary institution involves the specification of an external source to secure a society’s own self-definition: in his view this involves ‘the internalisation of various certainties and givens – or rather, more accurately, of certain values, ideas, or practices that are internalised as given, indisputable, and unquestionable by virtue of being internalised and thus naturalised’.70 So, Castoriadis’s description of heteronomous closure is therefore presented as a mode of symbolic closure that operates on strictly metanecessary grounds. The principle of metacontingency does not appear to factor into his description of heteronomous modes of historicity. This leads Castoriadis to ontologise the dichotomous distinction between heteronomy and autonomy. This is evident where he proposes that the denial of self-institution is ‘equivalent to the denial of the “contingency” of signification’.71 Instituted forms of symbolism remain arbitrary and are designated an authorial function, and it functions as such because authority is derived from an arbitrary ‘elsewhere of signification relative to the necessity and contingency’ of signification.72 This function of authority is framed by Castoriadis as a denial of contingency, which is his way to argue that heteronomous modes of institution are fundamentally non-creative; as will be discussed in chapter four, this argument also forms the basis of Castoriadis’s understanding of depoliticisation in contemporary Western societies. As I have argued so far, the dichotomy proposed by Castoriadis overemphasises the role of ontological closure in such a way that he presents the mode of heteronomous institution as a denial of contingent aspects of social-historical institution. Autonomous modes of institution, on the other hand, reverse the situation and instead historicity is arguably based on a denial of necessity. I will provide a rather long passage where Castoriadis outlines the ontological level of autonomous historicity, because in chapter 4 I will focus on the essentially political basis of this autonomy: Autonomy is not closure but, rather, opening: ontological opening, the possibility of going beyond the informational, cognitive, and organizational closure characteristic of self-instituting, but heteronomous beings. It is ontological opening, since to go beyond this closure signifies altering the already existing cognitive and organizational ‘system’, therefore constituting one’s world and

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one’s self according to other laws, therefore creating a new ontological eidos, another self in the world.73

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What is plainly obvious is that historicity is dichotomised as a strict predilection towards openness or closure. His devotion to this oppositional conception of these two modes of historicity meant that, despite his increased interest in social-historical contingency as a creative power of human creation, he would uphold until the end that there is a distinct and essential dichotomy between heteronomous and autonomous modes of historicity. This overemphasis restricts his analysis of historicity to a sociocentric (rather than an anthropogenetic) social-historical analysis, which in the end only serves to uphold the primacy of the Greco-European creation of political autonomy (echoes of Marx can also be found here); I will return to this criticism in chapter 4. This, in turn, serves to stifle the valuable insights that are implied by the metacontingent principle of institution that, in other words, are implied within his notion of self-alteration. This notion of heteronomous institution, instead, emphasises a non-creative mode of historicity. The emphasis on metanecessity portrays a view of historicity that is self-referential in a way that institutional self-alteration is indirect and coincidental, as it is a mode of institution that is seen to tend towards its own internal ends. In accordance with this perspective, contingency is viewed as the incorporation of ‘otherness’ that folds into a metanecessary logic. The self-alteration of eidos – considered as creation ex-nihilo – therefore cannot be understood in any other way than as the perpetual rupturing of an ontological constitution of the world. Castoriadis therefore constructs a dichotomy between two modes of historicity that hinge on differing social imaginary orientations towards ontological closure: whereby, on the one hand, ‘everything happens as if society were unable to recognize itself as making itself, as instituting itself, as self-instituting’, and ontological openness, on the other hand, whereby a society institutes itself based upon contingent relation to its own creativity.74 In heteronomous societies the metacontingent relation to an authorial ‘elsewhere’, which opens the institution up to the incorporation of ‘otherness’, is seen by Castoriadis to be covered over and imbued with the authority of a sovereign ‘world-image’. The sovereign ‘world-image’ is signified as the only source of origin for the institution, and it is therefore instituted as the ‘unalterable’ organisation of a society. In Castoriadis’s view, the ‘unalterable’ order of a heteronomous society is an instituted fact that conceals ‘its being as [self-instituting] society by negating the temporality that is first and foremost its own temporality, the time of otherness-alteration that it brings into existence and that, in turn, makes it exist as society’.75 The self-alteration of a society’s institution, which is nothing other than a society’s particular mode of historicity, is therefore seen to be enclosed within its central world-ordering

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significations. Castoriadis argues that self-alteration within heteronomous modes of historicity can therefore only take place within the confines of a fundamental ontological closure. The creative emergence of new determinations and their subsequent contingent alterations are seen to be completely translated into the symbolism of a social organisation whose meaning can only be attributed within the metanecessary logic of instituted form. This denial of contingency is therefore taken by Castoriadis to be an ontological denial (which is to say that it is, to a large extent, a form of denial that is structural), which is to say that it is a predetermined closure of the capacity for communities to question the ‘self-image’ of their societies and to propose new forms of self-organisation. In the final section of this chapter, I will argue that Castoriadis’s overemphasises of the ontological dimension, which grounds his distinction between these two modes of historicity, unnecessarily dichotomises what are in fact two differing institutional dynamics that are at play within all modes of historicity. Further to this, it will be argued that Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary (which drew influence from Merleau-Ponty), in fact, offers a way to develop such a relativised conception of the creative and self-altering modes of historicity. OPENING UP THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY: MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE WORLD HORIZON

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The work of Arnason offers a pathway beyond the impasse of ontological closure that limits Castoriadis’s insight into creative modes of historicity and the capacity for communities to alter their social-historical contexts. Arnason proposes that when engaging with Castoriadis’s work there is a need to develop the hermeneutical dimension of social creativity, which shifts the focus on institutions from a strictly ‘ontological’ theory towards a more ‘culturological’ conception of the world-forming ‘imaginary significations’ that orient the self-institution of societies. This culturological approach develops the notion of the social imaginary, which is a notion that Castoriadis formulated – as will be argued in this section – alongside his engagement with Merleau-Ponty, and the latter’s description of culture as a mode of existence that shapes a world horizon. Arnason views the culturological approach as an ‘articulation of the world’ that incorporates ‘cultural spheres (‘world orders’ in Weber’s terminology) as well as overall cultural patterns and traditions’.76 By taking this approach, Arnason is de-emphasising the importance that Castoriadis places on the role of imaginary significations as an ontologically determining ‘articulation of the world’. Rather, the culturological approach emphasises how significations contribute to the ontological openness of institutional conditions, which situate the creative capacities of a community

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within a field of power that regulates their potential for self-alteration. What is significant about this approach is that the instituted forms of symbolism are viewed as the source of creative potential for self-alteration rather than an ontological trap. Arnason’s approach therefore suggests a shift of emphasis towards a phenomenological-hermeneutics of creation that foregrounds the culturological articulation of the world that shape imaginary significations.77 It is argued in this section that the phenomenological-hermeneutic approach develops the critical insights offered by Castoriadis’s novel conception of the social imaginary, and that by developing this notion in relation to self-altering modes of institution it is possible to – in the following chapter – provide a unique political understanding of historicity. Arnason’s critique, in fact, picks up a thread within Castoriadis’s thought that can be seen as a continuation of the phenomenological concept of ‘the world’. He observes that the concept of the ‘world’ within phenomenological thinking has been shown to highlight two interrelated points of orientation: whereby ‘the reference to a totalising context or horizon is as important as the ultimate open-endedness of the context and the possibility of conflicting interpretations’.78 However, Arnason argues against Castoriadis’s idea that the horizon of the world-image ‘has no referent’ outside self-originary ontology.79 Arnason’s intervention proposes that the organising principles of the world-image are not ontologically derived from within a ‘worldless vacuum’, rather, it is derived from the cultural dimension of instituted symbolism, and therefore the ‘referent is the world with which society is confronted and of which it nevertheless forms a part’.80 The ‘world’ is therefore shaped by a ‘shared’ and ‘interpretive’ horizon of articulated meaning whose contingency is derived from a collective existence within the ‘world’ in an overarching sense. The culturological basis of social-historical institution decentres Castoriadis’s insistence on ontological creation ex nihilo and positions the ontological dimension within an anthropological horizon of the world. It would be easy at this point to simply say that this shifts Castoriadis’s sociocentric conception of world constitution to a broader anthropocentric version.81 However, this would not be entirely correct. What is being argued here is that social-historical institution is a mode of anthropogenesis that is not confined to the sociocentric limits Castoriadis placed on forms of closure derived from social-historical ontology. This move away from a strictly ontological approach also means that social creativity can begin to be understood in terms of a decentred anthropology.82 This perspective reintroduces one of Castoriadis’s pertinent phenomenological insights, that a ‘shared’ and ‘interpretive’ world horizon opens up an ‘inexhaustible supply of otherness’, which offers something more than an abyss of undifferentiated chaos, because it is an opening to a ‘shared’ anthropological horizon that incorporates ‘other’ forms of differentiated meaning.83 If the interpretive horizon

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can be defined as being open to the capacities of a limitless interpretation of otherness, then the hermeneutic is not enclosed within ontological bounds (as Castoriadis, in fact, views the hermeneutical approach). By introducing a culturological approach to the interpretation of the world it is possible to develop Castoriadis’s insights into the reflexive mode of self-alteration that drives historicity, and to show that the institution of society is contingent upon the broader cultural articulation of the world horizon; it will be argued in the following chapters that this ontological openness requires a stabilising mode of regulation, which places historicity in the context of instituting power.84 In order to come to the political implications of Castoriadis’s thought, it must be recognised that his theoretical work essentially grappled with the fundamental tension between the ontological dimension of social-historical institution and the self-altering creativity of the cultural dimension. As Arnason has pointed out, Castoriadis’s articulation of this tension was framed around his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to clarify the phenomenological ‘world problematic’. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology exercised a strong influence on Castoriadis’s theorisation of social-historical ontology.85 Merleau-Ponty’s work offers a ‘relational’ ontology that considers the co-dependency of the self, the ‘other’ and the world. Castoriadis drew from the significant inroads that Merleau-Ponty had made towards understanding how it was that perception, as a faculty of corporeal imagination, becomes instrumental in the formation of a subjective world that is based on a relational encounter with social meaning.86 In fact, Castoriadis’s attempt to theorise the ontological status of the social-historical world should be traced back to his engagement with the work of Merleau-Ponty, particularly in the way that Castoriadis reformulates Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of the fact that ‘because we are in the world we are condemned to meaning’.87 This ‘condemnation to meaning’ was taken by Castoriadis as an indication that we are condemned to the ontological eidos of social institution, which is to say that we are condemned to ‘society’ at large. In fact, as Adams has duly noted, Castoriadis was one of the first to develop the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the transsubjective dimension of society gives rise to the basis of perception.88 In his lectures at the Collège de France between 1954 and 1955, Merleau-Ponty began to envisage the ontological character of institutions. Merleau-Ponty considered the notion of institution as a field of social meaning, or cultural context, from which the subject is able to create its own Sinngebung (‘donation of sense’, or ‘bestowal of meaning’).89 These considerations led MerleauPonty to turn from a ‘history of perception’ to the ‘perception of history’, which includes the perception of ‘ideologies, of myths, of intellectual tools, of practical wholes’.90 Merleau-Ponty attempted to read the institution as a

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field that arises in a ‘bi-directional’ confluence between ‘the given to us, and also of us to the given’.91 A theme, it can be argued, that is reinterpreted by Castoriadis in his distinction between ‘instituted society’ and ‘instituting society’. For Merleau-Ponty, the institutional field arises as a dialectic synthesis that considers ‘objective’ history to be lived subjectively ‘only in our life’, it is through our Sinngebung that we conceive the advent of history as a sector of lived experience.92 There remains a sense of ‘objective’ history that can be perceived as the ‘gaze of other times on mine’, however Merleau-Ponty begins to dissolve the concrete ‘objectivity’ of the past in proclaiming that, ‘we never have closed significations; we, like the humans of the past, have only open significations and situations whose sense is in genesis’.93 History is interpreted here as an instituted passivity, two terms that would become the basis of his 1954 to 1955 Collège de France lectures. History is therefore something received and projected temporally through lived experience, it is ‘something that arises from an Urstiftung’ (i.e., self-origin of the institution), whose instituting capacity arises from an intersubjective level of Sinngebung.94 Merleau-Ponty situates historicity as an issue of the reception and projection of meaning that forms a society’s temporal presence. These themes are remarkably visible in Castoriadis’s discussion of the self-origin of social-historical institution. Merleau-Ponty saw that the phenomenological problem of ‘being-in-the-world’ had to address the institutional dynamic of its historical dimension; which Castoriadis admits can be perceived as ‘a mixture of activity and passivity’.95 By emphasising the perceptual schema of subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the Sinngebung capacity of the subject directly translates experience into ‘the prose of the world’ (a position that is seemingly reflected in Castoriadis’s theorisation of self-reflection). However, meaning that is formed through perceptual experience is not drawn from a mute, concrete or passive world, rather, in Castoriadis’s view, the prose of the world is already ontologically transcribed in the eidos social-historical world, which exists outside of subjective experience and forms the basis of what Castoriadis came to call the social imaginary:

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It is above all the imaginary schema underlying the thought, the unnameable primordial figure that gives shape, that organizes, includes in and excludes from that which is taken into consideration, allots in the field values, volumes, lights, and shadows, animates what will be coined into privileged types of logical operations and into ‘ultimate’ ontological decisions.96

What Castoriadis describes here is the preexisting symbolic matrix of the social-historical field, or what he calls ‘instituted society’, and it is important to highlight that the social imaginary represents the ‘privileged’ types

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of ontological form that shape what is ‘always already there’ in the world. Castoriadis describes the social imaginary on the basis of the institutional role it plays in shaping social-historical form and orienting the temporal dimension of historicity. It is a useful conceptual tool that provides insight into the institutional tension between what’s ‘always already there’ (ontologically speaking) and new cultural articulations. It can be said that Merleau-Ponty envisaged the originary ‘instituting/instituted’ dynamic at the heart of the subject (i.e., ontological creation at the level of perceptual-subjectivity, its Sinngebung), whereas Castoriadis expanded this ontological dynamic to elucidate the radical self-creation of anthropic being at the social-historical level.97 Castoriadis’s approach stresses the self-originary capacity of the ‘instituting/ instituted’ dynamic as a temporal mode of social-historical self-alteration. This dynamic equates the historicity of society with its creative temporality; an idea that will be discussed further in the following chapter. As I have outlined in this chapter, Castoriadis takes these Merleau-Pontian themes to be a central problematic in his attempt to think historicity in ontological terms. However, Castoriadis considers this later phase of Merleau-Ponty’s work to have remained trapped within a ‘schema of perception’, from which ‘he would never completely succeed in freeing himself’ because Merleau-Ponty viewed subjective perception (Sinngebung) as an experience of ‘ontological reception’.98 Castoriadis points out that by emphasising perception as the primary ground of ontological creation, MerleauPonty was destined to remain searching for the institution of society at the level of intersubjectivity.99 There is a level of irony in Castoriadis’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s entrapment within the ‘ontological tradition’, because Castoriadis himself leans on a similar ontological emphasis, albeit at a trans-subjective level, when he comes to analyse the political dimension of social-historical institution; this point will be argued in the following chapter. As I have shown in this chapter, it is Castoriadis’s emphasis on the ontological dimension of society that upholds the distinction between autonomous and heteronomous modes of institution. However persistent Castoriadis’s ontological emphasised remains, one can nevertheless argue that his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty still provided him with the basis from which he was able to develop his conception of the social imaginary in ways that go beyond its ontological strictures. If there is one archetypal idea that Castoriadis gleans from Merleau-Ponty it is that nothing is ‘a pure act of the subject’, that a self-image cannot be created without an image of the world within which such self-definition is made possible.100 In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this image of the world is tied together ‘almost by chance’ through the vision of an historical imagination, which is not produced according to a model, ‘it is, in fact, the advent of meaning’.101 Even though Castoriadis does not explicitly address the imaginary feature of

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the ‘advent of meaning’, I would suggest that it is perhaps one of the most significant ideas that he draws from Merleau-Ponty. It is also significant to point out that in Merleau-Ponty’s later work the imagination came to play a central role: Everything comes to pass as though my own power to reach the world and my power to retrench myself in phantasms only came one with the other; even more: as though the access to the world were but the other face of a withdrawal, and this retreat to the margin of the world a servitude and another expression of my natural power to enter into it.102

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Arnason views the constitutive role of the ‘phantasmal’ imagination within this passage as the sign of a direct affinity with Castoriadis’s later project. This is affinity is undeniable, however, Castoriadis goes beyond Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘retreating’ from the passivity of the world to show that the socialhistorical world, in the form of its institution, is a creative formation of the world by the social imaginary. Castoriadis perceives an ontological excess in the constitutive role of the imagination, he recognised that the collective dimension of the imagination is ‘a creative process, and the most fundamental precondition of freedom’, or more precisely, the freedom to collectively institute the form of the world as a self-originary eidos.103 The collective dimension is not a ‘passive’ articulation of the world horizon but, rather, the collective basis of an imaginary means to perpetually ‘create’ the horizon itself. It is this characterisation of ‘passivity’ that Castoriadis theorised into a model of heteronomous historicity that overemphasises the degree of ontological closure at the psychical level, leading to the suggestion that social creativity remains trapped within its pre-given significations. A dichotomy is erected in strict contrast with what is presented as the autonomous mode of historicity, by which culture is seen to be liberated and opened up to modes of self-alteration that are appear as the only true opening for politics; it is on this last point that his Marxist heritage is perhaps most pronounced. Castoriadis’s dichotomous construction became framed as a fundamental tension between instituted modes of historicity and the capacity of instituting new human creations. This dichotomous construction will be detailed in the next chapter by following the line of thought within Castoriadis’s work that recognises the ‘inexhaustible supply of otherness’ that poses an ‘irreducible challenge to every established signification’.104 The sources of self-altering creativity that are seen to be manifest through the social imaginary will be discussed in the context of power, which will provide a more nuanced account of the metacontextual tendency towards closure that was outlined in this chapter. It will also be argued that self-alteration is itself a metacontextual mode of historicity that should be thought on the basis of a

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political, and not an ontological, mode of historicity. The concept of the social imaginary is significant, because introducing an imaginary dimension at the social-historical level enabled Castoriadis to envisage the deep connection between subjective, cultural and historical creation. This deep connection is considered by Castoriadis to be the main driving force behind the temporality of society as an ongoing self-creation, where the ‘present exists as originating, as immanent transcendence, as source, as the surging firth of ontological genesis’.105 Anthropic being is therefore the self-creation of a social-historical mode of being in the world, which is always bringing itself into being based on a temporality that is ‘to-be’ (à-être). This notion highlights a central theoretical tension within Castoriadis’s philosophical project, between: the world as a ‘network of significations’ driven by ontological inertia and the more promising line of thought, that the world is ‘an inexhaustible supply of otherness’.106 Arnason offers an alternative approach to Castoriadis’s dichotomous perspective by shifting the emphasis on ontological form to a more nuanced world-interpretive culturological horizon. This approach understands that cultural creativity involves a perpetual opening-up to the experience of ‘otherness’ and takes instituted significations into account as a primary source for self-altering creativity. Arnason’s critique is an important corrective to Castoriadis’s social-historical creation, because it forges a culturological approach that recognises the possibility of an anthropic world horizon that permeates the cultural diversity of ontological forms and differing societies. This approach, in turn, invites a more nuanced interpretive dimension to social-historical existence that relativises the dichotomous distinction of historicity and offers a new proposition that any ‘denial of contingency’ actually springs from the political dimension of a society, as a mode of social-historical regulation. NOTES

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1. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Blackwell Press, Oxford, UK), 342. 2. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, The Castoriadis Reader, 273. 3. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, Thesis Eleven, no. 35 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 1. Castoriadis re-contextualises these pre-Socratic images in relation to his distinction between the psyche and social-historical forms, as outlined in the previous chapter: ‘under two forms, therefore, humanity continues, prolongs, recreates the Chaos, the Abyss, the Groundlessness from which it emerges: psychical Chaos, the Groundlessness of the psyche’s radical imagination; social Abyss, the Groundlessness of the social imaginary, itself creative of signification and

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of the institution. And, at the same time, it has to confront the Chaos, the Abyss, the Groundlessness of the world’. (Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 5). 4. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1994, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds.) (Routledge, London), 149. 5. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK), 359. 6. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1994, ‘The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 310. It is important to be clear that Castoriadis does not tie the notion of social-historical eidos to an ontology of being, it is the ontological form of social-historical existence that is a creation of collective human being; as will be discussed further into the chapter, human being is understood to be a creative capacity, not an ontological form in-itself. The term, eidos, is drawn from Aristotle’s reworking of Plato’s definition, in which form reflects an oussia that is specific to its own telos. Castoriadis’s own re-working of the term, in its social-historical usage, highlights the indeterminate character of telos, which reveals an interpretive dimension of eidos that Castoriadis relates to the contingency of ontological form (see: Cornelius Castoriadis, 1984, ‘Value, Equality, Justice, Politics’, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). Society is therefore open to alteration via the self-creation of new, and other, eide, which reflect other ends. I will argue in this chapter that this interpretive dimension of eidos does not only reflect a contingent characteristic, but that it also reveals an implicit ground of institutional creativity. 7. Castoriadis, ‘The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy’, 149. 8. Johann P. Arnason, 2007, ‘Imaginary Significations and Historical Civilisations’, Moderne begriefen, 96. 9. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 368. 10. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 359. 11. Arnason, ‘Imaginary Significations and Historical Civilisations’, 94. 12. Cited in Marc Richir, 1993, ‘The Meaning of Phenomenology in the Visible and the Invisible’, Thesis Eleven, no. 36, iss. 1 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1968, The Visible and the Invisible, Claude Lefort (ed.), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL), 99 and 242. 13. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 108. 14. John Rundell identifies that there are a few differing theoretical approaches to the social imaginary which all attempt to develop the philosophical implications of the imagination at the historical level. Rundell points out that each attempt is marked by a different emphasis, i.e., the ontological imagination (Castoriadis), the semantic imagination (Ricoeur), or the interpretive imagination (Arnason); see John Rundell, 1994, Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, 7. 15. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 138. 16. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Phusis and Autonomy’, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.), (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 337.

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17. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1988, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK), 144. 18. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 6. 19. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 117. 20. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 143. 21. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2015, ‘The Imaginary As Such’, Social Imaginaries, vol. 1, issue 1 (Zeta, Bucharest, Romania), 66. There is an aspect of the imaginary that exercises an indeterminate reflexivity in defining the specific significations that are socially instituted, Castoriadis describes this reflexivity as an anonymous degree of intensity that the collective invests in certain forms of symbolism: ‘nothing allows us to determine a priori just where the boundary of symbolism lies, the point at which the symbolical overlaps with the functional. We can establish once and for all neither the general degree of symbolization, which varies with the culture, nor the factors that decide the intensity with which a particular aspect of the life of a given society will be invested with symbolism’ (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 124). I will explicitly discuss this in relation to the ontological meta-contingency of the institution. 22. Castoriadis, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, 103. 23. Castoriadis, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, 103. 24. Castoriadis, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, 103. 25. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 372. 26. Castoriadis, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, 103. 27. Castoriadis, 1997 ‘Done and to be Done’, The Castoriadis Reader, 369. 28. Castoriadis, 1991 ‘The Social-Historical: Mode of Being, Problems of Knowledge’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 37. 29. Mouzakitis, 2014, ‘Creation Ex-Nihilo’, Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, 54–56. Mouzakitis has elsewhere shown that Castoriadis perhaps misrepresents the radical connotations of Christian theological understandings of creation, which also contain images of human ‘co-creators’. See Angelos Mouzakitis, 2008, Meaning, Historicity and the Social: A critical approach to the works of Heidegger, Gadamer and Castoriadis (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken). In my view, Castoriadis intended to de-theologise the concept of creation ex-nihilo in order tie his understanding of autonomous subjectivity with his radical conceptualisation of democratic politics; this relation will be explored in the following two chapters. It should be noted that this conception of creation ex-nihilo becomes the framework for his dichotomy between autonomous and heteronomous modes of institution. 30. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 221. 31. For an in-depth discussion on the ‘principle’ of ontological determination and the role it plays in the Western philosophical tradition, including the intervention that Castoriadis makes with his conception of ‘creation’, see Vincent Descombes, 1991, ‘The Principle of Determination’, Thesis Eleven, no. 29 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA). 32. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 3. 33. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, 94. It is worth pointing out that the self-originary basis of ontological closure should be understood

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in the context of its pour-soi characteristic, as detailed in the previous chapter. Castoriadis regards this characteristic as a defining feature of the social-historical region of anthropic being. 34. Fabio Ciaramelli, 1997, ‘The Self-Presupposition of the Origin: Homage to Cornelius Castoriadis’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 49, iss. 1 (Sage, Thousand Oaks. CA), 63. Ciaramelli succinctly demonstrates the radical ontological pre-supposition of self-creation: ‘this faculty of giving rising originally from itself to original determinations that henceforth are going to be determinations of the self – without, however, congealing this self in identitary closure – this inaugural appearance of a faculty of making itself be in and through its own alteration constitutes the very advent of Being, its radical orginatio, the primordial source of Time; and it is this same faculty that human creation prolongs as the drive to give meaning to the self-alteration of Being’ (Ciaramelli, ‘The Self-Presupposition of the Origin’, 53). 35. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 4. 36. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 4. 37. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 117. 38. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 4–5. 39. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 6. The term ‘special ontology’ is not a clumsy translation, it is how Castoriadis phrases the term. It refers to the ontological status of the ‘magma’ of significations, in the sense that it is an ontology that ‘specifies’ the institutional form of social-historical eidos. There are a variety of terms that Castoriadis uses in order to express this idea, see ‘primal institution’ (Cornelius Castoriadis, 2007, ‘Primal Institution of Society and Second-Order Institutions’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), the ‘self-image’ of a society (Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’), ‘radical instituting imaginary’ (Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’,). 40. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 209–10. 41. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 147. 42. Mats Rosengren, 2007, ‘Radical Imagination and Symbolic Pregnance: A Castoriadis Cassirer Connection, in Embodiment in Cognition and Culture, John Michael Krois, Mats Rosengren, and Angela Steidele (eds.) (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, Holland), 269. 43. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 205–6. 44. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 206. 45. Mats Rosengren, 2008, ‘The Magma of Imaginary Politics: 8 Theses’, in Politics of Magma, Art Monitor, no. 5, special iss, 46. 46. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 147. 47. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 3. 48. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 149. 49. Stathis Gourgouris, 2013, Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham University Press, New York), 102. 50. Castoriadis provides a more formal definition of ‘magma’, which reflects the origin of the idea as based on mathematical set theory: ‘A magma is that from which one can extract (or in which one can construct) an indefinite number of ensemblist

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organizations but which can never be reconstituted (ideally) by a (finite or infinite) ensemblist composition of these organizations’ (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 342). I do not have enough space to directly pursue the depth of this conception here, except to say that this concept was used by Castoriadis to express the idea that human creation is always ontologically indeterminate (even though the institution itself is always presented as determined) because it is formed through an irreducible heterogeneity, which incorporates the poly-regionality that was outlined in the previous chapter. It is the latter point that also indicates that this conception of ontology is also not anthropocentric. I will note that, at the level of signification, Castoriadis distinguishes this dual ontology between ‘secondary significations’ that serve the function of the ensidic dimension, and ‘primal significations’ that orient the magmatic dimension. 51. I have addressed the relation between this over-arching horizon and anthropogenesis in a paper that draws a parallel to Castoriadis’s reinterpretation of Plato’s notion of chora. See Sean McMorrow, 2012, ‘Concealed Chora in the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis: A Bastard Comment on Trans-Regional Creation’, Cosmos and History: Journal of Natural ad Social Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 2 (Open Humanities Press, London). 52. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Imaginary Significations’, A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York), 63. 53. Suzi Adams, 2011, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (Fordham University Press, New York), 209. 54. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 121. 55. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 147; Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, xxv–vi. 56. I have explored this aspect of Castoriadis’s ontology in relation to the notion of a self-altering chora. See McMorrow, ‘Concealed Chora in the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis’. 57. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. The fact that the image of the world and society are inextricably bound together is conveyed by the French expression lier ensemble. To place this concept into the context of my argument: this tying together (lier ensemble) constitutes an eidos as a social sphere, as it is created by the social imaginary, and is the point from which anthropic self-definition becomes an instituting mode of society. This ‘tying together’ explains how society is created (non-consciously) as the self-originary form of anthropogenesis. I will use the term lier ensemble as a noun from herein, because it succinctly represents this complex interrelation between the ‘world image’ and the ‘self-image’ of society. 58. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. 59. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. 60. Johann P. Arnason, 2013, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Meaning of Civilizations’, in Corporeity and Affectivity: Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karel Novotny, Pierre Rodrigo, Jenny Slatman, and Silvia Stoller (eds.) (Brill, Leiden, Holland), 294 61. Arnason, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Meaning of Civilizations’, 294.

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62. See Johann P. Arnason, 1989, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, Thesis Eleven, no. 22 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA). 63. This distinction should be seen as a contribution to ongoing historiographical debates that focus on a comparative analysis between ancient Greek and modern (Western) forms of politics; important interlocutors for Castoriadis in this instance are Moses I. Finley (1973, Democracy: Ancient and Modern [Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ]) and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1995, Politics: Ancient and Modern [Polity Press, Cambridge, UK]). 64. Castoriadis, ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, 340. 65. Castoriadis, ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, 341. 66. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. 67. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 213. 68. Castoriadis, ‘The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy’, 149. 69. Castoriadis, ‘Culture in a Democratic Society’, 341. 70. Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism, 92. 71. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. 72. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 7. 73. Castoriadis, ‘The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy’, 145. 74. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 213. 75. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 213. 76. Arnason, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, 27. 77. Castoriadis seemed to portray a distaste for the hermeneutical tradition, going so far as to say that it threatens to become a substitute for original thinking, which could explain one of the motivations that would lead him to privilege the radical capacities of the imagination to create new social forms. Arnason makes it clear that Castoriadis’s philosophy of social institution is, in fact, amenable to being developed along hermeneutic-phenomenological lines. This can be achieved by reconceptualising the theoretical implications of ‘meaning creation’, starting from the two basic proto-institutions that have been developed by Castoriadis: legein (i.e., language) and teukhein (social-doing). See: Castoriadis 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, chapter 5. Arnason bases his conception of an ‘open’ world horizon on Castoriadis’s re-articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s work on language (see Castoriadis, 1984, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, Crossroads in the Labyrinth), which was clearly expressed by Castoriadis’s in the final chapter of The Imaginary Institution of Society: the proto-institution of language opens up ‘the continuous emergence of linguistic signifieds other than those already recorded’ (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 345; see Arnason, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, 39). The proto-institution of social-doing, instead, refers to the dimension of praxis. This aspect looks at how various techniques of social doing bring form to the world and emphasises the temporal dimension of institutions through the social practices that give them shape. This idea was only briefly explored by Castoriadis in the early 1970s (see Suzi Adams, 2013, ‘Castoriadis, Arnason and the Phenomenological Question of the World’, Creation, Rationality and Autonomy). However, Castoriadis did not develop the epistemological aspects of social-doing and instead sidelined these

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concerns throughout the trajectory of his work by emphasising creation ex-nihilo as the capacity to rupture ontological form. 78. Arnason, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, 27. 79. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 364. 80. Arnason, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, 40. 81. Adams highlights the implications of Arnason’s intellectual shift to decentre Castoriadis’s socio-centric ontology: ‘the re-centring of ‘the world’ at the level of culture, that is to say, the trans-subjective field – that is, the social level of reality beyond the intersubjective domain – brings in the world as transcencus, to draw on Jan Patočka, that goes beyond the radical immanence of Castoriadis’ (Adams, ‘Castoriadis, Arnason and the Phenomenological Question of the World’, 80). 82. This aligns with the notion of decentred anthropology, which Adams proposes is a central aspect of Arnason’s civilisational theory: ‘Arnason elaborates the “world” as part of a decentred anthropology where anthropos is not only a “self-interpreting” animal, as per Charles Taylor, but also “world interpreting’’’ (Adams, ‘Castoriadis, Arnason and the Phenomenological Question of the World’, 79). 83. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371. 84. I began developing this approach to Castoriadis’s work on self-altering creation by pairing it with a seemingly implicit notion of chora, which is radically re-interpreted within Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary, but is barely, and only ever briefly, discussed by Castoriadis (See McMorrow, ‘Concealed Chora in the Thought of Cornelius Castoriadis’). 85. See Arnason, ‘Institution’, Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, 101. 86. The influence of Merleau-Ponty on Castoriadis is evident in two seminal essays that shape the development of his philosophical consideration of ontology. The first essay, Sayable and the Unsayable, is marked by a linguistic turn in Castoriadis’s thinking (important for the formulation of Castoriadis’s conception of legein in The Imaginary Institution of Society), however the second essay, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, Thesis Eleven, no. 36, issue 1 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA) has been said (with some controversy) to reflect a more guarded hermeneutical turn that I will explore in the remainder of this chapter. See also Suzi Adams, 2013, ‘After Merleau-Ponty: Castoriadis, Living Being, World’, in Corporeity and Affectivity: Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karel Novotny, Pierre Rodrigo, Jenny Slatman, and Silvia Stoller (eds.) (Brill, Leiden, Holland). 87. Suzi Adams, 2012, ‘Castoriadis and the Non-Subjective Field: Social Doing, Instituting Society and Political Imaginaries’, Critical Horizons, vol. 13, iss. 1 (Taylor & Francis, Milton Park, UK), 36. Ref: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge, New York). Although Adams has fairly pointed to Heideggerian legacy of the world problematic in Merleau-Ponty’s work, I am more inclined to read his theoretical trajectory in line with Husserl. In the last finished essay before his death (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1964, ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL), Merleau-Ponty reflected on his indebtedness to Edmund Husserl as a benchmark for approaching the phenomenological question of being in the world. This phenomenological legacy has been made explicit by Dan Zahavi (Dan Zahavi,

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2002, Merleau-Ponty on Husserl: A Reappraisal, in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree [eds.] [Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland]), who views the central ideas within Merleau-Ponty’s work as a continuity and development of key ideas within Husserl’s later work. This legacy is particularly discernible on two accounts: the idea of ‘otherness’ considered through the reciprocal conditions of reversibility, as well as the notion of ‘incarnated subjectivity’ within the context of transcendental intersubjectivity. 88. Adams, ‘Castoriadis and the Non-Subjective Field’ 36. Adams has further pointed out that Castoriadis is aligned with post-Husserlian phenomenological thought, because following Merleau-Ponty, he is also engaged in a critique of ‘the idea of the transcendental subject of knowledge’ (Suzi Adams, 2008, ‘Castoriadis’ Long Journey Through Nomos: Institution, Creation, Interpretation’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, no. 70 [Brill, Leiden, Holland], 280). Despite this obvious phenomenological lineage, Arnason has commented that Castoriadis was ‘consistently dismissive about Husserl, whose transcendental phenomenology he saw as a prime example of the “egological” illusion’ (Johann P. Arnason, 2007, ‘The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s Critique and Recovery of Metaphysics’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 90 [Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA], 23). 89. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2010, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the College de France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL). According to Merleau-Ponty, the natural world, or ‘the ‘natural thing’ appears to us only in a culture’ (Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 133). This is important to point for Castoriadis’s understanding of the ‘first natural stratum’ and its social-historical representation. 90. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 133. 91. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 133. 92. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 133. 93. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 134. 94. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 134. 95. Castoriadis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, 35. 96. Castoriadis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, 35. 97. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 6. 98. Castoriadis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, 4. 99. Castoriadis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, 35. 100. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 136. 101. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1973, Adventures of the Dialectic (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL), 17. 102. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 8. 103. Arnason, ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’, 27. 104. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371. 105. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 201. 106. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371

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The Social Imaginary, Power and Historicity

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Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary was introduced in the previous chapter as the self-instituting force of societies that arises in tension with the social world as it is collectively instituted. In this chapter, I will address how Castoriadis conceptualises the social imaginary in such a way that the aforementioned institutional tension is translated into a reflexive mode of historicity. From the perspective of Castoriadis’s social theory, this is understood to operate as a temporal dynamic in all societies. At its most basic level, the social imaginary is viewed as the collective ‘self-deployment’ of societies across time, which is a conceptualisation of historicity that leads to an innovative understanding of power and the political dimension of social-historical institution.1 Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary has remained a largely ambiguous notion, even though it supports the crux of his reflection on the institution of social-historical worlds. Arnason has suggested that this ambiguity originates from the fact that Castoriadis did not extensively develop the sociocultural implications of the social imaginary, that he tended instead to foreground two poles relating to its constitution, namely, psychoanalytic considerations of an individual’s creative imagination and the collective significations structuring institutions.2 This suggestion from Arnason points to an argument raised in the previous two chapters: that Castoriadis placed more emphasis on the radical creativity of the social imaginary to institute new forms than on the political implications of cultural self-alteration, the latter of which, I propose, offers his greatest insights. In what follows, I will develop this latter perspective to argue that the ambiguity surrounding Castoriadis’s conceptualisation of the social imaginary ultimately arises due to an inconsistent theorisation of this concept. It will be shown that throughout his work Castoriadis offers differing accounts of the radical creativity of the social 109

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imaginary. This chapter will propose that this remains an unresolved issue within Castoriadis’s work on social-historical institution that leads him to theorise historicity as a disproportionately dichotomous tension between society as instituting and society as instituted. I will argue that this issue can be resolved by articulating the regulative role that political power plays in the historicity of societies. It should firstly be made clear that as Castoriadis developed his conception of the social imaginary, it increasingly became understood as a manifestation of the tension between the appearance of an instituted society with the underlying presence of an instituting society. This institutional tension will be shown to be a fundamental feature of the historicity, which, according to Castoriadis, defines human societies. One of the most significant implications of this tension is the emergence of the political dimension as a field of power that serves to regulate this tension. In fact, Castoriadis views this field of power as a constitutive feature of the social imaginary, arguing that ‘we must therefore recognise that there is, in human collectivities, a power of creation, a vis formandi, which I call the instituting social imaginary’.3 The theme of this institutional tension first appeared in Castoriadis’s work in The Imaginary Institution of Society, and it will be argued in the first half of this chapter that throughout his later work he struggled to develop this theme alongside his schema of the social imaginary. It will be shown that he had a tendency to downplay the role of the symbolic field when taking into account the creative aspects of historicity. I will counter this tendency by placing emphasis on how the social imaginary maintains an open-ended world horizon, which, I proposed in the previous chapter, is important to view historicity as an orientation towards ontological openness; this point is important with respect to discussing Castoriadis’s theorisation of autonomy in the following chapter. As I have also shown in the previous chapter, Castoriadis tended to ontologise historicity, unwittingly echoing the errors of Marxist historicity that he so deliberately and painstakingly attempted to overcome. Ultimately, it will be shown that his tendency to ontologise was a result of an insistence to uphold a distinct dichotomy between autonomous and heteronomous modes of historicity. This chapter also put forward an important critical argument: that by collapsing the strict sense of dichotomy in Castoriadis’s social theory it is possible to understand historicity in a much more creative sense, and one that does not merely emphasise the radical potential of the imagination but also understands the creative power of institutions, as a power that regulates the instituting capacities inherent to the heterogenous cultural articulations of the social imaginary. This provides a deeper analytical conception of power, which not only accounts for the fact that differing social imaginary articulations attempt to alter established institutional form but also for the way that

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established institutions are maintained through instituting power. This chapter will therefore also propose a secondary critical argument: that the regulation of power through the social imaginary is at the basis of the political dimension of societies. The second half of this chapter will tie together two essential distinctions that frame Castoriadis’s understanding of the political dimension of society: (1) the transmission between infra-power (i.e., ground power) and explicit power as an underlying process that constitutes the political dimension, and (2) the conceptual distinction between the political dimension (le politique) and the activity of politics (la politique), which leads to a specific conceptualisation of autonomy. I will examine how political power takes shape through the social imaginary by proposing that the sociocultural implications that remain undertheorised in Castoriadis’s work can be taken into account through developing the role that implicit power plays in his theoretical schema of historicity, even if Castoriadis himself did not explore it fully. It will be shown that this is what frames specific social-historical modes of institution (i.e., regimes of historicity) and how historicity is regulated through the political dimension of societies. The fundamental link between the open-ended world horizon, the institutional tension of historicity and the political dimension of society exposed by Castoriadis’s work offers insights that open new avenues to rethink the political dimension of societies, as an immanent mediation between the ontological fertility of social creativity and the historically instituted forces of power. THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY: HISTORICITY AND ITS INSTITUTIONAL TENSION

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Together, instituted society and instituting society constitute a tension that is arguably the most fundamental motif in Castoriadis’s work.4 What has remained largely unexplored so far in the scholarship on his work is how this tension has been conceptualised as the basis for a number of key distinctions in his analysis of the political dimension of historicity. An exception to this can be found in the work of Mouzakitis, who justifiably points out that this tension ‘seems to have introduced an irreconcilable dualism at the very heart of sociohistorical processes’, on which Castoriadis bases his schematic model for theorising historicity.5 This tension is not to be thought on the basis of divisible ‘forces’ of society (i.e., base versus superstructure, in Marx’s terms), neither is this tension a mediation between ‘society’ and ‘individuals’ (i.e., legitimate authority versus social actors, in Weber’s perspective). Rather, this tension of social-historical institution is contained within the social imaginary, which is a trans-subjective mode of being that encompasses the individuals who, collectively, constitute themselves as the flesh of the social institution.6

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The social imaginary ‘brings itself into being as a mode of being’, a mode of historicity that is a manifestation of this institutional tension, it brings society into being through an instituted temporal mode of self-alteration.7 The idea of the social imaginary remains highly ambiguous in Castoriadis’s writing due to the fact that he expresses this institutional tension in different ways over the span of his entire work. Not only does the social imaginary account for the emergence of social-historical novelty, it also accounts for a mode of self-alteration that provides the temporal orientation of institutional cohesion, as well as reinforcing the imperative of institutional closure. This institutional tension is therefore contextualised within a social imaginary that harbours both radical social conflict and complicit relationships between heterogenous cultural articulations of the social imaginary. Ultimately, this tension reflects processes of historical continuity and discontinuity, and therefore what is at issue is really the political context of historicity. From this perspective, we can begin to envisage how Castoriadis increasingly came to understand social imaginaries as a source of power that shapes institutions according to particular cultural articulations; the meaning through which institutions are shaped is therefore contestable and subject to hierarchical organisation, leading to differing capacities for certain cultural articulations to more or less participate in social-historical alteration. Here it is important to elaborate on Mouzakitis’s observation concerning the ‘irreconcilable dualisms’ to emphasise how the tension between instituting and instituted society is central to his theoretical work. Castoriadis emphasises a number of key dualisms – determinacy/indeterminacy, primordial power/explicit power, political/politics, heteronomy/autonomy – in order to establish his theory of historicity as a series of dichotomies that elucidate the social imaginary as the foundation of a society’s mode of historicity.8 In this section, it will be shown that the social imaginary is an umbrella concept that Castoriadis used to schematise these dichotomies in such a way that he could construct his understanding of the political as the basis for a theoretical account of historicity. In general terms, as highlighted in the first chapter, the social imaginary can be understood as having its source in the radical imagination (with its incessant flux of representations, affects and desires/intentions), it emerges as a radical capacity for collective self-institution.9 The social imaginary is an ‘open stream of the anonymous collective’; it is the collective articulation of social-historical eidos, shaped through the articulation of collective representations, affects and intentions that form the social institution.10 In other words, the social imaginary ties together significations into a wholistic expression of the world, which, in turn, serves to institute societies. It involves an ongoing collective articulation of the symbolic, affective and temporal experiences of

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social-historical existence. In an early formulation of the social imaginary, Castoriadis placed central importance on its symbolic dimension: ‘the imaginary has to use the symbolic not only to “express” itself (this is self-evident), but to “exist”, to pass from the virtual to anything more than this’.11 However, as outlined in the previous chapter, the symbolic dimension of the social imaginary is open-ended and draws from radically heterogenous articulations that exceed established determinations. So, it can therefore be said, that the social imaginary is only ever constrained by instituted forms of meaning and never limited by the latter. The symbolic dimension is both ‘constitutive of’ and a ‘resource for’ the creative tension of the social imaginary: the creative capacities of the social imaginary constitute an anthropological horizon of the ‘world’, which is in itself situated in the institutional formation of established meaning (i.e., ‘society’). This horizon is open-ended and consistently articulates the world in such a way as to bring into being radically new formations of social-historical meaning. In this sense, the social imaginary is indistinguishable from the symbolic dimension of a specific social-historical context, and yet it should be made distinct from the institution of society, as Castoriadis maintains: ‘institutions cannot be reduced to the symbolic but they can exist only in the symbolic; they are impossible outside of a second-order symbolism’, the latter of which requiring a level of specificity that serves to articulate the open-ended context of significations.12 In relation to the social institution, the social imaginary is therefore responsible for the ‘emergence of other types, other relations, other norms’ that bring new significations into the fold of society.13 Castoriadis sets the anthropological horizon at a distance from the institution of society. What is significant about the social imaginary is that, despite Castoriadis’s claim to the contrary, it in fact serves a functional role, that of tying together the social institution with its broader world horizon. The innovative feature of Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary, however, is that its role is not to embody the symbolism of institutions but to account for the collective ‘choice’ of the symbolism that shapes a given society: ‘it is only relative to these significations that we can understand the “choice” of symbolism made by every society, and in particular the choice of its institutional symbolism’.14 In Castoriadis’s social theory, this collective ‘choice’ accounts for a primal level of institution, whereby the social imaginary creates society ‘afresh in each instance’, by drawing on its symbolic foundations.15 The social imaginary configures the ‘choice’ of significations that constitute the social institution on the basis of its second-order symbolism; this corresponds directly with what has been discussed in the previous chapter as the formation of a self-image of society.16 The self-image of society, crystallised in instituted form, is defined by the social imaginary through a complex relation of significations that must always be articulated alongside

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a perpetually open world-image; the social imaginary therefore serves to tie together (lier ensemble) their relation. The social imaginary opens up a reflexive space to negotiate how societies are specifically instituted without interrupting the homogeneity of the world, this space situates ‘society’ as that which is instituted and brought into existence in accordance with a more general anthropic self-definition that must take its world-image into account; in the following section of the chapter, it will be shown that this relation is established politically, through the institution of laws and norms that regulate the self-instituting power of the collective. The concept of the social imaginary was first posited by Castoriadis in the latter period of his political militancy within the group Socialisme Ou Barbarie. At the time, its formulation was tied up with his desire to revise Marx’s historicism, while maintaining a vision of political praxis that left the door open for the possibility to actively engage with processes of social transformation. The notion of a radically self-altering social imaginary came to be developed as an attempt to theorise an inherent freedom in human creation that – as outlined in the previous chapters – would overcome the impasse of Marx’s historical teleology. Initially, this led Castoriadis to envisage the radical instituting capacity of human societies as a force lurking in the shadows, waiting to be harnessed by the social imaginary, which would then rupture and engulf instituted society, replacing it with yet another form of social institution (eidos). It is not difficult to perceive the persistence of a Marxian conceptual framework within these shadows, as there is without doubt a notion of revolutionary change in Castoriadis’s understanding of the instituting society ‘that bursts onto the stage and pulls up its sleeve to get to work’.17 An idea that distinguishes between everyday life, as a reproduction of the same, from the extraordinary modes of social activity typified by revolutionary periods. This early formulation encompasses a highly dichotomised interplay between instituting and instituted moments of society: ‘once this institution is set in place, the social as instituting slips away, puts itself at a distance, is already somewhere else’.18 At this stage, the social imaginary itself is also conceived in distinctly dichotomous terms, which mirror these institutional moments. On one side, there is an actual imaginary that corresponds to society in its instituted and rationalised form, and then on the other side, there is the radical imaginary, which is understood as an indeterminate instituting force within which the instituted ‘dwells’.19 The Imaginary Institution of Society marked Castoriadis’s turn toward defining the social imaginary as a perpetual flux of ontogenesis that propels the historicity of a society. Castoriadis reconfigured the dichotomous relation from his initial formulation as an ebb and flow between two institutional imaginary moments – that is, actual imaginary and radical imaginary – towards a more synthesised version of the social imaginary

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that incorporates the institutional tension. The dichotomy, far from being dissolved, is in fact intensified and presented as what defines, outright, the mode of social-historical being. The institutional tension therefore translates directly into the historicity of a society. However, the major problem with this conception – and one that I will attempt to overcome – is the fact that Castoriadis downplays the inner logic of the symbolic field that characterises the instituted aspect of this tension, even though it is crucial to analysing the implicit role of the political dimension of society. In doing so, Castoriadis fundamentally neglects the role of instituted meaning as a source of historical novelty, which was seen in the previous chapter to be a repercussion of his insistence on the radically creative aspects of social creation (i.e., creation ex nihilo). Instead, the role of instituted society is marginalised and reduced to one particular institutional dynamic: a mode of historicity defined in terms of its reproduction of the past – in other words, it is considered essentially heteronomous. Heteronomy is, ultimately, understood as an institutional dynamic whose temporality revolves around a self-referential mode of historicity: heteronomy is embodied and materialised in the ‘concrete institution of society, incorporated in its conflictual division, carried and mediated by its entire organisation’, which is interminably reproduced in and through the social imaginary.20 Rather than focus on the role of social reproduction as an institutional resource for the innovative capacity of social-historical creation, Castoriadis was more concerned with the radical instituting aspects of the institutional dynamic and with a potential capacity to establish a politics of autonomous self-institution. In general terms, society therefore came to be seen by Castoriadis as Janus-faced: instituting society entails an ongoing relation with itself as instituted society. This is why the social imaginary remains such an ambiguous concept. Even though the underlying dichotomy remained a consistent feature of Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity, his conception of the social imaginary nevertheless established a significant theoretical breakthrough. It allowed him to pursue a philosophical reflection on the underlying tension that constitutes reflexive modes of historicity. Historicity, as a mode of social imaginary institution, must be understood as a radically creative temporality that rests upon a historical heritage, yet, is not defined by it. Castoriadis crystallises this breakthrough in one concise sentence: ‘as instituting as well as instituted, society is intrinsically history – namely, self-alteration’.21 The breakthrough can be envisaged in the sense that the dichotomy can be relativised within a temporal logic of self-alteration, it is not necessary to uphold a distinction between instituted and instituting moments, rather, societies are perpetually instituting in their very temporality: ‘even as instituted, society can exist only as perpetual self-alteration’.22 This perspective can be seen as an underlying aspect of the main argument in The Imaginary Institution of

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Society, which proposes historicity to be a conscious relationship to instituted society that opens up the capacity of its instituting dimension as a political project of society. Castoriadis developed the idea of a self-altering historicity in order to draw out the political dimension of human autonomy and this precisely constitutes the basis of his project for an autonomous society. A proper exploration of how he conceptualises autonomous societies will be the subject of the following chapter. For the moment, it is worth noting that Castoriadis proposes a deeply fundamental understanding of autonomy that rests on the following premise: historicity is an autonomous temporal creativity that is fundamental to all human societies. It is his view that such a fundamental autonomy has been denied by forms of societies based on tradition and religion, indeed going so far to say that this denial has been constitutive of a heteronomous mode of institution that ‘almost always’ and ‘almost everywhere’ has been the dominant mode.23 Here, again, the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy is erected, and this time not on institutional grounds but in the constitution of the social imaginary itself. In my view, the social imaginary was conceived by Castoriadis in order to account for the problem that all human societies face: how to regulate their constant self-alteration; I will return to this point at the end of the chapter. A significant insight provided by Castoriadis is that the capacity to regulate historicity is only possible if a society is engaged in a mode of reflexive self-institution. It is the idea of a reflexive mode of historicity that constitutes the most promising line of thought within Castoriadis’s work. This idea is, however, at odds with his more direct social criticism where he consistently foregrounds the tension between dichotomous modes of historicity: heteronomy always threatening to annihilate the historical creativity of autonomous institution. It can be readily presumed that recourse to this dichotomous tension allowed Castoriadis to push the radical democratic vision of his autonomous project, which, as I have proposed in the first chapter, is derived from his sustained attachment to the revolutionary element that inspired Marx’s work. It becomes clear that, as Castoriadis proceeded to develop this line of thought, his insights into social-historical self-alteration became increasingly limited by a repeated insistence on the dichotomous modes of historicity that stand at the basis of his social criticism. If one breaks out of this strict dichotomy, it is, however, possible to advance Castoriadis’s notion of self-alteration as a significant vision of human autonomy; this idea will be pursued in the following chapter. The implication of relativising this dichotomy is that the contingency underlying institutional modes can begin to be understood on the basis of a symbolic reflexivity (i.e., hermeneutic-interpretive creativity) that defines historicity as a mode of self-altering regulation, which means that it is political by virtue of being poietic rather than being derived from an

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established ontological dynamic, as Castoriadis himself argued. Following this more promising line in Castoriadis’s thought, the social imaginary can be conceived as a manifestation of institutional tension, as the general collective activity that shapes social-historical eidos, and this, in turn, brings into being a world in which society ‘inscribes itself and gives itself a place’.24 I must point out that the social imaginary is not merely topographical – that is, reduced to an inscription of place – it surges forth as temporal ontogenesis. It is from this perspective that the ‘always already established’ eidos must be viewed as the symbolic ground of a reflexive dynamic that has the social institution poised as ‘having-to-be’ (à-être) what it understands itself to be, a dynamic that propels the perpetually instituting mode of historicity. What is most significant in the ontological turn made by Castoriadis in The Imaginary Institution of Society is the fact that the instituting capacity of the social imaginary is understood to surge forth ‘in a relation of reception/ alteration with what had already been instituted’.25 In my view, this is one of the more concise descriptions of historicity that exists in Castoriadis’s work. The radical ontogenesis that is theorised at the heart of his anthropology comes to be considered as a reflexive capacity to shape or create particular social-historical determinations. Society itself is seen as a universalised reflection of instituted ontological determinations, a self-image that is instituted in the form of a totalising eidos. Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary is significant because, given the temporal flux of historicity, its self-image can only be projected via an instituting imaginary, which means that even though the social imaginary constitutes an open anthropological horizon it also serves the function of presenting the institution of society as a homogenous, albeit anonymous, ‘whole’.26 Society is therefore only grasped as a projection of its own self-image, the manifestation of which is precisely the social imaginary sphere itself. The homogenising self-image that is manifest through the social imaginary emerges as a world that is proper to the individuals that are encompassed by it: ‘the creation of instituting society, as instituted society, is each time a common world – kosmos koinos’.27 Kosmos Koinos, the ‘common social world’, stands as the experience of existing within the established form of social-historical institutions; it is an identification of the eidetic edifice that constitutes society as a self-originary ‘network of meaning’ through which a person relates to the world and understands themselves as anthropos. Castoriadis must therefore outline a distinction between kosmos koinos as an autonomous anthropic region and the broader natural world, from which it emerges. Anthropos, according to Castoriadis, is a radical self-originary creation that is set within the broader enigma of the natural world. This is to say that while anthropos is an extension of natural regions (i.e., physical and biological) its institution is not derived from these regions, precisely because it constitutes itself on

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the basis of a social-historical meaning that is self-originary. However, as argued in the previous chapter, this view presents differing societies as specific social-historical worlds that are closed within their own determinations. Castoriadis has a tougher time distinguishing between the common social world specific to societies and the broader anthropological world within which they are made distinct; it will be shown in the following section that this is precisely what opens up the properly political dimension of historicity that his ontological framework ends up neglecting. By following the alternate line of Castoriadis’s thought relating to the self-altering capacity of the social imaginary it is possible to theorise the open relations between these specific social-historical horizons. This perspective views the crosscurrents of specific social imaginaries as always taking place in the scheme of a broader anthropological world horizon. Such a suggestion invites a relational dimension to the articulation of signification that is not explicitly present in Castoriadis’s work and which rests on an enigmatic engagement with otherness. The relation between the social imaginary of specific societies and what is ‘other’ to it is experienced as an enigma because such otherness is always in excess of the social-historical meaning that defines a specific self-image. What the broader anthropological world horizon presupposes is that history is nothing other than an ‘inexhaustible supply of otherness’ experienced by a reflexive alteration of the common social world. But, most importantly, what this enigmatic quality tells us about the formation of a society’s self-image is that the latter is constituted politically and is therefore framed within a field of instituting power. After all, in Castoriadis’s own terms, because it is situated in the world, the self-image of society ‘is always also something else and more than what it is (posited as being [étant])’.28 This is the basis of the self-reflexive mode of historicity. Self-reflexivity is a feature of the collective level of society that sets its own social-historical mode of being at a distance from itself by virtue of its social imaginary creativity, which becomes the basis of instituting power.29 It is this social imaginary openness – and the incessant need for social-historical experience ‘to be’ meaningful – that propels the temporal mode of historicity in new directions. What is most enigmatic about creativity as an ‘inexhaustible supply of otherness’ is that this ‘otherness’ relates to a mode of instituting power that regulates what is incorporated into the self-image that shapes institutions. This, for Castoriadis, is presupposed in his principle of meta-contingency, which characterises historicity as a social-historical mode of institution that engenders its own mode of ‘perpetual self-alteration’.30 The temporal implications of a mode of historicity that is simultaneously the source of its own self-origin, as the movement of its own self-alteration, is that the social imaginary exists as ‘having-tobe’ (à-être) always already instituted.31 Historicity is therefore understood

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by Castoriadis as the instituting temporality of the social imaginary, whose mode of perpetual self-definition is contingent upon its own self-image. This conception of the ‘social imaginary’ is unique to Castoriadis’s philosophical system and, as I want to argue, it should be considered as an attempt to reveal the political dimension of historicity. Castoriadis’s theoretical approach to the institutional tension shifted further throughout his later years, as he began to contextualise instituted society more thoroughly as a specific manifestation of the instituting mode of the social imaginary. The institutional tension came to be viewed on the basis of ‘the work of the radical imaginary as instituting, which brings itself into being as instituted society and as a given, and each time specified, social imaginary’.32 In a 1996 paper, title Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads, Castoriadis also maintains the distinction between instituting and instituted, and seemingly re-introduces his initial formulation of a dichotomous polarity between the instituting social imaginary and an instituted social imaginary: once created, both imaginary social significations and institutions crystallize, or solidify, and that is what I call the instituted social imaginary. It provides continuity within society, the reproduction and repetition of the same forms, which henceforth regulate people’s lives and persist as long as no gradual historical change or massive new creation occurs, modifying them or radically replacing them by others.33

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In this formulation, after expressing the ultimately creative nature of the imagination and imaginary institution, Castoriadis highlights the existence of a dichotomy at the social-historical level, which seems to value only novelty that is historically disruptive and affirms his theoretical position on the ontological closure of an eidos. He takes the view that social-historical creation is marked by the ‘pulsating processes’ of historical transformation and concedes that the instituting imaginary is only rarely a rapidly effective force; although an extremely important ‘phenomenon’. He therefore views social-historical creativity as ‘phases of dense, intense creation [that] alternate with lulls, sluggishness, or regression’.34 Castoriadis’s later theoretical developments increasingly came to view the ‘radical instituting’ capacity of the social imaginary as only rarely creating new eidetic forms. The instituting mode of self-alteration otherwise, indeed, serves to reproduce forms of instituted social meaning, the social imaginary being trapped within its ontological closure, which produces history through differing articulations of the same significations. This revision of the tension between the institution and the creative capacity of the social imaginary revived his original version of dichotomous historicity, which saw him set up two opposed institutional modes that I have discussed above: autonomy and heteronomy. It is unfortunate that an analysis

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of the dimension of power, which regulates what becomes historically effective in the social domain, remained as a result markedly absent in this portrayal. While Castoriadis’s theory opens up potential avenues to understand the political dimension of historicity, the political issue does not lie with the inability to create new significations, but rather with the openness of significations to be freely articulated. A theoretical analysis of historicity therefore requires coming face to face with the implicit power of the social imaginary, a question that will be examined in the following section. It is worth noting that within this later period Castoriadis offered conclusions that contrast with his earlier enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of the social imaginary. In fact, the further he explored the historicity of contemporary societies, the further he came to consider its instituting capacity in a more sober light. This would suggest that Castoriadis, instead, increasingly came to view the instituting capacity of the social imaginary as the primary force of social reproduction. POWER AND THE POLITICAL DIMENSION OF SOCIETY

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At this point, some key clarifications must be made regarding how Castoriadis theorises the political dimension of society. His theorisation of the political dimension can be revealed through the definition he gives of instituting power and its role in shaping social-historical institution. The definition of instituting power that he evokes insists on the centrality of historicity as an institutional tension between the established social-historical institution and articulations of the broader anthropological world horizon.35 An initial point of clarification to be made concerns the key definition of politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). As Gourgouris has pointed out, Castoriadis offers a definition of the political/politics that is contrary to conventional definitions and brings a completely new meaning to these terms.36 As will be shown, Castoriadis defines ‘the political’ as a relation to the power of instituted form (i.e., social-historical eidos) and ‘politics’ as a potential capacity to participate in the instituting power of the social imaginary. Given that, I have so far put forward the suggestion that Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary drew significant influence from Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘the advent of meaning’ (particularly in its later formulation within the schema of ‘the visible and the invisible’), I would add that this influence is nowhere more prominent than in Castoriadis’s definition between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’.37 Further still, if, as argued in the previous section, the social imaginary is the locus of historicity, then one must distinguish between its instituted form (‘the invisible’) and its radical capacity to bring power

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into focus as an instituting imaginary (‘the visible’). To put it another way, Castoriadis’s definition of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ intends to highlight the primal institutional tension of historicity in relation to the capacity for self-alteration. The first thing to be mentioned with regard to Castoriadis’s analysis of power is the fact that it is defined purely in reference to ‘social-historical’ power, which is to say that it is not a characteristic of ‘physical’ or ‘biological’ dimensions. While this point seems incredibly obvious, it is important to emphasise that social-historical power acquires its force from its historical characteristics. Social-historical power emerges from the preexisting symbolic field of the ‘always already’ instituted, which contextualises the domain of power within the realm of historical-ontological forms. It is important to point this out because Castoriadis defines power as a constitutive force. Power is not only the radical (i.e., ex nihilo) capacity of social-historical creation. Simultaneously it is also defined as formative capacity and one that is oriented towards a mode of institutional cohesion that contributes to its social reproduction. As has been argued in the previous chapter, Castoriadis’s ontological analysis most often neglects to develop the hermeneutical dimension of creation that provides an account of social reproduction, and this neglect is also consistent in his analysis of political power. I intend to emphasise, instead, the role of an implicit mode of power that helps to develop such an account, which remained outside of Castoriadis’s focus and will allow power to be understood more thoroughly as a constitutive feature of social cohesion and, more importantly still, as a regulative dimension of historicity. This constitutive role cannot be understood in a straightforward manner unless we examine the very precise definition of power given by Castoriadis in his essay ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’.38 The political/politics is manifest through two separable instances of instituting power; yet another incidence of theoretical dualism. It is important to outline these instances of instituting power so that it is possible to critically analyse the political dimension as a manifestation of institutional tension, and therefore making it clear that the instituting power of the social imaginary has its basis in the historically instituted eidos. All of the notions that Castoriadis uses to define power are present in the following:

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If we define power as the capacity for a personal or impersonal instance (Instanz) to bring someone to do (or to abstain from doing) that which, left to themselves, they would not necessarily have done (or would possibly have done), it is immediately obvious that the greatest conceivable power lies in the power of preforming someone in such a way that of their own accord, they do what one wants them to do, without any need for domination (Herrschaft) or of

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explicit power (Macht/Gewalt) to bring them to . . . (do or abstain from doing something).39

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The most immediate point to be made is that Castoriadis describes ‘preforming power’ as the greatest conceivable force of social-historical power.40 This ‘preforming power’ is precisely the power of the requisite socialisation that is wielded by social-historical institutions. The ‘preforming power’ of the institution is viewed as an invisible organisation of the social-historical world, which reflects instituted society as a mode of social reproduction of its ontological form. In this way, Castoriadis views power as ‘the social-historical field itself’, which is grounded by the instituting power of the social imaginary to produce individuals as ‘walking fragments’ of society.41 Power is seen as the vis formandi capacity of the social institution to give form to social-historical existence, but it is also, simultaneously, seen as a potentially creative temporality that constitutes an historical mode of institution that is alterable. The ‘preforming power’ of institutions can therefore be seen as an infra-power that a society ‘wields over the individuals’ that it produces.42 It is a power that Castoriadis comes to name the radical ground power of the social institution. The ground power of social institution reflects the imaginary institution of society, which is to say that it produces the instituted ontological form of society. It presents a ‘regularity and stability to phenomena’, so there is a degree of certainty that the ground will not open up under foot.43 This certainty rests on the fact that the institution of society is always historical – and, by extension, therefore also ontological – or ‘always already there’; and it is in this sense that the ground power of the institution represents instituted society. However, Castoriadis maintains that ‘instituted society never succeeds in wielding its ground-power in an absolute fashion’; there is also always an ontologically indeterminate opening that comes with the instituting temporality driving social-historical institution and that implicitly renders this ground as alterable.44 The radical ground power of society is, ultimately, a manifestation of the institutional tension at the heart of the social imaginary because it is caught up in the perpetual instituting modality, requiring that it be continually articulated – in either an affirmed or altered form – in the present. This tension between the affirmation and alteration of instituted form is precisely the point from which the political dimension is ultimately presented by Castoriadis as the arbitrary domain of historicity. Castoriadis identifies the manifestation of this tension as the central issue of social-historical power: this ground power ‘is carried out by the instituted society, but in the background stands the instituting society’.45 It is in this illustration of radical ground power that Castoriadis offers his most developed, yet still highly ambiguous, treatment of institutional tension.

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It is worth noting that in his essay, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Castoriadis seemingly harks back to his earlier dichotomous definition of the institutional tension of historicity, which reintroduces the notion of a radical instituting creativity that ruptures the ground power of ontological form. This, by proxy, positions ground power as a deradicalised mode of instituting power: ‘once this institution is set in place, the social [imaginary] as instituting slips away, puts itself at a distance, is already somewhere else’.46 However, Castoriadis also simultaneously theorises ground power as instituting power, which serves to introduce a paradoxical correlation to the idea that ground power provides society with its instituted form.47 This paradox is systematically avoided by Castoriadis, because if he were to delve into the implications of this paradox, it would become clear that his insistence on the stricter sense of dichotomy between modes of historicity (heteronomy and autonomy) would be considerably undermined at the level of any distinction between instituted/ instituting instances. In my view, it is imperative to consider the implications of this paradoxical correlation – which I consider to be characteristically implicit – in order to extend the profound theoretical elucidation of historicity that is offered by Castoriadis’s thought. These implications that Castoriadis himself seemingly avoided bring his thought face-to-face with the question of the ‘advent of meaning’, which can be further pursued on the basis of his conception of radical ground power: it is the historical force of society as instituted that is, in fact, its most powerful instituting force. This involves a temporal argument that highlights historicity as a mode of social reproduction, which Castoriadis outlines as follows: The present, to be sure, always transforms the past into a present past, that is, a past relevant for the now, if only by continually ‘reinterpreting’ it by means of that which is being created, thought, posited now; but it is always that given past, not a past in general, that the present shapes according to its own imaginary.48

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The ceaseless tension within the social imaginary therefore persists in the temporal modality of social-historical creation, as a mode of social reproduction that incessantly propels the historicity of societies. It is on the basis of this historicity that we can identify the paradoxical situation underlying Castoriadis’s definition of institutional ground power as a radical mode of instituting power: with the social-historical institution, there is ‘always, and to an unmeasurable degree, also recovery of the given’, and therefore the radical imaginary is always ‘burdened’ with historical inheritance.49 Castoriadis dichotomises the two differing modes of historicity based on how historical inheritance is cast into a specific representation (affect and intention) of institution. Autonomous modes of historicity are marked by the ability of societies to ‘call into question their institution, which is to say the law presiding over

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their existence’, while heteronomous modes of historicity tend to sacralise their instituted inheritance.50 In both cases, the ‘fundamental’ ground power of societies is defined as the instituting power of the social imaginary, in the sense that the social-historical field is subject to a collectively anonymous self-alteration of instituted historical limits and constraints. The apparently slippery and ungraspable feature of ground power reflects the fact that this collective anonymous power ‘is neither locatable nor formalisable’ in a static instituted form.51 This can be explained by the fact that the instituting power of the social imaginary is only partially ontologically formed; in this sense, the social imaginary capacity for self-alteration can be seen to reflect the intervention of a radical instituting imaginary that either reforms historical inheritance or institutes new forms that partially alter its inheritance. To reiterate a point made in the previous chapter: the creative capacity to alter historical inheritance is made possible due to the fact that institutional temporality is always ‘to-be’ (à-être), at both subjective and collective levels (a point that was raised in relation to the influence of Merleau-Ponty). The major parallel to be made between Merleau-Ponty’s idea of historicity as an imaginary ‘advent of meaning’ and Castoriadis’s formulation of the ‘the political’ is that they describe how necessary it is for a community to grapple with its historical inheritance. Both regard the articulation of this inheritance as the central dimension of historicity. Castoriadis, in particular, develops this notion of articulating historical inheritance in the form of a collective ‘self-image’ of the social-historical world, which would then operate as a mode of existence oriented towards its self-alteration. What is significant about Castoriadis’s development of the social imaginary as a mode of instituting power is that historical inheritance (the ‘advent of meaning’) is simply the basis of a fundamentally creative mode of historicity. The definition of instituting power as a creative capacity of the social imaginary, however, does not alone account for the political capacities of society. What constitutes the political dimension is the immersion of instituting power within the broader cultural life of a society that exceed the terms of its self-institution, Castoriadis makes this abundantly clear, remarking that ‘there cannot be a “political” institution that is not, from top to bottom, from its most superficial to its deepest level, linked to the mores, the Sitten, the whole anthropological, socio-psychical structure of the people living in that society’.52 In order to clearly identify the political dimension within the broader cultural horizon of a society, Castoriadis therefore makes an important distinction between radical ground power and its explicit forms. The creative temporality of social-historical institution means that no society can achieve total control of its institution (its instituted form). Even though this may be an obvious and banal point, the reason for this is because human subjectivity is lived in the sphere of ‘everyday life’, and social-historical existence is experienced

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culturally. However, it is also worth pointing out that the cultural dimension of power, which emerges at the collective level, is not the only creative relation that people have with their institutional contexts. It is also necessary to highlight that, at the subjective level, the radical imagination underlying socialised individuals surges forth in excess of instituted form, which means that praxis is essentially informed by institutional ground power. Castoriadis’s emphasis on the ground power of institutions situates a society’s mode of historicity firmly within the context of its political dimension. Historicity is based on the necessity of instituting laws that ground institutions and represent the forms of instituting power that shape a societal self-image. The political dimension must therefore be seen as the genesis of a capacity to regulate the cultural articulations that shape institutional form. It is also important to point out that this necessity of instituting laws is the basis upon which Castoriadis relates the ‘proper sense’ of politics to a society’s mode of historicity: ‘it is only in the social-historical domain that we encounter an eidos that puts into question its own law of existence’.53 The important point to maintain is that politics is not considered as a latent potential of social institution, rather, Castoriadis emphasises the conditions of a radically reflexive historicity, upon which politics is considered to embrace self-reflection, the ex-nihilo creation of society, and to open up a capacity for heterogenous cultural articulations to participate in the shaping of institutional form. This argument is central to Castoriadis’s political theory; it is also the core of his conception of political autonomy and its subsequent institutional context: democracy. This conception of autonomy and democracy will be the respective themes of the following two chapters. For the moment, it must be understood how Castoriadis’s theoretical view of the political dimension led him to theorise how instituting power constitutes a political regime of institution that defines a society’s mode of historicity. IMPLICIT POWER AND THE REFLEXIVE FOUNDATION OF POLITICS

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So far it has been established that Castoriadis understands the political dimension (le politique) of society to be an extension of a more fundamental social-historical power that underlies the institution of society. This fundamental level of power is conceptualised in terms of the radical ground power of social-historical institution. This underlying level of power is regarded to be the institution’s ‘power of formation’ (the vis formandi of the institution), which is the power to shape individuals in accordance with the collectively defined institutions of society. However, according to Castoriadis’s formulation, this radical ground power is not rendered political (le politique) until it

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is explicitly wielded. The characteristics of explicit power become a decisive aspect of Castoriadis’s theorisation of the political dimension. It is the distinction between radical ground power and explicit power that will therefore be the focus of this section, and further still, I will suggest that Castoriadis’s conception of instituting power could also benefit from developing the implications of an implicit power, of a ground power that is politicised and, yet, never assumes an explicit form.54 In order to make this claim, it is necessary to draw on Castoriadis’s notion of ‘politics’ as a questioning of the validity of significations. I will propose that the theme of implicit power could complement Castoriadis’s considerations of the political dimension and help to deepen an understanding of a political dimension that consists of competing cultural articulations that shape the instituting power that circumscribes a society’s particular regime of historicity. This argument supports Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos’s proposition that the idea of ‘receiving significance’ operates ‘implicitly’ in Castoriadis’s critique of contemporary modes of heteronomous subjectivity, whereas ‘receiving significance as part of the enacting of autonomy’ remains a blind spot in his work.55 Castoriadis argues that the political dimension of society takes shape in the way that its ground power is rendered explicit because ‘it will always be necessary to settle conflicts, or decide that a particular act has transgressed the law of society’, and due to this necessity, there will always be a need ‘to make decisions that affect every member of a society, as to what may or may not be done’.56 In other words, the political dimension emerges due to a necessity to create laws, which are instituted on the basis of three necessary functions serving to establish social-historical power as law: to judge, to legislate and to govern.57 It should be noted that even though these functions of explicit power are considered to be universal across societies, the way that these functions form an overarching eidos, which accounts for legislative and executive forms of power, are not necessarily explicit in every society. In Castoriadis’s view, legislative and executive forms of power can be masked by social imaginary significations that are imbued with such powers (i.e., gods, kingdoms, ancestors). This is what Castoriadis refers to as a heteronomous mode of institution, whereby a society posits the appearance of its instituted eidos in a way that gives form to significations that represent extra-social forms of legislative and executive power. This analysis of heteronomous institution is regarded by Castoriadis as typical of how religion renders implicit the mechanisms of instituting power, as opposed to an autonomous mode of institutional questioning where it is claimed that representations of power are not masked by extra-social significations but are, rather, viewed as the explicit self-instituting power of the political community.58 What Castoriadis succeeds in doing by presenting us with these three functions of instituting

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power (to judge, to legislate and to govern) is that he sets a clear definition of the political dimension (le politique) as the exercise of explicit power through ‘instances capable of formulating explicitly sanctionable injunctions’, which serve to regulate the social-historical field and maintain the stability of instituted forms of society.59 Politics (la politique) is viewed by Castoriadis as an activity that takes hold of these three functions of explicit power in order to establish a mode of interrogation that encompasses the entire institution of society (its eidos) as its subject. It is worth highlighting that Arnason interprets Castoriadis’s assessment of politics (la politique) as aimed towards establishing ‘a reflexive connection between the two levels of social-historical power’: the ground power of the institution and the ways in which it is rendered explicit.60 It is important to grasp how Castoriadis theorises the political dimension as a reflexive connection between these forms of power, because this reflexivity informs the historicity of a society and provides an explanation as to how the social imaginary of a community is able to harness its capacity to alter established institutions. Arnason accepts Castoriadis’s notion that explicit forms of power must necessarily take the form of laws, in that there is ‘always a need for specific institutions of explicit power with some authority to enforce rules and inflict sanctions’, and further to this, these forms of explicit power will always become ‘object[s] of negotiation, manoeuvre and rivalry’.61 Aside from the coercive characteristics of explicit power, Castoriadis also identifies a deeper social imaginary foundation to explicit power, one that is based on enforcing the ‘effective validity’ (Geltung) of the significations that underlie such a power, and which also relates to a ‘positive validity (in the sense of “positive law”) of the immense instituted edifice of society’.62 This is to say that the exercise of explicit power is derived from an affirmation of the broader selfimage of society within which institutions are embedded. It is in this sense that explicit power utilises the established form (eidos) of social-historical institution ‘to compel recognition and acceptance on the part of the psyche’ of those who are subject to it.63 Castoriadis identifies the basis of this form of power in stating that for explicit power to be effectively wielded, its power must be firmly rooted within an institutional ground power that is legitimated by ‘la communauté des fidèles’.64 What Castoriadis perhaps fails to sufficiently develop in this assertion is that there are two instances of instituting power that can derive its validity from la communauté des fidèles, in that the affirmation of instituting power – in both instances – must appeal to the matrices of ground power from which the political is drawn. Castoriadis recognises the political as explicit power and, yet, leaves undeveloped the politicised instances of an implicit instituting power of the social imaginary. This implicit power relates to the conscious utilisation of the social-historical institution’s radical ground power without resorting to the wielding of explicit power. By

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considering implicit instances of instituting power, we can acknowledge that another intervention in the ‘reception of significance’ is possible that does not rely on ‘explicitly sanctionable injunctions’. Such instances of implicit instituting power are evident in the ‘culture wars’ of contemporary ‘Western’ societies. Implicit power is a significant feature of how instituting power is wielded, both to reproduce institutions based on historical inheritance and to open up the capacity to alter the processes of social reproduction towards the ends of specific interests within a societies via rearticulation of the social imaginary field. In this sense, implicit power politicises the validity of particular significations, as well as the totalising context of social-historical institution, or eidos, more generally, without rendering such action explicit. If Castoriadis were to develop the implications of implicit power, then his theoretical conception of historicity would be deepened and reinforced, especially given that, within any mode of institution, implicit instituting power opens up the capacity for the questioning of institutional legitimacy in a way that is oriented towards processes of self-alteration. The political dimension is therefore seen to emerge from the reflexive connection between two levels of social-historical power: the ground power of institutions that are given legitimacy through processes of validation that lead to their emergence in explicit form – these processes will be discussed in the following chapter. On the one hand, political antagonism arises at the point when the validity of instituted radical ground power is questioned via differing social imaginary articulations. On the other hand, political confrontation can also arise in the way that ground power is either rendered explicit or implicitly politicised. Here, again, the Merleau-Pontian schema of the visible/invisible can be seen as influential to the conception of instituting power. Explicit power is rendered visible through the political dimension because it is draws instituted form into the light and, what is more, this form of power is reinforced implicitly by its validation within the broader symbolic field (eidos). It is in this sense that explicit power can be viewed as an extension of the ground power of the institution. This is a particularly important theorisation of the political dimension because it lends itself to a culturological approach to power, in the sense that the validation of institutions consists of the capacity for differing cultural articulations to participate in the shaping of such institutions. This is the point previously raised by Arnason, who rightly suggests that instituting power concerns how ‘the centres and mechanisms of explicit power are to be used to determine or change the instituted patterns of ground power’.65 Arnason highlights the point that remains undeveloped in Castoriadis’s work, one that proposes the social imaginary to be an instituting force that alters the reproduction of social conditions. What remains to be elucidated in Castoriadis’s work, is the ‘invisible’ side of explicit power,

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because Castoriadis himself does not provide an explanation of how the social imaginary, as an ‘advent of power’, politicises the symbolic field and sets into motion its formative instituting power. The point to be highlighted from this assessment of the social imaginary is that attempts to politicise the symbolic basis of institutions is what renders power explicit and that attempts to question the explicit power of established institutional forms are implicitly regulated by dominant modes of instituting power. An exploration of the social imaginary as an ‘advent of power’ would open up avenues to explore the regulative role of an implicit power, which deploys the latent potential of self-alteration from which explicit power can be drawn. This notion of implicit power is, in my view, one of the most significant features of the political (le politique) dimension. It should be understood as a reflexive capacity through which cultural articulations are formed and shaped, providing them with an actively subjective relation to the political community, meanwhile situating these articulations in relation to both the ground power of institutions and how this power is explicitly wielded. It is fair to say that this conception of implicit power owes more to a phenomenological-hermeneutical reading of the social imaginary, to which Castoriadis was not inclined to explore, but doing so would certainly help to explain the cultural limitations imposed on the radical imaginary (as opposed to simply ontological limits). This formulation of implicit power means that Castoriadis’s political distinction is still upheld, in the sense that politics (la politique) is still seen to emerge when instituted forms of explicit power are collectively questioned and potentially invalidated. Politics is therefore based on a collective choice that concerns what ‘ought’ to remain instituted, or what ‘other’ forms should be instituted in its place. In my view, the proposed development helps to explain how politics must first become gestated within the social imaginary, implicitly, in the form of perspectives that question the validity of institutions; this issue will be addressed further in the following chapter in the context of autonomy. RELATIVISING HISTORICITY: NEW VISIONS OF INSTITUTING POWER

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Castoriadis offers an elaborate theorisation of how the political dimension of societies fundamentally shape their modes of historicity. Historicity, in this context, is seen to be based on a reflexive institutional tension between the reinforcement of established institutional form and the incorporation of new institutional configurations that emerge from the culturally heterogenous creativity of a community. It has been argued that the emphasis Castoriadis placed on self-alteration can be developed even further to show how modes of historicity are structured around institutional processes of political

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regulation, which, in turn, bring to light the reflexive dynamics of the social imaginary. Historicity is, therefore, seen as a mode of instituting power that regulates social imaginary creativity; the latter is evident in the heterogenous array of cultural articulations that are active within any social-historical context. This means that institutional reflexivity does not reflect ontologically defined modes of historicity, but rather, historicity is defined through a tension between the open articulation of social imaginary creativity and a mode of instituting power that attempts to maintain significations that inhabit established institutional form. This reorients Castoriadis’s analysis of dichotomous institutional modalities towards the culturological dynamism of social imaginary institution. Arnason has been shown to offer a path forward that foregrounds the significance of this culturological dimension, which was a present, and yet under-explored, aspect of Castoriadis’s work. So far, my argument has been positioned in order to propose the following point: in order to downplay the stricter dichotomous modes of historicity that Castoriadis sometimes turns to throughout his work, it is necessary to consider how cultural articulations – dominant or not – are altered through implicit means of instituting power, as well as how certain cultural articulations can attain the capacity to implicitly alter the institutional contexts from which they emerge. The reflexive capacity to question institutions must therefore be seen to emerge from alternate interpretations of what ‘ought to be’ instituted, which in turn questions the legitimacy of how power is wielded in ways that maintain established institutions. Adversely, however, cultural articulations that differ from those that are largely represented by established modes of instituting power are faced with the need to confront and engage implicit forms of power that attempt to regulate the capacity for certain articulations to influence and shape institutional contexts. This power is maintained implicitly due to the fact that the symbolic logic of established institutions works to suppress the capacity for such positions to alter the symbolic dimension upon which the validity of established institutions is based. It is because implicit power attempts to deny these alternate articulations that the capacity to reformulate symbolic meaning in the collective context becomes the politicised site of social imaginary creativity; the tension underlying historicity is therefore situated at the implicit level of cultural articulation, whose power hinges on the denial/opening of any capacity to render such an articulation explicit in the political domain. My argument here is that social reproduction is therefore regulated both by explicit and implicit forms of power. Further to this, the use of implicit power to maintain the legitimacy of established institutions must also be seen to be contingent upon what is required to maintain dominant forms of instituting power, and this is why the ‘tendency toward closure’ that Castoriadis regards

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to be a self-perpetuating feature of heteronomous modes of institution must not be reduced to an ontological status, but also be considered to be creative, something which Castoriadis himself did not fully develop, perhaps due to his emphasis on the revolutionary potential of social imaginary creativity. This shifts the focus of ontological concerns regarding heteronomous modes of institution, and emphasises not only their reactionary dynamic that responds to the capacities of social imaginary creativity but also their implicit political creativity. Throughout the remaining chapters, I will elaborate on the role of implicit power as a cultural – not ontological – domain of instituting activity. This will be undertaken to consider whether historicity necessarily involves a heteronomous dynamic and, correspondingly, whether this dynamic can always be contingently undermined by the politicisation of autonomous articulations of cultural reflexivity. This argument serves to relativise Castoriadis’s dichotomous conception of heteronomous institution, because we see that in such contexts there are deep political innovations and self-reflective forms of social-historical creativity at the level of implicit power. And the same should be said vice versa, as Castoriadis highlights, the autonomous capacity to place institutions into question and to alter the laws of a community must necessarily be seen to take root from what is ‘always already instituted’; in other words, the social imaginary draws its self-altering power from the symbolic field itself. What is important is that the politicisation of cultural articulations can, therefore, be seen as an attempt to alter established institutions by articulating the implicit relation between these institutions and the formulation of a common ‘world image’. This assessment infers that the self-alteration of institutions involves the emergence of differing cultural articulations that, to a large extent, attempt to ‘partially’ reformulate symbolic forms along the lines of maintaining other forms of historical continuity and that they do so in a self-reflective fashion. This is precisely because social-historical alteration occurs in the context of a collective articulation of the world horizon. What Castoriadis helps us to see is that the collective articulation world horizons are set into the institutional form of a societal self-image, a self-image that is held together on the basis of a mode of instituting power, which is validated at the social imaginary level. This is to say that, for alternate cultural articulations to solicit alterations to social institutions, these articulations must lay down the continuity of their position in relation to the common conceptions of the world. What I will show in the final two chapters is that this culturological approach to instituting power provides a promising framework to analyse how a society’s mode of historicity is regulated by dominant forms of instituting power. Further to this, this framework will be put to task in order to provide an assessment of the mode of historicity specific to liberal-democratic regimes.

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1. See Cornelius Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK), 147. 2. Johann P. Arnason, 1994, ‘Reason, Imagination, Interpretation’, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, Gillan Robinson and John Rundell (eds.) (Routledge, London), 167. 3. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2007, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 72. 4. This institutional tension remains a central problematic for Castoriadis throughout the entirety of his work. John Rundell rightly situates it within broader philosophical debates, not least in ‘the interplay between the natura naturans of the creative, instituting imaginary, and the natura naturata of the instituted social imaginary’ (Rundell, 1994, Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, 10). Adams has convincingly shown that Castoriadis’s approach to this problematic has its deepest inspiration from Aristotle and various other pre-Socratic sources, in which he came to interpret this dichotomy on the basis of a fundamental tension between physis and nomos (Suzi Adams, 2013, ‘After Merleau-Ponty: Castoriadis, Living Being, World’, in Corporeity and Affectivity: Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karel Novotny, Pierre Rodrigo, Jenny Slatman, and Silvia Stoller, [eds.] [Brill, Leiden, Holland], 335). 5. Angelos Mouzakitis, 2014, ‘Social-Historical’, Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, Suzi Adams (ed.) (Bloomsbury, London), 92. 6. There is a polarity in Castoriadis’s thought between the social imaginary and the singular psyche (which is prior to the social individual), however this polarity sits outside of the social institution. It serves, instead, to demarcate anthropic being and natural being. See: Castoriadis, 1991, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 145–46. 7. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK), 372. 8. These distinctions are discernible for Castoriadis, in the broadest sense, as an invocation of the ancient Greek distinction of nomos/physis, which describes the broader cosmological nature of anthropic institution: nomos/physis. See Suzi Adams, 2011, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (Fordham University Press, New York). 9. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 369–73. Adams has pointed out that the social-historical mode of being of the social imaginary has deep affinities with Kant’s understanding of aesthetic creation in the third Critique, However, Castoriadis develops this notion of creative imagination in relation to the role Kant gives to the imagination in the first Critique, which considers the imagination as the root of reason. See Suzi Adams, 2008, ‘Castoriadis’ Long Journey Through Nomos: Institution, Creation, Interpretation’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, no. 70 (Brill, Leiden, Holland), 275.

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10. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 369. 11. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 127. 12. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 117. 13. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’, Thesis Eleven, no. 36, iss. 1 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 24. 14. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 146. 15. Castoriadis, ‘Primal Institution of Society and Second-Order Institutions’, Figures of the Thinkable, 100. In my view, the notion of primal institution of society means that the notion of society in-itself is meaningless, it reflects a social space whose specificity is articulated through social imaginary significations, it is in this respect that the social imaginary can be viewed as a parallel to the cultural dimension of social life. Society can therefore be seen as nothing more than the temporal dimension of the social imaginary, it is a social space that is inhabited by present significance and oriented as something to-be (à-être). 16. I have omitted discussion of transhistorical institutions that correspond to the level of social imaginary significations that must lean on a ‘world referent’; in other words, the level of institution that is not culturally specific and must conform to the necessities of the physical or biological substratum (i.e., family, cuisine, etc.) 17. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 112. 18. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 112. 19. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 146. The notion of an actual imaginary was subsequently dropped by Castoriadis; however, it is significant to mark its inception at the heart of the instituted/instituting dichotomy. This passage illuminates it: ‘The social world is, in every instance, constituted and articulated as a function of such a system of significations, and these significations exist, once they have been constituted, in the mode of what we have called the actual imaginary (or the imagined)’ (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 146). 20. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 373. 21. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371. 22. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 372. 23. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Neither a Historical Necessity nor Simply an ‘Ethical’ Exigency: A Political and Human Exigency’, A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York), 151. 24. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997 ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Stanford University Press, CA), 84. 25. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 369. 26. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, World in Fragments, 6. 27. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 370. Castoriadis’s reference to a kosmos koinos alludes to a fragment from Heraclitus and implicitly expresses the polarity between the social-historical world (kosmos koinos) and the psychical world (kosmos idios). The Heraclitus fragment can be paraphrased as follows: ‘the waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside into each a world of his own’.

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28. Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, Thesis Eleven, no. 35 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 6. 29. This theoretical distinction seems to reflect Claude Lefort’s notion of the ‘double movement’ of self-institution that forms the basis for his conception of ‘le social’. See Claude Lefort, 1985, ‘Reversibility’, Telos, vol. 1985, no. 63, 106–20 (Telos Press, New York). This point can also be made in order to draw a parallel with the influence of Merleau-Ponty, whose notion of reversibility can be seen as a predecessor. 30. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371. 31. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 371. 32. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 145. 33. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, 73–74. The notion of institutional ‘regulation’ is an implicit theme that underlies his theoretical approach to the political dimension of society. Although the notion is not explicitly developed by Castoriadis, I will situate it alongside his theory of power in the following section of the chapter. 34. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, 76. 35. Castoriadis developed his conception of power and contextualised it within his definition of the political in an essay that was written between 1978-1988 titled, ‘Power, Politics and Autonomy’ (Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’). This essay is his most detailed statement on the political dimension of society, whose implications were only vaguely (i.e., Castoriadis, 2007, ‘The Rationality of Capitalism’, Figures of the Thinkable) and implicitly (i.e., Castoriadis, 1993, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’) pursued in his later work. 36. Stathis Gourgouris, 2013, Lessons in Secular Criticism)Fordham University Press, New York), 123 (fn. 3). 37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1973, Adventures of the Dialectic (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL), 17. 38. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1988, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, in Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (eds.) (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). 39. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 149. 40. It is worth noting that the notion of a ‘preforming power’, which forms an essential component of Castoriadis’s conception of social institution, addresses a problematic that was first put forward by Étienne de la Boétie (in his pamphlet titled, ‘Le discours de la servitude volontaire’). Interestingly, Castoriadis’s colleagues were involved in a project relating to La Boétie’s pamphlet at the same time that Castoriadis began to formulate his theory of social-historical power (1976–1978). The project that was overseen by Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet, and also included work by Claude Lefort and Pierre Clastres. 41. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150. 42. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150. As suggested in the previous chapter, Castoriadis provides an alternative account of biopower from that which is presented by Foucault. The social imaginary basis of institutional infra-power offers us another way to understand biopower from the perspective of a political

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anthropology that views the institution of power as a consistently rejuvenated imaginary force. 43. Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Done and to be Done’, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Blackwell Press, Oxford), 362. 44. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 151. 45. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150 46. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150. This statement originally appears in ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’ (Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 112). 47. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 168. 48. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 170. 49. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150. Castoriadis neglected to interrogate the political circumstances of this ‘burden of inheritance’, which would have deepened his theory of power within a more immediate, and richer, extrapolation of the institutional tensions at play in the social imaginary; this would bring his theory of explicit power into the realm of social imaginary creation, in all its latency, virtuality and potential. 50. Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Imaginary Significations’, A Society Adrift, 57. Castoriadis reads the history of human societies on the basis of their mode of institutional historicity, such that autonomy is seen to be a rare form of social institution, an historical creation that was made ‘first in ancient Greece, as far as we know, and was redeveloped later, with some completely new features, in western Europe starting at the end of the Middle Ages. It is historical creation that makes autonomy exist as openness rather than as closure’ (Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 57). In my view, this historicism is based on, both, a misreading of the self-reflective creativity of heteronomous institution (which does operate with a degree of openness) and an overly romantic ‘revolutionary’ view of autonomous institution. This historicised dichotomy leads Castoriadis to a rather Greco-Eurocentric bias when it comes to developing his political anthropology. 51. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 168. Castoriadis uses the example of language, which is not restrained by any intentional forms of power, and whose alterations are potentially open to all who speak. He points to other ‘activities that are beyond the scope of legislation’; i.e., family, mores, ‘art’, ‘ideas’. See also, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). His first essay on the work of Merleau-Ponty. 52. Castoriadis, ‘Heritage and Revolution’, Figures of the Thinkable, 111. The distinction between the political and anthropological dimensions of society is a problem made explicit by Plato (especially in The Laws, without at all commenting on Plato’s political approach). Castoriadis remarks that this is a political problem that is being forgotten by most contemporary political thinkers. 53. Castoriadis, ‘The Social-Historical: Modes of Being, Problems of Knowledge’, Figures of the Thinkable, 226. Based on this definition of politics (la politique), Castoriadis gives a consonant definition of philosophy as the specific social-historical capacity to ‘put into question the transmitted representations it has for itself of a world and of itself’, which I should note situates the task of philosophy as

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developing a mode of self-reflective thought that elaborates the meta-contingency of social-historical institution. 54. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, 90. 55. Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, 2018, (Un)Willing Collectives: On Castoriadis, Philosophy and Politics (Re.Press, Melbourne, Australia), 12. 56. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, 90. 57. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2013, Democracy and Relativism: Discussion with the ‘MAUSS’ Group, NotBored!, http://www.notbored.org/DR.pdf, 34. 58. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 155–56. 59. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 156. 60. Johann P. Arnason, 2014, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections’, in Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski (eds.) (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK), 20. 61. Arnason, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus’, 19. 62. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 148. 63. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 148. This is an ontological claim, that regards the institution of society as positing itself as a ‘universal’ (in the sense that its self-originary principle means that it presents an absolute knowledge based on self-institution); this idea is central to Castoriadis’s emphasis on the primacy of self-originary ontology. 64. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2002, Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique: Séminaires 1986–1987 (la création humaine I) (Seuil, Paris), 388. This term can be translated as ‘the community of believers’, playing on the religious overtones of the phrase, Castoriadis is referring to the idea that institutions must be cathected by an individual, which in turn produces the context of the social-historical world from which is possible to act as a subject; refer back to the discussion of subject formation in chapter 1. 65. Arnason, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus’, 20.

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The central thread weaving through the philosophical and political trajectory of Castoriadis’s work can be said to be his ongoing emphasis on the role autonomy plays within institutional processes. Autonomy, in his view, is a feature of social-historical institution that engenders collective political projects. In the most general sense, Castoriadis theorises autonomy as the capacity for people, and societies, to reflect on the incessant flux of experiences, interpretations and expressions that are specific to their social imaginary contexts. Autonomous modes of institution would allow for new and alternate articulations to find appropriate channels to become instituted within the broader collective horizons of social-historical institution, in turn, altering preexisting social-historical forms. Castoriadis therefore proposes a uniquely political conception of autonomy that takes into account the confrontation of heterogeneous articulations within given social-historical contexts. Further still, he views autonomy as characteristic of the fact that the foundation of social-historical institution is self-originary, an idea discussed at length in chapter 2. In accordance with this view, autonomy is regarded as a potentiality inherent to all societies because it is a feature of the self-instituting activity that shapes social-historical institution. In this way, autonomy is put forward as an anthropological concept, whose etymology, derived from the ancient Greek, marks its fundamental status: a society is autos-nomos in so far as it is engaged in an activity ‘(to give to) oneself one’s laws’.1 However, even though Castoriadis ties autonomy to the self-instituting capacity of all societies, he regards autonomous modes of institution as exceedingly rare in human history. It is this assessment that leads him to think that a cardinal distinction is to be made when looking at the way societies define their instituting power, between heteronomous societies (that present the foundation of their institution in law as coming from elsewhere) and societies in which the project of autonomy begins to emerge 137

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(where the foundation of society is seen to be self-created and politically legislated by the community).2 This view is accompanied by a highly speculative claim that only two societies in human history have, at least partially, turned towards autonomous modes of institution: these include the creation of the ancient Athenian polis (specifically in the period between the eighth to fifth centuries BCE) and the emergence of Western European modernity (from around the eleventh and twelfth century to the present day) – a claim that holds an obvious Eurocentric (Greco-Western) bias that underlies his conceptualisation of a politically exceptional mode of autonomy that emphasises a particular form of self-reflection.3 Heteronomous modes of institution are described as those whereby ‘the nomos, the law, the institution, is given by another – heteros, in Greek’, adding that, ‘in fact, as we know, the law is never really given by someone else, it is always the creation of the society’.4 This perspective regarding the social-historical creativity of non-European societies is based on a strict dichotomisation between two distinct modes of historicity that assume differing capacities for self-alteration, but in reality have never taken form in a strict sense. This chapter will look beyond the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous modes of institution and, instead, interpret the way that instituting power shapes the historicity of societies, to show that further elaboration of this theoretical schema can help us to approach the political situation of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes associated with depoliticisation and the increasing shift towards authoritarian modes of governance. As mentioned in the introduction, I am situating Castoriadis’s work with respect to two central questions: What holds societies together? and What brings about other and new forms of society? The first three chapters have discussed Castoriadis’s response to these questions through a theory of institution that emphasises the political dimension as a central structuring force that holds societies together. This chapter will examine further the way that Castoriadis addresses these questions, extending on the previous chapter’s discussion of the instituting capacity of the social imaginary. It will be shown that Castoriadis develops a conception of autonomy that accounts for the capacity to bring about new and other forms of society, by attempting to understand the radical capacities of the social imaginary. My intervention, relating to this question, is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the role of instituting power shaping these capacities, particularly in light of its implicit features. In order to do this, I will interrogate how Castoriadis produces a theory of historicity that emphasises the fact that human societies, in their diversity, are characterized by modes of self-institution that are concerned with the creation of a world of meanings that bring into existence a world that is proper to each society. This is a mode of self-definition that organises the world of a society in relation to the natural world, and also

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brings forth a world of social meaning that is novel in relation to nature, a social-historical world within which ‘society inscribes itself and gives itself a place’.5 In doing so, a society constitutes a system of norms, or institutions, in the broadest sense of the term, which include ‘values, orientations, and goals of collective as well as of individual life’.6 In Castoriadis’s view, such a system is articulated through specific significations, which humans use to orient themselves and validate (or invalidate) the institution of society. This general account of social institution encapsulates both the self-definition of societies and knowledge of their respective world, both of which can be said to be contained within what Castoriadis calls the ‘social imaginary’ of a given society. Among the significations that animate the institutions of a society, one is singled out by Castoriadis to be of particular importance: ‘the one that concerns the origin and the foundation of the institution, or the nature of the instituting power, and what would be called, in an anachronistically modern, Eurocentric language, the ‘legitimation’ or ‘legitimacy’ of law, in the broadest sense.7 This chapter will emphasise how autonomous institutions are still structured via dominant articulations of legitimacy regarding law (taken in this broad sense), which imposes a regulative dynamic on emergent forms of cultural creativity within a given institutional context. With the approach that I want to take, the central issue for me is not to argue that heteronomy is a mode of institution that necessarily reflects a collective inability to create new significations of social-historical existence (as is the case with Castoriadis’s proposed need to break the ontological closure of heteronomous societies, in order to attain a true politics). Rather, my analysis instead focuses on the capacity for significations to be openly and freely interpreted and articulated. Such a capacity requires coming face-to-face with an aspect of instituting power that was not extensively explored by Castoriadis himself: the explicit and implicit ways that the instituting power of the social imaginary denies various forms of cultural creativity from participating in the shaping of their respective societies. A guiding question that is of concern to this aspect of instituting power asks: What expressions of social existence are privileged or denied in historical processes? I view this as a particularly pertinent question with regard to addressing tendencies of depoliticisation, because we can begin to analyse these tendencies in relation to specific modes of regulation over the myriad cultural milieus that constitute social-historical contexts. It is the autonomous capacity for societies to engage with the processes of their own social-historical transformation that will be explored in this chapter, precisely because I want to show how Castoriadis’s conception of autonomy opens up a unique understanding of instituting power that will then serve as a basis to interrogate contemporary institutional contexts in the following chapter. Social-historical transformation is framed in the context of self-alteration, which, ultimately, emphasises historicity as a poietic (i.e.,

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creative) mode of historicity that involves the collective alteration of established institutional forms. This mode of self-alteration is at the forefront of Gourgouris’s interpretation of Castoriadis’s conception of autonomy: ‘strictly speaking, self-alteration signifies a process by which alterity is internally produced, dissolving the very thing that enables it, the very thing whose existence derives meaning from being altered, from othering itself’.8 In fact, Gourgouris provides an important interpretation of Castoriadis’s theorisation of autonomy, because he develops an understanding of the poietic features of autonomous subjectivity that lead to the creation of conditions that can overcome established institutional form.9 This is significant because autonomy is therefore understood as a mode of self-alteration based on the creative capacities of the social imaginary, which is understood to be deeply rooted in the cultural dimension of the political community. Gourgouris emphasises the social imaginary context from which social-historical institution is drawn. In doing so, he affirms that poietic self-realisation only takes place in relation to a broader temporal dynamic: ‘self-alteration . . . takes place in the only way anything can take place in the world – in history, as history’ – and, further to this, autonomous activity ‘configures its groundwork in the world of human action, not in the universe of concepts and propositions’.10 This also means, however, that the institutional context that lays the ground for self-alteration is regulated implicitly by an established mode of instituting power, whose creative force finds its source in the dominant significations of the social imaginary. Or, as Gourgouris proposes: ‘precisely because there is no historical vacuum, the [individual] subject is always instituted as a social form insofar as it assumes the imaginary significations particular to the social-historical moment that pertains to it’.11 Autonomous self-realisation therefore aims to alter the structure of established institutions, and ultimately to re-configure instituting power in a way that makes possible the incorporation of alternate forms and articulations that emerge in given social-historical contexts. It is therefore within this tension, between a power that is wielded in favour of established forms and the capacity for alternate articulations to attain ‘actually effective’ instituting power, that historicity becomes the regulative dimension of collective selfaltering activity. Based on this perspective, I will consider here two tiers of autonomy that Castoriadis proposes: the fundamentally autonomous capacity of human societies to participate in shaping the historicity of a given socialhistorical context, and the specific capacity for self-alteration granted by a political autonomy that questions the totality of social-historical institution. Following on from the discussion of the previous chapter, what is of concern here is the extent to which alternate articulations of social-historical existence are able to become incorporated into the instituting power that shape institutions, this is to say, I am concerned with that power which is able to assume

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the capacity to alter the institutional landscape of a social imaginary context (and, of course, perhaps more importantly, those articulations that are not able to assume such a capacity). In order to show this, I will concentrate on three distinct aspects of Castoriadis’s conception of autonomy. Firstly, I will define heteronomous and autonomous aspects of social-historical institution, in order to distinguish them as specific, coexisting tendencies of instituting power rather than opposite ones. In the second section, I outline the dynamics of institutional self-alteration and situate the role that implicit forms of instituting power play in the regulation of historicity. Ultimately, within this section, historical heritage is recognised as a source of instituting power – an idea that was introduced in the previous chapter. Then, in the third section, I will show how the regulation of historicity is undertaken via the instituting power of dominant social imaginary articulations. This involves a society’s autonomous capacity to regulate processes of institutional legitimation, and this will highlight instituting power as the structuring element involved in the self-altering capacity of autonomous cultural creativity. So far, I have argued that Castoriadis’s perspective is limited by his framework of dichotomous modes of historicity. Rather than following through with Castoriadis’s intent to project an ideal political mode of historicity based upon radically autonomous modes of institution, I want to show that the question of autonomy needs to be turned towards an interrogation of how instituting power enables the institutional consolidation of dominant social imaginary articulations. I aim to show how his theorisation of autonomy, in fact, can lead to another perspective that exposes how autonomous modes of historicity are, paradoxically, acting as the catalyst of contemporary processes of depoliticisation. Castoriadis intuited the increasing trend of depoliticisation within liberal-democratic regimes, however he framed this trend as a ‘rising tide of insignificancy’ that threatens to regress into heteronomous modes of institution. Rather, I define depoliticisation in relation to a mode of autonomous instituting power where dominant social imaginary articulations are maintained by regulating emergent political capacities that threaten to alter a given institutional context. Contrary to Castoriadis’s claim that depoliticisation represents a broader crisis of autonomous institution – an apparent regression ‘back’ into heteronomous modes of institution – I argue that, in fact, contemporary depoliticisation is a distinctly autonomous political phenomenon. This argument can be made due to the fact that the conception of autonomy offered by Castoriadis implies a creative mode of social-historical regulation, which is legitimised – as shown in the previous chapter – through the social imaginary level. This chapter develops the discussion of the previous chapter to show that one has to take seriously the implicit power of established institutional form, which utilises established symbolic structures in a way

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that autonomously regulates institutional contexts. Castoriadis’s account of autonomy does not deal with this aspect of instituting power, largely because he falsely dismisses implicit forms of power as definitively heteronomous. Ultimately, I will argue that, the contemporary liberal-democratic regimes constitute themselves through the creative emergence of social imaginary articulations that maintain dominance implicitly through establishing a regulative mode of autonomous institution.

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Castoriadis’s understanding of autonomy can be firmly grasped by looking into his engagement with the emergent field of ‘New Biology’, whose members were interested in developing the term in relation to the natural sciences, notwithstanding its social and political implications.12 This immediately shifts the sociopolitical framing of autonomy away from commonly held Kantian interpretations. According to proponents of this ‘New Biology’, the term is associated with a self-organising characteristic, and so it follows that something (i.e., a form of life) is autonomous when it functions in accordance with its own laws, creating its own form by cohering to a unity that is defined by these laws, its own life system. Castoriadis debated this conception with Francisco Varela, a biologist who – alongside Humberto Maturana – popularised the notion of autopoiesis (i.e., self-creation) in the natural sciences, and who shared with Castoriadis an interest in the question: ‘How is it that [in the formation of a living system] a unity can arise?’13 (The corresponding social question being the one raised in the discussion of Castoriadis’s work so far: ‘What holds societies together?’). For Varela and Maturana, any conception of autonomy must aim ‘to understand the organisation of living systems in relation to their unitary character’.14 Accordingly, this means that what makes a living being autonomous is the fact that it operates as a system holding its-self together on the basis of its own identity, and in doing so it tends towards its own self-realisation; living systems are autonomous because ‘they subordinate all changes to the maintenance of their own organisation, independently of how profoundly they may otherwise be transformed in the process’.15 In Castoriadis’s view, the importance of Varela’s conception of autonomy is that a living being ‘has its own laws, and nothing can appear in its world that is not in conformity with those laws in one way or another, cognitively speaking’.16 A living being therefore exhibits its autonomy through a mode of ‘organisational, informational, and cognitive closure’ and it interprets what is meaningful for its world as such.17 Following Varela’s

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discussion of autonomy, Castoriadis proposes that this closure is a common principle that runs across both the biological and social realms of being, and it is on the basis of this principle of closure that in the human domain, ‘each society, like each living being or species, establishes, creates, its own world, within which, of course, it includes “itself”’.18 Castoriadis was extremely sympathetic to the way that the ‘new biologists’ had framed autonomy on the basis of how life forms create their own living systems. However, Castoriadis’s contribution to discussions in this field was to point out that it would be mistaken to apply this definition of autonomy to the way that autonomy operates in the social-historical domain. Castoriadis believes that the principle of closure that defines autonomy in living systems, as described by Varela, finds its parallel in the social-historical world, instead, as the perfect example of heteronomous modes of self-institution. This is because the closure that is characteristic of autonomy, for instance in the biological domain, is structured by pre-determined conditions: Closure therefore implies that the functioning of that life form, of that subject, of that oneself, its correspondence with what may exist ‘outside’, is governed by rules, principles, laws that are given once and for all. . . . Some changes do occur, but they occur in a way we can only view as random [as far as these changes are meaningful to its world].19

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These ‘rules, principles and laws’ become the ‘natural’ constraints and limitations within which the autonomy of a living being is enclosed, and this means that it can alter itself only within the parameters of arbitrary and pre-given conditions. It is on this point that Castoriadis insists that ‘the radical difference between the biological and the social-historical world is the emergence, in the latter, of autonomy – or of a new meaning of autonomy’.20 The principle of closure is not considered to be a defining characteristic of autonomy in the social-historical domain because the laws that govern the mode of being of societies are self-originary and therefore are not arbitrary, which means that they are open to self-alteration. This new meaning of autonomy in the social-historical domain operates ‘not as closure, but as openness’.21 This corresponds to what was discussed in chapter 2, where it was shown that the institution of the social-historical world ‘creates a new type of order (unity, coherence and organised differentiation)’.22 Because the laws of a social-historical world are not derived from ‘natural’ conditions but are self-originary, the constraints and limitations imposed by these laws are governed by conditions of self-determination – that is, historical conditions – that are alterable by societies themselves. This is to say that societies subject themselves to an ongoing self-alteration of their established historical conditions, which, as addressed in the previous chapter, defines

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their fundamental mode of historicity. Social-historical worlds are therefore autonomous in the sense that they are self-instituted (i.e., constitute their own principles of closure) and self-altering (i.e., create new principles for this closure). They are engaged in a self-instituting modality that is de-functionalised from their ‘natural’ moorings, as opposed to living beings, societies merely ‘lean on’ natural laws. The principle of closure governing social-historical worlds are therefore specific to the laws instituted within a given context, and these laws ‘are always under the sway of social imaginary significations’, which are the self-originary source of a society’s autonomous closure.23 Further to this specific definition that Castoriadis adds to the conception of autonomy is the distinction between human autonomy as a general anthropological fact (i.e., the self-originary institution of the social-historical world) and the particular mode of institution that he would regard as being autonomous (i.e., as distinct from heteronomous institution). On this point, societies are said to become autonomous when they recognise that ‘socially and historically created significations are neither contingent nor necessary’ but are instead, as explained in chapter 2, metanecessary and metacontingent.24 This is to say that the significations of a social-historical context are contingent only upon their own self-origin, and therefore the self-institution of these significations is necessarily arbitrary. An autonomous mode of institution, according to Castoriadis, emerges in a context where it is understood ‘that these significations have no ‘absolute’ source, that their source is our own meaning-creating activity’.25 The characterisation of social-historical autonomy put forward by Castoriadis could therefore be understood as follows: societies become autonomous when they realise that their significations are indefinite, that their meanings are infinitely interpretable and contestable, and that this offers societies the capacity to institute themselves politically, in a way that opens up the potential for new significations to emerge and take their place within the broader institution of the world. Heteronomous modes of institution, on the other hand, operate via a different relationship to closure. Castoriadis proposes that it is characterised by a version of autonomy closer to the one portrayed by Varela, with the crucial distinction being that it operates on the self-instituting basis of what I described as general anthropological autonomy. This means that heteronomy is conceived as an instituting mode whereby the institution of a society’s laws remain arbitrary and unalterable, where a society has not been able to recognise itself as its own origin and foundation, ‘to see itself as creation, source of its institution, [or the] ever-present possibility of alteration of this institution; to recognise itself as always more and always also something other than what it is’.26 In fact, Castoriadis proposes that throughout human history this has been the normal mode of social-historical institution:

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In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, the creation of this institution is imputed to an extrasocial instance or authority, or in any case, it eludes the power and the activity of living human beings. It becomes immediately clear that, so long as this situation holds, it constitutes the best means of assuring perenniality, the intangibility, of the institution.27

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It is important to understand that the heteronomous representation of a society’s origin as ‘extra-social’ is designated in such a way that a society’s ‘self-image’ is arbitrarily derived from the laws that constitute a broader ‘world-image’. Heteronomous institution delegates the self-originary processes of society to an extra-social representation of the world, which grounds the origin of society in laws that are natural to the world within which societies are instituted – these laws are seen as extra-social because they are represented as such. This is what makes autonomous and heteronomous institution distinct in Castoriadis’s eyes, because in the former, ‘as we know, the law is never really given by someone else, it is always the creation of the society’.28 This means that heteronomous societies are grounded in representations of laws that are externalised from the communities within which they emerge (i.e., religious laws, ancestral laws, naturalised historical laws, etc.) and, in Castoriadis’s view, these laws cannot be questioned from within the community because they are posited as a fundamental characteristic of the world. The point to emphasise here is that, even though Castoriadis remains faithful to his essential anthropological perspective that views social-historical institution as the self-originary creation of societies, his point is that this does not prevent societies from instituting themselves heteronomously. He goes so far as to argue that heteronomous modes of institution impose a form of authority whereby ‘principles, rules, laws, and significations are posited as given once and for all, as inviolable, unquestioned and unquestionable’.29 Further still, Castoriadis contends that this ‘extra-social’ authority has a non-questionable character, ‘guaranteed by instituted representations which in turn are part of the institution of society: all those representations ensuring that the source of the institution – its origin, foundation and guarantor – is non-social’.30 The notion of an extra-social representation is expressed in Castoriadis’s work under the guise of differing terms (i.e., extra-social, supra-social, pre-given). However, the underlying idea remains the same, which is to explain how the origin and foundation of the Law are instituted in a way that stipulates the source of its legitimacy as being beyond the instituting power of the collective. Heteronomous modes of historicity are seen to be caught in a dynamic of representational closure that delegates a self-instituting capacity to the authority of pre-determined institutions that maintain the legitimacy of extra-social representations as the true, originary foundation of a society’s

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institution. Subsequently, the legitimacy of extra-social laws are placed beyond question, and it matters little whether such law is received from ancestors, gods, nature, or the laws of history, and so forth. However, as discussed in chapter 2, Castoriadis overemphasised the ontological basis of this institutional closure; to the degree that he believed that questioning the legitimacy of the institution is literally ‘unthinkable’ in heteronomous contexts. The legitimacy of extra-social law, as Castoriadis argues, is embedded in the psychosocial structures of individuals, ‘for whom the idea of challenging the Law is inconceivable’.31 Further still, heteronomy is seen to be a quintessentially stable mode of historicity. Because such societies are caught in their own ontological closure, their institutions are merely interpreted and contested within the confines of their legitimacy. Processes of self-institution are depoliticised because they are seen to be grounded in a source that is unquestionably legitimate; such is the validity of heteronomous authority. Castoriadis wants to make the point that, in turn, this means that ‘new’ and ‘other’ significations do not come into the fold of heteronomous societies in a way that questions the ultimate foundation of authority; this, it is argued, obviously gives heteronomous modes of institution a ‘fantastic potency in the service of the preservation, the conservation, of the institution’ – I will come back to this discussion in the following section, because it primarily concerns the role that instituting power plays within instituting processes.32 What makes societies autonomous, in Castoriadis’s view, is therefore simply the capacity to bring into question the laws that are specific to the ‘existing order’ of societies. Societies become autonomous because they open up the possibility for individuals, who are the living embodiment of the significations that constitute a given society, to participate in the processes that shape institutions. The logic follows that questioning significations that are central to the foundation of the laws that constitute societies lead directly into the questioning of whether the institutions embodying these significations are legitimate:

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These societies call into question their own institution, their representation of the world, their social imaginary significations. This is, of course, what is entailed by the creation of democracy and philosophy, both of which break up the closure of the instituted society prevailing until then and open up a space where the activities of thinking and politics lead to putting again and again into question not only the given forms of the social institution and of the social representation of the world, but the possible ground for any such forms.33

Autonomy is therefore based on establishing the validity of an instituting power that lies at the foundation of institutions. Autonomy is the capacity to

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alter the validity of established authority, and to establish institutional conditions that ‘open’ processes of legitimation to political contestation. What Castoriadis did not explore in any depth is how this autonomous ‘opening’ is always implicitly structured by established modes of instituting power, or ‘regimes of historicity’, that regulate processes of legitimation. Historicity, as the general mode of social imaginary institution, should be understood as a creative temporality that rests upon an historical heritage; the question concerning instituting power therefore concerns the extent to which societies are defined (or determined) by such a heritage. As discussed so far, Castoriadis believed that, when looking at the way societies define their instituting power, a cardinal distinction had to be made between heteronomous societies and societies where – what he called – the ‘project of autonomy’ began to emerge. It is necessary, however, to look beyond the obvious distinction between heteronomous and autonomous modes of institution and, instead, interpret the specific ways that instituting power shapes the historicity of societies. The major theoretical flaw in Castoriadis’s work is that he characterises heteronomy as an instituted social imaginary trapped within its ontological closure, reproducing its own history through differing articulations of the same set of significations. As was argued in the previous two chapters, this closure is not purely ontologically determined but, rather, it is structured by a mode of instituting power that privileges dominant social imaginary articulations. It is on the basis of the question regarding historical heritage that Castoriadis regards the role of instituting and the instituted modalities, from which he construes his dichotomisation of autonomy and heteronomy as two distinctive modes of historicity. It then becomes clear that as Castoriadis proceeded to develop his picture of historicity his insights into the processes of social-historical self-alteration became increasingly limited by his dichotomising these two differing modes of historicity. Such a dichotomisation proves insufficient to analyse the institutional dynamics of historicity, because they are not in fact distinct modes of historicity, they should be seen as tendencies that are complicit and operate more generally within specific modes of historicity, which are constituted through contextual, and self-altering, regimes of instituting power. If one breaks out of this strict dichotomy, as I first suggested in the previous chapter, it is possible to advance Castoriadis’s notion of self-alteration as a significant vision of autonomy. This also allows us to consider the emergence of autonomous creations while taking into account some of the more heteronomous dynamics that are involved within institutional processes of historicity. In the following section, I will therefore argue that these dynamics become apparent when one looks at the regulative role of power within institutional processes.

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SELF-ALTERATION: A REGULATIVE MODE OF HISTORICITY

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So far, I have attempted an exposition of Castoriadis’s work, detailing its value and limits, which lead us now to a new cluster of questions which must be grappled: How do we judge to what extent societies are defined (or determined) by historical heritage? What role does instituting power play in processes of self-alteration? And, further to this, how can answers to these questions be theorised in a way that relativises Castoriadis’s dichotomisation of autonomous and heteronomous instituting tendencies, all the while extending the key insights that his theory of social-historical institution brings? In my view, this is best accomplished by placing self-alteration at the focal point of analysing historicity, and to do so in a way that maintains Castoriadis’s emphasis on the formative power (vis formandi) of the social imaginary. To make this perspective clear, it must be understood that it is the instituting power of the social imaginary that is the permeating and structuring element of the social-historical world. And in order to establish this perspective, it must be made clear that the structuring forces of instituting power not only regulate the capacity to alter established institutions by (explicitly) bringing ‘new’ and ‘other’ forms of human existence into the fold of institution. Crucially, the c apacity for instituting power to establish institutions (implicitly) also regulates and alters the emergence of ‘new’ and ‘other’ forms of creation. This perspective highlights the underlying theoretical argument, simple as it may be, that I intend to make regarding Castoriadis’s work: historicity remains a regulative instituting regime that involves an immanent mediation between the ontological fertility of cultural creativity and historically instituted forces of power. Self-alteration takes place within the myriad ways that these two elements overlap and intertwine. In order to elaborate the notion of self-alteration it is necessary to incorporate the theme of historical heritage into the conception of instituting power, in a more detailed way than Castoriadis attempted. As was brought to light in the previous chapter, Castoriadis came to view cultural creativity as a relatively rare event, marked by ‘pulsating processes’, and autonomous institution is therefore only seen in ‘phases of dense, intense creation [that] alternate with lulls, sluggishness, or regression’.34 This view presents an inherent ambiguity in Castoriadis’s work, alongside his insistence on the persistence and variation of cultural creativity at play in any given social-historical context. Cultural creativity – as explained in the previous chapter – involves the activity of heterogenous social imaginary articulations that shape the social imaginary. Historical heritage frames the temporal context of these heterogenous cultural sources. In a more abstract sense, this heritage can be seen

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as an established symbolic field that provides the instituting temporality of societies with references to its (self-)origin. Indeed, as was touched upon in the previous section, the social imaginary institutes its ‘instituting’ temporality in terms of its own significations, which is to say that it understands itself as instituting (or at least recognises the foundation of its institution) in the representations that place itself in relation to its world. The instituting temporality of societies is therefore understood in terms of their historical heritage, and in this process they ‘always tends to cover over, to conceal and to deny temporality as otherness-alteration’, or in other words, to deny that their self-alteration is ‘other’ than emerging from the context of their histories.35 It is not particularly useful to take Castoriadis’s position linking this denial of ‘otherness-alteration’ to a denial of cultural creativity in general. It is one thing to invest in a political project that would be oriented around a radical autonomous instituting temporality, but this in itself denies a crucial political dimension to the institutional processes of self-alteration characteristic of all societies, even those Castoriadis deemed to be heteronomous. In all cases, the political dimension involves an implicit and ongoing regulation of cultural creativity. I argue that the problem is not merely that cultural creativity is bound by the reception of an historical heritage but also, more importantly, that it is bound by an instituting power that possesses a regulative dimension, a regulative dimension that is most effective at the social imaginary level. To return to the discussion begun in the previous chapter, Castoriadis introduced the notion that an ‘infra-power’ is involved within instituting processes and this idea can be developed further in order to explain how this regulative dimension operates. The most immediate point to be made is that Castoriadis describes the notion of infra-power as the strongest force of instituting power because of its role in ‘preforming’ individuals in relation to established institutions. Castoriadis insists that the source of this preforming power comes from the established historical dimension, it is an infra-power that produces individuals in the image of established social institutions and therefore to also shape the cultural milieus in which they are a part. In order to show how historical heritage is received and experienced as an instituting temporality, it is worth highlighting how the infra-power of institutions fabricates individuals that conform to social-historical norms. Castoriadis established the link between historical heritage and instituting temporality by proposing a psychoanalytic theory of socialisation that explains the role of social-historical meaning in processes of subject formation. This theory foregrounds the role that social imaginary significations play in shaping individuals in ways that are not explicitly coercive but, rather, in ways that form individuals in accordance with historical norms;

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This explicit power, the one we speak of in general when we speak of power, which concerns the political sphere, in its essence rests not on coercion – there obviously always is coercion to some extent or other and, as we know, it can reach monstrous heights – but rather on the internalisation, by socially fabricated individuals, of the significations instituted by the society under consideration. It cannot rest on mere coercion. . . . There must be a minimum adherence, be it by only a portion of the population, to the institutions already in place, or coercion loses its grip.36

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To a large extent, socialisation is the process whereby individuals are produced and educated to conform to preexisting institutions by internalising the significations that give meaning to a social-historical world – a process that will be explored in the following chapter. Andreas Kalyvas paints a picture of this in broad strokes, when he writes that ‘individuals are produced through the radical ground-power [infra-power] of the instituting society, the identity of an individual is embedded in prior relations, engulfed in cultural, symbolic, and linguistic structures’.37 In psychoanalytic terms, in becoming socialised, we let go of the psychic omnipotence of our ego and sublimate instituted social meaning in ways that allow us to function within social-historical contexts as they are specifically structured. As Stathis Gourgouris puts it particularly aptly, it is in this way that ‘the psyche receives the instituted significations that signify it as a subject in a given social-historical domain’.38 Individuals cathect the significations of society, but, it must also be added, they do so in such a way as ‘never to be reducible to the overall instituted signification’.39 As Gourgouris puts it further, ‘subject-formation is never exhausted in a single instance but is inevitably an open-ended (re)iteration, a historical enactment’.40 As discussed in the first chapter, it is the radical imagination of the psyche that opens up the capacity for creative individuation in relation to the ground power of the institution, this is why the latter can never be wholly omnipotent over the subject. An individual’s relation to this ground power therefore involves a creative relation to the historical heritage that informs them and provides them with a temporal orientation. This creative relation to historical heritage opens up the capacity for autonomy and, as Castoriadis maintains, ‘makes it possible for the individual to escape the enslavement of repetition, to look back upon itself, to reflect on the reason for its thoughts and the motives of its acts, guided by the elucidation of its desire and aiming at the truth’.41 This is the case not only with respect to the personal dimension but, importantly, also to the cultural one (an aspect I will turn to momentarily): subjectivity is therefore seen as a creative correspondence with an established social-historical world. Gourgouris interprets this in psychoanalytic terms, saying that

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subject-formation is the limitless process by which the radical imagination of the psyche retains its capacity to make and unmake (to alter) the horizon of possibility of social imaginary institution by accepting (and acceding to) social-imaginary signification, by accepting (and acceding to) the specific social-historical content it then comes to recognize as its worldly existence.42

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This, of course, is not limited to the situation of an individual subject, this creative relation is also experienced by the political community. The political community is formed on the basis of the heterogenous cultural sources that exist within a given social-historical context. The creative relation between the political community and its historical heritage shapes the temporal orientation of a society and informs their mode of historicity. Historical heritage itself can be articulated in heterogenous ways, in many ways that is precisely what it is, but what matters for this discussion are those sources that inform a mode of instituting power that regulate how the established institutional context is articulated. The heterogenous articulations of a community are placed in tension with their institutional conditions, they can (even only partially) become incorporated, appropriated, superseded, maligned, and so on, but generally speaking they all become hierarchised via degrees of validation with respect to instituting power in the course of their specific articulation. Further still, this tension tends to influence the direction of each and every articulation put forward within the community, whether that be in the direction of complicity, antagonism, and so forth, with the dominant articulations that wield instituting power. Societies are always structured around the regulation of their cultural dimension, which explicitly and implicitly imposes a dominant ‘regime of historicity’ that actively limits the capacities and directions of a political community. In my view, however, this creative relation is always a source of autonomous subjectivity – even in those contexts that Castoriadis himself deemed to be cognitively and institutionally closed (i.e., heteronomous). It is through the cultural dimension of this creative relation to historical heritage that the political dimension of historicity becomes the focal point of self-alteration caught in the tension between cultural creativity and historically instituted forces of power. And, further to the point, this is the juncture at which the instituting temporality of the social imaginary should be seen in terms of instituting power. Socialisation is a process through which instituting power at its most basic level regulates the psychic phantasm. At the level of the social imaginary, regulation is enacted implicitly through instituting power that is directed instead towards the cultural dimension of subjective creativity. Regulation is directed toward the capacities of cultural creativity to institute ‘new’ and ‘other’ forms of existence within a given social-historical context.

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It is significant that regulation, as Castoriadis began to intuit, is largely carried out implicitly, through the established infra-power of the social imaginary; with the explicit forms of coercion being only an extensive version of this regulative instituting power. This regulative power is directed towards shaping the ongoing processes of subject-formation, it therefore inherently involves implicit political techniques aimed at forming subjects in relation to established institutional conditions, as Gourgouris points out, this is made possible because subject formation ‘signifies the inaugural negotiation with power – indeed, with the power of the other, or with power as other, but also, inevitably, with power as altering (othering) force’.43 It is with reference to the subject’s creative relation to instituting power that the temporal mode of regulation cannot be seen as pre-determining subjective responses to power, but rather this regulation must be regarded as an autonomous determining power that is established within two essential contexts of subject formation. On the one hand, regulation must reinforce dominant forms of instituting power by reproducing the symbolic structures of established institutions (i.e., regulative instituting power is based on established institutional conditions). On the other hand, regulation must also reinforce dominant forms of instituting power in relation to the generally ‘anonymous’ characteristic of indeterminate social imaginary creativity (i.e., regulation relies on establishing a normative dimension). Autonomy, ultimately, is the collective capacity to alter the institutional conditions of society, and it is from this perspective that autonomous modes of self-altering historicity must be grounded in preexisting significations that constitute the material from which the social imaginary draws its creative capacities. The regulative dimension of instituting power anchors autonomous self-alteration within a specific regime of historicity. And yet, the formation of an autonomous regime, as described by Castoriadis, ‘operates implicitly, is intended as such by no one, is realized through the pursuit of an undetermined number of particular ends’.44 Autonomy involves the capacity to participate in collective modes of instituting power that is brought about on the basis of preestablished historical creation, and it is generally ‘anonymous’ because this power is not something that can be made historically effective by a singular individual or cultural milieu. In this respect, I want to emphasise a crucial aspect of self-alteration whose implications were not thoroughly explored by Castoriadis: it is the historical force of society as already instituted that is, in fact, its most powerful instituting force. This involves a temporal argument that highlights historicity as a mode of social reproduction. Castoriadis points towards this idea in his conception of the social imaginary as a creative instituting mode of historicity. However, by emphasising the creative instituting modality of radical social transformation, he neglected to explore the creative instituting modality of implicit historical transformation – the obvious reason for this emphasis being

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that Castoriadis was focused on countering the determinism of traditional Western philosophical thought, while attempting to salvage the revolutionary project that he had inherited from his engagement with Marxism. This project places emphasis on an insurrectionary politics based on what was considered to be the radical emancipatory potential of social production. For Castoriadis, the creative dimension of the social imaginary is the source of insurrectionary politics; however, I want to stress that it is also the most significant aspect of social reproduction. This aspect of the instituting imaginary can be easily extrapolated from Castoriadis’s work on the instituting mode of historicity, take this passage, for example:

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The present, to be sure, always transforms the past into a present past, that is, a past relevant for the now, if only by continually ‘reinterpreting’ it by means of that which is being created, thought, posited now; but it is always that given past, not a past in general, that the present shapes according to its own imaginary.45

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The complex situation Castoriadis faced in defining institutional ground power as a social imaginary instituting power comes with recognising that with social-historical institution, there is ‘always, and to an unmeasurable degree, also recovery of the given’, and therefore his problematic remained focused on an insurgence of the radical capacities of autonomy in the context of a social imaginary that he saw as always ‘burdened’ with historical inheritance.46 In fact, if anything, further theoretical development of how established institutional contexts are implicitly maintained and creatively reproduced is perhaps more useful in serving the capacities of an insurgent imaginary (particularly for the development of any kind of insurrectionary politics). The point to be emphasised, in this regard, is that the instituting force of historical heritage is more often than not experienced as anything but a burden on societies and it is, in fact, the most important creative source for political activity (regardless of the intention behind the politics). In fact, Castoriadis is rather ambiguous on the issue of historical inheritance (i.e., continuity) because he simultaneously recognises the principle of closure as a necessary instituting tendency that ensures the self-preservation of societies. It is this principle that can be seen to be the underlying tendency of a reproductive instituting power that is oriented toward regulative modes of historicity. Why is such an instituting power necessary? And why does Castoriadis propose that it belongs ‘among the ultrarare instances of social-historical universals’? There are four reasons why he thinks so, and they all relate to the idea that every society must maintain itself, preserve itself and defend itself:

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A society is constantly being challenged, first of all, by the world in its very unfolding, the infra-world as it exists before being constructed by society. It is menaced by itself, by its own imaginary, which can rise up and challenge the institution as it already exists. It is also threatened by individual transgressions, a result of the fact that at the core of each human being is to be found a singular psyche, irreducible and indomitable. Also and above all, each society is immersed in a temporal dimension which itself cannot be mastered, a time-to-come that is to-be-made and to-be-done, in relation to which there are not only enormous uncertainties but also decisions to be taken.47

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What I want to stress about instituting power, is as follows: in all of these instances, instituting power is established in relation to internalised threats to institutional coherence, or you could even say, threats to historical continuity, which emerge from cultural creativity within a given social-historical context; coercion, therefore, must be seen to constitute a mode of social-historical regulation that explicitly engages with forms of cultural creativity that implicitly constitute such threats to the cohesion of established institutions; or put another way, self-alteration involves implicit instituting processes that confront established forms of explicit power that are oriented towards the regulation of historicity. In contemporary societies, contrary to Castoriadis’s notion of heteronomy, the regulation of implicit forms of instituting power should be seen as one of the significant features that constitute autonomous regimes of historicity. In fact, it is because instituting power regulates the creative alteration of societies for the purpose of maintaining the cohesion of their dominant articulations that impressions – such as Castoriadis’s – arise that view contemporary experiences of alienation accompanying depoliticised modes of institution as being heteronomous. This is a crucial point that will be addressed in the following chapter. INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE: VALIDITY AND THE HIERARCHISATION OF DOMINANT SOCIAL IMAGINARY ARTICULATIONS

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So far, this chapter has established that the cohesion of social-historical contexts is maintained through the instituting power of dominant social imaginary articulations. This alludes to a deeper level of implicit instituting power that regulates the capacities for alternate forms of cultural creativity to articulate themselves within broader social institutions. It must be understood that the regulative dynamic imposed by dominant social imaginary articulations is not determined by the historical inheritance of a pre-determined ontological scaffolding – as Castoriadis would propose for heteronomous

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societies. Rather, the political dimension of autonomy emerges as a space of cultural contestation between differing interpretations of historical heritage. Autonomy therefore emerges as a creative relation between the creative temporality of culture and the historical heritage of a given context. This section will discuss how autonomy emerges in a way that harbours implicit and explicit tendencies of instituting power that structure social-historical institution. The innovative feature of Castoriadis’s conception of instituting power can be described as follows: because instituting power is grounded in the social imaginary it does not simply embody the symbolism that structures institutions, but it also accounts for the collective ‘choice’ of the symbolism that shapes a given society. Instituting power is therefore seen to be established at two levels, because its collective legitimacy is validated through the affirmation of institutions that form the institutional context of heterogenous cultural articulations. As I discussed in chapter 2, this ‘choice’ is not to be understood as intentional in any way that would attribute some kind of subjectivity to the collective dimension of the social imaginary; in fact, quite the opposite is the case: this ‘choice’ represents the collectively anonymous constitution of social imaginary contexts. Institutional choice is reflected in the ‘overall’ form of social-historical institution, which is the result of the collective articulation of a matrix of significations that constitute and hierarchise an institutional context: ‘it is only relative to these significations that we can understand the “choice” of symbolism made by every society, and in particular the choice of its institutional symbolism’.48 In light of this notion of institutional choice, I want to pick up on a question that Castoriadis poses as central to political autonomy, and which indicates the capacity to establish mechanisms directed toward intentional institutional ‘choice’: Can I say that I posit my own law when I am living, necessarily, under the law of society? Yes, if and only if I can say, reflectively and lucidly, that this law is also mine. To be able to say this, I need not approve of it; it is sufficient that I have had the effective possibility of participating actively in the formation and the implementation of the law.49

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I want to alter this question to reflect my concern for issues of instituting power in ‘partially autonomous’ contexts, by asking: How can we account for those experiences of society, where, as autonomous subjects, we respond, ‘I participate in the creation of a law that is not mine’? This question arises in ‘partially autonomous’ contexts, because subjects are capable of autonomous self-reflection, recognise the laws as social-historical creation and, yet, are not capable of participating in shaping such laws. In responding to such a question in this section, I want to highlight the extent to which institutional

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‘choice’ in autonomous contexts involves an implicit dimension of instituting power that serves as a structuring element for the capacity of dominant social imaginary articulations to enact regulative explicit power. The social imaginary is constituted culturologically – as discussed in chapter 2 – which means that the autonomous capacities inherent to cultural creativity are based on preestablished patterns and interpretations of the world (which I referred to as the symbolic dimension of societies). It is worth reiterating the discussion in chapter 2 where I outlined how the world (as it is culturally articulated, as a social imaginary) is framed in relation to two points: firstly and foremost, the world is a totalising context or shared horizon that should be viewed as an open-ended social-historical context, and secondly, the cultural articulation of social-historical context is open to conflicting interpretations and therefore the ‘overall’ form of institutional choice is shaped anonymously. This means that institutional choice is consistently being shaped through an instituting power that is based on a ‘shared’ and ‘interpretive’ world horizon. This is a type of openness that is culturally articulated through the reproduction of social meaning or the expression of alternate forms of social-historical existence. The common social imaginary is therefore the context in which instituting power is articulated collectively, that is to say culturally:

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We cannot conceive such a [cultural] creation as the work of one or of a few individuals who might be designated by name, but only as that of the collectiveanonymous imaginary, of the instituting imaginary, to which, in this regard, we shall give the name instituting power. Such a power can never be rendered fully explicit.50

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It is on this point that the idea that human societies have an autonomous capacity for cultural creativity offers an answer to the question, ‘What brings about other and new forms of society?’ The complementary question posed by Castoriadis, ‘What holds societies together?’, remains to be defined in detail, and this is where it is important to understand the role of instituting power. In fact, Castoriadis did not go far enough towards developing the implications of instituting power in autonomous contexts for the reason that it would compromise his radical vision of autonomy. The key is to examine how multiple cultural articulations of the world contribute to the ‘totalising’ context of the social imaginary, and to analyse which are the dominant social imaginary articulations involved in shaping and altering the institutional form of these contexts. This instituting power of the social imaginary owes its existence to the fact that the culturological dimension is not defined by established institutional formations. As I have already said, the formative power of the social

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imaginary comes from the fact that its historical heritage is merely a resource for new forms of social-historical existence. The social imaginary, on the one hand, is responsible for the ‘emergence of other types, other relations, other norms’, which bring new significations into the fold of society and, in turn, alter the institution of a society.51 This is the site of cultural creativity. While, on the other hand, the social imaginary simultaneously produces hierarchical forms of instituting power. It is essential to grasp this latter point to understand the autonomous modes of institutional regulation. The hierarchisation of institutions emerges on the basis of explicit instituting power being harnessed through dominant social imaginary articulations, this power is then wielded in ways that regulate the implicit cultural articulations of the social-historical world; in the sense that the capacities of the latter to effectively shape institutional contexts is curtailed and diminished by the former. An important aspect of what constitutes an autonomous mode of historicity, however, is that the culturological dimension of instituting power can never be made fully explicit, which is to say that the formation of explicit instituting power involves largely implicit processes because instituting power remains in large part hidden within the anonymous depths of the social imaginary.52 Forms of creativity emerging from specific cultural milieus within given social-historical contexts must challenge the institutional validation of dominant social imaginary articulations that constitute the broader instituting power of such a context. By virtue of emerging from an established institutional context, cultural creativity must therefore also bear a relation to the broader institutional ‘choice’ imposed by the instituting power structuring the social-historical domain. Castoriadis defines this choice as being ‘carried by a system of imaginary significations that value or devalue, structure and hierarchise an intersecting ensemble of object and corresponding lacks; and it is here that one can read, more easily than anywhere else, what is just as uncertain as it is incontestable – the orientation of a society’.53 This understanding of instituting power as an institutional ‘orientation’ can lead into a descriptive analysis of contemporary societies. Processes of hierarchisation between differing cultural articulations of the social-historical world can be understood in the context of which articulations contribute to the validation of institutions that maintain dominant modes of instituting power. Key to this perspective is the need to view the ‘orientation’ of a society primarily through the question of knowing what significations are validated within a given social-historical context. It must be understood that processes of validation essentially boil down to articulations that become dominant within the culturally contested but shared domain of the social imaginary. More specifically, it must also be understood that between particular interpretations of the significations structuring a social-historical context certain interpretations attain

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greater instituting power. In order to explore these processes of validation more closely in the final chapters, it must be shown here that this validity is defined and sedimented in a way that leans on already established institutions, which are implicitly legitimised or delegitimized. In Castoriadis’s social theory, the orientation of societies is framed by their institutional ‘choice’ and this is shaped both explicitly and implicitly by the instituting power of the social imaginary. This instituting power is taken in a largely positive way by Castoriadis to express how instituting power attenuates the temporal creativity of historicity. More specifically, he theorises instituting power in a way that emphasises its opening up to autonomous capacities of social-historical institution, without developing how these autonomous capacities engage in processes of regulation that produce dynamics of marginalisation that serve to depoliticise certain social imaginary articulations over others. The institutional choice reflected in the social imaginary is seen to create society ‘afresh in each instance’ by drawing on its symbolic foundations.54 The important thing to be noted is that while the symbolic dimension constitutes the basis of historical continuity, it is also a resource for the establishment of an implicit regulative framework through which the creative capacities of the social imaginary to alter institutions is oriented towards the maintenance of dominant articulations.55 As has been argued in this chapter, instituting power is largely oriented towards the regulation of institutional ‘choice’ in ways that regulate threats to the continuity of dominant social imaginary articulations – discussed in the previous section in relation to the self-preservation of institutional coherence. This tendency is envisaged by Castoriadis as an explicit instituting power that is distinct from the historical ‘ground’ power of the institution. The apparently slippery and ungraspable feature of the ground power of the social imaginary reflects the fact that the orientation of this collective anonymous power ‘is neither locatable nor formalisable’ in static instituted form.56 Rather, as Castoriadis proposes, the fact that creative capacities of instituting power operate ‘implicitly, is intended as such by no one, is realized through the pursuit of an undetermined number of particular ends’.57 The fact that Castoriadis frames the orientation of society as operating through an ‘undetermined number of particular ends’, due to the political dimension of cultural contestation, clearly shows that he relates instituting power to a collective formation of the social imaginary, an anonymous totality, which constitutes a society’s mode of historicity. His point is that in order for explicit power to be effectively wielded in an attempt to regulate a particular institutional modality, its power must be to some extent rooted within this anonymous institutional ground power that is legitimated from what he refers to as ‘la communauté des fidèles’.58 It is important to note that Castoriadis’s discussion of explicit power therefore

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rests on the fact that the ‘effective validity’ of social institutions is grounded in these anonymous (totalising) social-historical processes of legitimation. Castoriadis is making the point that institutions are not validated through processes of formal State-sanctioned legitimacy. Rather this validation reflects deeper processes of legitimation that have their source in the ground power of the social imaginary. Institutional ‘choice’ is reinforced through an implicit infra-power, and therefore the validity of social institution is articulated at the level of the social imaginary. Here the dichotomy of instituted society and instituting society rears its head again, as Castoriadis distinguishes between two respective forms of institutional validity: de facto validity (instituted infra-power) and de jure validity (explicit instituting power). De facto validity ultimately reflects the collective acceptance of historical-ontological forms, significations, institutions, and so forth, that are instituted as an inherent quality of the social-historical world; such a validity is established through an implicit instituting power. De jure validity, on the other hand, refers to the explicit power that can be collectively wielded through social institution; these forms of validation are said to appear ‘universally’, in one form or another, as judicial and governmental type powers.59 De jure validity concerns the contested legitimacy of institutions. This is to say that social-historical norms are validated through competing capacities to wield an explicit instituting power that is intent on shaping the de facto validity that grounds institutions. In this way, de jure validity opens up the reflexive capacity to propose differing interpretations of the significations that constitute collective articulations of the social-historical world. Castoriadis frames this capacity as an autonomous reflexivity, which arises when ‘we raise the question of the de jure validity of this rule [i.e., of the de facto validity of instituted law]. We ask ourselves: What ought we to think of this rule and what ought we to make of it?60 De jure validity therefore constitutes a self-altering mode of legitimacy that is structured around the hierarchisation of dominant social imaginary articulations. What is more, this hierarchisation relies on the capacity to alter the grounding of de facto validity in a way that attempts to reinforce established institutional forms. And, further still, this reflexive dynamic opens up a contested political space through which the radical instituting capacity of the social imaginary emerges in such a way as to re-orient the institutional tendencies towards ‘closure’ in ‘new’ and ‘other’ (implicit) directions. Instituting power therefore establishes a framework of legitimacy, which in turn alters the mode of cultural creativity in relation to already established institutional form. This involves an implicit alteration that occurs both laterally, through encounters with ‘novelty’ and ‘multiplicity’ from within and without given social-historical contexts, and temporally,

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such as with the various historical narratives that justify the structuring of social hierarchies. In this formulation, the de facto validity of social-historical institution is reinforced by establishing a space through which cultural creativity can be regulated, a space through which instituting power can explicitly shape the de jure validity of institutions. Castoriadis connects the establishment of political space to the emergence of autonomous politics in general:

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This amounts to saying that through politics thus conceived man puts into question, and might possibly alter, his mode of being and his being qua social man. The social-historical is therefore also the site where the question of the de jure validity of institutions, and therefore also of people's behaviours, arises.61

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It is in this sense that autonomy is conceived by Castoriadis as a political project where the space for such openness is ensured by the established institutional conditions of power. This idea constitutes the topic of the following chapter. And it is in this formulation of institutional validation that Castoriadis sets a clear definition of the political dimension of social institution as the exercise of explicit power through ‘instances capable of formulating explicitly sanctionable injunctions’.62 It is through these injunctions that dominant social imaginary articulations are able to form the grounds upon which the social-historical field is regulated, for the purpose of maintaining the stability of established forms of society. Here it is useful to bring in a comment made by Arnason that supports this interpretation of social-historical regulation, where he suggests that ‘the centres and mechanisms of explicit power are used to determine or change the instituted patterns of ground power’.63 I want to emphasise that the injunctions wielded through explicit forms of instituting power are aimed at altering the autonomous capacities of specific expressions of cultural creativity, or, in other words, they are aimed at the regulation of the cultural creativity that exists implicitly within any given social-historical context.64 I contend that the major point to be developed in Castoriadis’s thought is the fact that instituting power, even in the most autonomous institutional contexts, remains oriented towards managing and regulating the self-alteration of social-historical form. Instituting power is therefore always oriented towards the reinforcement of dominant social imaginary articulations that consolidate the validity of established institutions. There is, however, an underlying blind spot in Castoriadis’s work that neglects to incorporate the experience of cultural multiplicity within given social-historical contexts and which leads him to homogenise the instituting capacities of the social imaginary in relation to a singular context (‘the overall institution of society’). His analysis becomes homogenised because he

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focuses his discussion of instituting power towards a totalising perspective, that of the anonymous dimension of the social imaginary, without attempting to theorise the constitution of a social-historical context that comprises a differentiation of cultural experiences existing in relation to the totalising force of instituting power. In other words, he does not theorise whether or not social-historical contexts can harbour multiple social imaginaries (a crucial political question in ‘multicultural’ contexts), or that each social imaginary articulation is replete with a social-historical complex that constitutes a specific relation to the totality of the social imaginary domain. It is on these points that the boundaries between political communities, societies, civilisations, and so on, become blurred; however, what remains clear is that approaching them in terms of an ontologically defined eidos is a limited way forward on these questions. In this sense, he does not develop in any depth, for example, a theoretical perspective on colonial, postcolonial or diasporic articulations of a social-historical context, or link the marginalisation of cultural creativity to an autonomous wielding of instituting power. Further development is therefore needed to consider the hierarchical mechanisms that emerge in the social imaginary domain in ways that produce the capacity for dominant social imaginary articulations to regulate cultural multiplicity through processes of institutional legitimation. This blind spot in Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary leaves significant gaps in his criticisms of contemporary societies. DEPOLITICISATION: WHERE IMPLICIT POWER REIGNS

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Throughout his theoretical development of autonomy, Castoriadis neglects to elucidate the implicit dimensions of instituting power. Due to the fact that he overemphasises the radical instituting capacities of the social imaginary, he leaves significant blind spots regarding tendencies within such autonomous instituting capacities that lead to societies constituting themselves on the basis of hierarchical relations. In this chapter, I have identified how these tendencies constitute the regulation of cultural creativity, which is undertaken on the basis of a hierarchical structuring of power that validates dominant social imaginary articulations. Castoriadis does, however, point to some important qualifications for conceptualising the limits of explicit instituting power. Namely, that historicity is shaped by anonymous conditions that can only attempt to regulate cultural creativity, and the fact that dominant social imaginary articulations can therefore only maintain their instituting capacity through processes of legitimation. For Castoriadis, hierarchical domination can never fully enclose the social-historical domain, as instituting power is

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always partial. Historicity can never be mastered but, as I have emphasised in this chapter, radical instituting capacities are also restricted by the historical heritage of given social-historical contexts, to a greater or lesser extent: the possibility for a society to establish another relationship between the instituting and instituted is confined within bounds, which are at once indisputable and undefinable, by the anonymous constitution of the social imaginary. But this tells us nothing about what we ought to will as the effective institution of the society in which we live.65

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This is to say that institutional contexts are not bound ontologically, and that the capacity to propose ‘new’ and ‘other’ forms of cultural creativity always emerge as an expression of the specific experiences of the social-historical world. Autonomy, as it has been described in this chapter, is therefore explicitly political in the sense that it concerns not only the political capacity to be culturally creative but also for a political space that is open for these capacities to contest established forms of institution. This space has been shown to emerge through the de jure validation of institutions; and in the following chapter this idea will be developed in the context of democratic modes of institution. However, the crucial point put forward in this chapter is that this space emerges in a way that is oriented towards the self-alteration of the de facto institutional field of power. The important contribution of Castoriadis’s work on this issue can be found in the fact that within his conception of social-historical autonomy, he affirms that the dominance of specific social imaginary structures is never concretely determined by established institutional form. In this regard, it is significant that the ‘fundamental’ ground power of societies is defined as an instituting power of the social imaginary, because it is in this sense that the social-historical field is subject to a collectively anonymous self-alteration of instituted historical limits and of the constraints that define a social-historical world. This is why I prefer to shift the definition of historicity from the idea of a tension between instituted and instituting poles, towards the question of regulation, the regulation of cultural creativity by institutional power. This is not to say that the regulation of cultural creativity is implemented in strictly anonymous ways, in fact when it comes to the wielding of explicit power, quite the opposite is true. This can be explained by the fact that the structuring capacities of dominant social imaginary articulations can in fact be seen to consolidate hierarchical regimes of historicity. This will be the theme of the following chapter. To summarise, the central argument presented by Castoriadis’s work shows that what spurs autonomous modes of historicity is an essentially political capacity to reflexively interrogate established forms of instituting power.

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His argument suggests that with autonomous modes of historicity there exists a collective imperative to reflexively question the underlying validity of established institutions. I argue that he did not take his insights that crucial step further, which would have involved showing how autonomous instituting activity also, and to a large extent, involves a reflexive mode of self-alteration that is oriented towards maintaining dominant forms of instituting power. By developing Castoriadis’s theorisation of autonomous historicity towards an account of hierarchisation, this chapter suggests that in order to analyse the political situation of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes it is necessary to take into account the implicit instituting processes that are engaged in shaping the de facto validity of institutions. This chapter has also argued that within institutional processes there is a strong tendency for dominant social imaginary articulations to occupy the political processes through which cultural contestation participates in the de jure validation of established instituting power; this is an issue that will also be explored in the following chapter. The argument that will be explored in the final chapter is that the occupation of political processes by dominant social imaginary articulations has introduced strong depoliticising tendencies into contemporary modes of institution. Depoliticisation must then be analysed as a shift from ‘partially’ open democratic modes of instituting power towards a mode of autonomous historicity that increasingly invalidates nondominant social imaginary articulations. This is an altogether different conclusion than that drawn by Castoriadis, who considered depoliticisation to be a manifestation of heteronomy, therefore emphasising autonomy as its opposite (defined purely on the basis of its radical emancipatory attributes). Again, here, Castoriadis’s Marxist heritage finds an echo. In my view, societies that are engaged in autonomous instituting activity are always engaged in a fiercely implicit tension between the maintenance of established institutional power and the emergent political capacities that threaten to alter a given institutional context. NOTES

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1. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1991, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK), 164. 2. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 8588-‫ج‬.

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3. On this issue, it is necessary to incorporate postcolonial critiques of Eurocentricity in order to consider mechanisms of conscious and lucid self-alteration, which can accompany Castoriadis’s conception of autonomous historicity, re-configure his approach to heteronomy and its psychical and ontological implications. Given the scope of this book, I cannot explore these critiques in depth. 4. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 85–88. 5. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84. 6. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84. 7. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 85–86. 8. Stathis Gourgouris, 2013, ‘Autonomy and Self-Alteration’, Creation, Rationality and Autonomy: Essays on Cornelius Castoriadis (Nordic Summer University Press, Copenhagen), 244–45. 9. Stathis Gourgouris, 2013, Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham University Press, New York), 115–17. 10. Gourgouris, ‘Autonomy and Self-Alteration’, 244. 11. Gourgouris, ‘Autonomy and Self-Alteration’, 259. 12. The ‘New Biology’ refers to the emergence of an intellectual network consisting that focused on addressing questions that largely bring together the fields of biology and information theory. This network attracted people that were interested in addressing interdisciplinary questions, while this approach owes much to the epistemological work of Gregory Bateson, at its core was an engagement between (what has been labelled) the Santiago school of cognitive Biology – represented by the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela – and the Parisian school of self-organising systems – formed around the work of Henri Atlan. See William Irwin Thompson (ed.), 1987, Gaia A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology (Lindisfarne Press, Great Barrington). 13. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2011, ‘Life and Creation: Cornelius Castoriadis in dialogue with Francisco Varela’, Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis, trans. Gabriel Rockhill and John V. Garner (Continuum, London), 59. 14. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, 1980, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland), 75. 15. Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 80. 16. Castoriadis, 2010, ‘Imaginary Significations’, A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, trans. Helen Arnold (Fordham University Press, New York), 56. 17. Castoriadis, 1984, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (14–16 September 1981, Anma Libri, CA), 151–52. 18. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 151–52. 19. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 56. 20. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 159. 21. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 160. 22. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 155. 23. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 153.

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24. Castoriadis, ‘A Society Adrift’, A Society Adrift, 214. 25. Castoriadis, ‘A Society Adrift’, 214. 26. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, World in Fragments, 327. 27. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, World in Fragments, 85–86. 28. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 85–86. 29. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, A Society Adrift, 57. 30. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 57. 31. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 57. 32. Castoriadis, ‘Imaginary Significations’, 57. 33. Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, 160. 34. Castoriadis, 2007, ‘Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, CA), 76. 35. Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity Press, UK), 212. 36. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 85. 37. Andreas Kalyvas, 1998, ‘Norm and Critique in Castoriadis’s Theory of Autonomy’, Constellations, vol. 5, no. 2 (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK), 169. 38. Stathis Gourgouris, 2010, ‘On Alteration’, Parrhesia, iss. 10 (Open Humanities Press, London), 9. 39. Gourgouris, ‘On Alteration’, 9. 40. Gourgouris, ‘On Alteration’, 9. 41. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 164. See also Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The State of the Subject Today’, World in Fragments. 42. Gourgouris, ‘Autonomy and Self-Alteration’,. 43. Gourgouris, ‘Autonomy and Self-Alteration’, 256. 44. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 363. 45. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 170. 46. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 150. 47. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84. 48. Castoriadis The Imaginary Institution of Society, 146. 49. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 167. 50. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84. 51. Castoriadis, ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, 24. 52. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84–85. 53. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 150. 54. Castoriadis, ‘Primal Institution of Society and Second-Order Institutions’, Figures of the Thinkable, 100. 55. It should be noted, on this point, that Castoriadis always insisted that history is the creation and destruction of ontological form. 56. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 168. Castoriadis uses the example of language, which is not restrained by any intentional forms of power, and whose alterations are potentially open to all who speak. He points to other ‘activities that are beyond the scope of legislation’; i.e., family, mores, ‘art’, ‘ideas’. See also:

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Castoriadis, 1984, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable’, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). 57. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 363. 58. Castoriadis, 2002, Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique: Séminaires 1986–1987 (la création humaine I) (Seuil, Paris), 388. 59. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 155. 60. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Done and to be Done’, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Blackwell Press, Oxford, UK), 388–89. 61. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, Thesis Eleven, no. 49 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 112. 62. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 156. 63. Johann P. Arnason, 2014, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections’, Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, Johann P. Anason and Karolewski, Ireneusz Paweł (eds.) (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh), 20. 64. Calvin Warren has described this experience of regulative instituting power in the context of blackness in the United States. See Calvin L. Warren, 2018, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation (Duke University Press, Durham, NC). 65. Castoriadis, ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, 171.

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The Institutional Conditions of Depoliticisation

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One of the most important insights in Castoriadis’s work is that historicity is maintained through political regimes that must necessarily institute the conditions of their mode of instituting power.1 He is talking specifically about the institution of explicit forms of power, namely the legislative, judicial and governmental forms that are bolstered in the process of socialisation. The particular mode of instituting power that is instituted defines the form of the political regime. Political regimes in the modern period structure instituting power according to modes of autonomous self-institution, and these modes have taken a variety of forms concerning the organisation of society and its institutions. In the modern period, political regimes can be characterised on the basis of a shift away from the institutional structures of ‘premodern’ instituting power – by which symbolic forms of political authority are validated through extra-social forms of sovereign power (as discussed in chapter 2) – and are instead validated by ‘modern’ forms of symbolic political authority, for instance, the ‘collective will of the people’, which is, in turn, defined through ‘open’ and ‘autonomous’ processes of legitimation. This is not to assume that the ‘collective will of the people’ is the universal ground of all autonomous modes of self-institution, but rather it means that this term represents a symbolic form of power that defines the ‘democratic’ characteristic of modern political regimes. Democracy is conceived by Castoriadis as a political regime that facilitates the reflexive self-alteration of its institutional conditions in a way that is devoid of any fixed representations of authority that would determine a society’s mode of historicity; [Democracy]implies the rejection of all ‘authority’ that would fail to render an account and provide reasons, that would not offer de jure justifications for the 167

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validity of its pronouncements. It follows from this, almost immediately, that there is: an obligation on the part of all to give an account of and reasons for their deeds and their words (this is what the Greeks called logon didonai); a rejection of preestablished ‘differences’ or ‘alterities’ (hierarchies) in individuals’ respective positions, therefore a questioning of all power flowing therefrom; an opening up of the question of what are the good (or best) institutions, insofar as these institutions depend on the conscious and explicit activity of the collectivity – therefore also an opening up of the question of justice.2

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As discussed in the previous chapter, the autonomous mode of so-called modern democratic political regimes can be seen as being relatively ‘open’ to self-alteration by the community. The alteration of these societies is ‘open’ in the sense that their self-institution is based on political contestation within the constituent political community, and this contestation is formalised through processes of political legitimation that validate the institutional structure of power. Political contestation can be seen as the basis of this democratic opening of modern instituting power to the ‘collective will of the people’, because sovereign power is no longer based on an arbitrary form of rule that dominates the cultural domain. The cultural dimension of societies has become autonomous because the terms of sovereign power are now open to a political contestation that defines the symbolic content of the ‘collective will of the people’, as was discussed in the previous chapter. It is this political contestation in the cultural domain that opens-up the capacity for heterogenous cultural articulations to shape and alter the structures of instituting power in modern political regimes. Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner provide a clear explanation of the ‘democratic’ conditions of sovereignty that are common within modern political regimes: ‘the collectivity [has] to be sufficiently closed and separate from others to master its own fate, on the one hand; and it [has] to be able to substantively determine its fate through internal communication, deliberation and decision, on the other’.3 The most significant aspect of modern political regimes is that these ‘democratic’ conditions became structured in the form of the State. Castoriadis, however, defines ‘democracy’ in a way that is clearly directed against the dominant form of modern political regimes, namely the State form: ‘there can be, there has been, and we hope there again will be societies without a State, namely, without a hierarchically organised bureaucratic apparatus separate from society and dominating it’.4 The State is the overwhelmingly dominant form of political regime in the modern period. The State regulates social conditions in a way that both limits and permits the capacity to alter these conditions within societies, all the while maintaining a form of political stability that reinforces dominant social imaginary articulations.5 In Castoriadis’s view, the ‘modern’ State is an apparatus that governs

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regimes of historicity in ways that have ‘led to the institution, implicit and explicit, of arrangements that, although they have not succeeded in effectively achieving autonomy and self-government, have nonetheless made these societies open societies, in which active contestation from within remains possible’.6 This chapter will analyse one of the more prominent political regimes of historicity in the modern period, the liberal-democratic regime, in order to understand one of the most pervasive experiences of power within these regimes: depoliticisation. It will be shown in this chapter that depoliticisation is a structural component of liberal-democratic regimes because the ‘liberal’ characteristic of these regimes paradoxically provides the institutional conditions for an oligarchical structuring of instituting power. In fact, Castoriadis characterises these regimes as liberal oligarchies: ‘oligarchies because they are dominated by a specific stratum of people, liberal because that stratum consents a number of negative or defensive liberties to citizens’.7 It is the State form of these regimes that structures oligarchical conditions in a way that simultaneously stabilises ‘democratic’ modes of self-alteration, institutes hierarchical processes of political legitimation and reproduces dominant forms of instituting power that depoliticise ‘open’ political contestation. This may seem paradoxical, however, as Chantal Mouffe has pointed out, these regimes are constituted on the basis of a ‘democratic paradox’:

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We are dealing with a new political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation… Let's not forget that, while we tend today to take the link between liberalism and democracy for granted, their union, far from being a smooth process, was the result of bitter struggles.8

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Mouffe raises the issue of a ‘mixed regime’ with Castoriadis in a debate with the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS) group, proposing whether liberal values, such as equality, freedom, and so forth, are not necessary to institute a democratic regime.9 This chapter will show how the ‘democratic’ characteristics of instituting power (i.e., the ‘equalisation of conditions’) have become instituted on the basis of a distinctly liberal interpretation of sovereign power (i.e., the ‘collective will of the people’). Rosich and Wagner reflect on the institutional conditions that have arisen as a result of this ‘democratic paradox’ to suggest that, in general terms, but also

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increasingly within contemporary forms of liberal-democratic regimes, ‘the commitments to freedom and democracy are highly ambiguous and volatile, that they constitute a field of tensions that, in conceptual terms, is devoid of any inclinations towards stability’.10 What is more, it will be seen that a central aim of the State form through which these regimes are structured is to stabilise institutional conditions on the basis of depoliticisation. The contemporary political issues arising from the depoliticised conditions of liberal-democratic regimes and their clinging to sovereign power will be seen as only indistinctly approaching the ‘democratic’ concern for the tragic circumstances of self-limitation, which hinges on the question: ‘Where does that power end? What are its limits? Obviously, that power must stop somewhere; it must have limits’.11 Further to this, Castoriadis proposes that ‘when a society no longer accepts any transcendental norm, or even any inherited norm, nothing, intrinsically, can set the limits at which this power must stop’.12 The answers provided by liberal-democratic regimes, their mechanisms for self-limitation, have fallen short of promoting their ‘democratic’ characteristics. In fact, this chapter will argue that the oligarchical conditions of these regimes have become the basis for a gradual shift to ‘neoliberal authoritarian’ modes of instituting power. This chapter will draw on the central themes of Castoriadis’s work that have been developed throughout the previous chapters in order to offer a theoretical perspective on how depoliticisation is in fact a constituent feature of liberal-democratic regimes and a characteristic of their regulative mode of historicity. The criticism of Castoriadis’s dichotomous conceptualisation of historicity will be extended to offer a specific understanding of the depoliticised political conditions of liberal-democratic regimes: that depoliticisation is a consequence of the implicit forms of instituting power that play a constitutive role within democratic regimes, which ultimately reflects a regulative mode of historicity that reinforces dominant social imaginary articulations. Depoliticisation is a characteristic feature of the autonomous regulation of heterogenous cultural creativity constituting the broader field of political contestation. Overall, depoliticisation is a condition of the established instituting power of liberal-democratic regimes.

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MODERN POLITICAL REGIMES: POLITICAL AUTHORITY AND THE STATE FORM

Modern political regimes are informed by a social imaginary that harbour various interpretations of the autonomous instituting power that shapes them. In each case, the central political question of modern political regimes remains the same: How should this autonomous instituting power establish the institutional conditions that shape specific societies? This is a question

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that fundamentally concerns how political authority is legitimated by ‘the collective will of the people’, which has emerged as a symbolic foundational principle for political authority within a liberal-democratic imaginary. This principle contends that political authority is granted to a ‘collective will’ that permits the political community to govern itself in the form of ‘the people’. In order for the ‘collective will’ to be legitimated in the name of ‘the people’, modern political regimes must institute conditions for the equal participation of all in decision-making, which Castoriadis defines as ‘the equal possibility – effective, not just on paper – for everyone to participate in power’.13 This is an ‘equality’ that aims to include within the ‘participation in power’ all heterogenous cultural articulations that constitute a political community. There have been a range of modern responses to this question of how to establish the institutional conditions that best accede an ‘equality’ based on the ‘collective will of the people’, the most dominant of these manifestations include republicanism, socialism, totalitarianism and liberalism.14 However, it is the liberal form of the democratic imaginary that has acquired a dominant influence in the formation of contemporary political regimes (most particularly within Western contexts). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Castoriadis recognises the emergence of the autonomous imaginary in medieval Europe; however, he also recognises that this did not manifest the social and political conditions that reflect his own interpretation of a democratic regime, rather, ‘almost as soon as they were born, the new [medieval] towns evolved toward oligarchic forms’.15 In fact, it is the oligarchical form of instituting power that strongly characterises the formation of modern political regimes; and this oligarchical form is what best characterises the liberal-democratic State form. Castoriadis’s analysis could benefit from further development of how an implicit instituting power structures the oligarchical characteristics that now prevail in modern political regimes. Perhaps he did not develop the details of this aspect of instituting power due to his incessant desire for modern Western societies to realise the radical potential of a democratic regime. The main issue that has been shown to plague his theoretical work is that this desire led him at times to pursue a stricter dichotomisation between two distinct modes of historicity, between the heteronomous characteristics displayed by every society that has existed in human history and the two autonomous exceptions where true democratic potential has emerged (modern Western societies and a brief historical moment in ancient Athens). This theoretical position – as pointed out in the earlier chapters – bears a significant relation to his Marxist heritage, and its emphasis can be said to have limited the insights of his theoretical work. Further development of the implicit mechanisms of modern oligarchical power leads to a substantial deepening of his analysis of modern political regimes. This section will attempt to open up a path in this direction by looking at how the liberal-democratic imaginary frames a

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specific mode of instituting power that constitutes the distinct State form of liberal-democratic regimes. This will provide a more nuanced understanding of how the ‘liberal-democratic’ imaginary has contributed to the oligarchical characteristic of these regimes, which then makes it possible to provide a more insightful account of the depoliticising tendencies of contemporary political regimes. Castoriadis suggests that in modern democratic regimes, ‘the attempt to found [the] sovereignty of the people on something other than itself’ persists, for instance, in a forms of political authority that are grounded in “natural law”, universal Reason or the rational legitimation of historical laws’.16 In these instances, the political community delegates authority to a symbolic framework of sovereignty that establishes the conditions of equality; and, at this point of the discussion, it is important to highlight that the ‘collective will of the people’ is the symbolic framework of liberal-democratic sovereignty. Castoriadis maintains his dichotomous framework of historical analysis to argue that there is a residual persistence of heteronomous modes of institution in the modern articulations of equality. In Castoriadis’s view, there is a tendency for ‘equality’ to be interpreted as the equalisation of conditions under a universalised form of sovereign authority (i.e., natural or historical laws, rational legitimation, etc.). In his own words:

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discussions on equality as well as those on freedom have been mortgaged to an anthropological ontology, to a metaphysics of the human being which makes of this human being – of this singular example of the species homo sapiens – an individual substance, an individual of divine right, of natural law, of rational law.17

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The conditions of equality are therefore subsumed under foundational forms of political authority. In Western contexts the, shift from religious to modern equality can be interpreted through the prism of secular political authority, which signals the emergence of a ‘liberal-democratic’ imaginary whose sovereign principle became ‘the collective will of the people’. This principle implies a kind of monism that Castoriadis regards as one that potentially threatens to repeal the ‘partially autonomous’ breakthrough of modern societies. In modern political regimes it is the sovereignty of ‘the people’ that symbolically sanctions legitimate authority, and it is on the basis of this sovereignty that equality is articulated in a way that reflects dominant articulations of the ‘collective will’. In order to provide an in-depth account of how instituting power structures the oligarchical characteristics that now prevail in modern political regimes, it is important to, again, relativise Castoriadis’s dichotomous interpretation of modern (autonomous) and premodern (heteronomous) modes of institution.

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This is not to discount the radical historical transformations that characterise the novelty of modern political regimes, nor to downplay the enhanced capacities for heterogenous cultural articulations within a given social-historical context to participate in political power. What is important to stress is the fact that the emergence of modern sovereign power involved a range of metacontextual processes of symbolic alteration that have maintained forms of historical continuity within the new frameworks of political authority.18 In the case of the transition from the premodern to modern political regimes, the emergence of a ‘democratic’ imaginary can be seen as co-extensive with a renewal of traditions that were engaged in radical social and political interpretations of power within religious culture. As Marcel Gauchet has aptly shown, in Western contexts, it is the political culture of Christianity (as ‘the religion of the end of religion’19) that initially conferred their autonomous characteristics upon modern societies. This can be seen most visibly in the transition from religious sovereign authority to secularised forms of political authority. This transition can only be understood in terms of a transformation of the instituting power that shaped the institutional conditions of these social-historical contexts and involved a shift in social imaginary articulations from one dominant framework of legitimation to another. The emergence of modern political regimes was associated with metacontextual processes that altered the symbolic ground of political authority. This emerging mode of historicity – like the emergence of any other – involved patterns of historical continuity that incorporated a creative and interpretive temporality that leaned on instituted symbolic form to articulate the new social-historical conditions of the present. These shifts were therefore closely aligned with forms of instituting power that contested and altered the institutional conditions of social life. They can only be understood with respect to the metacontextual processes of symbolic transition that articulated new foundations for political authority and formed the basis of new regimes of historicity. The recognition of the role played by historical continuity in these transitional periods should be central to the analysis of implicit forms instituting power, because such an approach sheds light on forms of implicit power that limit and regulate the emergence of new dominant social imaginary articulations, which temper the transition into a new mode of instituting power from one framework to another. This challenges Castoriadis’s purely heteronomous interpretation of religious political regimes. For example, he proposed that Christianity ‘is concerned only with equality before God, not social or political equality’, and that ‘in its proper historical practice, Christianity almost always has accepted and justified terrestrial inequalities’.20 In modern political regimes, inequality is similarly accepted and justified but in the name of autonomous (terrestrial) foundations of equality. The issue in modern political regimes is the fact that inequality is a constitutive feature of dominant forms of instituting power,

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and that it is symbolically legitimated by ‘the collective will of the people’ through the illusion of majoritarian rule; this point will be explored further in the following section. The important point to emphasise now is that there is no weight to the strictly dichotomous comparison between heteronomous and autonomous modes of institution. It does not offer a way to provide an in-depth analysis of liberal-democratic regimes. Andreas Kalyvas argues that liberal-democratic regimes are framed around a dominant consensus that modern sovereignty is grounded in the form of the State; which he explains across five essential points.21 Firstly, that political authority reconfigures and reproduces the regal paradigm of power, which instates a vertical structure of sovereignty that reproduces a pre-democratic mode of instituting power.22 Secondly, the reproduction of a regal mode of power presupposes a shift from the monarchical form of political representation (monarch/divine law) to a State form. This is reinforced by what Kalyvas identifies as a belief that ‘democracy in its modern manifestation exists only in and through the centralised and hierarchical form of the State’.23 Thirdly, that the form of ‘democracy’ established by the State is instituted on the basis of liberal interpretations of the ‘collective will’. This has promoted a doctrine of constitutionalism intent on limiting the power of government through the legislation of separate powers, which aims at constraining the excessive capacities of majoritarian rule that may pose direct threats to individuals and minorities. His fourth point is that the political theology of sovereignty becomes a political theology of democracy, in the sense that the transcendental power of ‘divine law’ is translated into the transcendental power of ‘the collective will of the people’. And finally, the liberal-democratic States must be seen in the broader geopolitical context of ‘European imperial expansion, transnational market and colonialism’, which is the context through which power came to be structured and reproduced. These points establish a dominant narrative of modern sovereignty that Kalyvas describes as ‘postmonarchical’, in the sense that liberal-democratic States did ‘not necessarily eliminate the absolutist discourse of sovereignty as command but replace one supreme commander with another’.24 The postmonarchical mode of political authority, even in the form of ‘the collective will of the people’, tends to reduce modern democracy to the formal proceduralism of the State form. Kalyvas argues that this dominant articulation of sovereign power does not, however, provide the full picture of modern democratic regimes. Instead, he proposes to redefine political modernity as ‘a series of struggles between two distinct ontologies of power and forms of sovereignty, irreducible and external to each other, the democratic and the monarchical, which have always ended with the victory of the latter over the former’.25 His argument proposes that there are in fact two competing conceptions of sovereign power that inform the historicity of modern democratic regimes, and that

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what is not present in this dominant narrative of modern sovereignty is the role that constituent power (as ‘the power of the Many to constitute over the power of One to command’26) plays in maintaining their autonomous modes of historicity. The definition of constituent power put forward by Kalyvas ‘evokes the principle of liberty as political autonomy, whereby the members of a collectivity constitute the political forms of authority in order to organize and institutionalize their common free life’.27 The recipients of the law become its authors and legitimisers. Constituent power is therefore a popular form of modern sovereignty that affirms ‘the basic democratic value of selfgovernment’.28 In his view, the autonomous capacities of constituent power are consistently depoliticised in modern societies by the dominant mode of ‘postmonarchical’ sovereign power that finds its most prevalent manifestation in the liberal-democratic State form. It can be argued that Kalyvas internalises Castoriadis’s dichotomisation of historicity and recasts this as a struggle between ‘constitutional and absolutist’ or ‘federalist and statist’ interpretations of political authority. It must be said that Kalyvas offers, therefore, a more concise conception of modern democratic regimes than Castoriadis, particularly in the way that he theorises modern political regimes as the outcome of a co-constitutive tension between heteronomous and autonomous institutional tendencies that exist within the liberal-democratic imaginary. This co-constitutive account of modern political regimes provides an indication of the ‘democratic paradox’, suggesting that the foundation of political authority needs to be grounded (represented) through the institution of plural and contestable values. The point that is made by Kalyvas is that the State form mediates the institutional manifestation of the sovereignty of ‘the people’. Through its mediating role, the ‘liberal-democratic’ State can be seen to regulate the instituting power of ‘the people’. Rather than facilitating institutional conditions that open up the capacity for heterogenous cultural articulations to question and alter the values that constitute the ‘collective will’ of the political community, the State governs ‘collective will’ in order to establish institutional conditions of ‘equality’ based on ‘democratic processes’ that produce social hierarchies and form oligarchical structures. The contemporary political issues in liberal-democratic regimes can therefore be seen to reside in the fact that, because they are essentially autonomous regimes, no clear lines are drawn between postmonarchical and constituent modes of power. Contemporary modes of instituting power reinforce established institutional agendas (of the oligoi – we are here talking mainly about the structural conditions of capitalism)29 and regulate any threats to the implementation of these agendas. These threats are seen to be essentially cultural, because they emerge from interpretations of the symbolic framework of instituting power in the form of social imaginary articulations that differ from those that have attained institutional dominance.

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As was discussed in the previous chapter, the perceived threats to the constitutive integrity of dominant social imaginary articulations initiate both explicit and implicit strategies of self-preservation. They are perceived as threats to the historical continuity of established forms of power. It was also shown in the previous chapter that Castoriadis understood these threats to be amongst ‘the ultrarare instances of social-historical universals’, because the creative instituting temporality of the social imaginary is consistently informing and challenging established forms of instituted power.30 Kalyvas shows that in the context of the liberal-democratic State, this social imaginary creativity amounts to what he has called the ‘revolutionary excess of constituent power’. He proposes that the liberal-democratic interpretation of this creative excess carries a double meaning that relate to the strategies of self-preservation. On the one hand, ‘it reveals the conditional and authorized existence of all constituted powers’, which places constraints and limitations on the duty of obedience that is required of a citizen.31 On the other hand, ‘it argues for an extraconstitutional check on the constituted authorities’, with certain constraints established in order to maintain the rule of law and limit the dangers posed by arbitrary forms of majority rule.32 Both of these perspectives on constituent power will be analysed in the following section as they constitute the institutional conditions of equality imposed by the liberal-democratic State. It will be shown that depoliticisation is a constitutive feature of the process through which this modern political regime confronts the democratic features of its social imaginary. It is this self-preserving tendency of instituting power, contained within the State form, that leads Castoriadis to highlight the ‘essentially negative, defensive character, that lead us to call Western political regimes liberal oligarchies, and the societies that sustain them, relatively open societies’.33 The idea that oligarchies are sustained through ‘relatively’ open regimes resonates with Kalyvas’s notion that there is a strong ‘postmonarchical’ streak within liberal-democratic modes of instituting power. The liberal-democratic State form sets up a framework for power to be consolidated through dominant social imaginary articulations that set an agenda for the negative demarcations of freedom and equality. It will be shown, in the final section of this chapter, that liberal-democratic regimes implicitly institute conditions of inequality that structure the social hierarchies that are authoritatively regulated by State institutions. The force of depoliticising tendencies in contemporary modern societies is a direct consequence of the ceaseless regulation of social imaginary creativity that characterises liberal-democratic regimes. The conditions of this regulation are instituted for the purpose of reinforcing the dominance of established institutional conditions. In no way, however, can contemporary liberal-democratic modes of instituting power be considered as heteronomous, in the strict sense. The capacity to participate in explicit self-institution

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of the collective is ‘partially’ open and accessible to those who reinforce dominant social imaginary articulations and are able to implicitly orient instituting power towards their own agenda. What Kalyvas’s analysis reveals about the modern ‘nature’ of instituting power – in a way that is more precise than Castoriadis – is the fact that, despite this oligarchical form, there is still an underlying ‘liberal-democratic’ imaginary that fuels political attempts to harness the capacities of modern constituent power. The impetus of this liberaldemocratic imaginary, however, is not simply a desire to institute autonomous conditions for politics to take place, but to alter the established institutional conditions of social life that reorient instituting power. It is important to be aware of the fact that the role of the liberal-democratic imaginary is not benign in that it would simply lead to the equalisation of conditions within a given social-historical context. Rather, it merely opens up the capacity for heterogenous cultural articulations to participate in processes of political contestation that shape institutions. The fact that inequality is produced under the guise of ‘the collective will of the people’ comes as no surprise to those who experience marginalisation and exclusion within regimes that claim to be based on democratic political processes. To a larger or lesser degree, the production of inequality through ‘democratic’ political processes has been the prevailing tendency of modern liberal-democratic regimes. In order to reach an understanding of the conditions underlining the contemporary transition of liberal-democratic regimes toward even newer authoritarian modes of instituting power, it is now necessary to shift the discussion from the role of dominant modes of political authority to the question of knowing how liberal-democratic States have enhanced the institutional conditions of depoliticisation. LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC REGIMES: OLIGARCHICAL HIERARCHY AND DEPOLITICISATION

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Now that it is understood that modern democratic regimes are stabilised by their adherence to forms of political authority that are defined by ‘the collective will of the people’, a more specific question needs to be asked: how do liberal-democratic modes of legitimisation reinforce oligarchical political conditions? This section will discuss Castoriadis’s interpretation of the oligarchical conditions of liberal-democratic regimes and the ideological role that liberalism plays in establishing these conditions. It will be shown that the delegation of sovereignty to representative-procedural forms of instituting power essentially depoliticises and alienates the heterogenous sources that could potentially form a ‘democratic’ constituent power. This will lead to an explanation of how the institutional conditions of equality come to

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serve as the basis for implicit modes of regulation within these regimes; the implications of this within contemporary political regimes will be explored in the following section. What this explanation of the oligarchical structure of liberal-democratic regimes will show is that depoliticisation is an inherent feature of the institutional condition of these regimes. Castoriadis develops a theoretical analysis of the political experience of social life in order to understand how societies are governed.34 This framework establishes a topographical schema of social life (which he defines using ancient Greek references), which includes: the ‘private sphere’ (oikos), public ‘private sphere’ (agora) and the public ‘public sphere’ (ekklēsia).35 He claims that these are ‘universally valid’ spheres of human activity that ‘the overall institution of society must both separate and articulate’.36 The important point to be highlighted is that Castoriadis considers each sphere in relation to the way instituting power structures the conditions of social life. Each sphere corresponds to his typology of instituting power, outlined in chapter three, whereby the private sphere is the domain of the ‘infra-power’ of instituted meaning and the public/public sphere relates to the ‘explicit power’ of instituted regimes. In making these distinctions, Castoriadis’s intention was to distinguish between the ways instituting power is structured in democratic and non-democratic political regimes. His dichotomisation between regimes of historicity returns, yet again, in his belief that: ‘these spheres are clearly distinguished (and properly articulated) only under a democratic regime’.37 I have dealt at length with the necessity of relativising this dichotomy.38 What is central to my argument is that Castoriadis does not develop the implications of the existence of an ‘implicit instituting power’ that would correspond to the private/public sphere, and this means that he neglects to factor in a significant portion of political activity that actually shapes social imaginary articulations and contributes to the alteration of social-historical institutions. None the less, it is instructive to consider how Castoriadis assesses the way that these social spheres are governed by differing political regimes. This entails an analytical perspective on how these social spheres are governed in relation to the way differing regimes articulate the parameters of their instituting power. It is through this lens that Castoriadis distinguished between different types of political regimes; and, further to this, how it will be possible in the next section to articulate the role of implicit instituting power in contemporary liberal-democratic regimes. In Castoriadis’s view, the central distinction that allegedly distinguishes the democratic regime from all others is the fact that it can be defined as the moment when ‘the public/public sphere – which in other regimes is more or less private – becomes truly public’.39 The ‘true’ democratic regime is then required to institute the conditions for what he considers to be the ‘proper’ articulation of these spheres, which can be summarised as follows. Firstly, a private sphere (oikos) that concerns

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‘strictly private matters’, which is conceived as an apolitical space in the sense that it is a sphere of private social activity that is not explicitly governed (comparing modern and ancient Athenian law, Castoriadis argues that the latter ‘never thought of setting by law the permissible modes of sexual relations – whereas only the missionary position is tolerated in the State of Georgia in 1989’, while I have heard arguments that this precisely the position to be outlawed, the point is that there are aspects of life that should not be governed).40 This is where the infra-power of institutions shapes social activity in a reflexive sense.41 What is clear, however, is that regimes articulate differently the parameters defining the private status of social life, and by extension the limits of political power in relation private concerns; for instance, the extent to which family matters are deemed private, or similarly the extent to which social activities should be a public concern of instituting power. This grey area between the private and the public sphere refers to the domain of cultural activity that Castoriadis characterises as the agora (the private/public sphere). It is unfortunate that he seems to characterise this sphere as some kind of ‘marketplace of ideas’, which reflects in many ways the liberal interpretation of social life that is focused on individual activity. This is a sphere where, as he says, he would ‘talk with other people, buy books, or do other things’, this is a space that is public and at the same time private because ‘no political decision (be it legislative, governmental, or judicial) can be made there. The collectivity, by its legislation, simply guarantees freedom within this space’.42 This sphere remains otherwise unarticulated by Castoriadis, and the implications of this is that he fails to develop an extensive understanding of the political dimension of this sphere of social activity. Specifically, it is this sphere that not only shapes the parameters of explicit instituting power but also implicitly regulates and alters established institutions at the social imaginary level; this will be explained further in the following sections. For now, it must be understood that Castoriadis equates the democratic regime with the institution of a ‘truly’ public sphere (ekklēsia). There are two main features that constitute the public sphere: on the one hand the ekklēsia is the sphere of explicit (i.e., legislative, governmental or judicial) power, which is wielded through the established institutions such as ‘the “government” and the courts’; on the other hand, the ‘truly’ democratic feature of the ekklēsia is that it is the sphere through which politics emerges as an activity of the ‘public assembly’ to deliberate and decide on ‘common’ matters, and where the decisions of ‘the people’ (demos) are ‘sanctioned by the public power of the collectivity’.43 It is the latter feature of the public sphere that Castoriadis argues is unique to the democratic regime; evident in his definition of democracy as ‘a regime in which the public sphere becomes truly and effectively public – belongs to everyone, is effectively open to participation of all’.44 The distinction between democratic and non-democratic regimes therefore hinges

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on the institution of equal conditions, where ‘equality means the equal possibility – effective, not just on paper – for everyone to participate in power’.45 The capacity for ‘everyone to participate in power’ is obviously not a feature of liberal-democratic regimes. In fact, as Castoriadis observed, these regimes are ‘pseudo-democracies’ that have ‘rendered the public sphere in large part private: the decisions that really count are those made in secret or behind the scenes (of the government, the parliamentary system, and the party apparatuses)’.46 Castoriadis maintained that the most significant feature of liberal-democratic regimes is the fact that ‘deliberation’ and ‘political decision-making’, which are the principal activities of politics, are privatised. The public sphere is structured upon conditions that can be better characterised in relation to oligarchical political regimes; ‘it is in the hands of the political oligarchy’, in which liberal democracy bears a close relation to totalitarian regimes that subsume the public sphere (the political domain, in general) into the ‘the party apparatus’ (i.e., the State).47 The oligarchical character of liberal-democratic regimes encompasses the distinct features within modern sovereignty, discussed in the previous section, between the ‘postmonarchical’ and ‘constituent’ modes of power that constitute the State form. The remainder of this section will discuss in specific detail how both of these modes of power constitute the oligarchical conditions of liberal-democratic regimes, which will serve to explain how depoliticisation has become a core feature of these regimes. Firstly, it will be discussed how ‘postmonarchical’ power achieves its ‘democratic’ credentials through the mechanism of political representation that leads to a procedural-bureaucratic structuring of instituting power. And, secondly, it will be shown how the State apparatus is shaped by a liberal ideology that establishes political power on the basis of an ‘equalisation of conditions’, which, in reality, establishes its oligarchical character; these are the conditions that distinguish liberal-democratic regimes from totalitarian ones, and gives them what Castoriadis defined as their ‘pseudo-democratic’ character. Political representation in liberal-democratic regimes is the mechanism that centralises and hierarchises the political authority of the State. The legitimacy to govern the public sphere in the name of ‘the people’ is delegated to the political authority of the ‘postmonarchical’ mode of modern sovereign power. The representative model of politics within liberal-democratic regimes is legitimised on the basis that the sovereign power of ‘the people’ is delegated to the State. The delegation of sovereign power to State authority is administered through processes that constitute (which is to say, dictate) the ‘collective will’ and structure the institutional conditions in accordance with this ‘will’; this essentially means that liberal-democratic regimes arbitrarily define and limit the ‘collective will’ and ‘make of democracy a mere set of

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“procedures” that govern the public sphere (i.e., “deliberates” and “makes decisions”)’.48 This means that the ‘collective will’ is procedurally administered by the institutions of the State. The State is, therefore, given a ‘mandate’ to establish the institutional conditions of social life, and this mandate is a symbolic representation of the sovereign power of ‘the people’. Castoriadis proposes that the electoral system at the heart of the model of representative politics delivers an ‘irrevocable and long-term’ mandate that produces an institutional mechanism for the ‘irreversible’ delegation of sovereignty to the procedural-bureaucratic State apparatus; ‘the outcome being that they themselves determine the parameters and the themes of their “re-election”’.49 Castoriadis, rather cynically, observes the symbolic nature of this mechanism in a way that highlights how political representation could be regarded as a ‘postmonarchical’ manifestation of the ‘collective will’: These ‘elections’ themselves are an impressive resurrection of the Mystery of the Eucharist and the true Presence. Every four or five years . . . the collective will melts, turns liquid, and is collected drop by drop in sacred/profane vases called ballot boxes, and in the evening, following several other operations, that liquid, condensed one hundred thousand times, is poured into the henceforth transubstantiated minds of several hundred elected officials.50

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This account of ‘postmonarchical’ legitimacy highlights how the symbolic delegation of sovereignty to the State apparatus has established purely procedural conditions under which the ‘collective will’ (i.e., constituent power) is sacralised via institutional mechanisms whose mandate becomes legitimised by the ‘parameters and themes’ set by those who reinforce particular interests through their ‘participation in power’. Political representation channels participation in power into a procedural mechanism of legitimation that consolidates and reproduces dominant articulations of authority. It can therefore be said that ‘the alienated sovereignty of those who delegate to the delegates’ is fed back to ‘the people’ on the terms that are imposed by the oligarchical structure of majoritarian rule.51 I would argue that these formal procedures of majoritarian rule initiate the structural conditions of depoliticisation. This phenomenon can be regarded as an implication of ‘postmonarchical’ modes of social hierarchisation whereby the public sphere becomes increasingly inaccessible to the constituency from which the representative mandate acquires its symbolic legitimacy. The representative model of politics instituted by liberal-democratic regimes therefore does not escape Castoriadis’s critical assessment of the State form in general, which, according to him, sets up a ‘hierarchically organised bureaucratic apparatus that is separate from society and that dominates it’.52 The formal procedures of liberal-democratic regimes, however,

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can be seen to open channels for constituent power to contest established institutions simultaneously. This liberal form of constituent power is aimed towards the liberation of the ‘collective will’, liberation in this sense means to allow the substantive values that exist within the collective to shape institutions in ways that represent the interests claimed by the constituency. Liberal articulations of the ‘collective will’ aim to ensure that institutional conditions promote liberty in the social spheres, most particularly regarding the freedom to express individual and cultural values within the private sphere of social life. It is pertinent to liberal-democratic regimes that ‘individual’ rights and liberties are reflected in framework of legislative and judicial procedural powers and that these rights are ‘enshrined in law’ (as would be said in the postmonarchical lexicon), because this is the basis of the legitimacy of these regimes. The constituent power of the ‘collective will’ is therefore contained within procedural channels of legitimation oriented around ‘individual’ rights. Liberal-democratic regimes are based on a mode of legitimatisation that establish oligarchical conditions by ‘sacralising’ such dominant social imaginary articulations. In her discussion of the modern State, Natalie Doyle sheds light on the modern incarnation of ‘sacral’ power, which highlights how heterogenous sources of constituent power emerge from both mutual and antagonistic relationships with ‘postmonarchical’ sovereignty:

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The sacred is essentially a cultural representation but with empirical consequences: it underpins the hierarchical relationships that structure human societies. The sacred simultaneously produces both social unity and social antagonisms but as a result of its constraining logic, antagonisms always remain contained by the definition of unity/identity on which the possibility of differentiation originally depends. There can be no antagonisms without unity, the two being mediated by social differentiation. In other words, the sacred produces difference and conflict at the same time as it produces unity.53

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The State form can therefore be shown to produce an institutional mechanism that deals with social contestation within open liberal-democratic regimes by promoting participation in those articulations that are dominant, because these are the perspectives that privilege access to power, whilst articulations that do not coincide with dominant interests are subject to implicit and, often, explicit forms of regulation. It will be shown in the following section that the structural features of depoliticisation endemic to liberal-democratic regimes have become a catalyst for tendencies that are leading towards the delegitimisation of these regimes in contemporary societies. The reason for this is that the ‘enshrinement’ of liberal freedom to express either individual or cultural values outside of the private sphere – which is to say in both the public sphere (i.e., the exercise of explicit power) and the sphere of the agora

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(which relates to the sphere of implicit power shaping the public sphere) – encounters starkly different institutional conditions. In these spheres, the procedural mechanisms of the liberal-democratic State intervene to promote a negative interpretation of liberal freedom that draws on the structural features of depoliticisation and intensifies the regulative dimension of its delegated authority. The mandate of sovereign power that is delegated to the State to govern on behalf of ‘the people’ has begun to shift from majoritarian representations of the ‘collective will’ towards neoliberal-authoritarian modes of institution. This latter mode of institution is based on intensified forms of neoliberal regulation, where perceived threats against the ‘collective will’ are increasingly interpreted on the basis of perceived threats to established forms of instituting power. This shift is occurring because the liberal-democratic mandate of State sovereignty is becoming delegitimised. These States are no longer considered capable of representing the ‘collective will’ through proceduralbureaucratic mechanisms that are fundamentally based on oligarchical conditions. It is these oligarchical conditions that orient the procedural mechanisms of the State towards an institutional framework of ‘equality’ that reproduces its specific set of social hierarchies; this, in turn, provides a framework for the definition and distribution of rights and liberties that promote dominant social imaginary articulations. This is why Castoriadis claims that the public sphere has in reality become privatised, because acceptance into the political community is defined and legitimated by the established forms of instituted power. The heterogeneity of social imaginary articulations are hierarchised according to whether or not they coincide with dominant forms of power within institutions. If they do not coincide with dominant interests they are depoliticised, excluded from participation in shaping the institutional conditions of social life, and stripped of their constituent power. At the same time, neoliberal-authoritarian regimes promote the liberalisation of autonomous cultural activities that reflect ‘non-political’ values (many of these containing a strong rational and economic dimension that reinforce dominant interests). The political community legitimises social hierarchies under the principle of majoritarian rule that in fact consolidates oligarchical power; this is because, where liberal articulations are dominant, the ‘the people’ consists of individuals whose ‘collective will’ represents a privatised community, which means that heterogenous cultural contexts within the political community become depoliticised. For those whose articulations are not depoliticised (i.e., those who are complicit with a defined set of liberal values), there is an expectation that the State reinforces political stability through an implicit mode of cultural regulation, which secures the interests of the privatised community from perceived threats to the established conditions of instituting power. The

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cross-contamination of ‘postmonarchical’ representation and of the procedural mode of constituent power therefore structures the oligarchical conditions in which the public sphere is depoliticised. It can be said, however, that that the public sphere in liberal-democratic regimes, as defined by Castoriadis, is only partially privatised. This is owed to the ‘relative’ openness of procedural decision-making within these regimes (not in the sense of transparency, but that there remains a degree of alterity), although, as has been shown, this model of procedural-bureaucratic representation is fundamentally oligarchical because it privileges dominant interests and therefore creates the conditions in which decision-making is only partially legitimised by the constituent power (the ‘collective will’). Liberal-democratic regimes structure the oligarchical conditions of instituting power by governing social spheres according to dominant interests, which means that they have effectively ‘partially’ privatised the political dimension of public sphere. It is this feature of privatisation that informs Castoriadis’s understanding of contemporary depoliticisation. This is evident in the social life that exists under liberal-democratic regimes, where ‘discussions take place as if the political sphere were entirely independent of the rest of social life’, and furthermore, where the ‘political sphere is not discussed on the basis of any real processes, arrangements, or effective mechanisms, or even according to the true spirit of the laws, but according to the letter of the laws’.54 The contemporary oligarchical conditions of these regimes lead Castoriadis to conclude that, ‘reality is obliterated, formalism is preferred, the implicit is replaced by the explicit, the latent by the manifest’.55 This liberal interpretation of instituting power therefore prevails and establishes a conception of negative freedom within the structures of social life that places cultural creativity under the control of the dominant articulations of the ‘collective will’. The liberal interpretation of the representative ‘mandate’ therefore becomes focused on the regulative role of the State to protect the political community from the excesses of constituent power. This liberal ‘mandate’ legitimates the political authority of the State to regulate the public sphere according to its definition of the ‘collective will’ and to set limitations on the exercise of political power within the political domain. This becomes obvious, for instance, when looking at the State responses to threats to the financial interests of State power (which has become increasingly beholden to corporate power).56 At its core the public sphere is governed by a negative conception of freedom that constrains the constituent power, because the ‘collective will’ is interpreted in a way that is fundamentally regulative and conditioned by dominant social imaginary articulations. The regulation of internal and external threats to dominant articulations within liberal-democratic regimes is now the primary role of the State, and this role is undertaken with a new mandate to secure the equalisation of conditions upon which the sovereign power of

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‘the people’ (as a privatised community) is based; increasingly, in contemporary regimes, this mandate is secured through authoritarian forms of rule. The heterogenous constituency of the political community are subjugated to values of social cohesion that privilege liberties under the control of law, which serves to interpret rights in a way that cohere with the normative standards set by established forms of power. The procedural mechanisms that legitimate participation in power therefore become utilised in a way that reinforces the legitimacy of dominant articulations of the ‘collective will’.

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CONTEMPORARY DEPOLITICISATION: THE EQUALISATION OF CONDITIONS AND IMPLICIT INSTITUTING POWER

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The contemporary conditions of depoliticisation are developing in such a way that liberal-democratic regimes are in the process of being configured into even newer modes of instituting power, whose distinct features at this stage can be characterised as neoliberal-authoritarian. Despite popular reactionary discourses proposing that the increasing delegitimisation of the liberal-democratic mandate should be viewed as a ‘crisis’ that marks the failure of these societies, the present period of liberal-democratic delegitimisation should be understood in terms of an exacerbation of political conflict that has intensified oligarchical conditions of liberal sovereignty and shifted these regimes into an authoritarian mode of instituting power. A strong historical continuity flows into these new configurations of instituting power. It is liberalism that provides the cohesive line of continuity that secures the emergence of a new type of legitimacy within these regimes. As I will discuss in this section, the ‘democratic’ character of these regimes, which has been shown to be essentially oligarchical, has begun to shift towards ‘authoritarian’ modes of instituting power. Castoriadis’s conceptualisation of depoliticisation opens up ways of understanding this transition; however, as has been pointed out, there is a significant blind spot in the way he understands depoliticisation, namely: he does not recognise the fact that, in contemporary regimes, depoliticisation largely occurs at the level of autonomous implicit instituting power, which serves to maintain dominant forms of instituting power. Not only does implicit power shape the parameters of explicit instituting power but it also implicitly reinforces established institutions at the social imaginary level. Where my analysis differs from Castoriadis is that he considers the implicit reinforcement of established institutional conditions to be fundamentally ontological, whereas I argue that social imaginary creativity is not ontologically limited but is in fact implicitly regulated by dominant modes of instituting power. This therefore challenges Castoriadis’s understanding

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of the contemporary conditions of depoliticisation, by questioning whether the ‘the implicit’ has really been replaced by ‘the explicit’ in autonomous politics. In fact, the inverse can be identified in the trend of depoliticised liberalisation that characterises the authoritarian shift of liberal-democratic regimes. The ‘explicit’ and ‘visible’ channels of legitimisation established by the ‘relative’ openness of earlier forms of liberal-democratic regimes (as oligarchical as they have always been) are increasingly becoming depoliticised and have been increasingly rendered ‘invisible’ by implicit forms of instituting power. Nowhere is this more evident that the institutional terrain of media in these contemporary regimes. The implicit reigns over the explicit. This is what characterises the tendency towards depoliticisation in contemporary liberal-democratic regimes. As I have tried to make clear, Castoriadis seriously underplays the implicit dimension of instituting power. Implicit instituting power, however, is pertinent to understanding how the political dimension of societies are structured through social imaginaries. What is more, a description of implicit power provides a deeper perspective on how the broader cultural dimension of the social-historical world is legitimately (and illegitimately) regulated by power. This section will look more closely at the role of liberalism in the shift of liberal-democratic regimes toward authoritarian modes of institution. It will be argued that this shift marks not only a continuity of liberal frameworks of power but also signals the fact that these frameworks have enhanced depoliticisation and intensified the regulative dimension of instituting power in these regimes. The section will address two elementary questions: How has the distribution of rights and liberties paradoxically become the framework of new neoliberal-authoritarian modes of social hierarchisation? And following from this, what, then, characterises these new neoliberal-authoritarian modes of institution? Historically speaking, the ‘liberal-democratic’ emancipation of modern sovereign power from monarchical regimes hardly deviated from oligarchical concentrations of power. It has been shown, so far, that these conditions have been reinforced through liberal political frameworks based on majoritarian rule, where the ‘equalisation of conditions’ under which ‘the people’ express their ‘collective will’ is hierarchised through the procedural mechanisms of the State. The crucial aspect that needs to be understood regarding the liberal frameworks that inform the oligarchical conditions of contemporary societies concerns the way the ‘equalisation of conditions’ provides a context for the distribution of rights and liberties in ways that allow dominant forms of power to institute new forms of hierarchical inequality. This inequality is not ‘ontologically’ derived, as was the case in premodern mode of dominant political authority, rather, inequality is instituted structurally and reinforced by the dominant mode of liberal instituting power that individualises the framework of equality and therefore depoliticises the cultural contexts of

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the political community. The State plays a central role in this hierarchical framework and provides an institutional apparatus that both politicises and depoliticises the instituting power of its constituents (and the heterogenous ‘ontological’ articulations within its constituency). In liberal political regimes the role of the State is to regulate the instituting power of ‘the people’ in such a way that the institution of ‘collective will’ reflects an equalisation of conditions that structure its hierarchical framework. Castoriadis turns to Alexis de Tocqueville to elaborate on this point, because the ‘equality of conditions’ is ‘the general trend of [modern] human societies that . . . leads those societies to reject the old forms of social discrimination’.57 But also, for the purposes of this discussion, the way that Castoriadis interprets Tocqueville can also be seen to intuit something about the shift of modern societies toward authoritarian modes of institution. Castoriadis accepts that, ‘the evolution of Western societies shows they really are tending toward the ‘equalisation of conditions’ in the Tocquevillian sense’, and that on the one hand equality is established through the ‘dimension of the old order’ that structures power, but on the other hand, this power is legitimated by a ‘project of individual and collective autonomy’ that is validated by ‘the capitalist transformation of money into the true general equivalence’.58 Here, Castoriadis points out that the constitution of dominant articulations within autonomous structures of power establish the equalisation of conditions on the basis of capital. It should also be pointed out that, in his rather ‘Marxisant’ reading of Tocqueville, Castoriadis highlights an important historical observation: as the ‘old’ forms of discrimination were rejected, ‘new’ forms of discrimination based on capital (which are not to be dissociated from discrimination based on race and gender) began to take form.59 The ‘equalisation of conditions’ therefore emerged as a discriminatory framework that recreates inequality in ways that reinforce the hierarchical conditions of oligarchy. The tendency towards the ‘equalisation of conditions’ is a provision for the delegation of power to the State, which sets a mandate to govern the privatised community of ‘the people’ under the rule of sovereign law; which is to say that no person is exempt from the sovereign law of ‘the people’. It has been argued so far in this chapter that sovereign law is governed by the liberal-democratic States in a way that engenders non-democratic mode of depoliticisation. More specifically, it has been shown that the ‘collective will’ is articulated through procedural mechanisms of the State, which maintain the ‘equalisation of conditions’ (of all under law) while these conditions are simultaneously utilised to establish oligarchical forms of rule. Castoriadis turns to Tocqueville to explain this seemingly paradoxical character of modern ‘democratic’ societies. Tocqueville identified a durable connection between the tendencies of ‘equality’ within modern ‘democratic’ societies

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and the conditions that lead to depoliticisation. On the basis of this connection, Tocqueville envisaged a general tendency of modern sovereign States to degenerate into despotic democracies. What Tocqueville meant by despotic democracy was ‘not the perfectly feasible case where a “tyranny of the majority” would be taken to the extreme, oppressing individuals or minority groups, thus violating [their] own laws’.60 As it has already been discussed, the mandate of liberal-democratic States is to regulate the public sphere in order to counter this threat. The rule of law in liberal regimes is justified on the basis of negative freedoms preventing the potential for a tyranny of the majority, it is therefore oriented towards the depoliticisation of constituent power; in fact, I would argue, the systematic hierarchisation of social imaginary articulations has concentrated the power of dominant interests in such a way that this mandate has become liberalised for the purpose of securing dominant interests (this point will be discussed further). Castoriadis’s interpretation of a despotic democracy depicts a regime where there is ‘perfect “equality of conditions” but in which citizens are so politically apathetic, so lethargically conformist, that they leave every power in the hands of a ‘tutelary state’.61 It would be tempting to conclude that this is the situation of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes, where depoliticisation would be understood as a disengagement of citizens who have retreated to the private sphere, and whereby sovereign authority wouldn’t be simply delegated to the State but rather gifted to it wholesale.62 In fact, Castoriadis concludes that this is an apt description of ‘liberal oligarchies’. Castoriadis draws on Benjamin Constant to emphasis this description, who wrote that ‘in modern societies, what interests people is not the management of common affairs but the guarantee of their enjoyments [jouissances]’.63 Castoriadis regards Constant’s observation to be somewhat prescient in that it speaks to the evolution of constituent power under the ‘equalisation of conditions’.64 It can be said that under liberal-democratic conditions the political power of individuals in the public sphere is relinquished due to their retreat into the private sphere, which reflects a broader forfeiture of the constituent power to representative forms of rule. As has been shown, this leads Castoriadis to view contemporary regimes as liberal oligarchies, whose State form he describes as the following: ‘a bureaucratic pyramid filled with privileged petty despots, solidly entrenched in their position, and who would be more equal than the others’.65 What Tocqueville calls despotic democracy and what Castoriadis labels liberal oligarchy are merely two descriptive accounts of the ‘equalisation of conditions’ that occur under liberal-democratic regimes and subsequently guide, not only, the ‘tendencies toward equality’, but more importantly, also, ‘the tendencies toward depoliticisation’ within these regimes.66 In short, both Tocqueville and Castoriadis intuit that the ‘equalisation of conditions’ under law is, some would say paradoxically, the basis of the

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oligarchical structures of liberal-democratic regimes. However, their assessments of the kind of regimes that emerge from these conditions do not adequately explain the reality of the present situation of these regimes. There are two critical problems with their assessments. Firstly, citizens have not disengaged from the public sphere due to an apolitical culture of individualism. They have disengaged due to structural features of liberal democracy that justify depoliticisation. The shift towards authoritarian modes of power has meant that constituencies are governed as a collective of privatised individuals. These individuals, otherwise, do attempt to politicise themselves in ways that identify with a myriad of collective and culturally established identities (such is the case with identity politics). Individualism is but a reflection of depoliticisation in the sense that individuals whose cultural articulations do not coincide with dominant interests are restricted from collective participation in power. And secondly, sovereignty has not been gifted to the State. The role of the State has shifted into an authoritarian mode because dominant interests have delegitimised its ‘tutelary’ role. What we see in the contemporary situation of these regimes is an intensification of the ‘regulative’ State whose role is to secure dominant interests within society. The ‘postmonarchical’ structures of power in liberal-democratic regimes ensure that forms of instituting power that are based on interests connected to capital are reproduced. This reproductive mode of instituting power gains its legitimacy by reinforcing the social imaginary articulations that coincide with these dominant interests. This mode of instituting power therefore regulates the capacity to participate in political power by implicitly privileging the depoliticised articulations of cultural and collective life. This form of regulative instituting power echoes Castoriadis’s reading of ‘despotic democracy’, in that such a regime is realised ‘for the benefit at least of someone, and this someone never can rule alone in society. Therefore, it is always established for the benefit of some portion of society; it implies inequality’.67 The framework of ‘equality’ is based on the exercise of instituting power, which is to say, on the capacity of participation in legislative, juridical and governing processes. Participation in power is subject to inequal conditions because equality itself is established on the basis of hierarchical conditions. The ‘equalisation of conditions’ in liberal-democratic regimes are based on a framework of rights granted to each citizen (i.e., ‘the people’ constituted by ‘individuals’ presumably detached from political articulations of their heterogenous ‘cultural’ interests). It is clear that the postmonarchical role of the State is to structure these rights in a way that reproduce dominant social imaginary articulations (i.e., ‘interests’ of the ‘collective will’), which means that rights are conditioned by normative standards which structure procedural mechanisms that only ‘partially’ open the capacities of the constituent power to participate in power. This highlights the fact that liberal interpretations of

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equality accept that the public sphere is a field of social contestation that is managed by the dominant interests that constitute it. Equality in the public sphere is therefore governed by the regulative mechanisms of the State, overall (as opposed to totalitarian conceptions of equality, where the State commands the public sphere). Again, this shows that the hierarchisation of instituting power is fundamental to liberal-democratic regimes. What, then, characterises these new neoliberal-authoritarian modes of institution? This can be understood by (a) explaining how heterogenous cultural articulations (that inform constituent power) have become disengaged from instituting power due to the structural features of depoliticisation; and, (b) how the role of the State is shifting toward increasingly regulative authoritarian modes of power. The ‘equalisation of conditions’ in its liberal-democratic manifestation has depoliticised participation in the public sphere (i.e., explicit power). But the oligarchical conditions of these regimes cannot be understood simply as a depoliticisation of constituent power within the public sphere. According to Castoriadis’s analysis, these oligarchical conditions also breed a culture of ‘insignificancy’, where constituencies ‘find themselves facing a society which is becoming less and less interested in “politics” – i.e., less and less interested in its fate as a society’.68 In his view, this breeds a culture of individualism that conforms to established forms of power, which represents a shift of historicity back into a heteronomous ‘sleep’. Rather, as I outlined in the previous chapter, these contemporary institutional conditions are instead highly autonomous in the sense that there are ‘deliberate’ and ‘lucid’ mechanisms that legitimate modes of political authority based on self-institution; the issue is that liberal-democratic modes of institution privilege oligarchical structures of power that depoliticise participation in these autonomous modes of power. This means that the interests of the constituency under liberaldemocratic conditions are only represented politically through dominant social imaginary articulations. In contemporary regimes dominant interests are secured through frameworks of procedural regulation that marginalise and exclude the majority of citizens from ‘participation in power’. Those that are excluded and marginalised are so because of structural mechanisms that regulate political (and, to a certain extent, public) articulations of nondominant articulations. These contemporary regimes are therefore governed on the basis that political equality is granted to cultural articulations that are validated through ‘relatively’ open procedural mechanism of legitimation, those that are not validated by dominant interests are therefore rendered unequal within the procedural mechanisms of instituting power. Inequality is therefore prevalent in liberal-democratic regimes, as Castoriadis describes: There is a tendency for some conditions to be equalized, and at the same time for others, constantly reproduced and ever present, to be unequalised. From the

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standpoint of effective social-historical reality, not of the letter of the law, we live in highly inegalitarian societies, including and above all, with respect to power of all sorts. It hardly matters, as regards this inequality, that the ruling classes may be revitalized by recruiting or co-opting the most capable, clever, and intelligent members of the dominated classes.69

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The procedural mechanisms that open up liberal-democratic regimes to their own self-alteration are therefore subject to intensive regulation. Procedural mechanisms of the State have enhanced the regulative dimension of instituting power in ways that both explicitly and implicitly limit the rights granted to citizens and their application in specific contexts. There are significant implications that result from equality being adjudicated through a normative framework of rights that validate and invalidate particular cultural articulations. Most significant of these is the fact that a social hierarchy is established through the stratification of cultural validity that is legitimated by dominant social imaginary articulations. Liberal-democratic regimes reinforce dominant interpretations of the ‘collective will of the people’ through this ceaseless regulation of cultural validity. This mode of institutional regulation results in either implicit forms of marginalisation within structures of instituting power (i.e., the law), or the explicit exclusion of these articulations from power, which eventuate in these articulations (especially when they are articulated through action) becoming rendered illegal. Expansion of the juridical regulation of culture has served to amplify the regulative dimension of liberal-democratic regimes and is certainly a potent factor in shifting these regimes toward increasingly authoritarian modes of institution. The stability and coherence of liberal-democratic regimes are based on forms of marginalisation and spaces of exclusion that ensures the security and reproduction of dominant interests.70 These interests are reinforced by social hierarchies that are supported by the prevailing dominant social imaginary articulations. That is, these hierarchies are reinforced through implicit practices of instituting power that are in themselves cultural. This means that the instituting power of the dominant interests are reproduced by incorporating – using the term ‘co-opting’ would perhaps make it look too consciously intentional – new social imaginary articulations into the domain of dominant interests by sacralising their complicit relation and validating this relation through procedural mechanisms of legitimation. Castoriadis describes how these supposed ‘democratic’ regimes of historicity are instituted by these very mechanisms that regime of so-called indetermination is perfectly ‘determined’ by real, informal mechanisms. These are essentially distinct from the formal (juridical) rules but are permitted and covered by them, and they ensure, as far as possible . . .

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that nothing changes. It is that very reproduction of sameness that we see in contemporary ‘democratic’ societies . . . which are the core of any social-historical regime. Be it in the economy, politics, or culture, we have reproduction of the same.71

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In neoliberal-authoritarian regimes, the implicit reigns over the explicit and this is due to the complicity that exists between dominant social imaginary articulations and the reproduction of social hierarchies that legitimate the political authority of the regime. While implicit instituting power does manifest explicitly through the procedural mechanisms of the State, its most effective form is within the cultural dimension of social-historical life: it is the sphere of the agora (in Castoriadis’s terms) that is pertinent to this complicit relation between dominant social imaginary articulations and social hierarchy. Castoriadis, however, did not analyse how the implicit power of political regimes is wielded within the social imaginary domain.72 Social hierarchy is maintained implicitly through an allegiance between dominant social imaginary articulations and the dominant interests of established power. They are complicit because hierarchisation privileges participation of particular interests in power, and invalidates and marginalises those articulations that do not coincide with dominant interests. This is why the agora is the seat of the implicit instituting power that maintains the integrity of political regimes. In Castoriadis’s view, this is a non-political sphere, where he would ‘talk with other people’, ‘do’ or ‘buy’ whatever, which is subject to ‘freedom’ derived by the political regime. However, this is, in fact, a sphere whose fundamental fabric is woven by power, which means that it is the sphere through which political regimes are both altered and reproduced.73 The blind spot remains in Castoriadis’s work because he did not provide an in-depth account of the historical continuities of postmonarchical rule within the autonomous articulation of constituent power. This, however, is understood perfectly by those who are marginalised and excluded by the complicit relation between dominant social imaginary articulations and the established instituting power. NOTES

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1. It has been argued by Christophe Premat that Castoriadis adopts the notion of a political regime from Aristotle’s categorical description of monarchies, oligarchies, democracies, aristocracies, tyrannies and republics. See: Christophe Premat, ‘Castoriadis and the Modern Political Imaginary: Oligarchy, Representation, Democracy’, Critical Horizons, vol. 7, iss. 1 (Taylor & Francis, Milton Park, UK), 253. 2. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, Constellations, vol. 4, iss. 1 (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK), 4.

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3. Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner, 2016, ‘Re-Interpreting Democracy for Our Time’, in Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner (eds.), 2016, The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK), 2–3. 4. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 1. 5. There are strong parallels to be made between Castoriadis’s conception of the bureaucratic State form and Louis Althusser’s conception of the ideological State apparatus, both view the State as a repressive apparatus. Although their analyses differ; where Althusser was concerned with an emancipation of broader capacities of structural reproduction, instead, Castoriadis focused on emancipatory potential of social imaginary creativity. The notion of ‘dominant social imaginary articulations’ is evoked as middle ground between their conceptions of the hierarchical stabilisation of the State form. See Louis Althusser, 1971, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New Left Books, London). 6. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2007, ‘What Democracy?’, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 127. 7. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 126. 8. Chantal Mouffe, 2000, The Democratic Paradox (Verso Press, New York). 2–3. 9. See Cornelius Castoriadis, 2020, Democracy and Relativism: A Debate, trans. John V. Garner (Rowman & Littlefield, London), 68. 10. Rosich and Wagner, ‘Re-Interpreting Democracy for Our Time’, 1. See also Johann P. Arnason, 1991, ‘Modernity as Project and as Field of Tensions’, in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.), Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). 11. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 122. 12. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 122. 13. Castoriadis ‘What Democracy?’ 124. 14. It may seem counter-intuitive to situate totalitarian regimes in the context of modern regimes that aim toward conditions of equality that validate ‘the collective will of the people’. However, in a bizarre twist of fate, totalitarianism can be viewed as a political regime that emerges from the liberal-democratic imaginary. Claude Lefort’s definition of totalitarian regimes is instructive on this point, because in his view the distinction between society and the State are collapsed. Therefore, the State form imposes on the political conditions of society a homogenous form representing ‘the collective will of the people’. See Claude Lefort, 1986, ‘The Logic of Totalitarianism’, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson (ed.), (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). 15. Cornelius Castoriadis, 2003, ‘Complexity, Magmas, History: The Example of the Medieval Town’, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (Not Bored!), http://www. notbored.org/RTI.pdf), 378. 16. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA), 93.

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17. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, trans. David Ames Curtis (ed.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 127. 18. The notion of metacontextual processes of institution was discussed in chapter two, where it is argued that there is a distinction between cultural creativity that takes shape within the social imaginary and the symbolic form of instituted power, a distinction which Castoriadis does not take fully into account. For an example of Castoriadis’s insistence on maintaining a dichotomous perspective that emphasises radical historical discontinuity, see Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, 2017, ‘Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary’, trans. Scott Davidson, in Ricoeur and Castoriadis: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, ed. Suzi Adams (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD). 19. See Marcel Gauchet, 1999, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ). 20. Castoriadis, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’, 128. 21. Andreas Kalyvas, ‘Rethinking “Modern” Democracy: Political Modernity and Constituent Power’, in The Trouble with Democracy, 50–52. 22. This quality can be likened to a modern version of Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory of ‘the King’s two bodies’, which portrays the structure of medieval Christian sovereignty. In this account the political authority of the monarch is not so much legitimated by their ‘physical’ body, but by their symbolic ‘spiritual’ body whose proximity to ‘divine law’ validates their transcendent claim to sovereign rule. See Ernst Kantorowicz, 2016, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ). Claude Lefort develops this notion further and used it to theorise a permanent theological-political dimension that underlies the institution of political authority. See Claude Lefort, 2006, ‘The Permanence of the TheologicoPolitical?’, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.) (Fordham University Press, New York). 23. Kalyvas, ‘Rethinking “Modern” Democracy’, 51. 24. Andreas Kalyvas, 2018, ‘Constituent Power’, in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, Jay M. Bernstein, Adi Ophir, and Ann L. Stoler (eds.) (Fordham University Press, New York), 89. 25. Kalyvas, ‘Rethinking “Modern” Democracy’, 52. 26. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent Power’, 90. 27. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent Power’, 87. 28. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent Power’, 87. 29. With regard to this oligarchical agenda, which is supported by a widely cathected capitalist articulation of social-historical existence, ‘the dominant social imaginary can be encapsulated in one sentence: the central aim of social life is the unlimited pursuit of rational mastery’ (Cornelius Castoriadis, 1997, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis [ed.] [Blackwell Press, Oxford,UK], 240). 30. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, 84. 31. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent Power’, 97. 32. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent Power’, 97. 33. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 128 (emphasis added).

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34. There is a second framework through which Castoriadis analyses the structuring of instituting power. This framework distinguishes between three institutional techniques of political power: these are the domains of legislative (nomos), juridical (dike) and governance (telos). However, in order to contain the limits of this discussion only the technique of governance will be analysed in some detail. 35. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to be Done’, The Castoriadis Reader, 405. It is worth noting that Castoriadis’s theorisation of relation between the public sphere and politics has parallels to Hannah Arendt’s work, particularly in the way that they both draw inspiration from ancient Greek notions of political space. See Ingerid Straume, 2012, ‘A Common World? Arendt, Castoriadis and Political Creation’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 15, iss. 3 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), 367–83. 36. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 7. 37. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 7. 38. The idea that there is a ‘proper’ articulation of the social spheres of human activity signals a fundamental eurocentrism underlying Castoriadis’s dichotomization of autonomous and heteronomous modes of historicity; particularly, his complement of a democratic regime as a ‘truly’ autonomous mode of institution. I will restrain myself to one comment on the issue, which is to point out that Castoriadis denies the radical ontological perspective of his theoretical work on social-historical institution that implies openly creative and plural capacities for human societies to institute social space within the world as they define it. Surpassing Castoriadis’s eurocentrism is paramount to addressing his theory of social-historical institution to political questions that relate to contexts of colonialism, globalisation and multiculturalism. It can be suggested that the multinaturalist anthropology, developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, offers pathways beyond the limits of Castoriadis’s theoretical approach. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2014, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (ed.) (Univocal Press, Boston, MA). 39. Castoriadis, 2007, ‘What Democracy?’, 125. 40. Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, 411 41. The political implications of rendering the private sphere apolitical is clearly insensitive to the political work of the feminist movement, which is clearly among the strongest dimensions of the modern autonomous imaginary and one of the most effective capacities for radical social-historical alteration in contemporary liberal-democratic regimes. For one of the more influential responses to this issue, see Silvia Federici, 1975. Wages against Housework (London: Power of Women Collective). 42. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 124. 43. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 124–25. 44. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 7. 45. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 124 (emphasis added). 46. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 7. 47. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 125. 48. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 1. 49. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 128–29. 50. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 129.

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51. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 129. 52. Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, 1. 53. Natalie J. Doyle, 2006, ‘The Sacred, Social Creativity and the State’, Critical Horizons, vol. 7 (Taylor & Francis, Milton Park, UK), 224. 54. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 128. 55. Castoriadis, What Democracy?’, 128. 56. These depoliticising forms of regulation are particularly acute within colonial contexts, where indigenous sovereignty is interpreted by the State on the basis of indigenous rights. In these situations, the interests of corporate power often dominate claims of indigenous rights (without even raising the issue of sovereignty). It is common that the protection of sites that are sacred to indigenous peoples are regulated by procedural mechanisms of the State that interpret the basis of their rights over territory. See Irene Watson, 2007, ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, Australia). 57. Castoriadis, ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?’, 121. 58. Castoriadis, ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?’, 122. 59. This ‘Marxisant’ reading of the ‘equality of conditions’ is in fact more specifically analysed in relation to the influence of Aristotle on Marx. Castoriadis’s analysis of ‘equality’ in relation to Marx and Aristotle relates primarily to the economic dimension of ‘general equivalency’, further discussion on this point would venture down the path of Castoriadis’s detailed analysis of capitalism and its relation to ‘rational mastery’ (as its dominant social imaginary mode of articulation) which falls outside the scope of the discussion on political sovereignty raised in this chapter. See: Castoriadis, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’. 60. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 121. Castoriadis notes that the law of ‘the people’ was delegitimised via a ‘tyranny of the majority’ in the Athenian ekklēsia in 406. This marks a political moment where the implicit dominance of particular social imaginary articulations manifest explicitly to overrule the political rights and liberties of the democratic constituency. This can be regarded as a populist moment, and this explanation has some resonance with contemporary populist moments. What is of concern in this discussion, however, is that these moments represent broader historical shifts of instituting power within the societies concerned. 61. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 121. 62. This gift of sovereign power would come with all of the Maussian connotations that this implies; in the sense that it would be gifted in order to establish reciprocal relation of power between individuals and instituting power 63. Castoriadis, Democracy and Relativism, 42. See: Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns’, Benjamin Constant: Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). 64. ‘Tocqueville, on the other hand, viewed constituent power as being consistently dominated by the sacralisation of postmonarchical State power, in saying that: although ‘the principle of the sovereignty of the people . . . is always to be found, more or less, at the bottom of almost all human institutions . . . [it] remains there concealed from view . . . [and] if for a moment it is brought to light, it is hastily cast

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back into the gloom of the sanctuary’ (Alexis de Tocqueville, 1990, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (Vintage Books, New York), 55). 65. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 122. 66. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’ 96. Also Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 119–21. 67. Castoriadis, ‘The Nature and the Value of Equality’, 138 (emphasis added). 68. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1982, ‘The Crisis of Western Societies’, Telos, iss. 53 (Telos Press Publishing, New York), 21. I have addressed in detail Castoriadis’s assessment of the ‘crisis’ of depoliticisation in Western societies here: Sean McMorrow, 2016, ‘Castoriadis on the Crisis of Western Societies’ (Telos Press, Candor, NY, https://www.telospress.com/castoriadis-on-the-crisis-of-western-societies). 69. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 122. 70. It is worth noting that this also occurred in ancient Athenian democracy, with the exclusion of woman, slaves, and foreigners from becoming citizens of the polis. The present concern, however, is not to outline the potential for the Greek example to contribute to the emergence of an emancipatory autonomous politics, which is clearly visible in Castoriadis’s ‘Marxisant’ intentions to engage the Greek example, but rather, how marginalisation and exclusion operates in contemporary liberal-democratic contexts. 71. Castoriadis, ‘What Democracy?’, 126. 72. It is interesting to note that Heller criticises Castoriadis’s denial of the role that liberalism has played in furthering a number of political causes, most specifically how this ideology has aided the political struggles of women to acquire an instituting power that challenges patriarchy. See Heller, 1989, ‘With Castoriadis to Aristotle; From Aristotle to Kant; From Kant to Us’, 169–70. 73. For instance, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and a range of other forms of discrimination provide clear examples of how practices of implicit power depoliticise such subjectivities and, in turn, reinforce and reproduce dominant social imaginary articulations. This tension also holds just as well for any cultural articulation, old or new, that has a stake in its ongoing social-historical existence.

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The major achievement of Castoriadis’s work was to elucidate the role of the social imaginary within the social-historical context of human societies. This is an important contribution to understanding the political dimension of historicity because, from Castoriadis’s perspective, history is viewed as the ongoing creative formulation of a societal self-image that shape institutions. What is significant about Castoriadis’s perspective is that this societal selfimage is understood to be shaped through a mode of instituting power that establishes the legitimacy of institutional order in relation to the extensive social imaginary representations of the world that exist within a political community. The social imaginary is an important context to understand if one wants to identify and examine the political field of power, to determine the legitimacy of established forms of instituting power and to attempt to formulate new social-historical eidos on which to base forms of political action that are inspired by differing articulations of the world and will, in turn, alter existing institutional conditions. It has been shown that the notion of a social imaginary opens up significant theoretical potential to understand how the political dimension of human societies encompass the capacity to regulate historicity. This is a useful critical lens to understand how historicity operates as a mode of social-historical alteration. It allows the institutional processes involved in shaping modes of historicity to be put under the microscope and to be understood in terms of the power relationships that temporalise social reality. It is also a useful lens to consider the anthropological foundations of society as based on a fundamentally autonomous capacity to create and institute societies on the basis of their imaginary articulations of the world. Here it must be repeated that, although it was never communicated clearly by Castoriadis, there is an important distinction between social-historical autonomy as a general anthropological capacity (and, it should be added, 199

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philosophical notion), and autonomy as it takes shape in the form of a political regime. Castoriadis’s project of autonomy, ultimately, harbours the post-Marxist vision of a revolutionary political regime. A vision that led him to privilege the radical capacities of autonomous subjectivity against the established institution of ontological form. His conception of historicity therefore remained somewhat limited because it does not provide any clarity further than the idea that autonomous instituting power has its basis in already established institutional conditions. This book has explored how the autonomous capacity of collective self-institution that shapes the historicity of social-historical institution is thoroughly political and not simply ontologically defined; which is to say that it relates directly to instituting power rather than to the ontological determination of instituted form as is seemingly proposed by Castoriadis when he contrasts autonomous politics with heteronomy. What Castoriadis fails to consider in any detail is that, if representations of the world are already formulated in the social imaginary they are already lived; that institutional contexts do not wholly encompass the cultural dimension of social-historical existence, in fact, institutions are predicated on processes of regulation, marginalisation and, in some instance, domination of heterogenous cultural signification. Here arises the reality of social-historical existence as a mode of historicity; the creative capacity for communities to implement heterogenous cultural articulations of the world into a corresponding institutional context does not mean that the capacity to alter the existing institutional conditions is open to all. In fact, articulations of the world are subject to regulation by the established forms of instituting power within any given social-historical context, and in this sense social-historical existence is defined through a conflictual encounter with the institutional conditions of society. Social life is therefore shaped by the broader context of instituting power. I have sought to argue that it is the inheritance of instituted form and meaning that propels even the most radical collective action. While the significance of instituted meaning for even the most creative radical politics may have been downplayed by Castoriadis, he did emphasise an inverse problem for radical politics concerning how instituted form imposes ‘historical constraints’ against political action. I have argued that these constraints are fundamentally political and not ontologically derived, as Castoriadis’s analysis suggests. I have also demonstrated that in the contemporary context the imposition of institutional ‘constraints’ reflects an autonomous mode of instituting power, which is an aspect of historicity that Castoriadis failed to develop: the instituting capacity of social imaginaries to exploit already ‘instituted forms’ of explicit power through implicit modes of institutional alteration. This aspect of historicity is important because it sheds light on the capacity for cultural autonomy within processes of institutional hierarchisation that shape

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social-historical contexts. Political action that aims for a radical revisioning of institutional conditions must therefore also negotiate with the creative capacities of an implicit mode of instituting power that maintains continuity with dominant interests of a given institutional context. Historicity involves an implicit maintenance of the dominant social imaginary articulations within institutional contexts, which aim to reinforce favourable institutional conditions by maintaining the ‘effective validity’ of instituted ‘constraints’; or, in other words, maintaining the ‘effective validity’ of institutions ensures that there is a legitimacy to instituting power which is established and granted a capacity to regulate the political community and diminish the capacity for institutional conditions to be altered. This book has also proposed that there is still great benefit in engaging with the political implications of Castoriadis’s work if the ontological emphasis he places on the dichotomous distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, as two distinct modes of historicity, is relativised. By abolishing the strict dichotomy between autonomous and heteronomous modes of historicity it is possible to understand that tendencies towards ‘closure’ can be characterised as a strategic mode of social-historical regulation that aims towards the reproduction of established political regimes. Castoriadis views this tendency to be a significant ontological feature of established forms of instituting power, particularly in the sense that it reflects a need to preserve the instituted form of society from alteration. Castoriadis’s view of the tendency towards ‘closure’, however, remains an ontologically determined assertion, which proposes that instituting power tends towards the closure of significance at an institutional level, encompassing culture more broadly. In order to relativise this perspective, this book has developed an important line of thought that, in fact, exists within Castoriadis’s work itself, which is centred on the social imaginary dimension of historicity. This perspective emphasises a culturological approach to Castoriadis’s insights concerning the political dimension of social-historical institution and its openness to a perpetually creative and autonomous temporality in human societies. Rather than maintaining Castoriadis’s dichotomous distinction, which emphasises the tendency towards ontological closure, it has been argued that the political community always also simultaneously shapes institutions according to a tendency of ontological ‘openness’. This argument develops a point that remains underexplored in Castoriadis’s own work; the fact that, to a large degree, and even in contexts that Castoriadis deemed to be heteronomous, there is also this tendency toward establishing a relationship to otherness. This is a relationship marked by a tendency of ‘openness’ that aims to establish a meaningful understanding of heterogenous significance, rather than experience otherness as a threat to constitutive integrity. Whether or not this involves a situation of experiencing ‘otherness’ that has its own preexisting history, or

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an ‘otherness’ that emerges as a novel cultural expression, what is important is the context within which this situation arises. It must be understood that institutional closure is a feature of instituting power (not instituted form), and that ‘openness’ is contingent upon the context through which heterogenous cultural articulations confront established forms of institutional power. What is important about this perspective is that it relativises the dichotomisation of distinct regimes of historicity, introducing an institutional dynamic that privileges an autopoietic temporality to cultural life regardless of how instituting power attempts to regulate its institutional parameters, and that this dynamic is what accounts for creative and self-altering modes of historical continuity. It is necessary to understand that the tendency towards closure in contemporary political regimes operates on the basis of autonomous modes of instituting power; this is to say that the tendency of institutional ‘closure’ in contemporary social-historical contexts must be seen as a response to the ‘partially open’ political conditions of liberal-democratic regimes that potentially threaten the constitutive integrity of the established forms of institutional power. The tendency towards closure can therefore be re-framed in the context of democratic politics by showing it to be a feature of instituting power that can be regarded as a regulative tendency toward self-limitation. Castoriadis considered self-limitation to be a characteristic of ‘true’ democracy, which involves a ‘regime that explicitly renounces ultimate ‘guarantees’ and knows no other limitation than its self-limitation’.1 He stressed that this makes it ‘the sole regime that takes risks, that faces openly the possibility of its self-destruction’.2 While he did consider the way that liberal-democratic regimes took an oligarchic form, Castoriadis, however, did not consider the increasingly (non-democratic) autonomous nature of this political mode of historicity. The regulation of constituent power based on liberal articulations of self-limitation (i.e., negative liberty), and the ‘equality of conditions’ based on individual rights, put in place to achieve the stability of such a regime is merely a case in point. Yet he, regardless, picked up on the significance of the contemporary situation of these societies by highlighting their predicament: that they were on the cusp of a significant shift in their mode of institution. He went so far as to say that democratic self-limitation could lead to the transgression of its logic of representative authority, and either ‘sink into oblivion (s’abîmer) or turn into its contrary’.3 It is clear that Castoriadis had intuited quite early that the mode of instituting power within liberal-democratic regimes was shifting, however his theoretical analysis could not sufficiently account for this phenomena because he could only perceive this shift as a regression into heteronomous modes of institution. The argument put forward in this book is that democratic forms of self-limitation have not turned into their contrary, but rather it is this exact autonomous feature of

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liberal-democratic regimes that has been intensified and extended into highly regulative and authoritarian political regimes. In closing, I will now assess what can be regarded as a significant shift in contemporary liberal-democratic regimes toward neoliberal-authoritarian regimes. This assessment takes into account the argument put forward in this book that depoliticisation is not only a direct result of the forces of institutional closure, but that it is also a constitutive feature of the mode of instituting power that takes the form of the liberal-democratic State. Ultimately, this will reveal how contemporary tendencies towards institutional ‘closure’ can be seen to operate through an autonomous mode of instituting power that is highly regulative; a perspective that Castoriadis was not able to develop due to his strict definition of heteronomy as mode of ontological determination. Natalie Doyle has provided a succinct analysis of the shift of liberal-democratic regimes into new political regimes, which can be formally summarised as ‘a shift in the perception of democratic legitimacy, away from the notion of government and toward that of governance’.4 Doyle analyses this shift in relation to the implications of liberal institutional conditions that are established on the basis of democratic sovereignty, by which the capacity to govern is seen to be ‘diffused through a plurality of institutions ranging from statutory and regulatory institutions to constitutional courts, whose task is to ensure that governmental action is both effective and respectful of the individual rights defining contemporary pluralism’.5 In Doyle’s view, the fundamental problem facing modern representative democracy is ‘the tendency of ‘governance’ to trump ‘democracy’ when it comes to managing crises’.6 Doyle’s analysis makes reference to the work of Marcel Gauchet, who contextualises contemporary depoliticisation in the context of a series of democratic crises, involving successive revisions of the very notion of democratic sovereignty.7 In many ways, as Doyle argues, Gauchet is one of the most important theorists to have developed the central themes of Castoriadis’s work – particularly the notions of heteronomy and autonomy – in order to develop an understanding of the role historicity plays in the institutional conditions of contemporary liberal-democratic regimes.8 He takes the theme of autonomy developed by Castoriadis and instead of historicising autonomy as a mode of institution he analyses the role it plays in establishing the mode of historicity that characterises how liberal-democratic regimes institute themselves on the basis of their own histories.9 Gauchet analyses the development of liberal-democratic regimes in a way that foregrounds the fact that these societies are established on the basis of political regimes that are characteristic of the more fundamental mode of autonomous institution upon which they are based. He similarly views the ‘openness’ of liberal-democratic political contexts (even if only partial) as ‘fragile’ and structured through regimes of power that are caught in a tenuous

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relationship with their autonomous mode of historicity. More importantly, what he sees as emerging from this ‘openness’ are political visions of social organisation that aim to acquire institutional power in order to institute conditions that reflect such visions. It is due to the essentially contestable ground of power in these regimes that democracy is often perceived as sitting on the precipice of crisis. Gauchet regards this crisis to be a perpetual condition of democratic politics, viewing it as a complex phenomenon precisely because it is essentially ‘a form of a government in which discord, protest and the questioning of what has been established cannot ever cease’, and considers this to be the condition of a regime that has to grapple with the question of whether this crisis really ever ‘begins and ends’.10 It can therefore be seen that Gauchet presents the crises of democratic politics in a similar way to Castoriadis, in that a true democratic crisis arises when political visions of social organisation emerge that contravene the conditions of political ‘openness’ that allow for ‘the participation of all in power’. Gauchet’s analysis differs, however, from Castoriadis’s notion that democratic crisis threatens to trigger a ‘retreat from autonomy’ that could devolve such societies into the reinstatement of heteronomous modes of institution; in fact, Gauchet argues the opposite. Gauchet’s position, which corresponds to the argument presented in this book, is that the contemporary crisis of democratic politics is fundamentally and paradoxically a crisis in the very development of autonomous modes of historicity. It is instructive to highlight how Gauchet’s approach to democratic crisis can support the development of Castoriadis’s work that has been presented in this book, because his analysis explicitly links depoliticisation to a contemporary shift in the mode of instituting power that shapes the historicity of liberaldemocratic regimes. He proposes that the first crisis of democratic politics in these regimes appeared during the period when totalitarian visions of social organisation began to gain traction in the social imaginary of these societies, this was a period ‘when a substantial proportion of citizens [came] to reject the principle binding its institutions and to support parties whose ambition [was] to establish an alternative system’.11 Gauchet regards this as a crisis of reconstitution that presented itself as a muddy cross-roads between the supposed democratic potential of liberalism (to ‘re-conquer democratic power and construct it anew, as capacity for self-government in the framework of a society geared towards history and its liberal structures’) and the secularised form of transcendental authority promised by totalitarianism (to ‘break with these liberal structures to rediscover the mastery of collective destiny’).12 According to Gauchet, the present crisis, began to rear its head in the mids1970s and has increasingly intensified ever since. It is seen to involve a ‘relaunch of the process of disengagement from religion’, which is described as a shifting mode of historicity that is not explicitly religious but fundamentally

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political.13 Gauchet regards the present crisis of liberal-democratic regimes to reflect the contemporary phase in this drawn-out exit from religion, which involves a further deconstruction of postmonarchical authority. He therefore frames the present shifting mode of instituting power to be a new phase in the maturation of ‘autonomous’ historicity.14 Gauchet suggests, in a way that is in parallel with the argument proposed in this book, that the liberal triumph of the previous democratic crisis ‘established the foundations for, and accumulated the means of, a new phase of expansion for social organisation directed towards autonomy’.15 In his view, this new mode of autonomy is based upon a procedural legal framework of social organisation and informed by what he calls a structural vision of autonomy to be distinguished from substantive autonomy (autonomie substantielle).16 A formulation that raised an interesting debate with Miguel Abensour, former collaborator and member of the Textures/Libre group, who marks a distinction between Gauchet’s framework that develops ‘power with freedom’ and his own approach that theorises ‘freedom against power’; it could be argued that this distinction marks the decisive influences bearing on each’s work, namely Castoriadis and Lefort, respectively.17 What Gauchet argues is that there is a ‘new operational ideal of democracy, which does not need to be explicit to function, [which] amounts to a procedural coexistence of individual rights’. Ultimately, with this new mode of institution ‘more rights for everyone means less power for all’, because ‘such a power is excluded from the start and the political community ceases to govern itself’, which means that politics builds less and less upon collective capacities to formulate the institutional limitations that relate to larger structural configurations such as globalised capitalism, environmental crisis, technoscientific development and so forth.18 In this context, Gauchet views depoliticisation as a distinct feature of the contemporary political regime he calls the political market society.19 The new mode of historicity presented by Gauchet sets out to understand the autonomous characteristic of the procedural frameworks of institutional power that can be regarded as nothing other than a ‘politics without power’ (i.e., structural depoliticisation).20 Doyle’s analysis of governance as the defining feature of this new political regime is an important development of Gauchet’s work.21 She interprets Gauchet’s notion of ‘political market societies’ from the perspective of what might be considered to be the mandate of this new form of political regime, whereby ‘a self-regulating aggregate emerging naturally from the subjective interaction of individuals and requiring only contractual regulation overseen by governance’.22 What is significant about these new political regimes is that the shifting orientation of political power has been driven by a thorough neoliberalisation of institutions. As Doyle points out, this shift involves an abandonment of the notion of State sovereignty that harbours electoral democratic processes, in favour of the

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new model of governance that has transformed the State into a regulator of public interest (i.e., cultural articulation): ‘a more diffuse understanding of legitimacy took form whereby the qualities with which governmental power is exercised became more important than the intrinsic properties of the electoral system or of public administration’.23 She argues that the implications of this development have played a significant role in the depoliticisation of liberal-democratic regimes, in which case, ‘conscious of their diminished steering capacity, governments displaced policy issues from the sphere of political contest towards spheres of state action possessing non-political legitimation principles’.24 Doyle’s analysis is important because she identifies in these regimes a new mode of procedural legitimacy that has created two specific institutional forms: the concentration of power in the procedural mechanisms that are founded on technical, juridical and economic expertise, and the colossal expansion of the State’s capacity to wield authority through techniques of surveillance and regulation. As I argued in the final chapter of this book, these developments have transformed the State into an authoritarian regulative apparatus that aims toward the production of neoliberal forms of social cohesion that secure the instituting power of the dominant social imaginary articulations within the context of a given State. Further to this, this analysis offers a promising contribution to the study of contemporary geopolitical dynamics in the confluence of neoliberal and non-liberal regimes. In this respect, what, both Gauchet and Castoriadis don’t analyse in their considerations of contemporary modes of historicity is exactly how instituting power is wielded by the dominant forms of the political regime, and most importantly, how the reproduction of instituting power is maintained through implicit modes of social-historical regulation. They both make reference to the oligarchical characteristics of the contemporary political regimes that were once called liberal-democratic regimes; however, they do not consider the ways that these conditions are reinforced by the implicit dominance of particular social imaginary articulations that actively regulate the political domain. It is not enough to lament the decline of democratic politics. It is in this respect that I tend to deviate from Gauchet’s assessment that these new political regimes involve a ‘politics without power’, even though his recent work does suggest that this mode of politics has enhanced the power of neoliberal ideology responsible for the depoliticisation of conditions that have ushered in an authoritarian shift, it is perhaps instructive to interrogate contemporary forms of political autonomy that do not emphasise a democratic heritage. One step in this direction is to view these regimes – crystallised in the form of the State – as agents of instituting power that are based on postmonarchical (or dynastic, imperial, etc.) notions of authority, and whose mode of institution is based on an implicit wielding of power that gives rise

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to mechanisms of governance that enforce an increasingly regulative mode of politics. The contemporary wave of depoliticisation that reflects the shift away from democratic forms of politics was, likewise, viewed by Castoriadis to reflect a state of crisis that concerns the foundation of liberal-democratic regimes. He even goes so far as to call the present period a cross-roads in history; where one path leads to ‘the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism, along with the growing takeover of the capitalist imaginary’ and the other to ‘a fresh upsurge of the project of individual and collective autonomy’, that is to say, ‘of the will to be free’.25 These cross-roads are clearly demarcated along the lines of his theoretical dichotomisation between heteronomous and autonomous modes of historicity. This book has argued that the fact Castoriadis maintains the dichotomous distinction between societies defined by instituted form and those that are open to the radical creation of new form, ultimately, limits Castoriadis’s theorisation of historicity. In this respect, he is unable to see exactly to what extent institutional power is not driven by tendencies towards closure and that the tendency towards closure is also a creative mode of institution. It is worth reiterating that the critique of Castoriadis’s work put forward in this book proposes that the shifts we are currently witnessing in these societies can only occur if societies are ‘open’ to creative self-reflective articulation, and not confined within an ontologised form of heteronomous closure, as would be the case if historicity was dichotomised. Having said this, Castoriadis is very clear to maintain that, ‘like justice, like freedom, like social and individual autonomy, equality is not an answer, a solution which could be given once and for all to the question of the institution of society’.26 This is because there is no pre-given content to the signification, as ‘the question of knowing what is implied and required in each case by the equal participation of all in power remains open’.27 Indeed, the openness afforded by autonomous instituting contexts has led to far more creative developments in the institution of inequality and the liberal-democratic political regime has indeed proven to be fundamentally structured upon oligarchical forms of instituting power. To present the crisis of democratic politics as the central issue that concerns the shift toward neoliberal-authoritarian regimes remains too limited in scope, and is in itself a depoliticising perspective because it does not take into account a swathe of creative capacities that are emerging from the political community of these societies which articulate a vision for a politics worthy of confronting such crises. What’s more, politics in liberal-democratic regimes have always been ‘partial’ in the forms of representation that have apparently ‘opened-up’ these societies to self-reflective participation in their instituting power. Participation in the institutional mechanisms of these regimes

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have also always been conditionally regulated as to which social imaginary articulations, within a given context, are validated. In this sense, there are significant structural forms of power that orient the political dimension of these societies, such as postcolonialism, which remained a significant blind spot in Castoriadis’s analysis. Postcolonialism is significant because it marks a strong form of historical continuity that accounts for the extension of postmonarchical power into autonomous projects of cultural regulation. From the perspective of postcolonial contexts, it is difficult to regard the shift of liberal-democratic regimes towards authoritarian regimes as anything other than a reconsolidation of institutional conditions established by the structural conditions of globalised capitalism. It is not enough to conflate an analysis of depoliticisation with a generalised notion of democratic deficit, because this would depoliticise the gains being made by marginalised cultural articulations, most particularly in their capacity to participate in broader instituting power. This is why this book has proposed to approach the issue of depoliticisation from the perspective of how ‘autonomous’ institutional conditions established modes of historicity that are ‘open’ to self-alteration. The value of Castoriadis’s work that I have presented here is to show that these forms of regulation are not only based on institutional frameworks but also operate implicitly at the social imaginary level. These new political regimes must therefore be seen to be shifting into increasingly regulative modes of institution that can be defined simply as neoliberal-authoritarian regimes of historicity. My concluding point with regard to depoliticisation in liberal-democratic regimes is that the shift towards neoliberalism has facilitated the conditions upon which authoritarian visions have emerged, and that this situation ultimately reflects the autonomous character of these societies. The strongest social imaginary visions emerging out of liberal-democratic regimes in the contemporary period largely reflect desires to control historicity and to implement authoritarian modes of self-institution. In many contexts, this vision is well on the way to becoming instituted in the form of neoliberal-authoritarian regimes. NOTES

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1. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1994, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds.) (Routledge, London), 151. 2. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 151. 3. Castoriadis, ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, 151.

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4. Natalie J. Doyle, 2014, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy: The European Union’s Crisis of De-Politicisation’, in Democracy and Crisis, Benjamin Isakhan (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke), 108. 5. Doyle, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy’, 108. 6. Doyle, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy’, 110. 7. Gauchet was a colleague of Castoriadis on the committee of two journals, Textures and Libre, and even though they do not explicitly engage with each other’s work the fact that they had a significant influence on each could hardly be denied. 8. See Natalie J. Doyle, 2012, ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal Democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 15, iss. 3 (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA) and Natalie J. Doyle, 2017, Marcel Gauchet and the Loss of Common Purpose: Imaginary Islam and the Crisis of European Democracy (Lexington Books, Lanham, MD). 9. See Sean McMorrow, 2022, ‘Marcel Gauchet’s Political Anthropology: Originary Social Division and the “Processual” Autonomy of a Community’, in Natalie J. Doyle and Sean McMorrow (eds.), Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics (Routledge, New York). 10. Marcel Gauchet, 2015, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, Social Imaginaries, vol. 1, iss. 1 (Zeta, Bucharest), 163. 11. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 165. 12. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172. 13. See Marcel Gauchet, 1997, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ). The reception of Gauchet’s theory of a post-Christian exit from religion has been met with some considerable confusion, by which it has been interpreted as an explanation of secularism rather than a political history that outlines the deconstruction of a previous mode of historicity characterised by hierarchy, tradition and incorporation (the subordination of individuals to the collective). 14. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172. 15. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172. 16. Marcel Gauchet, 2017, L’avènement de la démocratie IV: Le nouveau monde (Gallimard, Paris), 720. See also Natalie J. Doyle, 2019, ‘The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy’, in Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions, Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith (eds.), (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD). 17. Miguel Abensour, 2008, Lettre d’un ‘révoltiste’ à Marcel Gauchet converti à la ‘politique normale’ (Sens & Tonka, Paris), 8. 18. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172. 19. In Gauchet’s words, the notion that contemporary liberal-democratic regimes have become political market societies, does not refer to ‘a society where economic markets dominate the political choices made, but a society whose very political operation borrows its market model from the economic sphere and generalises it, with the whole configuration appearing as a consequence of the initiatives and claims of different players, at the end of a self-regulated process of aggregation’ (Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172).

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20. Gauchet, ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’, 172. 21. It should be noted that Doyle applies this development of Gauchet’s work to the specific context of politics within the European Union, however it stands as an important application of this theoretical perspective. 22. Doyle, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy’, 120. 23. Doyle, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy’, 113. 24. Doyle, ‘Governance and Democratic Legitimacy’, 112. 26. Castoriadis, 1991, ‘The Nature and Value of Equality’, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 139. 27. Cornelius Castoridis, 1991, ‘Nature and Value of Equality’, 139.

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Index

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absolutism, 174–75 à-être (to be), 101, 117–18, 124 Abensour, Miguel, 4, 205 abyss, 73, 96 action (activity), 2, 5, 9, 22–23, 30–36, 48, 56–57, 61, 80, 85, 98, 114, 127, 131, 137, 140, 144–46, 150, 153, 163, 169, 178–79, 183, 191, 199– 201, 206; enaction, 33, 150; praxis, 21, 28–31, 33–36, 57, 114, 125 Adams, Suzi, 10–11, 86, 97 advent, 30, 73, 99–100, 120, 123–24, 129 affect, 37, 39–41, 46, 51, 55, 112, 123; proto-affect, 43 agora (public/private sphere), 178–79, 182–83, 192 alteration, 1, 11–12, 14, 16, 22, 54, 61, 80–81, 90, 93, 112, 117–18, 122, 124, 127, 130–31, 137, 140–41, 143, 147–48, 151–52, 154, 156, 158–60, 163, 168, 173, 175, 178–79, 192, 199–201; alterity, 32, 40, 79, 167, 184, 201; inalterability (unalterable), 61, 94, 144; self-alteration, 13–14, 16, 28, 55, 61, 76, 81, 86–91, 94–97, 100–101, 109, 112, 114–16, 118–19, 121, 124, 128–29, 131, 138–41,

143–44, 147–49, 151–52, 154, 159– 60, 162–63, 167–69, 191, 202, 208 anaclisis, 39, 51 anarchism, 5 ancestors, 2, 92–93, 126, 145–46 anlagen, 54 anonymous, 42, 47, 57, 112, 124, 152, 155–59, 161–62 anstoss, 38 anthropos, 31, 35, 114, 117; anthropic being, 22, 30–31, 35–36, 39–40, 99, 101; anthropogenesis, 36, 40, 73, 83, 94, 96, 98, 101 anthropology, 6, 10–12, 21–23, 25–26, 29–31, 35–36, 39, 56, 59, 80, 91, 96, 113, 117–18, 120, 124, 137, 144–45, 172, 199; philosophical anthropology, 29, 35; structural, 78–79 Archeio Marxismou (Marxist Archive), 5 Arnason, Johann, 10–11, 25–27, 29, 32–34, 74–75, 89–90, 95–97, 100– 101, 109, 127–28, 130, 160 Aristotle, 4, 25, 32–34, 37, 50; neoAristotelean, 33 authoritarianism, 2, 15–16, 138, 177, 185–87, 189–91, 203, 206, 208; anti-authoritarianism, 16;

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Index

OP

continuity, 36, 112, 119, 131, 153–54, 158, 173, 176, 185–86, 192, 201–2, 208; discontinuity, 112 Ciaramelli, Fabio, 80 Clastres, Pierre, 4 closure, 11–12, 16, 42, 44, 48–54, 57–62, 75, 79–82, 84, 87–96, 98, 100, 112, 117, 119, 130, 139, 142– 47, 151, 153, 159, 168, 201–3, 207; enclosure, 4 cognitive, 79, 93, 142, 151 coherency, 1, 142–43, 154, 158 Collège de France, 97–98 complexity, 1, 13, 33–34, 36, 39, 44, 76–77, 82, 113, 161, 204 commodity, 25–26 communism, 5, 25, 27 community, 14, 32, 73, 75, 79, 82, 86, 88, 95, 124, 127, 129, 131, 138, 145, 151, 158, 168, 183, 185, 187, 199– 200; political community, 2–4, 7, 11, 14, 126, 129, 140, 151, 161, 168, 171–72, 175, 183, 187, 201, 205, 207 concealment, 7, 92, 94, 149 contestation (conflict), 15–16, 47, 96, 112, 115, 126–28, 144, 147, 155–56, 159, 163, 168–69, 177, 182, 185, 190, 200, 204, 206 conscious, 9, 41, 45, 50, 56, 116, 127, 168, 170, 175, 206; nonconscious, 41; unconscious, 9, 14, 43, 49–50, 55–56, 61 constitutionalism, 174–75, 203; mixed constitution, 4; extraconstitutional, 176 contingency, 5, 13, 33, 82, 93–97, 101, 116, 119, 130–31, 169, 202; metacontingency, 82–86, 93–94, 118, 144 corporeal, 38, 49, 54 cosmos, 73; cosmology, 9 creation, 8–9, 11–13, 23, 28, 30–32, 34, 36–38, 41, 47–49, 57, 60–62, 73, 77–79, 81–82, 85–87, 90, 92, 94, 96, 99, 101, 114, 117, 119, 121, 123,

TC

neoliberal-authoritarian, 170, 183, 185–86, 190, 192, 203, 207–28 authority, 93–94, 111, 127, 144–47, 167, 170–77, 180–81, 183–84, 186, 188, 190, 192, 202, 204–6 autonomy, 2, 6, 8–13, 33–34, 38, 46, 49, 54, 58, 60–62, 80, 82, 90–91, 93–94, 110–12, 115–16, 119, 123, 125–26, 129, 131, 137–44, 146–49, 151–56, 159–63, 167–73, 175, 177, 183, 185–87, 190, 192, 199–203, 205–8; autonomisation, 41–42, 49; autonomous mode, 1,3, 6, 12, 54, 59, 87, 93–94, 99–100, 110, 123, 126, 137–38, 141, 144, 147, 157, 167–68, 174–75, 200–201, 203–4, 207; partially autonomous, 2, 13–16, 62, 84, 124, 131, 151, 155, 162–63, 168, 172, 176–77, 184, 186, 189–90, 202–3, 207; project of autonomy, 3, 6, 8–10, 13, 137, 147, 187, 207–8; autonomous society, 2–3, 16, 60, 62, 116; retreat from autonomy, 15, 188, 204

NO

biology, 39–40, 49, 117, 121, 142–43; new biology, 142–43 biopolitical, 35 Bouchet, Dominique, 7, 10 bureaucracy, 5–6, 27–28, 168, 181, 183–84, 188; proceduralism, 15–16, 31, 174, 177, 181–87, 189–92, 205–6

DO

capitalism, 6, 24–29, 26, 175, 187, 189, 205, 207–8; anti-capitalism, 8 cathexis, 44–45, 47, 55–56, 59–60, 150 causation, 22, 34, 47 chaos, 73, 83–84, 96 Chaulieu-Montal tendency, 5 cohesion, 1, 12, 79, 88, 112, 121, 185, 191, 206 choice, 77–78, 113, 129, 155–59 colonialism, 161, 174; Postcolonialism, 161, 208 Constant, Benjamin, 188

Y 221

Index

OP

delegation, 27, 43, 93, 145, 172, 177, 180–81, 183, 187–88 democracy, 4, 7–10, 91, 125, 146, 162–63, 167–80, 185, 187, 192, 202–8; radical democracy, 6; democratic paradox, 169, 175; despotic democracy, 188–89; non-democratic, 178–79, 187, 202; pseudo-democracy, 180 denial, 2, 91–93, 59, 95, 101, 116, 130, 139, 149 depoliticisation, 2, 14–16, 93, 138–39, 141, 146, 154, 158, 163, 169–71, 175–78, 180–90, 203–8 desire, 16, 40–41, 46, 50, 150, 177 Despotopoulos, Konstantinos, 27, 33 destruction, 50, 86; indestructible, 52; self-destruction, 25, 202 determinacy, 1–2, 22, 24–26, 30, 33, 54, 78–80, 83, 86, 90, 112–13, 117–18, 143, 147–48, 152–53, 168, 191, 200– 201, 203; determining,22, 28, 32, 37, 76, 81, 95; indeterminacy, 1, 8, 26, 28, 31, 33, 36, 79, 112, 114, 122, 152, 191; self-determination, 89, 143 diaspora, 161 dichotomy, 1, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 34, 54, 59–62, 75–76, 80–82, 87–90, 92–95, 100–101, 110, 112, 114–16, 119, 123, 130–31, 138, 141, 147–48, 159, 170–72, 174–75, 178, 201–2, 207 Doyle, Natalie, 182, 203, 205–6 Durkheim, Émile, 75

DO

NO

TC

138, 140, 142–46, 148, 155, 184, 207; ex nihilo creation, 41, 79–81, 88, 94, 96, 121, 125; self-creation, 2, 38, 61, 80–81, 88, 91, 99, 101, 138, 142; creative capacity, 2, 11–12, 15–16, 30, 34–35, 79–80, 84, 88, 95, 97, 100, 113–15, 117–18, 120–21, 124–25, 128, 131, 138, 140–41, 145, 150–52, 157–58, 160–62, 168, 200–201, 207; creativity, 4,6, 11–15, 27, 32–36, 39, 54, 58, 61, 74–77, 86–87, 90, 94–97, 100–101, 109–11, 115–16, 118–19, 122–24, 129–31, 138–39, 141, 147–50, 152–54, 156– 60, 162, 170, 173, 176, 184, 199, 201–2, 207; non-creative, 93–94 crisis, 6, 185, 203–5, 207 culture, 3, 6, 9–11, 33–34, 46–47, 74, 76, 84, 95–97, 100–101, 124–25, 131, 149–51, 155–56, 168, 173, 175, 182–83, 186, 189–92, 200–202, 208; cultural articulation, 8, 10–13, 30, 34, 74, 76–78, 82–86, 88–90, 92, 96–97, 99, 110, 112–13, 118, 120, 122, 124–26, 128–31, 137, 139–42, 144, 147–48, 151, 154, 156–57, 159, 161, 168–69, 171, 173–79, 182–83, 185, 187–92, 199–200, 202, 206–8; cultural capacity, 33, 110, 112, 116–17, 124, 127–28, 130, 137, 139–41, 146, 156, 159, 162–63, 175, 177, 189, 199–201, 205–6, 208; cultural heterogeneity (multiplicity), 1, 12–14, 34, 47, 74, 77–78, 85–87, 89–91, 110, 112–13, 125, 129–30, 137, 148, 151, 155–56, 159–60, 168, 170–71, 173, 175, 177, 182–83, 185, 187, 189–90, 200–203; culturological, 11, 14, 28, 35, 95–97, 101, 128, 130–31, 156–57, 201 decision-making, 27, 98, 126, 154, 168, 179–81, 184 Dekemvrianá, 5

economic, 22, 24–26, 36, 183–84, 187, 192, 206 education, 22, 47, 150 ekklēsia (public sphere), 34, 178–81, 183–84, 188–90 electoralism, 181, 205–6 emancipation, 1, 26, 186 ensemblistic-identitarian (ensidic), 38, 41–42, 83, 85, 89, 98 existence, 1–2, 11–12, 14, 28, 31, 33, 36–37, 39, 56–58, 61, 73–74, 78,

Y

222

Index

OP

Gourgouris, Stathis, 55, 58, 61, 85, 93, 120, 140, 150, 152 governance, 2, 126–27, 138, 143–44, 159, 167–69, 171, 174–75, 178–81, 183–84, 187, 189–90, 203–7 Greco-Western, 1, 3, 6, 9, 13, 138, 171, 176; Greco-European, 9, 94; philosophical tradition, 1, 21, 80, 146, 153; Western contexts, 171–73; Western (occidental) societies, 24, 91, 93, 128, 187; western metaphysics, 32–33, 172 Greece, 10; ancient, 7, 10, 30, 73, 91, 137, 178–79; Greek Civil War, 5; Athens (ancient), 10, 138, 171; polis, 4, 9, 138

TC

81–83, 85–88, 92, 95–96, 101, 113– 14, 122, 124–25, 139–40, 143, 146, 148, 151, 156–57, 199–200 Europe; euro-centrism, 9, 139; european exceptionalism, 9; european societies, 4, 171; imperialism, 174, 206; medieval Europe, 171; nonEuropean, 138; western Europe, 7 equality, 169, 171–73, 175–77, 180, 183, 186–91, 202, 207; equalisation, 169, 172, 177, 180, 184, 186–90; inequality, 51–52, 173, 176–77, 186, 189–91, 207 extra-social, 91–93, 126, 145–46, 167

Hartog, François, 4 Heap, Jodie, 1, 7–8, 37–38, 41, 44, 46–47, 54, 57 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 22, 24, 26–27, 78–79 Heller, Ágnes, 33 Heraclitus, 37 heritage, 91, 115, 141, 147–51, 153, 155–56, 162, 206; inheritance, 7, 21, 32–33, 123–24, 128, 153–54, 200 hermeneutics, 11, 75, 90, 95, 97, 121; cultural-hermeneutical, 9–11; hermeneutic-interpretive, 116; phenomenological-hermeneutical, 11, 96, 129 heteronomy, 1–3, 8–9, 13, 16, 58, 60, 80, 82, 90–93, 100, 112, 115–16, 119, 123, 126, 131, 139, 141–42, 144–49, 151, 154, 163, 171–73, 175–76, 190, 200–201, 203, 207; heteronomous mode, 6–7, 15, 54, 59, 61, 84, 87–88, 92–95, 99, 110, 116, 123, 126, 131, 138, 141, 143–45, 147, 174, 201–2, 204, 207; heteronomous society, 3, 7, 13, 61–62, 91, 94, 137, 147 hierarchy, 14–16, 27–28, 52, 54, 112, 151, 155, 157, 159–63,

DO

NO

family, 47, 55, 179 federalism, 175 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 21–22 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 38, 41, 47 for-itself (pour-soi), 36–39, 42, 53, 56–57 form, 1, 3–4, 10–12, 16, 24, 30–34, 36–40, 42, 57, 73–74, 77–79, 81, 95, 99, 101, 109, 110, 122–23, 125–26, 128–31, 139–43, 156–60, 162, 167, 169, 173, 175–76, 183, 185, 192, 199–200, 202, 204, 207; eidos, 55, 73–74, 76–83, 85, 88–90, 94, 97–98, 100, 112, 114, 117, 119–21, 125–28, 161, 199, 201; instituted form, 13, 47, 58–59, 77–79, 81–84, 86–87 95–96, 113, 120, 124 Foucault, Michel, 35 freedom, 100, 114, 169, 170, 172, 176, 179, 182–83, 205, 207; negative freedom, 176, 183–84, 188, 202 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 42–43, 45, 49, 52 functional, 4, 32–34, 39–40, 47, 56–57, 78, 84, 113, 126–27, 142–43, 150, 205; defunctionalised, 39–41, 46, 144 Gauchet, Marcel, 4, 52–53, 173, 203–6 gods, 2, 9, 126, 146; God, 2, 92, 173

Y 223

Index

OP

61–62, 74–76, 79, 86, 88, 90, 94–96, 98–101, 109–14, 116–24, 127–31, 137–42, 147–49, 151–53, 155–59, 161–62, 170, 173, 175–76, 178, 182–83, 185–86, 188–90, 192, 199–201, 204, 206, 208; dominant social imaginary, 13–16, 87, 92, 116, 129–31, 140–42, 147, 151–52, 154, 156–63, 168–77, 181–92, 200–201, 206; multiple social imaginaries, 161 imagination, 4, 6, 23, 28–29, 32–33, 36–45, 47, 60, 99–100, 110, 119; corporeal imagination, 39–40, 97; creative imagination, 10, 33–34, 36, 109; radical imagination, 1, 8, 12, 40–45, 48–49, 53–54, 56–60, 62, 81, 125, 150–51 individual, 2, 6, 31–32, 34, 36, 42, 46, 48–52, 54–57, 59–61, 79, 111, 117, 122, 125, 139–40, 146, 149–52, 154, 168–69, 172, 174, 179, 182, 186–90, 202–3, 205, 207; individuation, 50, 60, 150 information, 37, 93, 142 instauration, 3, 61 institution, 1, 11–12, 23, 28–29, 32–34, 43, 46–48, 51, 55–57, 59–62, 75, 79–80, 82–84, 86, 88, 92, 94, 110–15, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 125, 127–31, 138–42, 144–46, 148–55, 159–60, 162–63, 167–69, 175–79, 182, 187, 199–204, 206–8; instituted society, 32, 48, 57–58, 61–62, 76, 84, 98–100, 109–12, 114–17, 119, 122–23, 127, 131, 146, 148, 152, 162, 178, 190, 200; instituting society, 32, 61–62, 76, 98–100, 110–12, 114–17, 119, 122, 149–50, 162; institution of society, 2, 10, 22, 31, 40, 48, 50–51, 55, 59, 73–75, 79, 82, 87, 97, 99, 113, 122, 125, 139, 145, 178, 207; institutional conditions, 14–15, 31, 55, 61, 95, 128, 143, 147, 151–52, 160, 167–73, 175–78, 180–90, 199–204, 206, 208;

NO

TC

168–69, 174–76, 180–83, 186– 92, 200; institutionalised class domination, 26, 191 historicity, 6, 13–16, 21–24, 26, 28, 30–31, 33, 48, 74–76, 78, 81, 85, 87–94, 96–99, 109, 111–12, 114–25, 127–28, 130, 138, 140–41, 147–48, 151–52, 158, 161–62, 167, 174, 199–201, 203–5, 207–8; mode of historicity, 1, 11–12, 23, 75, 77–78, 80, 82, 84, 88, 90–91, 94–95, 100, 109–10, 112, 115–18, 123–25, 129– 31, 138, 140–41, 144–47, 151–53, 158, 162–63, 167, 170–71, 173, 175, 190, 200–204, 206–8; conception or theorisation of historicity, 2–3, 6–8, 11–12, 14, 55, 62, 75, 79–80, 83–84, 86–87, 90, 111–12, 115, 129, 138, 163, 170, 200, 207; regime of historicity, 4, 11, 14, 16, 60–61, 111, 125–26, 147, 151–52, 154, 162, 169, 173, 178, 191, 202, 208 history, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 23–31, 47, 51, 58, 76, 86, 91–92, 97–98, 101, 121, 137–38, 140, 144, 146–47, 149, 171, 199, 201, 203–4, 207 Honneth, Axel, 29 horizon, 31, 46, 76, 83, 85, 89, 95–97, 101, 110, 113, 117–18, 120, 124, 131, 137, 151, 156 Howard, Dick, 22, 26 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 27 Husserl, Edmund, 75

DO

ideal type, 27 identity, 38, 45, 48, 50, 83, 89, 142, 150, 169, 182, 189 ideology, 7, 15, 97, 177, 180, 206 imaginary, 9–10, 32–35, 40, 44, 46–47, 50, 54, 77–78, 98–99, 113–14, 119, 123–24, 153–54, 171–73, 177, 207; radical imaginary, 7–8, 12, 33, 53, 57–58, 60, 62, 81, 109, 114, 123–24, 129, 159, 161; social imaginary, 4, 8, 11, 13–14, 42, 46–48, 56–58,

Y

224

Index

OP

187–88, 191; divine law, 174; natural law, 77, 93, 144–45, 172 lean-on (étayage)), 38–39, 51–52, 55–56, 144; anlehnung, 39, 51 Lefort, Claude, 4, 5, 205 legislation, 126–27, 138, 167, 174, 179, 182, 189 legitimation (legitimacy), 14–15, 16, 111, 139 128, 130, 139, 141, 145–47, 155, 158–59, 161, 167–73, 175, 177, 180–87, 189–92, 199, 201, 203, 206; delegitimisation, 182–83, 185, 189; illegitimate, 186 Legros, Robert, 4 Libre, 4, 205 liberalism, 16, 169, 171, 174, 177, 179– 80, 182–89, 202–5; neoliberalism, 16, 205–6, 208 liberal-democracy, 2–3, 6, 7–8, 14–15, 131, 138, 141–42, 163, 169–72, 174–78, 180–91, 202–8 lier ensemble (tying together), 89, 99, 113–14 life, 1, 37, 39–40, 56, 142; life sciences, 30, 35; living being, 35–42, 142–44 limitation (constraint), 4, 13, 15, 55, 60–61, 124, 129, 143, 151, 162, 168, 170, 173–74, 176, 179, 182, 184, 191, 200–202, 205; delimitation, 78; self-limitation, 13, 170, 202

TC

institutional context, 11–13, 16, 125, 130, 139–42, 148, 150–51, 155, 163, 200–201; institutional tension, 2–3, 13, 32, 53, 60, 62, 74, 76, 81, 87, 88, 97, 99–101, 109–13, 115, 117, 119– 23, 129–30, 151, 162–63, 170; mode of institution, 1, 7, 22, 75, 85, 90–93, 95, 97–100, 109, 122, 128, 139, 144, 147, 172, 183, 185–87, 190, 202, 205, 208; self-institution, 2, 9–10, 31, 61–62, 74, 81, 85, 91–96, 109, 115–16, 124, 137–38, 144–46, 167– 68, 176, 190, 200, 203, 208 intensification, 14, 115, 119, 148, 183, 185–86, 189, 191, 203 intention, 37, 39–41, 43, 55, 112, 123 interest, 14, 128, 181–84, 188– 92, 201, 206 interpretation, 34, 75, 96–97, 101, 123, 130, 137, 142, 144, 153, 155–57, 159, 169, 171, 173, 175–76, 183– 85, 189, 191 interrogation, 2

NO

Joas, Hans, 29 judgment, 126–27 judicial (juridical), 159, 167, 179, 182, 189, 191, 205–6 justice, 168, 207

DO

Kalyvas, Andreas, 150, 174–77 Kant, Immanuel, 37, 142; neo-Kantian, 27, 33; post-Kantian, 23 Karalis, Vrasidis, 33 KKE (Greek Communist Party), 5 Klooger, Jeff, 3, 47 knowledge, 34, 42, 60–61 139, 157, 202, 207 labour, 6, 25–27 language, 31, 38, 43, 47, 59, 150 law, 2, 6, 8–9, 31–32, 59, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 92–94, 114, 123, 125–27, 131, 137–39, 142–46, 155, 159, 169, 72, 175–76, 179, 182, 184–85,

magma, 85 mandate, 181, 183–85, 187–88, 205 marginalisation, 27, 158, 161, 177, 190–92, 200, 208 Marx, Karl, 5, 6, 11, 21–30, 32, 35–36, 74, 79, 94, 111, 114, 116; Marxism, 5–6, 11, 15, 23–27, 29–30, 33–36, 49, 84, 100, 110, 114, 153, 163, 171, 187; European Marxism, 21; postMarxism, 30, 35, 89, 200 material, 22–24, 26, 39, 53, 86–87, 115, 152 Maturana, Humberto, 142

Y 225

Index

OP

146, 148, 151, 156–57, 159, 162, 185, 187, 191, 204, 207–8

object, 4, 41, 43–45, 47, 55–59, 78, 98, 157 occlusion, 2, 91; self-occultation, 13, 61, 91 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 6 oikos (private sphere), 178–79, 182 oligarchy, 4, 5, 15–16, 169–72, 175, 177–78, 180–87, 189–90, 202, 207; liberal oligarchy, 169, 176, 188 ontology, 7, 10–12, 15, 23, 27–28, 30, 33–36, 39, 41, 73–101, 110–11, 117– 19, 121–23, 129–31, 139, 146–47, 154, 159, 161–62, 172, 174, 185–87, 200–201, 203, 207; ontogenesis, 76, 78, 114, 117 openness, 7, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 21, 49, 52–54, 58–60, 62, 75, 77, 80–82, 85, 89–90, 93–98, 100, 110, 113–14, 118, 120, 122, 128, 130, 139, 143, 146–47, 150, 156, 160, 167–69, 176–77, 179, 182, 184, 186, 189–90, 200–204, 207–8 organism, 39; organ pleasure, 40–42 origin, 10, 36, 37, 39, 46–47, 51–52, 59–60, 73, 80, 91–93, 99, 101, 139, 144–45, 182; self-origin, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 89, 91–93, 96, 98, 100, 117–18, 137, 143–45; urstiftung, 98 orientation, 2, 4, 6, 31, 34, 42, 48–49, 57–59, 81, 85, 88, 94–96, 99, 110, 112, 121, 128, 139, 149–51, 153–54, 157–60, 162–63, 177, 192–83, 188, 205, 208 otherness, 1, 11, 36, 40, 42, 44–47, 49–51, 56–58, 60–61, 78, 81, 85–87, 89, 94, 96–97, 100–101, 113, 118–19, 129, 138, 140, 146, 148–49, 151–52, 156–57, 159, 162, 168, 188, 201–2; omnipotence of otherness, 45–46, 49; otherness-alteration, 31–34, 87, 94, 149

NO

TC

MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales), 169 Mauss, Marcel, 75 meaning, 3, 21, 39–40, 44, 47–48, 53, 55–57, 59, 74–77, 79, 82, 86–87, 89, 95–100, 113, 115, 117–18, 120, 123– 24, 130, 138–39, 142–44, 149–50, 156, 178, 200–201, 207 mechanism, 14–16, 24, 41, 77, 126, 128, 155, 160–61, 170–71, 180–86, 189–92, 206–7 Memos, Christos, 8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 30, 75, 89–90, 95, 97–100, 120, 124, 128 messianism, 24, 27 metacontextual, 11, 84, 87–89, 91, 100, 173 Middle Ages, 7 modernity, 167, 172–73; European modernity, 1, 10, 138; modern society, 1, 62, 172–73, 175, 187–88; political modernity, 28, 174; premodernity, 167, 172–74, 186–87 Mouffe, Chantal, 169 Mouzakitis, Angelos, 7, 31, 79, 111–12 myth, 97

DO

nature, 2, 31, 36–39, 56, 117, 138–39, 143–46; environmentalism, 205; first natural stratum, 38–39; human nature, 24, 35–36, 177; natural sciences, 142 necessity, 22, 31, 33, 38–39, 44–46, 49, 52, 61–62, 73, 79–82, 92–93, 126; metanecessity, 82–85, 92–95, 144 Nicolacopoulos, Toula, 15, 127 norm, 7, 10, 31–32, 34, 46, 59, 73, 83–84, 91–92, 114, 139, 149, 152, 157, 159, 170, 185, 189, 191 nothing, 31, 41–42, 55–56, 77, 170 novelty, 1, 7, 112, 115, 119, 139, 159, 173, 201; new, 1, 8, 12, 14, 16, 30–33, 36, 39, 42, 44–45, 48, 57, 59–60, 78–82, 85–87, 99–100, 109, 113, 120, 124, 130, 137–39, 144,

Y

226

Index

DO

NO

TC

participation, 13–15, 112, 120, 125, 139–40, 146, 152, 155, 163, 171, 173, 176, 177, 179–83, 185, 189–90, 204, 207–8 passivity, 38, 98, 100 PCI (Parti Communiste Internationaliste), 5 people (demos), 167–69, 171–77, 179– 81, 183, 185–87, 189, 191 perception, 39, 41, 45, 97–99 phenomenology, 10–11, 23, 30, 35, 40, 74–75, 96–98 place, 31, 44–45, 55, 57, 62, 74, 84–85, 117, 139–40 Plato, 4 poietic, 33–34, 116, 139–10; autopoiesis, 142, 202; poiesis, 34 political (le politique), 3, 13, 27, 57, 75, 88, 101, 111–12, 114, 116, 118, 120–21, 124, 129, 131, 149, 163, 187, 200, 205; geopolitical, 174, 206; non-political, 183, 192, 206; political dimension, 6, 13–14, 22–23, 35–36, 62, 78, 82, 90, 99, 101, 109–11, 115–16, 118–22, 124–29, 138, 129, 151, 155, 160, 186–87, 199, 201, 208; political theology, 174, 181 political regime, 1, 4, 14–15, 167, 192, 200–201, 203, 205–6, 208; mixed regime, 169; modern political regime, 1, 13, 167–73, 175–76, 178 politics (la politique), 6, 10, 57, 100, 111–12, 115, 120–21, 125–27, 129, 139, 146, 153, 160, 177, 180, 186, 190, 192, 200, 202, 204–7; representative politics, 15, 177, 181, 184, 188 potential, 25, 29, 32, 54, 56–57, 59, 78, 95, 101, 115, 120, 122, 125, 129, 131, 137, 150, 169, 171, 177, 188, 199, 202, 204

power, 9, 11, 13, 15–16, 28, 33, 45, 61, 79, 90–91, 96, 100, 109, 110–12, 120–22, 125–31, 140, 144, 147–50, 152, 160, 162, 167–71, 173–76, 178, 180, 182–89, 191–92, 199, 202–4; constituent power, 175–77, 180–84, 188, 190, 192, 202, 204–8; executive power, 126; explicit power, 9, 13–14, 111–12, 122, 124, 126–30, 139, 148–50, 152, 154–62, 167–69, 176, 178–79, 182, 184–86, 190–92, 200, 202, 205; ground power, 111, 122–29, 150, 153, 158, 160, 162, 173, 204; implicit power, 13–15, 111, 115, 120–21, 123, 126–31, 138–42, 147–49, 152–59, 161, 163, 169–71, 173, 176–79, 182–86, 191–92, 200–201, 206, 208; infrapower, 111, 122, 149–50, 152, 159, 178–79; instituting power, 4, 7–9, 11, 13–14, 16, 57–58, 62, 78, 87, 97, 111, 114, 118, 121–31, 137–42, 145–48, 151–63, 167–78, 183–87, 189–92, 199–208; monarchical (regal) power, 174, 186; postmonarchical power, 15, 174–76, 180–82, 184, 189, 192, 205–6, 208; preforming power, 121–22, 149; primordial power, 112; sovereign power, 167–70, 173–75, 180–81, 183–84, 186–87; vis formandi (power of formation), 34–35, 38, 47, 58, 75, 94, 110, 121–22, 125, 129, 148, 156 Prague Spring (1968), 27 presentism, 4 primary narcissism, 42–44, 50 privatisation, 180, 183–85, 187–89

OP

outside, 2, 37–38, 44–45, 50, 81–82, 96, 98, 113, 143, 182

Y 227

Index

OP

relation, 6, 9, 11–13, 26, 29–31, 33–34, 38–39, 45, 49, 56–57, 61, 83, 85–86, 90, 97, 113–14, 118, 129, 138, 140, 149–50, 152, 154, 157, 161–62, 169, 191–92, 199, 201–5; creative relation, 89, 125, 150–51, 155 religion, 3, 7, 61, 80, 116, 126, 145, 172–73, 204–5; Christianity, 173, 181; secularism, 172–73, 204 representation, 2, 7, 9, 37, 39–41, 43–46, 55, 57, 59, 75–77, 89, 92–93, 112, 123, 125–26, 145–46, 149, 167, 175, 181–84, 199–200, 202, 207; political representation, 174, 180–81, 190; representational pleasure, 40–43, 54 republicanism, 171 revolution, 5–6, 7, 15, 21, 24–25, 88; revolutionary, 11–13, 22–29, 34, 36, 90, 114, 116, 120, 131, 153, 176, 200 Richir, Marc, 4 rights, 172, 182–83, 185–86, 189, 191, 202–3, 205; divine right, 9, 172; human rights, 169 Rosengren, Mats, 83–84 Rosich, Gerard, 168–69 rule, 168–69, 176, 185, 187–89, 192; majoritarian rule, 174, 176, 181, 183, 186, 188; rules, 34, 48, 58–60, 127, 143, 145, 159 rupture, 32, 44, 49, 51–52, 57, 61–62, 94, 114, 123, 139, 146 Russia, 5; Soviet State, 5–6, 28

TC

production, 2, 23, 25–26, 30, 47–48, 53, 122, 149–50, 153, 157–58, 182, 206; reproduction, 1, 12, 14–15, 32, 40, 44, 59–60, 79, 114–15, 119–23, 128, 130, 152–53, 156, 169, 174, 181, 183, 189–92, 201 psyche, 36–37, 40–62, 100, 124, 127, 150–51, 154; monadic psyche, 42–44, 46–55; omnipotence of psyche, 43–46, 49–52, 54, 150; psychical, 8; psychical tension, 55, 58–59; psychosocial, 146 psychoanalysis, 23, 30, 35–36, 38, 40–41, 43, 46, 48, 54, 60, 109, 149–50 questioning, 2, 8–11, 31, 37, 53, 56–61, 95, 126, 128–30, 146, 160, 168, 171, 175, 204, 207; unquestionable, 59, 81, 145–46

DO

NO

rationalisation, 24–28, 114, 172, 183 reality, 5, 7, 21–22, 26–28, 38–39, 44–49, 52, 57, 91, 138, 180, 184, 189, 191, 199–200; selfrealisation, 140, 142 reason 2, 33, 78, 167, 172; logon didonai, 168 reception, 11, 86, 98–99, 117, 128, 149–50 reflection, 11, 57, 59, 61, 76, 137–38, 150, 155; self-reflection, 56–61, 84, 90, 98, 125, 131, 138, 155, 207 reflexivity, 11, 31, 56, 60, 80, 97, 109, 113, 115–18, 125, 127–31, 159, 162– 63, 167, 179; self-reflexivity, 22, 31, 37, 83, 118 region, 36–37, 39–40, 47, 54, 117; polyregional, 36 regulation, 12–16, 92, 95, 97, 101, 110–11, 114, 116, 119–22, 125, 127, 129–31, 139–42, 147–49, 151–54, 156–58, 160–62, 168, 170, 173, 175–76, 178–79, 182–91, 199–200, 202–3, 205–8

sacred, 61, 124, 181–82, 191 self-definition, 28, 73, 82–85, 88, 93, 114, 119, 138–39 self-finality, 36–37, 39, 78 self-image, 12, 39, 47, 73, 83, 86, 88–93, 95, 113, 117–19, 124–25, 127, 131, 145, 149, 199 self-preservation, 146, 153, 158, 176, 201 self-organisation, 36–39, 41, 93, 95, 142 self-referential, 42, 49, 56, 94, 115

Y

228

Index

OP

149–52, 191; subject-formation, 149–52; subjectivity, 23, 28–29, 35–40, 44–45, 54–58, 124, 126, 129, 150–51, 155, 200, 205; intersubjectivity, 34, 36, 76, 98–99; trans-subjectivity, 97, 99, 111 sublimation, 47, 49, 51–52, 55, 57–58, 60, 150 substance (essence), 24–25, 28, 33, 35, 83, 172, 182, 205 symbolic, 11, 33–34, 74, 76–78, 81–83, 85–87, 89, 91–93, 95–96, 98, 110, 112–13, 115–17, 121, 128–31, 141, 149–50, 152, 155–56, 158, 167–68, 171–73, 175, 181

TC

sense, 39, 41, 75; non-sense, 44; sinngebung (donation of sense), 97–99 signification, 7, 45–46, 80–81, 86, 89, 91–93, 95–96, 98, 100, 118, 126, 150, 200–201, 207; second-order signification, 77, 82, 113; social imaginary significations, 11, 26, 46–47, 55–56, 59, 74–78, 82, 84, 95, 100–101, 109, 112–13, 119–20, 126–28, 130–31, 139–40, 144–47, 149–52, 155, 157, 159, 179 socialism, 28, 171 social-historical, 8–12, 15, 22–23, 27–36, 38–43, 45–47, 49, 51–52, 54–55, 59–60, 57–62, 73–83, 85–87, 90–91, 94–101, 109–11, 113, 115, 118–19, 121–22, 124–28, 130–31, 137, 139–40, 143–44, 148–50, 154, 157, 160–62, 173, 176–78, 186, 191–92, 199–202 socialisation, 42, 44, 46–55, 59–60, 81, 122, 149–50, 167 Socialisme ou Barbarie, 5–6, 24, 27, 114 sociology, 91 soma, 37, 41, 43–44, 47 sovereignty, 168–69, 172, 174–75, 177, 180–83, 185, 188–89, 203, 205 space, 31, 81, 84, 114, 146, 159– 60, 163, 191 species-being (gattungswessen), 22, 25–26, 36 sexuality, 39, 179 Smith, Karl, 52–53, 58 stability, 14, 47–48, 61, 97, 122, 127, 146, 160, 168–70, 183, 191, 202 State, 4, 15–16, 159, 168, 174–77, 180–84, 186–92, 203, 205–6; nationState, 5; Statism, 175; State-form, 14–15, 168–71, 174–76, 180, 182; tutelary State, 188–89 Stinas, Agis, 5–6 subject, 10, 23, 32, 35–36, 38–41, 43–48, 52, 55–57, 59–60, 62, 81, 97–99, 101, 124–25, 127, 140, 143,

DO

NO

technology, 24–26; technical, 36, 206; technoscience, 6, 205; tools 31, 97 temporality, 12, 30–31, 48, 57, 74, 84, 98–99, 101, 109, 112, 115–19, 122– 24, 147–52, 155, 158–59, 176, 199, 201–2; time, 31, 86, 109, 154 Textures, 4, 205 Thought, 4, 38, 50, 56, 58, 60–61, 80, 150; Thinking, 32, 57, 59–60, 83, 146; Unthinkable, 41, 146; inherited thought, 21, 32 threat, 62, 116, 141, 154, 158, 163, 172, 174–76, 183–84, 188, 201–2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 187–88 totality, 24, 31, 74–79, 82–83, 85–86, 96, 117, 124, 127–28, 140, 156, 158–61 totalitarianism, 171, 180, 190, 204 tradition, 3, 11, 32, 60, 80, 95, 116, 173 transcendental, 7, 36–37, 91–92, 101, 170, 174, 204 truth, 7, 150, 202, 204 Trotsky, Leon, 5; Trotskyism, 5, 27 unity, 1, 4, 43, 50, 83, 142–43, 182; unification, 50–51 validity, 126–29, 139, 146–47, 151, 155, 157–63, 168, 190–91, 201, 208

Y 229

Index

DO

NO

TC

Wagner, Peter, 168–69 Weber, Max, 4, 27–28, 111 Whitebook, Joel, 49–52, 54, 62 will, 48, 57, 167–69, 171–75, 177, 180–87, 189, 191, 207

world, 10–12, 21, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 41, 45–46, 53–54, 56–57, 73–80, 82–82, 84–89, 93–101, 109–10, 112–14, 117–18, 120, 122, 124, 131, 138–39, 142–46, 148–51, 154, 156–57, 159, 160, 186, 199–200; common world (kosmos koinos), 42, 50–51, 55, 117–18, 131; private world (kosmos idios), 42, 51, 55; proper world, 37, 55, 138; world-image, 83, 89, 91, 93–94, 96, 99, 114, 131, 145; world orders, 95

OP

value, 15, 25, 28, 31, 39, 46–48, 91, 93, 98, 138, 157, 169, 175, 182–83, 185 Varela, Francisco, 142–44 Vassilacopoulos, George, 15, 126 visible, 14, 121, 128, 186; invisible, 38, 120, 122, 128, 186

DO

NO TC

OP

Y

Y OP

About the Author

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Sean McMorrow is editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. He teaches at the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

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Y