The publication of an unpublished text by Castoriadis on the imaginary is for Arnaud Tomès the opportunity to return to the coherence and the continuity of a work too often misunderstood.
An unprecedented text
The imagination as such is first of all the publication of an unprecedented text by Castoriadis in which are exposed for the first time (its writing dates back to 1968) the seminal theses which will be fully developed in its large work, The imaginary institution of society (1975).
This text is preceded by two presentations in which A. Tomès gives off the meaning and originality of the concepts which are the basis of the Castoriadian philosophy. They make it possible to clearly grasp the nature of his approach based entirely on the conceptual promotion of the imaginary as the foundation of society. The imaginary, in Castoriadis, is this anonymous, collective and immotivated power to make it mean meanings from which the symbolic structures will result, the specific articulations of society (economy, law, politics, religious, art, etc.) and the underwater of what it considers to be rational or functional, which makes it possible to criticize the idea that there would be rational in itself: all rationality is essentially are beyond the true and the false and which make it such a form of rationality as adequate for its, instrumental ends.
A. Tomès thus underlines the central place of the Castoriadian philosophy in the criticism of structuralism where symbolic structures are understood as constitutive of the social, the imaginary, among the structuralists, being lowered to the rank of psychological seizure of these structures by individuals. But the thought of Castoriadis is also one of the most powerful criticisms of Marxism as the latter abusively extends to the whole history a determined mode of articulation of the social, that of capitalist societies where the economic infrastructure happens to be decisive. It also undermines functionalism or the sociological typologies of a Weber which isolate an axiologically neutral form of rationality (instrumental rationality), perfectly empowered with regard to any reference to collective meanings: the instrumental rationality that Weber is in fact specific to the societies which have the central meaning capitalism, meaning which in itself is neither true nor false ( indefinite capital is no more “ real Or more rational than God or the proletariat).
A badly understood philosophy
The presentations of A. Tomès are also an opportunity to dispel certain criticism and misunderstandings which are commonly committed against the work of this great thinker.
The first criticism often addressed to Castoriadis is biographical: she underlines that her career would be in itself the admission of a failure following her activities as a revolutionary activist, a failure which would have translated as a “ headlong In an ever more fundamental, ontological philosophical speculation. The period of revolutionary activism lived as part of the review Socialism or barbarism (1949 to 1967) during which Castoriadis is in the grip with practical questions of work organization (Fordism etc.), strategy (role of the party etc.), concrete analysis of bureaucratic capitalism, would have given way to a speculative activity of philosopher having as its object a radically decontextualized ontology (The imagination as suchwritten in March 1968, shortly after the end of the publication of the review, would somehow mark the cut between these two periods). Axel Honneth, making this reading of the trajectory of Castoriadis will thus define his philosophy as being a “ ontological safeguard of the revolution », In a context of apathy, conformism and generalized privatization of individuals, in short of massive reflux of revolutionary themes.
However, A. Tomès shows how much this interpretation is wrong. On the one hand, the concerns of Castoriadis have never ceased to be philosophical: his contributions to Socialism or barbarismas anchored in the social news of these years, make it possible to grasp the completely coherent progression of the criticisms addressed to the Marxist corpus, a critic culminating in this properly philosophical article that is: “ Marxism: Provisional assessment “, Published in the journal in 1964 (and which constitutes the first part of his great work, fully” philosophical “, The imaginary institution of society). Collective and individual autonomy constitutes the guiding thread of all its reflection and its activity, whatever it could have been the expression. There is therefore not not to flee forward, but a progression logically leading Castoriadis to deepen the criticism first of all factual of Marxism by going back to the properly conceptual presuppositions where the errors of this thought are rooted.
Mal understood concepts
The other source of misunderstandings which is effectively dissipated by A. Tomès concerns the concepts that Castoriadis highlights. These misunderstandings rotate of course around the concept of imagination. Some criticisms believe that Castoriadis would carry out a psychologization of the social. Would the psychoanalyst that was not ceased to be Castoriadis from 1970 would not have hypostasted in the foundation of the society of concepts inspired by Freudian metapsychology (the irreducibility of the collective imagination thus echoing the irreducibility of the psychic representation to the drive that however it represents) ? The adhesion of individuals to collective meanings is not similar to the dreamlike regression which makes us confuse imaginary representation and reality ?
However, it is not: Castoriadis has continued to insist on the ontological irreducibility of the imaginary instituting. Social imaginary meaning is not the compound or synthesis of private fantasies, as prophetic or charismatic as they may be (such phantasms are already deeply socialized). And if there is irreducibility of social representation to psychic representation, it is because the social imagination is what allows the newborn to get out of the psychic closure and the radically asocial imaginary representation of the world which is originally its own: it is the social imagination which makes it possible the institution of the individual as a social individual, able to life in society, by participation in collective meanings.
Indeed, the individual is made Based on his participation in collective central meanings that bring him out of autistic madness in which he comes to the world, which does not mean (another source of misunderstandings) that Castoriadis succumbs to a holistic vision of the social, devaluing any expression of individuality for the benefit of a collective conscience. The self-institution of society does not take up the Durkheimian theory of collective conscience: if individuals are established it is as, whatever their deviance or their originality, they are always suitable for the society in which they have been socialized: they are the ambulating fragments of the same type of society.
Last error committed against Castoriadis: the imaginary would make us fall back into a philosophy of creation: there would be a founding body (the imaginary instituting) which would be the separate source and the origin of social meanings, just like God, in the Christian imagination, creates ex nihilo his creatures. Now A. Tomès shows very well that the concept of creation (that of the imaginary and society) that Castoriadis offers has nothing to do with the inherited creation of theologians, a creation which was based on the position of a “ Creator “Radically distinct from his” creation ».
Castoriadis certainly shows that social institutions (meanings, language, doing it) cannot be related to voluntary decisions, taken contractually by a set of individuals: if the self-institution of society is radical, it is because it is not the fact of individuals taken as together. But it is not the fact of a transcendent and separate body of individuals either. It is the fact of an anonymous collective, that is to say individuals but as they are no longer seized as radically distinct, as pure together. The self-institution of society thus makes it possible to grasp an us which, without designating individuals as together, nevertheless designates nothing other than them (but as established in the same meanings). The us by which the community seizes does not refer or pure connotationsuch as legal and/ or symbolic fiction (“ the people “As established by a sovereign distinct from a multitude who authorizes him to act in his name) nor to a pure denotation (Because, once again, we are not the sum, all individuals). The individuals connotes us as it refers to the imaginary meanings in which the latter participate and that they embody in a differentiated way (which means that they are neither a pure multitude nor an undifferentiated whole). But this form of identity no longer necessarily connotes them in the form of mediation, a separate power. The political implications of this ontology of creation (relatively passed over in silence in the presentation that A. Tomès), are, as we can see, immense and allow you to establish a little more the idea that autonomy has constituted the red thread of Castoriadis’s reflection throughout its journey.
The book thus gives to read this first unprecedented presentation, by Castoriadis, of the imaginary as the foundation of representing and social making. On the other hand, the two introductions that are made of it, are very clear and very convincing. They highlight, from this first “ milling »What The imagination as suchthe originality of the concepts of imaginary and representation, both in relation to the empiricist tradition and the rationalist tradition or still at the phenomenological approach inherited from a Husserl or a Merleau-Ponty. They also constitute an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Castoriadis and make glimpse the scope of his thought.