This paper considers Cornelius Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations with an emphasis on their link to the radical imaginary. Castoriadis wrote on social imaginary significations for more than thirty years, and his understanding of them changed significantly during this time, yet this is not reflected in debates on his work. The paper argues that there are three distinct phases in his reflections. The first phase can be dated 1964-1970. This early phase is characterized by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the recognition of history (or: the social-historical) as the domain of meaning and unmotivated creation as the work of the radical imaginary. Importantly, Castoriadis also considered the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, on the one hand, and with social doing, on the other. Castoriadis’s approach in this early phase can be considered phenomenological in the broad sense that Merleau-Ponty gave it in the Phenomenology of Perception. The second phase is dated 1970-1975; that is, the period in which Castoriadis wrote the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society wherein he announced his turn to ontology. This is his most self-contained and systematic articulation of social imaginary significations. Castoriadis extends and develops his notion of magma in relation to social imaginary significations and emphasizes the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation, whilst the radical imaginary is presented as a part of his emergent general ontology of à-être. The third ‘kaleidoscopic’ phase is dated 1976-1997 and may be understood as a period of consolidation and expansion. Although his basic understanding of social imaginary significations did not dramatically alter (although further developments are visible), his thought went in a myriad of different directions and patterns – hence kaleidoscopic — that nonetheless shaped a wider background against which his elucidation of social imaginaries were configured. His reconsideration of the sacred, the ‘ground power’ of institutions, and the development of a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself were key to this changing background. The paper will conclude with a critical engagement with the implications of the changing permutations of the imaginary element for Castoriadis’s thought.
Dr. Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University and permanent External Fellow at the East-Central European Institute for Philosophy, Charles University (Prague). She is a founding co-ordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries refereed journal and book series, and from October-December 2019, was an inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the social imaginaries field, including most recently Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions (Eds. Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith), 2019, Rowman and Littlefield International, London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield International).
According to a pervasive and widespread literature, we came, whether we want it or not, to surround our existences with all sorts of narratives: retrospective interpretations of what came before us and how we were born, anticipative stories about what is to come and what we should expect, and, most of all, restless attempts to describe what our present is made of so that we know how to make sense of it. First-person narratives occupy a central position amongst these varieties of narratives, as they give each of us a chance to provide meaning to our lives and achieve some kind of self-understanding.
Taking a resolutely opposite stance, Sartre (in)famously declared through the voice of the main character of his novel La Nausée that stories cannot but betray the lives they claim to describe, and necessarily fail to be faithful to the very experiencing of life that constitutes its specific grain and texture. In which sense is this failure a failure? In which sense must we consider it a failure, if narratives are the privileged device we use to make sense of existences in general, and ours in particular? Wouldn’t it be both tragic and ironical, from that perspective, that we live our lives in a way that remains impervious to our attempts to bring some meaning over our existence, and that first-person narratives should be regarded as fundamentally inadequate to account for life as we live it?
This paper will address these questions in light of the definition of ‘tragic irony’ that Richard Moran draws from his interpretation of Sartre, understanding tragedy as a clash between forms of significance displayed by incompatible perspectives. We will examine in particular the problem raised by first-person narratives, which conflate the seemingly incompatible perspectives of the narrator and of the character of the story. I will argue that Moran’s view fails to show in which sense the failure of first-person narratives are also, according to Sartre, the condition of their success, and that the irony of life might rely first and foremost on its ability to succeed even when and where it fails. After all, isn’t it the most ironical of it all that Sartre, notwithstanding his harsh critique of the fundamental inadequacy of life narratives, ended his literary career with the publication of his most acclaimed autobiography?
Bio:
Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Assistant Professor of philosophy (phenomenology and contemporary German philosophy) at the University of Lyon. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les categories. Langage, pensée et perception, Paris, Vrin, 2015), co-edited a book on phenomenology of matter (Phénoménologies de la matière, with C.V. Spaak, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2020) and published many articles, in French and in English, on the phenomenological tradition and its connection with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPHIL) and an associate member of the Husserl Archives in Paris.
In the final part of The Human Condition (1958) Hannah Arendt turns to the danger of ‘world- alienation’. Based on a variety of discoveries and evolutions that are constitutive of modernity (globalization, Protestantism, the invention of the telescope), modern man has adopted an Archimedean, external position vis-à-vis the world. According to Arendt, this ‘view from without’ has gradually jeopardized the experience of a shared world, endangering the foundation of all meaning-giving activities.
My talk can be considered as a reply to Arendt’s pessimistic account of modern ‘world-alienation’. It builds on the idea that some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century (Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud) did not equate the loss of a shared world with the loss of meaning. Rather, the conceptual framework of a substantial part of early twentieth century German philosophy centers on the exploration of a productive opposition, negation or fragmentation of the world. From the perspective of these thinkers, the world’s ‘durability’ (Arendt) is not simply a source of shared meaning since it can be experienced as the mark of its indifference to change and renewal.
Bio:
Stéphane Symons is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research is focused on interwar German thought (Frankfurt School) and postwar French philosophy (structuralism and post-structuralism).