The Castoriadis

Reader
Cornelius Castoriadis

Translated and Edited by

D av id A m e s C u r tis

JB

BLACKWELL

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The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy

21 S ee ag ain M S P I , as w ell as I IS , p p . 3 3 2 -7 E .
22 1986 N o te : S ec L A uio-organisation, p . 354.
23 S ee M S P I , in C L , pp. 1 6 3 -4 E .
2 4 S ee I IS , c h a p te rs 4 a n d 6, p assim , a n d I C S I I D (1 9 8 1 ).
2 5 S ee G / (1 9 7 3 ).
26 S ee S B (1 9 4 9 ).
27 1986 N o te : 1 have d e n o u n c e d th e a b su rd ity o f s u c h fictio n a l 'tr a n s p a re n c y ' since 1965, in
M R T I V , n o w in I IS , pp. 1 1 0 -1 4 E [T /E : th is sectio n a p p e a rs ab o v e in th e p re se n t volum e
as C o m m u n is m in its M y th ic a l S e n se ).
2 8 1986 N o te : I h ave d isc u sse d this q u e stio n at len g th in S T C C (1 9 7 9 ). [T /E : S ec, n o w , an
u p d a te d v ersio n o f this te x t, C C S (1 9 8 6 ).]
2 9 1986 N o te : S ee I S R (1 9 8 2 ).
30 1986 N o te : S ec G P C D (1 9 8 3 ).

12
R ad ical Im a g in a tio n and th e S o cia l
In stitu tin g Im a g in a ry (1994)*

i
I have chosen to speak about im agination and the social instituting imagi
nary' not only because these are central them es in my work b u t also for two
m uch less contingent reasons. First, because im agination - the radical imagi
nation of the singular hum an being, that is, the psyche or soul - though
discovered and discussed tw enty-three centuries ago by A ristotle, never won
its proper place, which is central in the philosophy o f the subject. Second,
because the social imaginary', the radical instituting im aginary, has been
totally ignored throughout the whole history of philosophical, sociological,
and political thought.
Given the lim itations of space and tim e, I shall not enter into the history
of the subject, which includes the vacillations o f Aristotle in the treatise De
A nim a, the Stoics and Dam ascius, a long developm ent in Britain going from
H obbes to Coleridge, the rediscovery o f im agination by K ant in the first
edition o f the Critique o f Pure Reason and the reduction of its role in the
second edition, the rediscovery of the K antian discovery an d retreat by
Heidegger in the 1928 Kantbuch, the subsequent total silence o f H eidegger
on the subject, the hesitations o f M erleau-P onty in The Visible and the
Invisible as to w hat is reason and w hat is im aginary,1 not to m ention
Freud, who talks throughout his work about w hat is in fact im agination, and
accomplishes the feat of never m entioning the term.
I shall limit m yself to two remarks about the Aristotelean discovery and,
later, to a brief discussion of som e problem s raised by K an ts treatm ent of
the subject in the first edition of the first Critique.
It has not been noticed, as far as I am aware, that the Aristotelean
phantasia, in the treatise De A nim a, covers two com pletely different ideas.
M ost of the treatm ent corresponds to what I have called second (secondary)
imagination, imitative, reproductive, or com binatory im agination - and
Originally published in Rethinking Imagination Culture and Creativity, Gillian R obinson an d John R undel),
eds (L ondon and N ew York R outlcdge, 1994). T ran sla tio n forthcom ing in C L 5.

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Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

has provided the subsiancc of w hat, for centuries and up to now, passes for
im agination. But in the m iddle of Book T hree, Aristotle introduces,
w ithout warning, a totally different f>hantasa, w ithout which there can be
no thought and which possibly precedes any thought. T his I have
called prime (primary) imagination; it corresponds, roughly, to my radical
im agination.2
It is, at the sam e time, characteristic that Aristotle does not establish any
relation whatsoever between phantasia and poiesis, for him , is techne, and
techne im itates nature, even in the loftiest case, the case of techne noietikc.
T his ballet, this hide-and-seek gam e, should of course be explained, or,
rather, understood. T he m ain factor seems to me to be that philosophy from
the start has been a search for the truth (aleOieia) as opposed to m ere opinion
(<doxa), and truth was im mediately correlated with logos, nous, ratio, Reason,
Verstand and Vemunft. Doxa was linked with sense impressions, or imagina
tion, or both, and left at best to the sophists and sceptics. T ru th about the
world and about being was to be found along the ways of logos, of Reason,
w ithout the question being raised: How can a world, and being, exist for a
hum an subject in the first place? And how is it that these hum an subjects
possess logos, language? (In Aristotle logos is an extremely polysem ous term;
but in his dictum , anthrpos esti zoon logon ekhon - hum ans are living beings
possessing logos - logos, I believe, refers centrally to language; the translation
animal rationale is Senecas in the first century C E . ) Animals are certainly
m uch m ore logical or rational than hum ans: they never do something
wrongly or in vain. And hum an reason, as I shall try to sketch, entails radical
im agination, b u t also would be nothing w ithout language. It w ould, of
course, be preposterous to argue that language is a product of reason. But
then where does language come from? It is significant that the dispute about
the natural or conventional/instituted character of language was already
very heated in Greece in the fifth century' b c e , with Dem ocritus supplying
already unsurpassable argum ents for the conventional/instituted character
of language; that P latos Crarylus is inconclusive, though it obviously makes
fun of the idea of a natural character of words; and that Aristotle defines
the word as phnZ sSmamik kata suntheken, a voice (or so und) signifying
according to a convention, but does not push his reflection further. The
G reeks had discovered the phusislnomos (nature/institution-convention)
distinction and had already put it into practice by changing their institutions.
But their m ost im portant philosophies stopped short of using it, obviously
- at least in the case of Plato - out of fear o f opening the way to arbitrari
ness and freedom.
T his also allows us to understand why the social origin that is, creation
of language and of all institutions, though explicitly known and practically
d em o n strated at least in the dem ocratic cities, rem ained w ithout con
sequences for philosophy. W hen tradition and/or religion stopped supplying

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321

an indisputable source and form ulation for the law and for the m eaning of
the world, philosophy rushed in to take its place. F or this it had to find a
fundamentum inconcussum, an unshakeable foundation, which was to be
Reason. And according to the already em erging basic ontological categories,
this Reason could be found in Things, in Ideas, or in Subjects - that is,
Substantive Individuals - but certainly not in the anonym ous social collec
tive w hich could only be a collection o f such individuals entering into
com m erce because of need, of fear, or o f rational calculation.
Also, alm ost from the beginning (and already in Parm enides) the philo
sophical tenet ex nihilo nihil - a constitutive axiom of ensem blistic-identitary
logic* - im posed itself. But im agination, and social instituting imaginan-,
create - ex nihilo. Therefore, what they create m ust be a nonbeing, Unsein at best, fictions and illusions. O f course, this is a nonsolution, since illusions
are (e.g., they may have trem endous consequences). B ut this was covered
up by the idea o f degrees of being - or of intensity of existence - linked
very rapidly with the criteria o f duration, so diat perm anence, eternity, and,
finally, atem porality becam e fundam ental characteristics o f true being - of
immutability - so that everything belonging to the H eraclitean flux becam e
disqualified - and of universality - opposing what m ust be for everybody to
what just happens to be for somebody. Mutatis mutandis, all this rem ains
true today, despite talk about imagination and creativity, both of which are
rapidly becom ing advertising slogans.

II
Before going further, a preliminary- explanation o f the use of the term s imag
ination, imaginary', and radical may be helpful.
I talk about im agination because of the two connotations o f the word: the
connection with images in the m ost general sense, that is, forms (Bilder-,
Einbildung, etc.); and the connection with die idea of invention or, better
and properly speaking, with creation.
T h e term radical I use, first, to oppose w hat I am talking about to the
secondary im agination which is either reproductive or simply com binatory
(and usually both), and, second, to em phasize the idea that this im agination
is before the distinction between real and fictitious*. T o put it bluntly: it is
because radical im agination exists that reality exists for us - exists tout court
- and exists as it exists.
Both considerations apply as well to die radical instituting social imagi
nary'. It is radical because it creates ex nihilo (not in nihilo or cum nihilo). It
does not create images in the visual sense (though it docs this as well: totem
poles, em blem s, flags, etc.). It creates, rather, forms which can be images in
a general sense (linguists speak ab o u t the acoustic im age o f a w ord),

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hut in the main are significations and institutions (each o f those being
impossible w ithout the other).
So, to put it briefly, in both cases we talk about an a-causal vis fomxandi.
A-causal does not m ean unconditioned or absolute, ab-solutus, separated,
detached, w ithout relations. All actual and factual relations are not casual.
T h e seat of this vis formandi as radical im agination is the singular hum an
being, m ore specifically its psyche. T h e seat of this vis as instituting social
imaginary- is the anonym ous collective and, m ore generally, the socialhistorical field.

Ill
I turn now to the radical imagination o f the singular hum an being. One may
take two paths in order to elucidate this idea: the philosophical and the
psychoanalytical.
On the philosophical path, we may well start with an Auseinandersetzung
with Kant. In the Critique o f Pure Reason (24, B151) a proper definition is
given: Einbildungskraft ist das Vermogen einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessen
Gegemvart in der Anschauung vorzustellen' - Im agination is the power (the
capacity, the faculty) to represent in the intuition an object even w ithout its
presence. One may note that Parm enides was already saying as m uch, if not
m ore: C o n sid er how the absent (things) are w ith certainty present to
thought (>ji>o). A nd Socrates was going m uch further when he asserted that
imagination is the power to represent that which is not. K ant goes on to add:
As all o u r intuitions are sensuous, im agination therefore belongs to the
sensibility. O f course, just the reverse is true as I shall try to show presently.
W e shall see th a t K ant certainly intends m uch m ore than what is entailed
by the above definition: the conception o f transcendental im agination, the
paragraphs on the Schem atism , and even the substance of the chapters on
space and tim e go far beyond this definition. But the latter is useful in order
to oppose to it w hat I consider to be the proper definition: Einbildungskraft
ist das Vermogen Vontellungen hervorzubringen, ob diese einen dusseren Anlass
haben oder nicht. Im agination is the power (the capacity, the faculty) to make
appear representations (ideas is the old English term , e.g. in Locke),
whether with or w ithout an external incitem ent. In other words: imagina
tion is the power to make be that which 'realiter is not (I shall return later to
the term realiter.
W e take first the case of an external incitem ent (or excitation!). Fichte,
who in the first version of the Wissenschaftslehre gives m uch greater weight
to the imagination than K ant, speaks of Anstop (shock). In this he is, I think,
correct. But Kant speaks about the senses, opposing the receptivity of
im pressions to the spontaneity of concepts. Im agination obviously should

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323

go with spontaneity; but curiously, it is left out o f this opposition. (And, if

it is taken to belong to sensibility, as in the citation above, then it should
be passive - an idea difficult to make sense of.) But w hat about this recep
tivity o f th e im p re ssio n s? W h a t a b o u t S in n lich keit - se n sib ility or
sensoriality?
In tru th , there is no receptivity or passivity of the im pressions. T o begin
with, there are no such things as im pressions. Im pressions are a philo
sophical or psychological artifact. T here are, in some cases, perceptions - that
is, representations of external and m ore or less in d ep en d en t objects.
(Some cases only: there is an exorbitant privilege of perception in the whole
of in h erited philosophy, up to and including H usserl, H eidegger, and
M erleau-Ponty.) These possess, certainly, a sensorial com ponent. But this
com ponent is itself a creation o f the im agination. T h e senses make em erge,
out of an X , som ething which physically or really is not (if one equates
reality with the reality of physics): colours, sounds, smells, etc. In phys
ical n a tu re th e re arc no c o lo u rs, so u n d s , o r sm ells: th e re are only
electrom agnetic waves, air waves, kinds of m olecules, etc. T he sensible quale
(the fam ous secondary qualities) is a pure creation o f the senses, that is,
of im agination in its m ost elem entary m anifestation, giving a form and a
specific form to som ething which, in itself, has no relation with that form.
T hese arc, o f course, E ddingtons two tables. This table - the one I touch,
I see, I lean on, etc. - contains an indefinite plurality of elem ents crcated
by the singular imagination and the social imaginan.'. T h e other table - in
fact, no table at all - is a scientific construct, such as science makes it today.
(And this does not make it any less imaginary in the sense of the word I am
intending.)
As the m caningfulncss (at least, the philosophical meaningfulness) of this
distinction has been recently disputed, especially from phenom enological
quarters advocating the first-person stance/ a digression seems useful.
T here is, of course, no real distinction betw een prim ary and secondary
qualities - num ber, figure, size as opposed to colour, sound, taste, touch,
smell, pain, or pleasure. T hey are all creations of the living body, that is, of
the em bodied psyche in hum ans, creations m ore or less perm anent or tran
sient, m ore or less generic or singular. These creations are often conditioned
by an external X - not caused by it. Light waves are not coloured, and
they do not cause the colour qua colour. 'I*hey induce, under certain condi
tions, the subject to create an image which, in many cases - and, so to speak,
by definition in all the cases we can speak about is generically and socially
shared.
T his does not m ean (the idealistic or C artesian fallacy) that these
images are confused ideas in the m ind. T hey are not confused or m ore
or less co n fu sed , n or are they in the m in d . T h ey are just w hat they
are: images, not in the sense of ikons or im itations, but Vorstellungen,

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representations, or, better, presentations: presentations of som ething about

w hich n o th in g can be said except by m eans o f a n o th e r p resen tatio n ,
about which the discourse will be eternally open, but which is certainly
neither identical nor even isom orphic to them . (Analysis of, for example,
the constancy of colour on a surface shows this clearly.) T hey are original
ways of reacting (and this only in some cases: a com poser getting a musical
idea is not reacting to anything, at any rate not at this level and certainly
nothing external). T his reaction is not an idea in the m ind: it is a total
state of the subject (body and soul).
But neither does this m ean (the phenom enological fallacy) that the firstperson or intentional stance presents to, or for, m e the things as they are.
T his is the curious realistic delusion of phenom enology, paradoxically co
existing with fatal solipsistic consequences: How do I know that som ething
exists for the next person, or, indeed, that a next person exists at all if I am
confined to my first-person stance? From the strict phenom enological
point of view I have no access to the experience of other persons; they and
their experiences exist just as phenomena for me. T he simple naming of the
p ro b lem in H u s s e rls Cartesian M editations (or in M e rle a u -P o n ty s
Phenomenology o f Perception) is no solution.
T h e first-person stance is bluntly contradictory', even if we leave aside
the other p erson. It tells me, for example, that to move an object, or to
move myself, I need force. But if I am in a car and the driver brakes abruptly,
I am projected through the windscreen w ithout deploying any force. T he
privilege or authenticity of the first-person stance looks philosophically
very funny if this stance leads, as lead it m ust, to contradictions or incoher
ences in the very experience it keeps celebrating. H usserls T h e Earth, as
Ur-arkhe, does not move forces m e, for instance, to dismiss as absurd or
illusory p h en o m ena of equally com pelling im m ediacy (e.g., F o u cau lts
pendulum , or die yearly parallax o f the fixed stars).
N eith er does the escape of the later H usserl tow ards the life-w orld
(Lebenstveh) redeem phenom enology. Certainly, the im m ediate first-person
stance presents things as they appear in the life-world. B ut this only m eans
that it presents them as they have been shaped by the generic biological
(species) im agination and the social imaginary I am sharing with my fellow
hum an socii. N ow , philosophy starts when we begin trying to break the closure
of this life-world in both its biological and social-historical dimensions. O f
course, we can never break it to such a degree as to be able to fly outside any
closure, to have a view from now here. But break it we do, and there is no
point in pretending that we do not know that there is no red except for, in,
and through a living body - or, for that m atter, that there are no nymphs in
the springs and gods in the rivers, which were a perfectly legitimate part of
the life-world of the ancient Greeks.
Red, or the red object, is not a confused idea in my m in d and neither is

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325

it a reality down th ere (Sartre). M y, and our, creation of a world entails

also the creation o f an exterior where object, colour, etc., present themselves
as different and distant from me me being always and irrevocably here as
it entails also the creation of a double tem poral horizon (backw ard and
forward) within which I am the perm anently m oving nozo.
T o be sure, all this presupposes that I, som ehow or other, know first
hand what it is like to see red - but also, that I know first-hand what it is like
to live in a society where the m ost im portant things are social imaginary
significations - for example, nym phs. It is true that nobody and nothing can
make us stop living in or through" the experience, to treat it itself as an
object, or, w hat is the sam e thing, as an experience which could as well have
been som eone elses.1 And, equally true, to continue quoting T aylor, I
cannot experience my toothache as a m ere idea in the m ind, caused by
decay in the tooth, sending signals up the nerves to the brain. B ut neither
am I obliged to stick with this experience and ignore other ways of access
to the phenom enal fact of toothache, such as they lead m e, for exam ple, to
take an aspirin or rush to my dentist.
Behind the phenom enological, or first-person, stance stands the
attem pt to present m y ow n experience as the only authentic or, at any
rate, privileged one - the only one giving access to die Sache selbst'. But in
fact this experience* is not just my ow n b u t shares in a biological and
social genericity, otherwise we could never even talk, however in
adequately, about it; it is not an experience, b u t an imaginary creation; it
does not give access to the thing itself, b u t only encounters an X , and this
only in som e cases and only partly. It has no absolute philosophical privi
lege. It is only an eternally recurring starting and (provisionally) ending
point. H om e is where we start from , wrote, I think, T . S. Eliot. O ur per
sonal experience is o ur personal hom e - and this hom e would not be a
home, but a solitary' cave, if it was not in a village or a town. F or, it is the
collectivity' that teaches us how to build hom es and how to live in them . We
cannot live w ithout a hom e but neither can we remain hermetically
enclosed in o u r hom e.
And when one moves, as the last Husserl and the first Heidegger, from
the egological, strictly phenom enological point of view (the je meiniges, je
eigenes of Sein und Zeii) to the life-w orld, one has just exchanged the
egocentric for an ethno- or sociocentric point of view: solipsism on a larger
scale. For, to know, as we m ust, that our Lebensweh is but one am ong an
indefinite n um ber o f others is to recognize that there is a m ultiplicity o f firstperson collective experiences am ong which there is, at first glance, no
privileged one; at second glance, the only privileged one - philosophically
and. I would add, politically - is the one which m ade itself capable o f recog
nizing and accepting this very multiplicity' of hum an worlds, thereby breaking
as far as possible the closure of its own world.

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IV
As already stated, we never deal with im pressions. W e deal with percep
tions, that is, a class o f representations (Vorstellungen). And it is impossible
to com pose a perceptual representation (or any representation) by sheer
juxtaposition o f sense d a ta . A Vorstellung, how ever vague or bizarre,
possesses a unity and a formidable organization; it is never a sheer am or
phous multiplicity, a pure Mannigfaltigkeit. T here is therefore a trem endous
am ount of logical work contained in the representation, entailing som e of
K a n ts ca te g o rie s, som e o f his (w rongly nam ed and placed )
Reflexionsbcgriffen and som e o thers, notably topological schem ata (e.g.,
neighbourhood/separation or continuity/discreteness) which I cannot dwell
upon here.
T hese last considerations are certainly true of any living being - any bcingfor-itself- but in this case the logical functions are, in general, sim pler and,
at any rate, unadulterated by the other functions of im agination in hum ans.
Categories are intrinsic, im m anent to the perception. A dog chases a (= one)
rabbit, and usually catches it. A catch surely devoid of transcendental
validity since the unity of the rabbit caught has not been established through
m ediations o f transcendental schem ata from the dogs unity of transcen
dental apperception. K ant is bound to a Cartesian conception of *animaux
machines'. T ru e , the third Critique sketches anodier view, but only reflec
tively and only as p art o f a heavy teleological m etaphysics. L et us,
incidentally, outline my status under the K antian regime: from the deter
m ining point of view I am a (somatical and psychical) m achine; from the
reflective point of view I am a mechanistically un-understandable but id e
ologically understandable being; from the transcendental point o f view I
simply am not - Ich gelte; from the ethical point of view I ought to be what
in fact (from the determ ining point of view) I could never be: an agent acting
outside any psychological motives. T o say, in these circum stances, that I
am m ade o u t o f crooked w ood is certainly the understatem ent o f the
m illennium .
T o revert to our m ain argum ent: radical im agination (as source o f the
perceptual quale and of logical forms) is what makes it possible for any beingfor-itself (including hum ans) to create for itself an own [or proper] world (eine
Eigenzvelt) w ithin which it also posits itself. T h e ultim ately indescribable A'
out there becom es som ething definite and specific for a particular being,
th rough the functioning of its sensory and logical im agination, which
filters, form s, and organizes the external shocks. It is clear that no
being-for-itsclf could organize som ething out o f the world, if this world
were not intrinsically o rg a n iz a d which m eans that it cannot be simply
chaotic. But this is another dim ension of the question - the properly onto
logical dim ension - which cannot be discussed here.

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327

But we do not have to do only with representations provoked by external

shocks. In relative (and often, absolute) independence from these, we do
have an inside. Here we part com pany with anim als, etc. - not because they
do not have an inside but because we cannot say anything meaningful
ab o u t it (how it feels to be a b a t). T h e inside is a p erp etu al, truly
H eraclitean, flux of representations cum affects cum intentions, in fact indissociable. (O n this indissociation neither K ant, nor Fichte, nor for that m atter
m ost of the inherited philosophy, has m uch to say. At best all this would be
relegated to empirical psychology, etc.) I shall not insist upon this aspect:
the whole psychoanalytical path has it as its m ain concern. Suffice it to say
that here representations (and affects, and intentions or desires) em erge in
an absolutely spontaneous way, and even more: we have affects and inten
tions (desires, drives) which arc creations of this a-causal vis fonnandi in their
sheer being, their m ode o f being and their being-thus (Sosein). A nd, for all
we know, this stream of representations cum affects cum desires is absolutely
singular for each singular hum an being. It may be said that our sensory im
agination and its logical com ponents are, for all of us, identical (though
essentially similar would be a better term ). But, to the extent that its pro
ducts are decisively co-created by the inside, even this sensory' im agination
is, in the end, singular (de gustibus et coloribus . . .).
If, in its first aspect (perceptual, geared to the outside), the radical
imagination creates a generic own (or proper) world for the singular hum an
b ein g , a w orld su fficien tly sh a re d w ith th e o th e r m e m b e rs o f the
hum an species, in its second, fully psychical, aspect it creates a singular
proper world. T h e im portance of this could not be exaggerated. It is this
inside which conditions and makes possible, first, a distanciation relative
to the world considered as simply given, and, second, an active and acting
Einstellung, position and disposition, tow ards the world. R epresentation,
affect, and intention are at the same time principles of the form ation o f the
proper world - even materialiter spectati- and principles of distanciation from
it and action upon it.
A few words on a subject alluded to above: K an ts transcendental imagi
nation. W ithout in the least m inim izing the im portance of K an ts discovery,
one m ust point to its limits. First, K an ts im agination is subject, throughout,
to the requirem ents of true knowledge. Second - and for this very reason
- it is eternally the sam e. If K an ts transcendental im agination started to
imagine anything, the w orld, as c o n stru c te d by K an t, w ould instantly
collapse. For this very' reason Kant cannot or will not see the creative func
tion of the imagination in the cognitive (scientific or philosophical) dom ain.
This is why the existence of a history of science m ust remain in the K antian
framework an enigma or, at best, a sheer cum ulation of inductions.
T w o ad d itio n a l rem ark s arc h e re in o rd e r. T h e stro n g e st - and
truest - point in K an ts conception o f the im agination is, of course, the

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Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

schem atism m ediating betw een th e categories an d the sensory d a ta .

Introducing it, K ant says: T here is an art hidden in the depths of the hum an
soul . .
which is the source of the transcendental schemata. But, one
w onders, what business have the hum an soul and its depths here? The
hum an soul belongs in the dom ain o f empirical psychology, where causality
reigns suprem e, etc. It has nothing to do with the transcendental dim en
sion, w hich is supposed to ensure the possibility o f a priori synthetic
knowledge.
T h e im agination appears also in the Critique o f Judgment b u t is only
m entioned, not used. A creative pow er is recognized b u t is n o t called
creative (schaffen, not schdpfen; the latter word appears only once and in an
indifferent context). T his is the power of the genius - but the genius works
like nature (als Natur). W e enjoy in the work of art the free play of imagi
nation in conform ity with the laws of understanding, b u t the worth of the
work of art lies in that it presents in the intuition the Ideas of Reason. (I
confess that I am unable to sec the Ideas of Reason presented in Antigone or
in King Lear.)
I have already m entioned the logical organization contained even in the
simplest representation, perceptual or not. T h ai this is so should not surprise
us. Everything that is m ust contain an ensem blistic-identitary (logical, in
the largest sense possible) dim ension; otherwise it would be absolutely in
determ inate, and (at least for us) nonexistent. A posteriori, this is confirmed
by the grasp logical categories have on w hatever there is (e.g., the u n
reasonable effectiveness of m athem atics, to quote W igner). This, of course,
by no m eans entails that what there is is exhaustively determ ined by or
reducible to logic (not even when we consider physical reality).
T his is the objective (or in itself) side of the question. T h e for itself
side em erges with life. Living beings would not be there if they had not devel
o p ed , as a c o n s titu e n t o f th e p ro p e r w orld th ey c re a te , a (how ever
rudim entary) logical apparatus fit to cope, som ehow or other, with the
intrinsic ensem blistic-identitary dim ension of the world. T here are Kantian
categories obviously em bedded in the behaviour of dogs, not im posed on
this behaviour by the scientific observer.
F or all we know, these categories are not conscious in animals (though
obviously self-awareness is there), and even less reflected upon. For this to
happen, two further conditions arc required, which obtain only in the hum an
dom ain. T h e first pertains to the radical im agination of the hum an psyche
and its pathological developm ent expressed in its defunctionalization. I
have dealt with this aspect som ewhat extensively in other texts,6 so I shall be
very brief. Defunctionalization makes possible, first, the detachm ent o f the
representation from the object of the biological n eed, therefore the cathexis
of biologically irrelevant objects (Gods, King, C ountry, etc.); and, second,
the (biologically equally irrelevant) possibility that the activities of the psyche

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329

becom c objects for themselves, and the labile quid pro quo, which is the
prerequisite of symbolism.
T h e second, equally im portant, condition is the creation, by the radical
social im aginary, o f in stitu tio n s and, o f co u rse, first and forem ost, of
language. N either life as such nor the singular psyche as such can produce
institutions and language. U nderstanding and reason are socially instituted,
though, of course, this institution leans on intrinsic possibilities and drives
of the hum an psyche.
A last point m ust be m ade in this respect. T h e (K antian) distinction
between categories, transcendental5 schem ata, and em pirical representa
tions cannot, of course, be taken as a distinction in re (nor is it taken as such
by K ant himself). B ut one can be m ore precise. Any representation (I am
abstracting here from affects and intentions) contains qualia and an organi
zation of these qualia; this organization, in turn, consists in generic figures
and trails and in categorial schem ata. In other w ords, genericity and categoriality are intrinsic and im m anent to the representation. T o becom e
categories and schem ata they have to be named and reflected upon. And this
- that is, abstract thought as such - is a relatively recent historical creation,
not a biological trait of the hum an species, though all m em bers of this
species can share in this creation once it is there. But abstract thought itself
always has to lean on some figure or image, be it, minimally, the image of
the words through which it is carried on.

V
I shall be m uch briefer on the psychoanalytical path, which I have dealt with
at length elsewhere.7
T his path was opened, as we know, through the immense discoveries of
Freud. But as I noted in the beginning, Freud never them atizes im agination
as such. One has to use unsystem atized, though sem inal, indications in his
work to draw rigorous and radical consequences from these and also to go
beyond them in order to reach the reality o f radical im agination. Among
these indications, the m ain ones are the magical om nipotence of thought
(better called the effective om nipotence of thought, since we are dealing here
with unconscious thought, where, in the first approxim ation, thinking makes
it so purely and simply), and the (practically equivalent) assertion that there
is no distinction, in the U nconscious, betw een a strongly cathected repre
sentation and an actual p ercep tio n , th at is, th a t there are not in the
Unconscious indices of reality. W here from we can draw almost im m edi
ately a cardinal principle: for hum ans, representational pleasure prevails as
a rule over organ pleasure, from which it also results that both representa
tion and pleasure are fefunctionalized in hum ans. A nother equally decisive

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Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

consequence follows: projective schem ata and processes have precedence

over introjective ones, which should come as no surprise for any nonem piricist philosopher, and in which we just rediscover the very essence of any
being for itself: creation of a proper world precedes by necessity any lesson
events in this world could supply. O ne particular rem ark on this: there is,
nevertheless, m hum ans, certainly the specific strength and im portance of
the introjective processes and schem ata, which can be understood if we realize
that the hum an psyche cannot live outside a world of meaning and, when
its own, initial, m onadic m eaning is, in the course of socialization, disrupted,
as it m ust be, the resulting catastrophe has to be repaired by the internal
ization of the m eaning supplied by the cathected persons of its environm ent.
T h is is what is sometimes m istaken as an intrinsic disposition (Anlage) of
the psyche towards socialization, and which is nothing more than a leaning
on of the socialization process, m ade possible by the vital need of the psyche
for m eaning and the fact that society itself is nothing but the institution of
m eanings (social imaginary significations). Socialization is the process
whereby the psyche is forced to abandon (never fully) its pristine solipsistic
m eaning for the shared m eanings provided by society. Introjection goes
always m uch further than anim al mimesis, because it is always reinterpretation of that which is introjected, and this reinterpretation can only take
place on the basis of the existing proper schem ata. Below the Freudian
U nconscious, we have to postulate a psychical m onad, initially closed upon
itself and, until the end, constantly endeavouring to enclose in itself what
ever is presented to it. Ich bin die Brust (I am the bosom ), wrote F reud in
one of his last Notes in 1938.
H ere again a digression seem s useful. Paradoxically, inevitably, and
despite his intentions and his form ation, Freud remains a dualist. Soul and
body, psyche and soma, remain for him essentially distinct - despite his elab
oration o f hysterical sym ptoms, and so on (we could add today what we
know about psychosomatic illnesses). T here can be no question of elimi
nating or solving the tim e-honoured enigm as of this relation; let us just
rem em ber the amazing antinom ies with which the m ost elem entary evidence
confronts us. T h e psyche is strongly dependent on the soma: even short of
piercing your head with a bullet, I can make you talk nonsense with the help
of some additional glasses of bourbon. T he soma is strongly dependent on
the psyche: even without m entioning hysterical sym ptoms or psychosomatic
illnesses, I decided to write this text, therefore I am banging on my type
writer. T h e som a is strongly independent from the psyche: I have no control
over the innum erable organic processes going on all the time within my
body, som e of which prepare my death. T h e psyche is strongly independent
from the som a: even under the m ost horrible tortures, there are people who
will not hand their com rades over to the police. T his strange relationship
definitely requires from us new m odes of thinking. These should certainly

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331

sia n from som ething different from a reduction o f one of the two entities to
the other, or an irreversible and irreparable separation of soul and body.
Here are some indications along this line. We should posil b eh in d or
below the Freudian Unconscious (or the Id) a N onconscious which is the
living body qua hum an anim ated body in continuity with the psyche. T here
is no frontier between this living, anim ated body and the originary psychical
m onad. T h e m onad is neither repressed nor repressible: it is unsay able. N or
do we repress the life o f the body. W e vaguely feel ii, w ithout knowing
why and how - the beats o f the h e a n , the m ovem ents o f the bowels, proba
bly already, very long ago, our m ovem ents within the am niotic fluid. T here
is a presence of the living body 10 itself, inextricably mixed with what we nor
mally consider as the m ovem ents o f the soul proper. And there is the
obvious and understandable substantive hom ogeneity between the singular
persons psyche and soma. Socratess dead body is no longer Socrates.
K anis soul could not inhabit Ava G ard n ers body, nor the reverse. H um an
physiology is already soul-like; auloim m unc disorders, where the body's
defence m echanism s turn against the body they arc supposed to protect,
can hardly be understood as the result o f an external influence of the soul
on the body. (This example shows, incidentally, the nonfunctional, nonlogical character of the hum an im agination.) It is in this light that we should
consider the idea o f a sensory, and m ore generally bodily, im agination.
T hese arc tentative, embryonic thoughts. But there is a solid conclusion
we reach on the psychoanalytic path: that the imagination of the singular
hum an being is defunctionalized. Hegel has said that man is a sick anim al.
In truth, m an is a m ad anim al, totally unfit for life, a species that would have
disappeared as soon as it emerged if it had not proven itself capable, at the
collective level, of another creation: society in the strict sense, that is, insti
tutions em bodying social im aginan' significations. T his creation we cannot
help b u t im pute to the creative capacity of anonym ous hum an collectives,
that is, to the radical instituting imaginary.

VI
T o elucidate the idea o f the instituting social imaginary we can again follow
the iwo paths: the philosophical and the psychoanalytical.
Along the philosophical path, the discussion need not be long. Philosophy
itself, and thought in general, cannot exist w ithout language or, at least,
w ithout strong links with language. But any individual or c o n tra ctu al
prim ordial production of language is logically (not only historically) an
absurdity. Language can only be a spontaneous creation of a hum an collec
tive. And the sam e is true o f all prim ordial institutions, w ithout which ihere
is no social life, therefore also no hum an beings.

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Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

From the psychoanalytic point of view, we never encounter singular psy

chosom atic hum ans in the p u re state; we encounter only socialized
individuals. T h e psychical nucleus manifests itself very rarely, and only indi
rectly. In itself it forms the perpetually unattainable limit of psychoanalytic
work. Ego, Super-Ego, Ego-ideal are unthinkable except as the products (at
m ost, tile coproducts) of a socialization process. Socialized individuals are
walking and talking fragm ents of a given society; and they are total fragments:
that is, they em body, in part actually, in part potentially, the essential core
of the institutions and the significations of their society. T here is no opposi
tion between individual and society: the individual is a social creation, both
as such and in its each time given social-historical form. T h e true polarity is
between society and the psyche (the psyche-som a, in the sense indicated
above). These are both irreducible to each other and effectively inseparable.
T h e society as such cannot produce souls, the idea is meaningless; and an
assembly of nonsocialized souls would not produce a society, b u t a hyperBoschian nightm are. An assembly of individuals can, of course, produce a
society (e.g., the .Mayflower pilgrims), because these individuals are already
socialized (otherwise they would not exist, even biologically).
T h e question of socicty (and, indissolubly, o f history) is, o f course, an
abyssal subject, and I shall not tty to sum m arize inadequately here what I
have written at length elsewhere.* I shall only outline a few points.
A.

Society is creation, and creation o f itself: self-creation. It is the em er

gence of a new ontological form - 1'idos - and of a new m ode and level
of being. It is a quasi-totality held together by institutions (language,
norm s, family forms, tools and production modes, etc.) and by the
significations these institutions em body (totem , taboos, gods, G od,
polis, com m odities, wealth, fatherland, etc.). Both of these represent
ontological creations. W e do not encounter anywhere else institutions
as a m ode o f relation holding together the com ponents of a totality;
and we can explain - causally produce or rationally deduce - neither
the form institution as such, nor the fact o f the institution, nor the
particular prim ary institutions of a given society. A nd we do not
encounter anywhere else signification, that is, the m ode o f being of an
effective and acting ideality, the im m anent unperceivable; nor can
we explain the emergence of prim ary significations (e.g., the Hebrew
G od, the G reek polis, etc.).
I talk about self-creation, not self-organization. In the case of
society we do not have an assembly of already existing elem ents, the
com bination of which could possibly produce new or additional qual
ities of the whole; the quasi- (or rather pseudo-) elem ents of society
are created by society itself. Athens cannot exist w ithout A thenians
(not hum ans in general!) but A thenians are created only in and by

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333

Athens. T h u s society- is always self-institution - b u t for alm ost the

whole of hum an history- this fact o f the self-institution has been veiled
by the very institutions of society itself.
B.

Society as such is self-creation; and each particular society is a specific

creation, the emergence of another eidos w ithin the generic eidos of
society.

C.

Society is always historical in the broad, but proper sense o f the word:
it is always undergoing a process o f self-alteration. T his process can
be, and alm ost always has been, so slow as to be im perceptible; in our
small social-historical province it happens to have been, over the last
4,000 years, rather rapid and violent. T h e question: W hen does a selfaltering society stop being the sam e and becom e another? is a
concrete historical question for which standard logic has no answer
(are the Romes of the early R epublic, o f M arius and Sulla, of the
A ntonins, etc., the sam e?).

D.

In so far as they are n eith er causally p ro d u c ib le n o r ratio n ally

deducible, the institutions and social imaginary significations of each
society are free creations o f the anonym ous collective concerned.
T hey are creations ex nihilo - b u t n o t in nihilo or cum nihilo. T his
m eans, in particular, that they are creations under constraints. T o
m ention the m ost im portant am ong these constraints:
i.

T h ere are external constraints - especially those im posed by

the first natural stratum , including the biological constitution
o f th e h u m an being. T h e s e are essentially trivial (w hich
does not mean unim portant): the society is, each tim e, condi
tioned by its natural habitat - it is n o t caused by it. In so far
as the first natural stratum exhibits, to a decisive degree, an
ensem blistic-identitary dim ension - two stones and two stones
m ake four stones, a bull and a cow will always produce calves
and n o t chickens, etc. - the social institution has to recreate this
dim ension in its representation of the world, and of itself, that
is, in the creation of its Eigemvelt. T his dim ension is also, of
course, present in language; it corresponds to language as code,
that is, as a quasi-univocal instrum ent of m aking'doing, reck
oning and elem entary reasoning. T h e code aspect o f language
(the cat is on the m at) is opposed to but also inextricably en
tangled with its poietic aspect which conveys the im aginary
significations proper (G od is one person in three). T o these
external constraints responds the functionality of institutions,
especially relative to the p ro d u ctio n of m aterial life an d to
sexual reproduction.

Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

T here are internal constraints, relative to the raw m aterial
out o f which society creates itself, that is, the psyche. T he
psyche has to be socialized and for this it has to abandon more
or less its own world, its objects of investm ent, w hat is for it
m eaning, and to cathect socially created and valued objects,
orientations, actions, roles, etc.; it has to abandon its own time
and insert itself into a public tim e and a public world (natural
as well as hum an). W hen we consider the unbelievable variety
o f types of society known, we are almost led to think that the
social institution can make out of the psyche whatever it pleases
- make it polygamous, polyandrous, m onogam ous, fetishistic,
pagan, m onotheistic, pacific, bellicose, etc. O n close inspection
we sec th a t this is indeed tru e , provided one condition is
fulfilled: that the institution supplies the psyche with m eaningm eaning for its life and m eaning for its death. T his is accom
plished by the social im aginary significations, alm ost always
religious ones, which tie together the m eaning of the indi
viduals life and death, the m eaning of the existence and of the
ways of the particular society, and the meaning of the world as
a whole.
T here are historical constraints. We cannot fathom the ori
gin of societies, but no societies we can speak o f em erge in
vacuo. T here are always, even if in pieces, a past and a tradi
tion. But the relation to this past is itself a part of the institution
of society. T hus, primitive or traditional societies attem pt to
reproduce and repeat alm ost literally the past. In the other
cases, the reception of past and tradition is, partly at least,
conscious - but this reception is, in fact, re-creation (presentday parlance would call it reinterpretation). A thenian tragedy
receives Greek mythology, and it re-creates it. T he history of
C hristianity is but the history of continuous reinterpretations
of the sam e sacred texts, with amazingly differing outcom es.
Classical Greeks have been the object o f an incessant reintcrp retatio n by the W estern Europeans since the thirteenth
century. T his re-creation is, of course, always done according
to the imaginary significations o f the present - but, of course
also, w hat is reinterpreted is a given, not an indeterm inate,
material. Still, it is instructive to com pare what the Byzantines,
the Arabs, and the W estern Europeans have done with the same
G reek heritage. T he Byzantines just kept the m anuscripts,
adding some scholia here and there. T h e Arabs used only the
scientific and philosophical texts, ignoring the rest (see the

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335

beautiful short story by Borges on Avcrroes and A ristotles

Poetics). T he W estern Europeans have been struggling with the
rem nants of this heritage for eight centuries now, and do not
seem to be through with it.
Finally, there arc intrinsic constraints - the m ost interesting of
all. I can deal with only two of them .
a.

Institutions and social im aginary significations have to be

coherent. Coherence has to be assessed im m anently, that
is, relative to the m ain characters and drives of die given
society, taking into account the conform al behaviour of
the socialized individuals, etc. Pyram id building with
starving peasants is coherent when referred to the whole
organization and social im aginary significations of the
Pharaonic or M ayan societies.
C oherence does not preclude internal divisions, oppo
sitions, and strife. Slave-owning or feudal societies arc, of
course, coherent. T h in g s are different w ith capitalist
society, especially latter-day capitalist society, b u t in this
case this is a historical novation, and belongs to another
discussion. C oherence is not, generally, endangered by
contradictions betw een the strictly imaginary and the
ensem blistic-identitary dim ensions of the institution for,
as a rule, the form er prevail over the latter. Arithm etic
and com m erce have n o t been ham pered in C hristian
societies by the fundam ental equation 1 = 3 im plicit in
the dogm a of the Holy Trinity.
Here belongs also the imaginary reciprocal entailm ent
o f the parts of the institution and o f the social imaginary
significations. T his is the enigm atic unity and substantive
kinship b etw een a rtifa c ts, beliefs, political regim es,
artistic works, and, o f course, hum an types belonging to
the same society and the same historical period. Needless
to say, any idea of a causal or logical explanation o f this
unityr is meaningless.

b.

O n the other han d , institutions and social imaginary

significations have to be complete. T his is clearly and
absolutely so in heteronomous societies, where closure of
meaning prevails. T h e term closure has to be taken here in
its strict, m athem atical sense. M athem aticians say th at an
algebraic field is closed if the roots of any polynom ial of
the field arc elem ents o f the field. Likewise, in any closed

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Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary

society, any question which can be form ulated at all in
the language of this society m ust find its answer within
the m agm a of the social imaginary significations of the
society. T h is en tails, in p a rtic u la r, th a t q u e stio n s
concerning the validity of the social institutions and sig
n ificatio n s ca n n o t be posed. T h e exclusion o f such
questions is ensured by the position o f a transcendent,
extrasocial, source o f the institutions and significations,
that is, religion.

E.

Some additional com m ents on the term social imaginary significations

may help to prevent m isunderstandings. I have chosen the term signi
fications because it seems to me the least inappropriate to convey what
I have in m ind. B ut it should absolutely not be taken in a m entalistic
sense. Social imaginary' significations create a proper world for the
society considered - in fact, they are this w orld; and they shape
the psyche of individuals. They create thus a representation o f the
world, including the society itself and its place in this world; but this
is far from being an intellectual construct. It goes together with the
creation o f a drive for the society considered (so to speak, a global
intention) and o f a specific Stimmung or m ood (so to speak, of an
affect, or a cluster o f affects, perm eating the whole of the social life).
F o r example, C hristian faith is a specific and pure historical creation
entailing particular aim s (to be loved by G od, saved, etc.) and m ost
particular and peculiar affects, which would have been totally unun d erstan d ab le (and nonsensical - morias very rightly, says Saint
Paul) for any classical G reek or Roman (and, for that m atter, any
Chinese or Japanese). And this is understandable, if one realizes that
society is a being for itself.

VII
How is it possible that we are capable of talking in this way (correctly or not,
that is another m atter) about societies in general, putting ourselves, as it
were, at an equal distance from all of them (be it an illusion, this is also
another matter)?
Almost all societies we know have instituted them selves in and through
the closure of m eaning. T hey are heteronom ous; they cannot put into ques
tion their own institution and they produce conform al and heteronom ous
individuals for w hom the putting into question o f the existing law is not just
forbidden but m entally inconceivable and psychically unbearable. These
individuals are conscious, b u t not self-reflective subjectivities.
T h is state of affairs was broken for the first tim e in ancient Greece, and

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337

this breaking was repeated fifteen centuries later, with m uch greater diffi
culty but also on an incom parably large scale, in W estern Europe. In both
eases the institutions and the ultim ate beliefs o f the tribe have been explic
itly called into question and, to a large extent, m odified. Partially open
societies have em erged, together with self-reflective individuals. T h e m ain
carriers of this new historical creation were politics as collective em ancipa
tory- m ovem ent and philosophy as self-reflecting, uninhibitedly critical
thought. T h u s em erged what I call the project o f collective and individual
autonomy.
In both cases the project has not been brought to its com pletion. O ne
might say that it coidd not be brought to a com pletion. T o this I would
answer that neither this statem ent nor its contradiction can be theoretically
d em o n strate d o r estab lish ed , it being u n d e rsto o d th a t th e p ro jec t o f
autonom y does not aim at establishing Paradise on E arth or at bringing
about the end of hum an history'; nor docs it purport to ensure universal
happiness. T h e object of politics is not happiness b u t freedom ; autonom y is
freedom understood not in the inherited, m etaphysical sense, but as effec
tive, hum anly feasible, lucid and reflective positing o f the rules of individual
and collective activity. T his is why the social-historical struggles anim ated
by this project have left so many im portant results, am ong which are w hat
ever intellectual and political freedom we may be enjoying today. B ut the
philosophically im portant point is that, even if it finally failed, as in A thens,
or if it is in danger of waning, as in the present W estern world, its effect has
been the creation o f a totally new, unheard of, ontological eidos: a type of
being which, consciously and explicitly, alters the laws of its own existence
as it is, however partially, m aterialized in a self-legislating society and in a
new type o f hum an being: reflective and deliberating subjectivity. And this
is what allows us to take some distance from our own society, to talk about
society and history in general, and to accept rational criticism of w hat we
say in this or any other respect.
Notes
1
2
3
4

5
6
7
8

S ee M P (1 9 8 6 ).
S ee D / (1 9 7 8 ).
O n c n s c m b listic -id c n tita rv logic, see c h a p te r 4 o f IIS .
S ee, e.g ., C h a rle s T a y lo r, Sources o f the S e lf (C a m b rid g e , E n g la n d : C a m b rid g e U n iv e rsity
P ress, 1 9 8 9 ), p p . 162T. R ich a rd R o rty h a s also , fro m a n o th e r p o in t o f view , a tta c k e d th is
d istin ctio n .
T a y lo r o n D e sc a rte s, Sources o f the Self, p. 162.
S ee S S T (1 9 8 6 ) a n d L IR (1 9 9 1 ).
S ee th e tex ts cited in n o te 6 , a n d c h a p te r 6 o f IIS .
S ee C L , I IS , P P A , a n d W IF .