Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension

Abstract

Is a symbol created or found? Does it reveal the freedom of human creation or does it disclose the form of the world? This was a perennial question for the Romantics of the early 19th century. While some denied the instituted character of symbols in order to assert their correspondence with reality, others defended the autopoietic power of the human creator. In his theory of the radical imagination and his insistence on society’s instituting creativity, Cornelius Castoriadis was an emphatic heir of the latter camp. Yet, it is important to recall a point that Paul Benichou once made in his great work The Consecration of the Writer. In Romanticism, Benichou urges us to recognize “the ambiguity that is characteristic to this intellectual theme, and make of the symbol both a human invention and a characteristic of being itself.”1 Claude Lefort, the theorist of the “symbolic dimension” of the political, remained within this ambiguity. Indeed, many of the issues that came to divide Castoriadis and Lefort in the years after their intensive collaboration as the cofounders of Socialisme ou Barbarie could be encapsulated in the contrast evoked by Benichou. Where Castoriadis held that democracy emerged out of the exercise of human autonomy, and further insisted that autonomy has the potential to become more and more lucid about its self-creating activity, Lefort came to believe that, even as democracy opens new circuits for the articulation and realization of autonomy, democratic power, indeed, the political domain as such, remains unmasterable.