The Social Imaginary: A Critical Assessment of Castoriadis's Psychoanalytic Social Theory

Abstract

In universities around the world, interdisciplinary study is all the rage. Postmodernism, postcolonialism, new political economy, cultural and media studies: such theories are making increasing inroads into sociology, political science, history, and other fields across the social sciences and humanities. To their supporters, these discourses are valuable precisely because they disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries. Yet it is sometimes hard not to feel that such studies are a pseudointellectual cover for avoiding the truly pressing issues of our times. Looming ecological devastation, the depoliticization of public life, the privatization of public resources: many of the new discourses have little or nothing to say about such matters. Not all sophisticated confrontations with the current age, however, are resolutely apolitical. The appearance of Cornelius Castoriadis's books, World in Fragments (1997) and The Castoriadis Reader (Curtis 1997), as well as the French publication of Figures du pensable (1999a) and Sur le Politique de Platon (1999b), alters, significantly and dazzlingly, the status of multidisciplinary research. Alongside Jürgen Habermas or Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu or Julia Kristeva, Castoriadis deserves to be counted as one of the most brilliant theorists of the relations between the individual and society to have emerged in postwar Europe. His books induce a deeper appreciation of the tasks faced by social scientists in recognizing the imaginative and creative capacities of human beings in their dealings with the world. Castoriadis develops both a theory that seeks to reveal [End Page 141] the objective relations constituting and underpinning social life, and a psychoanalytic excavation of creation and imagination in the psyche, personality, and human nature itself. Castoriadis died in Paris, at the age of seventy-five, on December 26, 1997, shortly after the publication of World in Fragments. For the previous half century, he had been both dauntingly prolific and amazingly versatile, able to leap in a sentence from Hegel to Handel, equally at home with Fichte or Freud, and active in social movements from environmentalism to feminism. Economist, philosopher, psychoanalyst, social theorist, political radical: Castoriadis was an intellectual jack-of-all-trades, and the master of most. When, in 1945, being a Communist, his life was threatened by fascists, Casoriadis moved from Athens to Paris, where he undertook postgraduate study and then worked for many years as an economist at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Intensely political, he joined the Fourth International. After a falling out in 1949, he cofounded the noncommunist revolutionary group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, with his friend and coauthor Claude Lefort. 1 A journal bearing the group's name soon appeared and continued to be published through the early 1960s. During this period, Castoriadis gained his reputation as a political theorist. In his journal writings, he repudiated the Soviet Union, developed a critique of bureaucratic capitalism, and exhorted the Left to support workers' uprisings in Eastern Europe (Singer 1979). His views on the crisis of Western societies influenced the May 1968 student-worker rebellion in France. The political highs and lows of May '68 led Castoriadis to reconsider the commitment needed to bring about social change and realize new values. Provoked by the simultaneous power and failure of this upheaval, Castoriadis left his post at the OECD in 1970 and began training as a psychoanalyst. He undertook his training with the French-language psychoanalytic organization known as the "fourth group," a break-away association from the Lacanian école freudienne. The encounter with Freud proved decisive for his future thinking. In Freud, Castoriadis found a means to correct Marx's economically reductionist approach to identity and culture. Like many [End Page 142] before him who attempted to marry Marx and Freud, such as Wilhelm Reich or Herbert Marcuse, he argued that we must listen to our dreams and desires if our struggles are to usher in genuine social change. "Each society," writes Castoriadis in the opening article (1984b) of World in Fragments, "is a construction, a constitution, a creation of a world, of...