Abstract
Given that the recent turn to ‘imagination’ in social and cultural thought is not in all cases based on a clearly political outlook, it is recommendable to revisit Cornelius Castoriadis’s path-breaking political account of social imagination. However, even the latter, it is argued, must be confronted with an understanding of politics more in line with the tradition of political realism. In order to fully activate the political potentials of Castoriadis’s thought, he is situated in a larger contextual network of intellectual reference points. By characterizing Castoriadis’s thought as a post-Marxist theory of radical democracy, based on a post-foundational ontology of imagination, Castoriadis is put in dialogue with other neo- and post-Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau, who present us with a more realistic understanding of the political function of imagination.
The Turn toward Imagination
The last decade witnessed a veritable ‘turn’ toward the topic of imagination in political and social thought. A growing number of books appeared that promise to illuminate the role of imagination in history (Staley, 2021; Taylor, 2004), democracy (Bottici, 2019; Ezrahi, 2012), and especially radical politics (Gilman-Opalsky and Shukaitis, 2019; Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014; Mulgan, 2022; Olufemi, 2021; Shukaitis, 2009; Thaler and Mihai, 2024; Trautmann, 2020). 1 It would indeed be hard to deny that a real desideratum exists. The ubiquitous adage: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, variously attributed to Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, or Mark Fisher, has assumed proverbial quality. Our political faculty of imagination, that is, our capacity to imagine a state of the world not congruous with the status quo of liberal-democratic capitalism or its authoritarian contenders, was diminished by hegemonic forces that managed to relegate the very idea of an alternative to the unimaginable. 2 What could be more evident, under these conditions, than to recognize in our severely limited powers of imagination the bottleneck that every political alternative has to pass? And what could be more timely than theoretically engaging with questions of political and social imagination?
And yet, the booming academic market for a trending topic like imagination may also raise suspicion. Could we be dealing not so much with a genuinely political response to our predicament as with, simply, the academic sublimation of political defeat? It should be obvious that the philosophical incantation of the powers of imagination will hardly suffice to create viable political alternatives to authoritarian neoliberalism (Chamayou, 2021). But even as it would be unfair to offload the responsibility for finding such alternatives onto philosophy or political theory, we should at least insist that the philosophical concept of imagination remains in synch with political reality. It would be self-defeating to portray imagination as the master key to a better world while at the same time ignoring the grim realities of political ordering: the undeniable fact that any alternative order will have to be imposed on powerful forces that are well-entrenched in the institutional apparatus of the state and the institutions of civil society. There is a danger that a politically rather innocuous term like ‘imagination’ might serve as a soft focus through which the grim realities of politics deceptively appear in a less offensive light. In this case, imagination, rather than revitalizing politics, would become a surrogate for politics, thus diverting our view to utopian or heterotopian landscapes while relieving us from the responsibility of looking the beast in the eye. 3
It would nevertheless be unwise for political theorists to prematurely reject the notion of imagination, given that it attests to an actual political desideratum. In the following, I will be arguing that there is a more constructive option available: we need to repoliticize the term and confront theories of imagination with a realistic conception of politics and the political, without denying the importance and timeliness of the turn to imagination.
As it would be unmanageable within the scope of one article to review and discuss the abundant literature on imagination (Seitz, 2022), it is advisable to start such an endeavor with a return to the philosophical origins of the current ‘turn’: the work of Cornelius Castoriadis who, since the mid-1960s, like no other theorist contributed to revitalizing the concept of imagination. 4 His work pursues a clear political intention on two distinct, yet related theoretical planes. On a fundamental level, Castoriadis devises a social ontology of imagination as an unsurpassable dimension of all social and political life. On a more narrowly political level he engages in a radical reflection on democracy envisaged as the autonomous and self-conscious imaginary institution of a political community. As will be claimed in this article, however, the Castoriadian project, despite its political intentions, fails to do justice to the unpleasant realities of political life – the inescapable fact that every imaginable democratic alternative to our unimaginative and less-than-democratic status quo must be politically enforced and, subsequently, defended. More than that, it should also allow for the political, in the sense of struggle and antagonism (Marchart, 2018), to be to some extent accepted and integrated into the institutional framework of a democratic order. In other words, even a political account of the imaginary, as in Castoriadis, needs further politicization.
To activate and radicalize the political potentials of Castoriadis’s thought it will be necessary to first situate his work in the context of political and democratic thought, instead of buying into the myth of Castoriadis’s solitude and his self-stylization as a singular thinker. While there are certainly alternative ways of situating Casoriadis, given his extensive and multifaceted work, I propose to characterize Castoriadis’s political thought, when situated in a larger contextual network of intellectual reference points, as a post-Marxist theory of radical democracy which, in turn, is based on a post-foundational ontology of imagination. Only by situating Castoriadis within the broader context of radical-democratic and post-foundational debates (1) will his blind spots become apparent (especially regarding the danger of depoliticization) and (2) will it be possible to further politicize the current ‘turn’ to imagination by putting Castoriadis in a productive dialogue with neo- and post-Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci or Ernesto Laclau.
To flesh out this all too brief characterization, we will proceed in the following way: I will first outline the historical genesis of the radical notion of imagination that, according to Castoriadis, serves as the ‘ground’ of both psychic life and social order. This notion will be tested as to its ontological status and, as a result, classified as post-foundational (Marchart, 2007). In a further step, Castoriadis’s admittedly heterodox employment of the conceptual differentiation between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, which in French theory replicates the Heideggerian ontological difference between ontological Being and ontic beings, will be taken as an indicator for certain, mostly disavowed left-Heideggerian leanings in Castoriadis. However, both sides of the political difference – imagination (which comes to replace what in the work of theorists like Claude Lefort would be called the political) on one side and politics on the other – warrant further politicization. At this point, I will take issue with Castoriadis’s restrictive normative rendering of politics, unduly narrowed down by him to the autonomous practice of democratic self-institution. In the final sections of this article, it will be argued that by supplementing Castoriadis with a Gramscian approach to imagination, Castoriadis’s via creativa may lead us to a more down-to-earth understanding of democratic politics, an understanding that takes into account the political means of enforcement and hegemonic expansion of any democratic alternative to the current status quo.
Situating Castoriadis I: Aristotelian Hauntology and the discovery of Phantasia
Let us take as a starting point the most ‘fundamental’ level of Castoriadis’s thought: his ontology of radical imagination. Every political or social theory is based, explicitly or implicitly, on a particular ontology, that is, on fundamental assumptions about the very nature of the social universe and the kind of entities inhabiting it. Max Weber’s sociological approach of methodological individualism, for instance, is not to be called individualistic simply for methodological reasons; the whole approach only makes sense in a world imagined as populated by individual actors rather than, say, collective actors or trans-individual assemblages between objects and humans, as in Bruno Latour’s social ontology. Weber’s ‘methodology’ is, thus, silently based on a theory about the nature of social being in general, i.e. an ontology. It might be objected that all ontology amounts to metaphysical speculation and should thus be thrown into the dustbin of intellectual history. Indeed, ontology is without the slightest scientific value to most social scientists, which is why they tend to disavow the concept while unknowingly relying on ontological assumptions about the mode of being of society. The result is an outright scientism in all its variants: empiricism, positivism, quantificationism, etc. Such an objectivist viewpoint of the social world in no way escapes Western metaphysics, but, as Heidegger would claim, is as metaphysical as the most antiquated scholastic ontologies. Metaphysics cannot easily be overcome by lapsing into its supposed opposite, thus foreclosing the very question of being and restricting oneself to procedures of testing, measuring, calculating, and thus objectivizing beings. Such an objectivist understanding of the social world is deeply complicit with the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy in which being, as Castoriadis criticized, has always been envisaged as something determined and determinable – a criticism perfectly in line with Adorno’s vitriols against positivism, or Heidegger’s critique of scientism.
So, if every approach in the social sciences is based upon implicit ontological assumptions about the nature of social or political phenomena, then it is just a matter of scientific honesty to make these assumptions explicit or even take a leap and actively develop a distinct social ontology. Castoriadis, being fully conscious of the impossibility of circumventing questions of ontology, counts among those theorists who unashamedly engaged in such effort. What he proposed was an ontology of imagination. This ontology was not only unfolded systematically, it also was excavated historically. With the first volume of a long-term publication project entitled L’Élément imaginaire, 5 Castoriadis planned to present a philosophical history of imagination. While the entire project never made it to publication, the historical narrative of L’Élément imaginaire can be easily reconstructed, given that Castoriadis himself provided a skeletal version of the narrative. Returning to a critical topos reminiscent of Heidegger, but also of Horkheimer and Adorno, Castoriadis holds that the philosophical tradition always thought of being under the aspect of determinacy (as this being determined by particular predicates), while at the same time subordinating being to reason, so that indetermination appeared as a deficit to be overcome. What escaped the philosophical tradition in its effort to conceive of being as already determined was the creative force of positing new determinations. Philosophy, thus, has always been involved in a cover-up operation, thus contributing to the ‘occultation of the radical imaginary’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 183) as the creative force behind all determinations.
In Castoriadis’s eyes, this operation was not, and could not be, entirely successful. Sporadically, philosophers stumbled upon imagination as an ineradicable dimension of the human psyche, for imagination is ‘in its essence rebellious against determinacy’ (p. 184). It happened twice in the history of philosophy that the ‘cover-up’ (p. 184) was blown. In modern times, Kant re-discovered the human faculty of transcendental imagination, with Fichte and the young Hegel following him; yet, very soon the pivotal role of imagination was once more occulted and only restored with Heidegger’s book on Kant (Heidegger, 1997). Still, Heidegger, who had criticized Kant for ‘recoiling’ from the ‘“bottomless abyss” opened by the discovery of the transcendental imagination’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 185), completely ignored the topic of imagination in his later work, thus recoiling himself from the abyss of imagination. While Castoriadis postpones the detailed discussion of German Idealism and Heidegger, the modern discoverers of imagination, he returns to Aristotle’s De Anima as the historical first encounter of philosophy with the faculty of radical imagination.
His discussion of the Aristotelian tract, similar to his patiently unfolding seminar presentations, reveals a Castoriadis engaged in a close reading effort who contrasts starkly with the often cursory, polemical, and repetitive Castoriadis we encounter in his occasional writings and interviews. In his reading of Aristotle, he follows the ‘embarrassments, aporias, and impossibilities that will always accompany’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 187) the question of imagination. In De Anima, imagination invades Aristotle’s theory of the soul as an aporia, for it is only through the emergence of a particular aporon – the phantasm – that for Castoriadis the essence of philosophy reveals itself. In fact, the whole ontological apparatus presented in De Anima turns out to be subverted by the emergence of phantasm to which Aristotle fails to assign a determined ontological place. To understand this, one needs to know that from the viewpoint of Aristotelian psychology, the realm of being is fully exhausted by the sensible (the aisthèton) and the intelligible (the noèton). All beings fall in either of the two categories: ‘Central to De Anima, they alone have some ontological weight; they give access to two great types of being (étants) and provide, as far as possible, determination for their mode of being (être)’ (p. 188). 6 Yet, Aristotle gets in his own way by introducing, without any apparent motivation, a third category that escapes this clear division when stating that all thought must be accompanied by the contemplation of a phantasm. The faculty of phantasia starts to intrude on the harmonic division of labor between aisthèsis and nous, sensation and intellection. Its product, the phantasm, is not really a sensible – it is just like a sensible in the thought process; nor is it identical with thought, even as it must accompany all acts of thinking which otherwise could not occur without ‘this problematical being/non-being, the phantasm’ (p. 189). And as much as phantasmata escape the bipartition of beings, the faculty that produces them – phantasia – escapes the bipartition between the traditional faculties of sensation and intellection. Castoriadis discovers in the argumentative interstices of De Anima a primordial phantasia, a first imagination that unsettles every traditional ontology, including the ontological distinction between fact and fiction. 7
Keeping this in mind, let us, instead of further delving into the intricacies of Castoriadis’s discussion of De Anima, point out its ontological as well as political implications. Through his careful reading, Castoriadis carves out what in a deconstructive vein would be called the undecidable status of the category of imagination. It is because of its status as an undecidable that radical imagination ‘virtually bursts apart Aristotelian ontology – which amounts to saying, ontology tout court’ (p. 184). The question of imagination unsettles every traditional ontology (p. 185), if by the latter we understand the science of a static, eternal chain of Being. The reasons should be clear by now. Since it is neither purely noetic nor purely aesthetic, the phantasm does not belong to any particular species of being. The ontological status of phantasmata is undefinable, as they come to lie beyond the division of being and nothingness – they are, as it were, the specters not only of our psyche but of being as such.
Situating Castoriadis II: Toward a Post-Foundational Ontology
Through his reading of De Anima, Castoriadis managed to retrace in intellectual history the germs of a new ontology. It could be objected that the term ‘ontology’ is not systematically used by Castoriadis for his project. Wherever in his magnum opus The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis, 2005) Castoriadis employs the term, he critically refers to the opposite of his project: the ‘inherited logic-ontology’ or ‘identitarian ontology’ of the philosophical tradition. And yet, there is no doubt that Castoriadis’s engagement with the very question of psychic and socio-historical being amounts to nothing less than a new form of ontology. Not an ontology, to be sure, by which the realm of being is envisaged as immutable and eternal, but one based on the premise that being is fundamentally creation (Tomès, 2007: 80). The very concept of creation implies that something new is imagined, something not predetermined by or assembled out of the pieces of what was already created. In this regard, Castoriadis takes his distance from Aristotle or Kant, who, while stumbling upon the human faculty of imagination, failed to see the enormous creative capacity of the latter. For Castoriadis, contrary to the philosophical tradition, the unsettling nature of imagination can only be accounted for if the latter is envisaged as an eruptive force of creation, not as static schematism.
This ontology should be qualified as post-foundational, since creative imagination will only be given a chance if the world is not seen as predetermined, i.e. if the field of the historico-social is not taken to be anchored in a ground transcending this field. The archetypical supplier of socio-transcendent grounds is religion, but also Western philosophy has always been on the search for ‘a fundamentum inconcussum, and unshakeable foundation’ (Castoriadis, 1997b: 321). Comparable to religion, classical philosophy aimed at equipping being ‘with the criteria of duration, so that permanence, eternity, and, finally, atemporality became fundamental characteristics of “true being” – of immutability – so that everything belonging to the Heraclitean flux became disqualified’ (p. 321). Modern philosophy claimed to have discovered an ultimate foundation in reason. If being, by contrast, is to be envisaged as creation, it cannot be confined to a world anchored in immutable and eternal grounds – because in this case there would be nothing left to create. Being must be envisaged as essentially ungrounded. In Castoriadis’s words: ‘Being is abyss, or chaos, or the groundless’ (Castoriadis, 1997a: 3). In drawing on the vocabulary of the ancient Greeks, Castoriadis decides to term the very absence of an ultimate foundation chaos. The ancient semantic could easily mislead us to impute to Castoriadis an anti-foundationalist position – and his recurring insistence that creation unfolds ex nihilo does little to dispel the impression. Yet, a strictly anti-foundationalist position would amount to the untenable claim that everything that exists is arbitrary (similar to Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’ approach). For a card-carrying anti-foundationalist, there are no grounds to anything. Our contemporary experience of the social world, however, is not that we are confronted with total groundlessness, but that wherever we go we step on partial and contingent grounds. Therefore, an ontological approach consistent with the latter experience would better be described as post-foundationalist, rather than anti-foundationalist. 8
Likewise, for Castoriadis, what he calls chaos is always only partially indeterminate, unstructured, and disordered. Being cannot be entirely chaotic, because if this were the case we would be forever dwelling in a psychotic abyss without any hope of creating some degree of order. Whenever we engage in a grounding effort, we must base our actions on precarious islands of stability. Society, in other words, is both partially grounded and partially ungrounded, which makes it subject to further attempts at grounding. In his own vocabulary, Castoriadis thus differentiates between two modes of socio-historical being: the instituted society or ‘societas instituta’, on the one hand, and the ‘instituting society’ or ‘societas instituans’ (Castoriadis, 1997a: 13), on the other, the latter being the domain of radical, creative imagination. These are not entirely separate domains, though. Rather, we would be well-advised to think of the relation between imaginary institution and instituted society as chiasmatic, that is, as mutually intertwining, with the chaotic and abysmal ‘constantly invading’ the realm of ‘the given, the familiar, the apparently domesticated’ (Castoriadis, 1997a: 320). This figure of the chiasm – the indissoluble intertwining of opposites – is characteristic not only of Merleau-Ponty’s work but also of Martin Heidegger, as it were the ‘founder’ of post-foundational thought.
In this regard, Castoriadis’s ontology orbits around French left-Heideggerianism (Janicaud, 2001), even as the affinity remains largely unaccounted for by Castoriadis. 9 It is a characteristic feature of left-Heideggerian thought that being is dissolved into an interminable play of difference between the ontic and the ontological, beings and their ‘beingness’; a play which in the later Heidegger takes on different names – just think of all those Heideggerian quasi-concepts like ‘beying’, ‘the event’, or even a politically charged notion like ‘freedom’ in his lecture course on Schelling (Heidegger, 1985). All these names point not to an immutable ontological Being or particular ontic entities, but to the very differencing between the ontological and the ontic. Such an ontology – or, as Derrida would have it, hauntology – can be called post-foundational to the extent to which Being is deprived of its metaphysical status as a stable ground for all ontic beings without, however, being dissolved into nothingness (which, again, would amount to an anti-foundational position). Rather, the absence of an ultimate ground elicits a never-ending quest for precarious and temporary grounds. Thus, the play of difference between the ontic and the ontological is set in motion and a process of grounding starts to unfold. In such a world the very absence of an ultimate ground sets us on a search for penultimate grounds. As Heidegger would put it: the ground grounds as a-byss (‘Der Grund gründet als Ab-grund’, Heidegger, 1994: 29). Similarly, any act of radical imagination, in Castoriadis, emerges from the chiasmatic intertwining between ground and abyss, or, in ancient terminology, kosmos and chaos.
Situating Castoriadis III: Left Heideggerianism and the ‘Political Difference’
There is no better indicator of left-Heideggerian leanings in French theory than the political difference – the conceptual differentiation between ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ (Marchart, 2007) – with which Heidegger’s onto-ontological difference (the differential play between Being and beings) was transposed onto political terrain. Everything started between 1980 and 1984 with a series of talks at the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political, founded by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Many of the most prominent French thinkers of the time presented on the question of the political, as differentiated from politics in the ordinary sense, taking their cue from Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s proposition of a supposed ‘retreat’ of the political (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997). Among these thinkers, Claude Lefort – Castoriadis’s former comrade and agonist from the times of Socialisme ou Barbarie – presented one of the most cogent accounts of the political difference. In the eyes of Lefort, political science, not least because of its empiricism and objectivism, misses what the political is about: the symbolic dimension that gives form to, and thus institutes, society as a whole. This dimension cannot be confined to a particular societal sphere reserved for political party competition. Instead, the political serves as a name for the generative principles that constitute a political regime as a whole way of life, thus raising ‘the question of the constitution of the social space, of the form of society’ (Lefort, 1988: 11).
In his article ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Castoriadis (1991) took issue, if only implicitly, with the Lefortian rendering of the political. While holding on to the conceptual difference between politics and the political, he tries to both redefine their content and invert their position to give greater prominence to his idea of an instituting imagination. To do so, he restricts the scope of both the political and politics. Firstly, the term ‘the political’ is reserved by Castoriadis for everything that can be associated with ‘explicit power’, by which he understands ‘instances capable of formulating explicitly sanctionable injunctions’ (Castoriadis, 1991: 156). As all societies are in need of such instances, the latter can be embodied by highly diverse actors – by elders and warriors in traditional societies, by the demos in ancient democracy, or by his favorite target in modern societies: the bureaucratic state apparatus (p. 156). As it remains restricted to cases of ‘explicit power’, Castoriadis’s concept of the political is set off from a much broader Lefortian understanding of the political as the instituting dimension of a whole way of life. Secondly, politics is not identified anymore with the workings of the political system, nor does it imply a realist understanding of political action as a power game. Instead, it is given a strong normative bias: the term is supposed to only apply to democratic political action in the sense of a self-conscious, autonomous institution of society: ‘Politics is a project of autonomy’ (p. 169).
Castoriadis’s motivations for the first shift, clearly directed against Lefort, are obvious. He warns us that his conception of the political as explicit power is not to be mixed up with a Lefortian notion of the political as ‘the overall institution of society’ (p. 157). In the latter case the concept of the political would be unduly expanded, he fears, up to a point where it threatens to resorb Castoriadis’s own concept of imaginary institution (p. 158). It seems as if Castoriadis wanted to defend himself against any intrusion of his categorial apparatus. Without mentioning Lefort by name, he denies that any gains could be made by changing the vocabulary from ‘imaginary institution’ to ‘the political’, yet he can hardly provide convincing reasons why his terminology should be better suited than the one discussed by Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lefort and other left-Heideggerians who at the time raised the ‘question of the political’ in ways reminiscent of Heidegger raising the ‘question of being’ (Marchart, 2007). On the contrary, one could easily make a case against Castoriadis. The concept of the political – especially if we look at it not only through Lefort’s eyes but also through the lens of Laclau’s hegemony theory version of the political, to which we will return in the concluding section – has the advantage of potentially referring us, from a realistic perspective, to the less enchanting aspects of instituting society: power, force, domination, decision, struggle, and the construction of hegemony. 10 These, perhaps, less likable aspects of any political attempt at instituting social order are not exactly highlighted with such innocuous notions as imagination or creativity. The term ‘the political’, whatever its disadvantages, at least retains semantic proximity to politics as we know it. Finding a particular name for the institution of society is not a nominalistic exercise without any bearing upon the matter at hand. The naming of the grounding moment – be it as ‘imagination’, be it as ‘the political’ – has not only palpable theoretical effects but is in itself a political move. By refuting the political in its grounding role, thus stripping what he calls the ‘imaginary’ institution of society semantically of political resonances, Castoriadis in fact distracts our view from political life.
The same argument applies to his notion of politics. Castoriadis’s normative vision of what in his lexicon is called politics – restricted as it is to the praxis of self-conscious democratic autonomy – equally excludes any form of power politics. But why should the ambit of politics be confined to what ancient democracies presumably took it to mean? Why should we restrict our contemporary understanding to the one of the Greeks, thus remaining faithful to a supposedly original meaning, if we know very well that the meaning of concepts is subject to significant alterations over time and adapts to changing politico-historical circumstances? In clinging to an ideal of politics, Castoriadis falls prey to what could be called democratic apriorism: the assumption that all true politics is by necessity democratic politics. 11 Such normative short-circuiting of politics, again, has depoliticizing effects, given that the significance of conflict, division, and negativity in political and social life is seriously downplayed. This comes with conceptions of creative imagination and the imaginary, which, from a realistic perspective, may appear as rather harmless substitutes for politics and the political and, therefore, are easily translatable into the neoliberal regime of creative capitalism, as described, among others, by Chiapello and Boltanski (2007).
Politicizing Imagination I: Originary Division and Residual Transcendence
Castoriadis’s normative short-circuiting of politics translates unfavorably into democratic theory. There is a danger that a notion of democracy purified from struggle, power, and domination remains detached from the political realities on the ground. This puts him in the vicinity of post-foundational theorists who lean toward an an-archic understanding of democracy, such as Rancière (1999) or Abensour (2011). By oscillating between an an-archic ontology and an anarchist understanding of politics, these approaches fail to fully capture the dimension of demotic kratos that goes way beyond institutions of explicit power. Tellingly, the Greek term demokratia does not belong to the ‘-archy’ family of words, as ‘monarchy’ or ‘aristocracy’ do. With regard to kratos, which implies the actual enforcement of a claim to power, the idea of democracy cannot be limited to the arbitrary distribution of public offices by lot. As a form of kratos, democracy does not exhaust itself in institutions that would allow individual citizens to rule and be ruled in turn, as Castoriadis, following Aristotle, would have it. If this were the case, democracy would amount to abolishing kratos, thus ending up as another name for anarchy. The rule of the demos, if materialized, must also be the rule over those who threaten popular rule: hereditary aristocrats, aspiring monarchs, potential tyrants, and, first and foremost, wealthy oligarchs. Athenian democracy, so cherished by Castoriadis, was replaced twice by oligarchic coups in 411 BC and, after democratic Athens lost the war against Sparta, in 404 BC. In the second case, the rule of the ‘thirty oligarchs’ had to be militarily defeated by a democratic army. Democracy will never be a sure-fire success; it needs to be imposed on social groups with a deep investment in retaining or reestablishing anti-democratic types of rule. Whether we like it or not, democracy – like any other regime, but unlike anarchic non-domination, which for this reason is bound to remain unrealizable – necessarily involves a moment of domination, i.e. the continuous political enforcement of popular rule as such.
Yet, the point is not to abandon any notion of creative imagination, which remains indispensable for a project of radicalizing democracy – the point is to politicize it. Any political attempt at enforcing democracy will certainly imply an effort at imagining alternatives to the status quo, but at the same time it needs to transform these alternatives into a potentially majoritarian political project and construct what Gramsci (1971) used to call a ‘collective will’. Such a (counter-)hegemonic project, according to Gramsci, must be aimed eventually at the institutionalization of a broad consensus – an alternative view of society that commands consent harnessed with force. In a very practical sense, creative imagination involves the laborious building of a consensual collective will which, eventually, ingrains itself in institutions that defend and foster democratic rule. It is clear that any such attempt will need to overcome resistance and, therefore, can only evolve through conflict. Of course, Castoriadis is not blind to the fact that democracy, where it historically emerged, had been instituted by way of struggle if not revolution. Yet, much like Arendt (1990), Castoriadis tends to separate the potentially violent phase of liberation from a democratic (for Arendt: republican) order of accomplished freedom; as if, from a post-foundational perspective, the process of liberation could ever stop and an unobstructed rule of freedom could begin. In this regard, the institutions of direct democracy and democratic self-limitation, as portrayed by Castoriadis (1983), give the impression of being expurgated from conflict and domination. What defines ‘politics’, in his account of direct and council democracy, is reduced to procedures of delegation. In such a model of democracy, politics exhausts itself in the selection, by lot or by consensus, of individual delegates or by casting a vote on specific proposals in the assembly. It never reaches the point where in politics a collective will must be forged through the struggle against adversarial forces.
Castoriadis’s ideal type of direct democracy, based on procedures of delegation, allows us to bypass these supposedly ugly aspects of democratic power politics. His delegation model of democracy, hence, contrasts with a Gramscian perspective, within which the necessity to establish a democratic hegemony is underscored, and it contrasts with Lefort’s account of democracy as a regime in which ‘social conflict in all its forms’ is accepted as legitimate. In Lefort’s case, democratic institutions – notably those that allow for political representation – are given the task to show ‘that division is, in a general way, constitutive of the very unity of society’ (Lefort, 1988: 18). As Lefort (1986) claimed in his book on Machiavelli, every society is constituted on the basis of a division between popolo grasso and popolo minuto, that is, between those who desire to dominate and those who desire not to be dominated. 12 But for Lefort, this division, reminiscent of Marxian class struggle, yet disentangled from economic determinism, is not the whole story. There is an even more originary dimension of division: the division between the inside of society and its outside. Society can only achieve some degree of identity if the latter is symbolized – through the mise-en-scène of power – vis-à-vis an outside, i.e. that which society is not. The fact that there can be no identity or unity without a certain degree of alienation, transcendence, and division is what most distinguishes Lefort from Castoriadis. Both started with roughly the same socialist project at the times of Socialisme ou Barbarie, but ended up with highly distinct theories of politics and democracy: Castoriadis never accepted the idea of an originary division, while Lefort remained critical about the abolishment of representational relations and the identitarian embodiment of popular rule in direct democracy (Poirier, 2015: 14–15).
Politicizing Imagination II: The Imaginary Horizon
The difference between Castoriadis and Lefort is of a paradigmatic nature. It must not only be located on the ‘ontic’ plane of their diverging views about democratic politics, or with regard to the difference between envisaging social conflict primarily as institutionally embedded, as in Lefort, or as extra-institutionally vagabonding, as in Castoriadis. Their disagreements are at the same time ‘ontological’, that is to say, they concern the status of, respectively, the political and the imaginary. Given that both sides of the political difference, the ontic and the ontological side, are distinct and yet related, there should be no surprise that particular ideas about politics shade over into political ontology and vice versa. Take first the case of Castoriadis. He defends a holistic ontology of the imaginary: the imaginary holds together society as a whole and there is no necessity for any – not even symbolic – reference points beyond its immanent unity. His ontology is also vitalistic in the sense that the imaginary works as a self-propelling force. In contrast to Castoriadis’s immanentism, Lefort’s ontology requires a minimal degree of transcendence, if by the latter we understand the impossibility of society ever reaching a state of full self-identity. In Lefort, it is precisely this impossibility – expressed by the ineradicability of conflict, the inescapable remnants of transcendence, the impossibility of ever fully embodying social unity – that serves as an ‘absent cause’ propelling further action. Hence, within this framework, there is no positive, vitalistic substance required to account for social change; it is precisely the absence of such substance that propels change. While for Castoriadis being is an active, creative force within a closed space of immanence, for Lefort being is shot through with gaps and inconsistencies. If, in one case, there is always ‘too much’ of it, in the other it is always to some extent lacking.
It goes without saying that no final decision will ever be reachable as to the ‘correctness’ of social ontologies. It would be absurd to claim, about Castoriadis’s ontology of imagination or Lefort’s ontology of division (or any other social ontology for that matter), that one is wrong and the other one right, for in doing so one would have to base one’s judgment on a stable ontological ground – a possibility excluded ex hypothesi. Nevertheless, this does not imply that we are bereft of all means for judgment. It is a matter of practical phronesis, the political faculty of judgment so cherished by Castoriadis (2002: 19–20) himself, to venture an educated guess based on our phenomenal experience of politics – a guess not about the ‘truth’, but about the verisimilitude or ‘truthlikeness’ of ontological claims about society. 13 And it is at this point that the question of political realism re-enters the equation. A theory of creative imagination may prove impractical or have undesirable implications if, translated onto the ‘ontic’ plane of politics, it transforms into wishful thinking. 14 The question that remains to be answered, hence, is the following: is there room to accommodate, in a post-foundational theory of radical democracy, both a realist view that takes account of the ugly necessities of politics and a theory of political imagination? Is it possible, in other words, to disentangle the idea of creative imagination from its lofty connotations, thus bringing it down to ordinary, mudslinging political action and, potentially, the hegemonic enforcement of a demotic kratos?
Let us, by way of concluding, point to one potential path to a theory of political imagination that may also help to revive the combative side of Castoriadis’s thought. In the Marxist tradition, it was precisely Antonio Gramsci who sought to combine an imaginative ‘optimism of the will’ with a realistic account of the operating modes of politics. As emphasized above, only then can a radical democratic politics hope to be effective if it succeeds in establishing a (counter-)hegemonic collective will in opposition to all the guardians of a less-than-democratic status quo. In contemporary political thought, it was arguably Ernesto Laclau who contributed most to the systematic advancement of Gramscian hegemony theory. For Laclau, any attempt at achieving hegemony must seek to expand a particular ‘myth’ to what he calls an ‘imaginary horizon’. In a situation of widespread crisis, political forces compete to provide a reading principle that offers remedy and serves as a surface of identification for those whose identity has been shattered. Political proposals of such a nature will provide the ‘myth of an achieved fullness’ (Laclau, 1990: 63) that everybody longs for. However, as long as political myths remain too closely attached to a particular political project, they will not be able to provide a surface for the inscription of every frustrated demand. This only happens when a particular myth is politically expanded into what Laclau calls a ‘social imaginary’, i.e. if ‘the moment of representation of the very form of fullness dominates to such an extent that it becomes the unlimited horizon of inscription of any social demand’ (p. 64). As Laclau continues: The imaginary is a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an absolute limit that structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object. In this sense, the Christian millennium, the Enlightenment and positivism’s conception of progress, communist society are all imaginaries: as modes of representation of the very form of fullness, they are located beyond the precariousness and dislocations typical of the world of objects. (Laclau, 1990: 64)
The point not to be missed is that an imaginary is not simply given, it is politically constructed through a hegemonic effort of expanding a particular myth into an imaginary horizon. Hence, imaginaries result from political struggles that successfully managed to universalize their particular aims. While Laclau provides us with a Gramscian theory of social imaginaries, if only elaborated by him in a rudimentary way, he leaves untheorized the question of imagination as a creative political practice. At this point, perhaps, Castoriadis’s insistence on the creative force of imagination is of value. While standing, in the West, within the imaginary horizon of authoritarian neoliberalism, a horizon that by and large defines the limits of the imaginable, we need to invent – ex nihilo, as Castoriadis would have it – the germs of another horizon. In other words, radical democratic politics, if it is to have any longer-lasting effects, needs to create a counter-hegemonic ‘myth’ that has a fighting chance to be transformed, in the future, into a new democratic imaginary. Such effort in achieving hegemony, overcoming institutional obstacles, and outmaneuvering political adversaries, will certainly necessitate a large degree of creative, imaginative power. In this sense, hegemony, as a practice, is imagination. Castoriadis, if read through the lens of political realism, may after all be the right starting point for our current turn to imagination – provided we come to understand by imagination the creation and hegemonic expansion of a radical democratic ‘myth’ with the potential of being seen as a viable response to a world riven by crises. We are here right at the meeting point between Gramsci’s stubborn ‘optimism of the will’ and Castoriadis’s obstinate vindication of creativity. If what is currently called democracy is to be truly democratized, we will be in dire need of both: stubborn optimism and obstinate creativity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funded by the European Union (ERC, PREDEF, 101055015).
