Norm and Critique in Castoriadis Theory of Autonomy PDF

Norm and Critique in Castoriadis’s Theory of
Autonomy
Andreas Kalyvas
The concept of autonomy has been a central normative principle in modern polit-
ical thought and a constitutive feature of democratic politics. Today, however, it
is either absorbed, and thus neutralized, in the individualistic and formal liberal
ideal of “moral autonomy,” or fiercely attacked by heteroclite political and philo-
sophical positions – some versions of feminism,1 poststructuralism,2 and commu-
nitarianism.3 Despite their many differences, they agree that autonomy, an
anachronistic residue of modernity, has come full circle. The foundational
assumptions of autonomy, they argue, organized around the mythical sites of a
transparent Subject, a universal Reason, and a masculine Will, have irrevocably
been corroded. By revealing the fragility of ultimate grounds, they claim to have
exposed the normative nakedness of the category of autonomy.
These attacks have no doubt disclosed the limits and hazards inherent in the
traditional elaborations of individual and political autonomy. While the first, an
idealization of the disembodied, male private entrepreneur, incarnated the ratio-
nal, monological mastery of the “other of reason” and the repression of inner
nature, the second allowed the eradication of plurality and difference in favor of
a homogeneous sovereign collectivity. These original insights, however, gradu-
ally turned into a devastating critique, culminating in the total abandonment of
self-determination as a meaningful political category. This sheer rejection
deprived social criticism and radical politics of their normative content. The more
the appeal to social norms and general principles, inspired by the ideal of self-
determination, was identified with hidden forms of mastery, homogeneity, and
possessive individualism, the more difficult it became to justify democratic insti-
tutions and participatory practices, and the less effective became critique of the
structures of domination of the capitalist state.
Given this crisis of critical thought caused by the alleged “death of autonomy,”
Castoriadis’s project to rethink this concept, initiated four decades ago, acquires
today a totally new importance: it represents one of the most sustained and ambi-
tious efforts to open anew the question of autonomy and to revive the democratic
project. His attempt to relocate the category of autonomy – individual and politi-
cal – at the center of a post-metaphysical political theory with an emancipatory
content shows how we can go beyond today’s blocked and stylized debates and
dilemmas. Yet his promising effort remains surprisingly unnoticed within the
contemporary political-philosophical landscape, being marginal and peripheral to
Constellations Volume 5, No 2, 1998. © Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
162 Constellations Volume 5, Number 2, 1998
the main debates in the English-speaking world.4 This paper aims precisely at
reinscribing Castoriadis as a formative thinker with an original contribution to
make in the new orientations of contemporary political thought. Indeed, by build-
ing on Castoriadis’s conceptual innovations I hope to show that his contribution
opens once again the fundamental question of autonomy and democracy. His
work represents a focal point around which diverse modes of political inquiry
exhausted with poststructuralism and dissatisfied with the current state of critical
social theory can converge in the articulation of a new democratic project filling
the empty space of radical politics created by the crisis of Marxism.
Yet Castoriadis’s aim to revive the emancipatory dimension of political theory
with a normative content, to elucidate a post-metaphysical form of autonomous
action that can be justified without an appeal to ultimate foundations, is far from
unproblematic. It is a task that has not fully elucidated its own theoretical and
normative presuppositions. Although Castoriadis attempts to show that there are
a number of good reasons to prefer the value of autonomy even if we cannot
provide it with an absolute justification,5 he does not provide a conclusive and
systematic defense. His arguments are dispersed and his conclusions incomplete.
He has thus become the paradoxical target, on the one hand, of liberal critics who
point to the supposed lack of normative grounds and the ensuing relativistic
consequences6 and, on the other, of poststructuralism, which detects in his texts
the biases of “eurocentrism,” “logocentrism,” and “phallocentrism” typical of
modernity’s rational drive for mastery and omnipotence.7
Using Castoriadis’s theoretical framework and conceptual tools, I hope to
show, contrary to the above charges, that a recomposition of the normative core
of autonomy suitable for a theory of radical democracy is still possible. I will do
so by proposing a strategy of justification based on the conceptual resources
found in the two main thematic domains of his work: (1) that of the subject, and
(2) that of the dialectical relation of instituting and instituted power. In the first
part of this study, I highlight the origin and transformations of the concept of
autonomy and I present the tension in Castoriadis’s project. In the second part, I
interpret his innovative theory of subjectivity as the starting point for a fresh alter-
native definition and justification of individual autonomy and “negative liberties”
sharply distinguished from the liberal tradition. In the third part, I discuss his
formulation of political autonomy as the explicit and lucid self-institution of soci-
ety, located at the interstices of the instituting and the instituted power of society.
I. Autonomy between Facticity and Validity

Castoriadis’s attempt to rethink the concept of autonomy is a gradual deepening
and constant reworking of a category that appears in his very early writings. The
first elaboration of autonomy is strongly marked by the radical tradition of
economic self-management. Autonomy, Castoriadis argues, is the rule of the
workers’ councils, organized in a central assembly and expressing the political
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

Castoriadis’s Theory of Autonomy: Andreas Kalyvas 163
power of the society as a whole.8 Once Castoriadis abandoned Marxism and its
metaphysical and deterministic assumptions, he distanced himself from this early
formulation of autonomy. He rejected the tenets of a historically privileged work-
ing class, the immanent movement of history towards the realization of socialism,
and the subordination of politics to the economy and the paradigm of production.
Behind these theoretical transformations lies a critical and constructive
engagement with the antinomic theories of Marx and Freud. From Marx,
Castoriadis preserved the emancipatory project of the revolutionary transforma-
tion of society and the radical intuition that history is open and indeterminate,
susceptible to the struggle and creative action of self-organized collective actors.9
From Freud, he appropriated the extraordinary discovery of the unconscious,
which he developed into the theory of the radical imagination as the source of
genuine historical creation, thereby cleansing it of the reductionist and positivis-
tic tendencies found in traditional psychoanalysis.10 He also adopted the idea that
the “other of reason” can never be eliminated, totally illuminated, or mastered by
the rational or the conscious: it always remains a subterranean realm of indeter-
minate historical alterity and diversity. Castoriadis injected these two insights into
Kant’s moral philosophy, which supplied him with the concept of autonomy as an
act of self-legislation whereby individuals freely assign general principles to
themselves.11
Castoriadis, however, is deeply critical of Kant’s theory of moral autonomy,
and distances himself from it in three important ways. He detranscendentalizes
it by eliminating the rational mastery of inner nature, the unconscious, and the
repression of heteronomous desires. Autonomy, Castoriadis claims, is not
achieved through violence and constriction exercised by the conscious over the
unconscious. On the contrary, it consists “in another relation . . . in another atti-
tude of the subject with respect to himself or herself. . . . Desires, drives . . . this
is me, too, and these have to be brought not only to consciousness but to expres-
sion and existence.”12 Additionally, against the empty formalism of Kant’s
concept of autonomy as self-determination, Castoriadis argues for a substantive
reinterpretation of autonomy as self-realization. He reintegrates what Kant
excluded as inclination, that is, empirical existence. An adequate, more flexible,
less formal notion of autonomy must do justice to meanings and goals that were
previously stigmatized as instrumental or utilitarian. Autonomous individuals
are those who can clarify their needs and incorporate the ethical into an
expanded concept of morality. Finally, Castoriadis decenters autonomy by
avoiding the postulate that there is a “total man,” an “absolute subject” behind
the act of self-legislation.13 This critical and provocative synthesis takes the orig-
inal form of an explicit transformation of the relation to the unconscious, to the
“discourse of the Other,” through the self-reflective positing of new forms,
values, and meanings.
Though the concept of a nonrepressive, substantive autonomy has gained in
profundity and complexity, it has deprived Castoriadis of its traditional bases.

Very early he had to denounce the “foundational illusions” of Western meta-

physics,14 emphasizing that “there is not and cannot be a rigorous and ultimate
foundation of anything”15 in the form of a transcendental Subject, a universal
Reason, or a teleological vision of History.16 At the same time, however, in strict
opposition to some nihilistic trends of social thought, he foresaw the dangerous
consequences of relativism unleashed by the collapse of absolute foundations.17 If
there can be no appeal to something higher than effectively actual individuals, nor
any objective extra-social standpoint, nor any prior transcendental moral order,
given our partial interests and subjective preferences, why and how can autonomy
claim the positional status of a critical norm?18 Does the lack of an absolute reduce
the potential critical role of the concept of autonomy to another form of power
game? Is autonomy one of those evaluative commitments which, as MacIntyre
has argued, like “all faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; [they] all
are subjective directions given by sentiment and feeling”?19
In the case of political autonomy, for example, the justification of an
autonomous, democratic society cannot be deduced from an immanent critique of
the “so supposed” facticity of crisis-ridden capitalist societies or from an onto-
logical theory of labor. Similarly, individual autonomy cannot be derived from an
essentialistic theory of human nature or from pure reason. It is not only that these
assumptions – these objective “facts” – have proved themselves to be illusions;
even if they were true, they would not generate normative standards. Castoriadis
powerfully argues that “this simple ‘factual’ datum [i.e., the actual existence of
autonomy] is not enough, could not as such impose itself on our thinking. We do
not approve of what contemporary history offers us simply because it ‘is’ or
because it ‘tends to be.’ ”20 Although this move away from the prescriptive
violence of facts has liberated the creative potentialities of action and opened the
space for indeterminate human intervention, it has destroyed the conventional
normative basis of radical-democratic politics:
Once the guarantee of “objective processes” has been eliminated what remains?
Why do we want the revolution – and why would others want it? . . . Just what does
autonomy mean, and to what extent can it be realized? Is there any sense in postu-
lating a radical reversal? Are we not pursuing the illusion of absolute novelty? Is
there not behind all this another philosophy of history?21
Once the Marxist framework that supplied Castoriadis with the “immanent”
normative and historical resources is abandoned, his position appears arbitrary,
verging on relativism and ethical decisionism. Can autonomy be justified, as
Castoriadis sometimes argues, by a sheer choice that we as individuals “are
aiming at because we will it”?22 Here, following Weber,23 Castoriadis seems to
claim that all normative principles, autonomy included, are equally nonrational,
derived solely from our will and desire to affirm and struggle for them.24 From
such a perspective, ultimately, “we are unable to justify this will . . . rationally
since such rational justification would presuppose” what we try to justify.25 By the

time we finish his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, we are
persuaded that the question of validity is not answered. It is difficult to see how
the normative content of autonomy can be deduced solely from individuals’
desires and volitions. If this were so, autonomy would fail to play the role of a
critical, impartial norm. As Habermas has claimed, the argument proposed in The
Imaginary Institution of Society does not properly address the problem of valid-
ity. It leaves no room in “which socialized individuals are accountable,”26 “brush-
ing aside the difference between meaning and validity . . . [that] no longer relies
upon the profane verification of its creation,”27 thus inviting Hugues Poltier to ask,
“How it is possible in this case to discriminate? Can we give good reasons for
preferring one social signification to another?”28 and Axel Honneth to conclude
rhetorically that Castoriadis’s “ontology of nature . . . fleeing from its own radi-
calism . . . leads in the end into a metaphysical cosmology which today can
scarcely be discussed with rational arguments.”29
What these criticisms miss, however, is Castoriadis’s explicit and emphatic
understanding of the concept of autonomy as a normative criterion with which
one judges, criticizes, and chooses between different institutional structures and
practices. Indeed, rather than lamenting the demise of ultimate foundations,
Castoriadis exploits this opportunity to explore new paths. His concept of auton-
omy emerges precisely as a viable response to the aporias of critical thought. With
the deployment of the concept of autonomy, Castoriadis directly intervenes in the
debate over the possibility of once again incorporating the idea of critique within
a normative political program, given the exhaustion of traditional, foundational-
ist modes of thought and the impasses of poststructuralist discourses. Autonomy
constitues a normative standpoint for the “critique of existing instituted reali-
ties,”30 thereby creating that “distance relative to the object”31 from which it will
still be possible to judge and to choose among plural values, institutions, and
norms.32
Castoriadis clearly distinguishes his theoretical position from relativism. There
is a rational component to the justification of norms. He does not reduce them to
blind emotional attitudes, sheer preferences, or power positions. Politics,
Castoriadis claims, is the reflective and deliberative activity that aims, through
the public practice of unlimited interrogation of the instituted reality, at the
creation and organization of a social and political order in accordance with “the
norm of the autonomy of the collectivity.”33 By embracing the “tradition of radi-
cal criticism,”34 Castoriadis adopts its two main presuppositions: first, that the
norm of autonomy must express something more than subjective preferences,
desires, or partial interests and, second, that it must overcome the distortions of
everyday life by creating a distance from the given, an “outside” of the real.
This commitment to the critical tradition, however, is not without conse-
quences. It is accompanied with dilemmas and tensions. On the one hand,
“putting things into question, criticizing them, requiring a logon didonai”
demands that a critical discourse “be provided with norms.”35 Consequently, the

issue of the validity of moral claims, the question of “how can we judge and
choose . . . how can we confront reasonably, if not ‘rationally,’ the question of
judging and choosing between different institutions of society,” is the “political
question par excellence,” a “nontrivial question.”36 Only by facing this challenge
can we aspire to delegitimate the real and reveal the hidden “brute and brutal rela-
tions of force”37 that dominate liberal societies. On the other hand, it is neither
possible nor desirable to seek refuge in an absolute source of ultimate authority
that would ground, once and for all, normative principles, transporting politics
from the realm of collective struggle to the sphere of abstract speculation, thus
ending political disagreements, oppositions, and conflicts. As “ethical or tran-
scendental purism” has proved to be “finally incoherent” and “the foundation of
nothing actual,”38 one has to accept, Castoriadis warns, that “it is vain to evade our
own will and responsibility.” Political decisions cannot but be “based upon . . .
our political will and political responsibility.”39
In his later writings, Castoriadis attempts to solve this tension within his theory
of autonomy, seeking to steer between normative foundationalism and ethical
relativism. To clarify his great philosophical project, the elucidation of the prac-
tice of autonomy, Castoriadis has to resolve the enigmatic and vexing relationship
between factum and jus, facticity and validity. In his critique of Habermas,
Castoriadis clearly states that “one can never legitimately pass from facts to laws”
and that “Habermas’s attempt ‘rationally’ to deduce, once again, right from
fact . . . appears to me just as untenable as the other attempts of the same kind that
have been made in the past, and which he repeats.”40 Similarly, in his discussion
of postmodernism, he claims that any critical project must accept a “sharp distinc-
tion between factum and jus.”41 Castoriadis here adopts the extreme anti realist
position that “reality possesses no privilege, neither philosophical nor norma-
tive.”42 By his refusal to theorize how the normative content of autonomy is
related to reality, he deprives himself of the necessary resources, failing to
account for a mediation between “de facto validity” and “de jure validity.”43
In a different context, however, Castoriadis adopts a surprisingly opposed
argument in favor of a balanced relationship between factum and jus. “If we
cannot think the possibility and the effectivity of a marriage between jus and
factum,” he claims, “we simply cannot think anymore.”44 He goes even further
to ask, “How can validity become effective actuality and effective actuality
validity?”45 Yet he does not fully develop this alternative line of argument. Apart
from his suggestive but highly elusive statement that “it is our free and histori-
cal recognition of the validity of this project, and the effectivity of its partial
realization up to now, that binds us to these claims,”46 we can nowhere find a
conclusive and systematic elaboration of a mediation between facts and norms.
Why? How are we to account for Castoriadis’s ambivalence? His argument for
a sharp separation between factum and jus does not only have a polemical,
strategic character to strengthen his critique of Habermas. Nor is his alternative
scheme introduced solely to emphasize his disagreements with the radical

relativism of deconstructionism. The problem, stated in more general terms, is

the following.
On the one hand, in order to avoid any regression to the deterministic and
reductionist grip of the “ensemblistic-identitary” ontology, something that Marx,
Freud, and even Habermas did not escape, the sources of the imagination are cut
off from the real and made independent of and separate from their historical
context, with the danger of losing all anchorages in the normative tissue of
modern society.47 This position is totally consistent with the ontological presup-
positions of Castoriadis’s theory and his attempt to avoid an objectivist approach
that would understand being as being-determined by something external to itself.
Castoriadis wants to avoid the regression to an origin, a natural ground that would
compromise the contingent and open character of the social and ultimately would
threaten the radical creativity of human action. The postulation of structural deter-
minations, more than a flight from the conflictual realm of politics and history,
would also signal the draining of political imagination, alterity, and difference.
On the other hand, in order to account for the possibility of social criticism and
political resistance, a firmer, broader, impartial perspective has to be provided.
Thus a “point of view beyond the given”48 must be postulated for a critique of the
liberal state and its capitalist structures of domination to be something more than
one of many incommensurable, trivial wishes and partial interests of political
actors. Only through an emphatic defence of the normative content of autonomy
can political theory incorporate the emancipatory intention of rationally formu-
lating a more just form of political order. A mediating relation between fact and
right would overcome the impasses of radical skepticism and postmodern cyni-
cism which suggest the desirability and superiority of modern democratic move-
ments but deprive themselves of the theoretical and normative resources
necessary to transform this suggestion into a consistent program.
In his attempt to mediate between facticity and validity, Castoriadis dismisses,
and correctly so, an ontological strategy of justification. He does not transform
the fact of the unconscious’s creative impulses into a norm. Contrary to Agnes
Heller’s misplaced criticism that Castoriadis “doubles his psyche into an onto-
logical and a normative element [i.e., psyche as physis and as nomos] . . . and
smuggles a normative element into physis, and he distinguishes between societies
by using precisely this normative element as standard of comparison,”49 he
successfully escapes the ontologization of the psyche as a meta norm and rejects
the deduction of “ought” (autonomy) from “is” (radical imagination). He imme-
diately points out that “there is no passage from ontology to politics. . . . [I]t is not
possible to deduce a politics from philosophy.”50 Castoriadis does not transform
the creative potential of the psyche into a normative, ultimate foundation.51 On the
contrary, the effort to transform the psyche into an absolute ground through a
scientific-psychoanalytic justification of autonomy is not only epistemologically
incoherent – since science cannot produce ethical norms – but also dangerous.
The products of the psyche, the images of a different reality, must themselves be

examined from an external perspective in order to determine which are justifiable

and desirable images and which are not. And this requires a principle other than
the radical imagination. We cannot use the subversive force of the psyche as a
normative principle, Castoriadis claims, because “the exigencies of the originary
physical core, of the physical monad which we carry within us and which always
dreams, whatever our age, of being all-powerful and at the center of the
world . . . corresponds much more ‘naturally’ . . . [to] an institution of society
which institutes inequality . . . under the form of social hierarchy.”52 Thus, the
radical imagination fails normatively to ground the radical, social imaginary.
How can the normative superiority of an autonomous society be defended and
how can autonomy fulfill the function of an emancipatory critique of the insti-
tuted reality once this path has been closed off? This question can be answered by
redefining the point of encounter between norm and fact. This is what I will try
to do by closely examining Castoriadis’s definitions of individual and political
autonomy.53
II. Individual Autonomy

In the case of individual autonomy, Castoriadis’s project directly depends on his
struggle to salvage the category of subjectivity from the offensive of deconstruc-
tionism without falling back either on the metaphysical idea of a reason that
dominates and represses heteronomous desires and inner nature or on the liberal
fiction of a disembodied self, protected by the natural, prepolitical walls of a
private sphere. He formulates an original theory of a decentered and social-histor-
ically situated subjectivity equipped with the imaginative capacity to distance
itself from the social order and provided with the subverting power to question its
own presuppositions, reinterpret its affective constitution, and articulate new
projects.
If Castoriadis is well aware that any reconstruction of the concept of individual
autonomy cannot dispense with the category of the subject – because “without
such a subjectivity . . . not only does every attempt at truth and knowledge collapse
but every ethical effort disappears, since all responsibility vanishes”54 – he does not
join the naive and “boisterous proclamations about the return of the subject, like
the alleged ‘individualism’ that accompanies it.”55 These proclamations are based
on “the fiction of an ‘individual’ that would come into the world fully equipped
and determined as to its essential features and that would be corrupted, oppressed,
enslaved by society – by sociality as such.”56 If autonomy is to have any meaning
at all, it presupposes a category of subjectivity in which the subject is minimally
understood as the author of the laws that govern it and endowed with the ability to
form, affirm, express, and reinterpret its needs and identity.
This sense of having control over one’s identity does not imply an individual-
istic and rationalist theory of individuation; for Castoriadis the subject is both
embedded and detached, socialized and subversive, instituted and instituting.

Contrary to the extreme, oversimplified depictions of the subject as the passive

effect of superior forces that operate behind its back, Castoriadis elaborates a rich
concept constituted by three regions of being of the “self” or “for-itself”: the
psyche, the social individual, and the subject.57 For the present discussion, I will
focus on the last two regions. The individual is a social construction, the effect of
socialization. With this concept of the social institution of the individual, of the
“fabrication of the individual as social individual,”58 Castoriadis adheres to the
constructivist and communitarian “epistemology” according to which the indi-
vidual is socially constructed, an imaginary social signification, the result of
discourses, norms, practices and intersubjectively defined roles. As the product of
the radical ground-power of the instituting society, the identity of the individual
is embedded in prior relations, engulfed in cultural, symbolic, and linguistic struc-
tures. From this constructivist position, Castoriadis is able to attack both liberal
individualism and the tradition of the philosophy of the subject, which converge
in their view of the individual as a pure, abstract, disembodied rational agent.
At this point, however, Castoriadis breaks with the extremes of constructivism.
He wants to account for creativity, responsibility, difference, but above all for
autonomy. He is highly critical of the various approaches which understand the
individual as a blank slate on which are inscribed codes of culture, structures of
language or the effects of power relations. Along with their monistic reduction-
ism, these approaches lead to the disappearance of otherness, agency, and auton-
omy. The social individual appears to have no “outside.” It is but a pathetic
product of impersonal structures and determinations operating behind its back. It
can no longer master and create that distance, that space between itself and the
social world necessary for the formation of a unique singularity and a reflective
and deliberative autonomous agency. Conformism and homogeneity directly flow
from this caricature.
The fabrication of the social individual, Castoriadis argues, can never be total.
Even if the instituted society – tradition, linguistic structures, social norms –
craves an absolute submission of the radical imagination – the monadic core of
the psyche – it always faces the resistance of the latter, which wants to return to
its original closure and self-sufficiency. He rightly warns against the naive belief
in the efficacy of structural determinations to produce docile and fully integrated
social individuals. This belief unconditionally glorifies the real. The failure of the
social-historical to absorb the psychical nucleus, to erase its difference and to
eliminate the “other of reason,” can be interpreted as an objective limitation of the
instituted identity to assimilate the instituting identity. The deployment of the
concept of the subject aims precisely at the rigorous conceptualization of those
mechanisms of resistance, imagination, and creation.
Now, the concept of the subject is a qualitative extension of the concept of the
social individual. Modernity has produced its own distinct social imaginary signi-
fication of the individual. While previous history, Castoriadis argues, has accus-
tomed us to collectivities conceived in organic terms in which the social

individual was immersed in all-encompassing social practices that suspended

distanciation, self-reflection and critical deliberation,59 the modern age – and here
he deploys his theory of modernity60 – has brought about a decentering of the
subject. This is not the moment to take up this historical narrative for discussion.
Suffice it to say that Castoriadis introduces a historicist argument.
Subjectivity is defined by its self-reflectiveness and deliberate activity, its
capacity to adopt a stance of disengagement toward itself, to represent itself as
something other than what it is, “to see oneself as other.” To reflect is to have
access to oneself, to approach one’s affections and desires, to question one’s own
constitution, to interpret one’s needs, and to posit new images, meanings, and
forms. Self-reflectiveness encompasses the moments of introspection, distancia-
tion, and self-creation. Introspection is a turning inward, an awareness of one’s
own subjectivity and of the processes and mechanisms that form it. This with-
drawal into oneself ensures a minimal form of self-knowledge and a sense of
coherence and unity, of being conscious of one’s individuality. The subject, by
turning its eyes upon itself, can stop simply living passively within its traditions,
habits, and norms. It can interrogate the instituted society, question the hegemonic
interpretations of collective identities, and displace, relativize, and subvert the
processes of its formation. In the subject, Castoriadis claims, there is the “always
present possibility of redirecting the gaze, of abstracting from any particular
content, of bracketing everything . . . the naked possibility for evoking something,
setting it at a distance, a spark outside of time.”61
Distanciation implies the creation of a “private,” inner space. By enfolding an
inward terrain within which it can “put itself into question,”62 the subject can
actively intervene in the formation of its identity to negotiate and affirm its
uniqueness. The development and maintenance of a meaningful and sustained
relation to oneself, directly dependent on one’s capacity for self-presentation,
requires one’s own territoriality to host self-experimentation, unexposed to exter-
nal gazes. It is within this “interior” that one can withdraw, in an act of inner exile,
to shape and reinvent one’s identity and contribute creatively to one’s own self-
formative process. Self-realization, far from implying the externalization of an
essence, denotes the activity of form-giving and value-positing. It is the practice
of reflectively appropriating the creative potentialities of the psyche to
“constantly reorganize its content . . . that produces by means of a material and in
relation to needs and ideas.”63
This emphasis on an inner space that forms an “outside” to the instituted soci-
ety is of central importance to Castoriadis’s project to reconstruct the normative
content of individual autonomy. He defines autonomy as
the state in which “someone” . . . is explicitly, and, as far as possible, lucidly (not
“blindly”) author of its own laws. This implies that this “someone” instaurates a
new relation with “its laws,” which signifies, among other things, that this singular
. . . “someone” can modify that law, knowing that it is doing so.64

This “other relationship” with oneself is not an abstract moral ideal; it is a politi-
cal project with the critical potential for creating an alternative justification of a
normative theory of individual rights to that found in liberal discourses.
Individual rights become the condition of possibility for the full development of
one’s identity and the constitution of subjectivities. The construction of the
modern subject depends, to a crucial extent, on the cultivation and protection of
a real and symbolic private realm that will protect the process of ego-develop-
ment, the creation of one’s coherent and distinct identity. Individual rights corre-
spond to those constitutive minimal institutional preconditions that will respect
the topos for developing a subjectivity of one’s own and ensure that one’s differ-
ence and uniqueness are protected.
Individual autonomy is the self-reflective and lucid capacity to form, maintain,
and revise a coherent identity. Therefore, the protection of those “efficient condi-
tions for the subject’s activity”65 points to a new justification of “negative liber-
ties” emancipated from individualistic and property-oriented liberal formulations.
Castoriadis’s normative concept of individual autonomy provides a justification
of those individual rights necessary for the protection of imagination, creativity,
and otherness. It secures the preconditions – a sense of control over one’s iden-
tity, experimentation, self-confidence, value-creating power, bodily integrity,
access to oneself, and the inviolability of personality – for the individual to func-
tion as subject, that is, as a responsible moral agent capable of questioning the
instituting reality, of acting on the basis of reasons as the author of the political
and moral laws to which it is subject, and of participating in the instituting power
of society.66 The protection of the radical imagination from encroachments and
invasions of the instituted, explicit power, in the form of either social conformism
or state intervention, emanates from Castoriadis’s concept of the subject. Social
institutions, practices, and norms – and thus the institution of society as a whole
– must delineate a real and symbolic territory; it
must allow – or it is not able not to allow – the individual the possibility of finding
and of bringing into existence for himself a meaning in the instituted social signifi-
cation. But it must also allow him – and whatever it does cannot help but allow him
– a private world, not only as a minimum circle of “autonomous” activity but as a
world of representation (and of affect and intention), in which the individual will be
always his own centre.67
Two very important distinctions should be made.68 First, Castoriadis’s

concept of the subject is not a resurrection of the ego of transcendental philos-
ophy. The attributes and potentialities of the modern subject are historical
creations, deeply embedded in the imaginary of modernity. They do not refer to
a natural, progressive movement towards the teleological realization of the
subject’s essence. Adopting a historicist stance, Castoriadis approaches the
subject not as objective nature but as a historical-cultural “project,”69 This
aspect of his argumentation has been, however, misinterpreted. He has been

criticized for introducing a transcendental foundation by the back door in the

form of the traditional teleological theory of substance unfolding itself in
history, reminiscent of Hegel’s theory of Geist, of Bergson’s vitalism,70 or even
of Heidegger’s theory of the Being that appears/emerges in the flow of history.71
Behind these criticisms lies the assumption that there is a foundationalist
residue in Castoriadis’s theory.
Heller, for example, views the psyche as something “timeless . . . which, like
an eternal volcano erupts in emitting originary imagination, taking or not taking
root in the world, forming or failing to form institutions of imagination. If an
ensemble of such new institutions is formed, then, in a Hegelian language, a new
epoch in the life of the spirit is established. Here Psyche is functionally equiva-
lent to Heidegger’s Being.”72 In a similar vein, Honneth noisily claims that
Castoriadis “carried out a ‘substantialization’ of creative achievements”73 which
transforms the radical imagination into reality. Yet both Heller and Honneth are
mistaken. The psyche does not contain an absolute meaning that is gradually
externalized and realized in the form of the subject; it does not consist of an a
priori that is both logical and ontological, atemporal and universal, always the
same, penetrating every human creation. The radical imagination is not something
located beneath or behind the subject as a separate and independent entity.
Castoriadis avoids the trap of ontologizing the psyche as madness, as the good
Other of reason, or as an authentic, unspoiled inner nature. He is careful enough
not to argue that beneath the various stages of socialization there is something
authentic whose sealed mouth needs only to be opened.74
Consequently, this justification of individual rights is not overburdened with a
particular substantive telos; it rests neither on a particular concept of the true self
nor on a single idea of the good life. Castoriadis emphasizes imagination and
creativity, but only as conditions of possibility for the formation of a reflective
and coherent self that afterwards can choose whatever identity, commitments, and
conceptions of the good it wants. Individual autonomy in the form of “negative
liberties,” embodied in the legal and public institutions of society, permits the
coexistence of many different forms of life and a plurality of concepts of the
person that do not privilege a single value, least of all perfectionism. In this
context, imagination is, for every subject, the experience of creating meaning-for-
itself, of form-giving. It constitutes the necessary precondition for the subject’s
formative process and for its lucid and self-reflective participation in the institut-
ing ground-power of society.
III. Political Autonomy

In his many essays that followed The Imaginary Institution of Society, one of
Castoriadis’s major concerns has been to develop the political implications of his
ontological investigations and to clarify the normative content of political auto-
nomy. As I see it, the success of this effort directly depends on his ability to

develop a substantive theory of democracy against liberal and proceduralistic

appropriations that have hegemonized recent democratic theory, without falling
back either on the anachronistic fiction of popular sovereignty, of a homogeneous,
self-transparent collective subject, hostile to pluralism, following the fashion of
communitarianism, or on the decisionistic excesses of an arbitrary, boundless
political will that knows no limits. To carry out this ambitious project, Castoriadis
distinguishes between the instituting and the instituted society. In their interstices,
he articulates an innovative theory of political autonomy.
An autonomous society is one that consciously appropriates a segment of the
instituting power of the radical imaginary to create its own institutions and signi-
fications and to establish its proper laws and practices. The possibility of an
autonomous, self-instituting society, accumulating greater amounts of ground-
power and thus affirming its value-producing potentialities, is inherently related
to the society’s capacity to act collectively. Only through collective action can
society see itself as what it is, self-instituting, knowing and affirming its power as
a producing subjectivity. Democracy is precisely that regime which endows an
expansive collectivity with increasing creative power. It is exactly this demiurgi-
cal and voluntaristic element in Castoriadis’s theory of political autonomy that
has attracted the most vigilant attacks. Is not Castoriadis resurrecting a
Rousseauian-Jacobin theory of popular sovereignty that presupposes substantive
homogeneity and strong identifications? Does he imply that only when a political
body is transformed into a perfectly single person, self-transparent and omnipo-
tent, can the otherwise dispersed instituting power be gathered and mastered by
the community? Is Habermas correct in arguing that Castoriadis “has to support
the world-disclosing productivity of language on an absolute ego and return in
fact to speculative philosophy of consciousness”? That “this fits with the person-
ification of society as a poetic demiurge that releases ever new world-types from
itself?”75
This critique totally misses the constituting dimension of political autonomy.
Castoriadis does not presuppose a naturally given collective subject or, even less,
the idea of popular sovereignty, which never appears in his writings. On the
contrary, autonomous political activities aim first of all at the creation of new
political identities through successive displacements and rearticulations among
particular entities.76 The primary objective of an autonomous program is the
construction of a collective, democratic will. To ensure the existence of plural
values and interests, Castoriadis proposes “the creation of a public space, . . . a
political domain . . . which belongs to all.”77 By bringing together on common
ground a multitude of subject-positions, the project of political autonomy repre-
sents a struggle for the formation of a collective subjectivity, capable of democ-
ratically conceiving and positing common ends as regards the central social
significations of society. This social subject need not be substantively articulated.
Its different elements must simply comprise a “shared ground,” organized around
central symbolic representations and meanings. This collective subjectivity “is

the one which made itself capable of recognizing and accepting this very multi-
plicity of human worlds, thereby breaking as far as possible the closure of its own
world.”78
It is the social institution of a democratic identity, structured around shared
political values, that constitutes the first materialization of political autonomy.
Indeed, the project of autonomy presupposes the constitution of a collective
subjectivity capable of bridging the differences among plural imaginary signifi-
cations, embodied in divergent collective agents and incarnated in distinct politi-
cal programs. Additionally, this effort to institute a democratic body requires the
piercing of the ideological mystification and social fragmentation imposed by the
rule of capital. The fabrication of a collective subjectivity is one of those institu-
tions by means of which and on the basis of which dispersed identities are
displaced and rearticulated to form a social actor “capable of participating in
social doing and representing/saying, and capable of representing, acting, think-
ing in a compatible, coherent, convergent manner.”79 Only such an “artificial”
collective agency can participate directly in the ground-power of the social
imaginary.
Even so, however, the collective democratic subject can never achieve a full
identity. It cannot exhaust or consume the instituting ground-power. The moment
of absolute coincidence is never realized. The instituting power cannot be located
in one instance of the social or incarnated by a transcendental subjectivity; it is
anonymous and spontaneous; it “operates implicitly, is intended as such by no
one, is realized through the pursuit of an undetermined number of particular
ends”80; it is mobile, fluid, and relational; it escapes all efforts to circumscribe it;
it can never absorb the plurality of the imaginary significations into a closed
organic unity. Political autonomy, therefore, cannot be identified with a subject
postulated explicitly in order to embody it,
whether this is called “group consciousness,” “collective unconscious,” or what-
ever. These terms were forged and the pseudo-entities constructed by exporting
them illegitimately from other spheres, or tracing them after other entities, by
reason of the inability to come to terms with the mode of being specific to signifi-
cations.81
In addition, Castoriadis alludes to a conflictual model of politics according to

which the central social imaginary significations that establish the eidos of a
particular society do not emanate from a Schmittean single act – an absolute, final
decision. Instead, they are seen as the historical product of political conflicts and
social struggles. Rather than “be thought of on the basis of an alleged relation to
a ‘subject’ which would ‘carry’ them or ‘intend’ them,”82 those social-historical
creations such as democratic identity are the unmotivated and unintended product
of a multitude of practices, strategies, alliances and form-giving collective activ-
ities that coalesce into a deliberate and lucid project. This is the project of politi-
cal autonomy. It is not a static manifestation of the will of an omnipotent and

omnipresent sovereign people, but “a struggle over the institutions, a struggle

aimed at the change of these institutions . . . , [a] struggle that brings about an
extraordinary change in institutions.”83
The construction of a democratic bloc is not, however, solely the contingent
effect of conflictual relations among antagonistic wills struggling over the appro-
priation of greater amounts of the instituting power. It also requires practices of
public deliberation about the appropriate institutions and laws of their community
among citizens, altering the instituted norms and values and positing new ones
according to the common ends that the community each time posits for itself. The
explicit self-institution of society presupposes the moment of rational, discursive
will-formation for the constitution of a democratic identity. Reason precedes the
act of the self-institution of society and requires a set of procedures and mecha-
nisms, rooted in the public sphere, where reasons are given and debated,84 criti-
cized and challenged according to “the possibility – and actuality – of free speech,
free thinking, free examination, and questioning without restraint.”85 Democratic
will-formation cannot but be generated in an institutionalized public space where
a “continuous open and public discussion and criticism”86 “pertains to everything
in society that is participable and shareable”87 and involves the effective partici-
pation of all individuals in the existing forms of explicit power. Political partici-
pation aims at the constitution of a set of reasonable, broadly shared ends,
themselves social-historical products, that will make effective the exercise of
collective action and, thus, the appropriation of greater units of the radical imag-
inary’s instituting power.88
At this point, however, Castoriadis criticizes purely procedural definitions of
democracy. Procedures can never be neutral. They are inherently related to the
aims and projects of a political community. They are segments of its central social
significations. Castoriadis does not dismiss procedures in general. He rejects their
appropriation by liberal discourses that aspire to hide their substantive objectives
under a veil of neutrality and legality. In liberal states, procedures are designed
and deployed so as to protect, entrench, and reproduce particular structures of
domination. Instead of challenging asymmetrical power relations, they perfect
them, making them adequate to the needs of capital accumulation and private
profit.89 In contrast, a democratic, autonomous society is one that will openly
propose a different set of procedural arrangements appropriate for the consolida-
tion of a democratic identity through the effective participation of citizens in the
institution of society.
According to this interpretation of democracy, as society proceeds to articulate
and constitute itself as an expanding subjectivity organized around central social
significations, the project of political autonomy gradually acquires a substantive
content, the expression of the increasing power of an expansive democratic iden-
tity. A society that has democratically constructed a collective will can move to
the elaboration of a radical, emancipatory program inspired by the following
political imperative:

Create the institutions which, by being internalized by individuals, most facilitate

their accession to their individual autonomy and their effective participation in all
forms of explicit power existing in society.90
Though this redefinition of political autonomy dispenses with the myth of

popular sovereignty, it appears, as Habermas is eager to point out, “assessed in
terms of authenticity of the self-transparency of a society that does not hide its
imaginary origin beneath extra-social projections and knows itself explicitly as a
self-instituting society.”91 But again, Habermas is misled. The idea of a self-trans-
parent social subject cannot be sustained. The psychoanalytic content of
Castoriadis’s theory informs and shapes his understanding of collective subjec-
tivity. The ever-lasting presence of the radical imagination can never be fully
eradicated or mastered. This time against the “psychoanalytical lethargy of the
sociologists,”92 Castoriadis integrates the objective limits set by the unthematized
and inexorable presence of an “outside” that reminds any social subject of its
restricted, opaque, incomplete identity.
This recognition of the opacity of the social – the imaginary character of
collective representations – establishes a permanent gap between the signifier
and the signified. No collective subject “has any need to ‘represent to itself’
the totality of the institution of society or the significations that it carries, nor
indeed could do so.”93 Stated in more abstract terms, the instituting society
can never be reduced or consummated by the instituted society. The latter
cannot absorb or completely integrate the first. A self-transparent,
autonomous society, meaning the total appropriation of the instituting power
from the instituted power, would signify the end of history. This is a pure
impossibility. Contrary to Habermas’s claim, Castoriadis clearly argues that
“society can never escape itself. The instituted society is always subject to the
subterranean pressure of instituting society. Beneath its established social
imaginary, the flow of the radical imaginary continues steadily.”94 This onto-
logical presence negates direct, unmediated, total access to the instituting
sources of society.
This line of argument is not missed by Habermas. On the contrary, it gives him
the opportunity, once he misses his first target, to reverse his critique, arguing
now that Castoriadis, acquitted from the charge of collective voluntarism, is
nevertheless guilty of a form of fatalism that destroys the possibility of
autonomous, creative action. According to Habermas, the ever-lasting presence of
the power of Outis, of Nobody,95 compels Castoriadis
to call the agents back, as Heidegger does, from their intramundane, subject-crazed
lostness into the sphere of the nonmanipulable, and thus into an auratic autonomy
vis-à-vis the primordial happening of a self-instituting society – and this would
amount only to an ironic inversion of praxis philosophy into another version of
poststructuralism.96

Consequently, Habermas concludes, Castoriadis’s theory of the instituting

power of a democratic collectivity falls short. All that remains are the historically
mutating structures of totally independent, free-floating social imaginary signifi-
cations that unfold within a world-history which constitutes the topos of their
externalization and objectification. As with his previous criticism, this one too
misses its mark. It is really perplexing how and where Habermas discerns the
presence of objective structures in the concept of the social imaginary significa-
tion. This criticism would have made sense if articulated by an exponent of the
philosophy of the subject who is threatened by the presence of a disturbing
“absence” that subverts the subject’s claims to unity, consciousness, and fully
transparent identity. In the case of Habermas, however, this objection is rather
rhetorical and purely polemical. He himself has a similar theory: that of the life-
world. What else is Castoriadis’s concept of social imaginary significations than
a different articulation of the horizon of unthematized, intuitive, intersubjective
meanings, values, symbols that make a society intelligible and meaningful,
thereby permitting communication and the coordination of action among social
individuals? Habermas purposefully bypasses Castoriadis’s advice to read the
social imaginary as “not a substance, not a quality, not an action or a passion,”97
but “as the invisible segment holding together this endless collection of real,
rational, and symbolic odds and ends that constitute every society, and as the prin-
ciple that selects and shapes the bits and pieces that will be accepted there.”98 In
a tone very like that of Habermas’s discussion of the life-world, Castoriadis
correctly argues that
just as an individual cannot grasp or provide himself with anything at all – neither
the world nor himself – outside of the symbolic dimension, no society can provide
itself with anything outside of this second-order symbolism. . . . And, just as I
cannot call my relation to language a form of alienation . . . in the same way there
is no reason to call the relation between society and the social-historical imaginary
alienation. Alienation appears in this relation, but it is not this relation – just as error
and delirium are possible only in but are not language.99
The originality of Castoriadis’s version of political autonomy, as I have tried to

show, consists in its attempt to transcend both liberal theories of individual, moral
self-determination and postmodern discourses of the “death of autonomy.” By
successfully avoiding false oppositions, Castoriadis has sought to retrieve the
emancipatory content of modernity, renewing interest in a post-metaphysical,
decentered notion of collective self-institution as the core of radical democratic
politics. In light of these observations, I hope to have established the unique
significance of Castoriadis’s political thought for transcending stylized dilemmas
and thus enriching ongoing discussions and debates in contemporary political
theory.

NOTES
I am deeply grateful to Jean Cohen for her valuable discussion, criticism, and encouragement.
I would also like to thank David Ames Curtis for his constant help during the composition of the
manuscript. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Cornelius Castoriadis.
1. J.M. Murphy and C. Gilligan, “Moral Development in Late Adolescence and Adulthood: A
Critique and Reconstruction of Kohlberg’s Theory,” Human Development 23 (1980); C. Gilligan,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982); Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” Women and Moral
Theory, ed. E.F. Kittay and T.D. Meyers (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987); and J.
Benjamin, Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1988).
2. J. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34
(1953); J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Vol. II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); M. Foucault, The Order
of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Vintage Books, 197); and J. Derrida “Structure, Sign,
and Play,” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed.
R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
3. M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982); “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12 (1984); A.
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984);
Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
4. There are some exceptions. See for example D. Howard, “Introduction to Castoriadis,” Telos 23
(Spring 1975); B. Singer, “The Early Castoriadis: Socialism, Barbarism and the Bureaucratic Thread”
and “The Later Castoriadis: Institution under Interrogation,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory 3.3 (Autumn 1979) and 4.1 (Winter 1980); J. Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary:
An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 2.5 (September 1982); and H. Joas,
“Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis’s
Political Philosophy,” American Journal of Sociology 95.5 (1989). All these attempts to introduce to
the American audience the work of Castoriadis share the same interpretative approach: they focus on
the relevance of Castoriadis for a post-Marxist social theory. Recently, Thesis Eleven 49 (May 1997)
has devoted an entire issue to the work of Castoriadis on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
5. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), tr. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1987 [1975]), 99–101.
6. J. Habermas, “Excurses on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution,” The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. Frederick Lawrence (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1987); A. Heller, “With Castoriadis to Aristotle; From Aristotle to Kant; From Kant to Us,”
Autonomie et Autotransformation. La Philosophie Militante de Cornelius Castoriadis (Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 1989); A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Cornelius
Castoriadis’ Theory of Society,” The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and
Political Philosophy, ed. Charles Wright (New York: SUNY Press, 1995); and H. Poltier, “De la
praxis a l’institution et de retour,” Autonomie et Autotransformation. La Philosophie Militante de
Cornelius Castoraidis (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989).
7. R. Rorty, “Comments on Castoriadis’s ‘The End of Philosophy?’,” Salmagundi 82–83 (1989):
24–30; and V.E. Wolfstein, “Review Essay: Psychoanalysis in Political Theory,” Political Theory
24.4 (1996): 718, 726.
8. Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism II” (1957) in Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and
Social Writings, Vol. 2, ed. D.A. Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 95–8.
9. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 56–68.
10. See Castoriadis’s two “programmatic” essays: “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul which
has been Presented as a Science” and “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation” in Crossroads in

the Labyrinth (Cambridge MA: MIT Press and Brighton, 1984 [1978]). The definitive elaboration
is stated in The Imaginary Institution, 281–289.
11. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 93. Autonomy, recast in Kantian terminology, is the
will to “want the Law not to be simply given, but for me to give it to myself at the same time.” The
concept of the will, that plays a central role in this definition, has to be distinguished from the ratio-
nalist tradition of Western philosophy. It does not refer to self-control as the mastery of the lower
part by the higher and the gradual elimination of the former. It does not allude to a control of the
passions by reason that gradually restricts, manipulates, and supervises desires, feelings, and
emotions. Deliberate action is a subtle relationship, a delicate attachment to the representational flux
of the radical imagination. Not one of control or mastery, of elimination and oppression, but one of
sensitive intentional redirection, a thoughtful gesture of ordering and shaping. The subject can rede-
fine and renegotiate its identity. Castoriadis defines deliberate activity or will “. . . as the possibil-
ity for a human being to make the results of his/her reflective processes enter into the relays that
condition his/her acts. In other words, will or deliberate activity is the reflexive dimension of what
we are as imagining (that is, as creative) beings, or again: the reflective and practical dimension of
our imagination as source of creation.” Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” Thesis Eleven
24 (1984): 28.
12. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 104.
13. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 79; “The Greek Polis and the Creation of
Democracy,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (Oxford University
Press, 1991 [1983]), 121. This point will be discussed in detail in the next section.
14. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis,” 87 and The Imaginary Institution, 196, 267, 332.
15. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis,” 87.
16. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Equality” (1982), Philosophy, 125–8.
17. Castoriadis, “Preface,” Crossroads in the Labyrinth, xiii, xxiii; and The Imaginary
Institution, 100.
18. “What can be the measure if no extra-social standard exists, what can and should be the law
if no external norm can serve for it as a term of comparison, what can be life over the Abyss once
it is understood that it is absurd to assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an idea, a value,
or a meaning determined once and for all?” Castoriadis, “Institution of Society and Religion”
(1982), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 329.
19. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 26.
21. Ibid., 79.
22. Ibid., 373.
23. M. Weber, Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
24. Castoriadis, “The ‘End’ of Philosophy?” (1988), Philosophy, 32.
25. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Equality,” 125.
26. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 330.
27. Ibid., 321.
28. H. Poltier, “De la praxis a l’institution et retour,” 434–5.
29. A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology,” 183.
30. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy: Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism”
(1990), Thesis Eleven 31 (1992): 22.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. The interpretation of the concept of autonomy as a critical norm restricts its use to a
principle for testing the validity of rules, laws and institutions of existing liberal, capitalistic
democracies. This is a restricted and partial interpretation of the concept of autonomy.
Autonomy does not consist only in providing a point of view, a distance, from which a critique
of the modern instituted societies is possible. The concept of autonomy cannot simply
be reduced to a critical norm. It is also a practical political project, a model of democratic

organization: the model of a radical democratic society that realizes institutionally and symbol-
ically the value of autonomy.
33. Castoriadis, “Individuals, Society, Rationality, History” (1988), Philosophy, 76.
34. Castoriadis, “Intellectuals and History” (1990), Philosophy, 4.
35. Ibid.
36. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis,” 87, 101.
38. Castoriadis, “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul,” 37.
39. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Equality,” 140, 142.
40. Castoriadis, “Individual, Society, Rationality, History,” 79; and “The Nature and Value of
Equality,” 125.
41. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” 19.
42. Castoriadis, “Intellectuals and History,” 10.
43. Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done“ (1989), The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames
Curtis (London: Blackwell, 1997), 388.
44. Castoriadis, “The ‘End of Philosophy’?,” 31.
45. Castoriadis, “Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics” (1990) Thesis Eleven 49 (1997): 110; and
“Done and To Be Done”, 395, 404.
47. Castoriadis has attempted to redefine the terms of the relationship between the radical imag-
ination and the social imaginary by crucially distinguishing ex nihilo, not cum nihilo. The form-
investing action of the social subjectivity “takes place,” Castoriadis argues, “upon, in, and through
the already instituted. This conditions it and limits it, but does not determine it. Political agents
struggle and act always within the horizons of their common social-historical world; this remains in
the background for the participants as an intuitively known, unproblematic temporal reality. It
delimits a context and delineates the available terrain for autonomous activities.” Castoriadis,
“Individual, Society, Rationality, History,” 64.
48. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” 22.
49. A. Heller, “With Castoriadis to Aristotle,” 166.
51. Here Castoriadis clearly distances himself from Habermas’s strategy of deducing the norma-
tive content of communicative reason from a reconstruction of the unavoidable pragmatic presup-
positions of the linguistic structure of speech. See, mainly, Castoriadis, “Individual, Society,
Rationality, History,” 80.
52. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Inequality,” 134–35.
53. It should be reminded that Castoriadis has argued for the “consubstantiality” of individual
and political autonomy. Rather than being two separated, or even antagonistic norms, placed in a
hierarchical relation, they are intertwined. The one presupposes the other; or better, none can be
realized without the full realization of the other. Their distinction in the present discussion has
solely an analytical character, propelled by reasons of conceptual clarity.
54. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,”37.
55. Ibid., 5.
56. Castoriadis, “Socialism and Autonomous Society” (1979), Cornelius Castoriadis: Political
and Social Writings, Vol. 3, ed. D.A. Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 315.
57. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 103–7, and “The State of the Subject Today.”
59. Castoriadis, “Socialism and Autonomous Society,” 316.
60. For Castoriadis’s concept of modernity see, J. Rundell, “From the Shores of Reason to the
Horizon of Meaning: Some Remarks on Habermas’ and Castoriadis’ Theories of Culture,” Thesis
Eleven 22 (1989); J.P. Arnason, “Culture and Imaginary Significations,” Thesis Eleven 22 (1989);
and D. Roberts, “Epilogue. Sublime Theories: Reason and Imagination in Modernity,” Rethinking
Imagination: Culture and Creativity, ed. G. Robinson and J. Rudell (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994).


62. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” 26.
64. Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy” (1983), Philosophy and
Social Criticism, 20.1/2 (1994): 143.
66. This line of justification leans heavily on Jean Cohen’s argument for private rights. See her
“Democracy, Difference, and the Right of Privacy,” Democracy and Difference: Contesting the
Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
68. Additionally one should note that self-reflectiveness is not a rational, instrumental capacity;
it is something more. It is the ability of one’s imagination to bring into being images of what it is
not. Reflection is based on and presupposes the radical imagination of the psyche. It is not the ratio-
nal domination and mastering of the unconscious but rather the ability to “create pathways,” to
mobilize, redirect, and channel the representational flux, the new images and phantasies, that makes
“the human being [be] imagination.” This imaginative capacity to reflect on something that previ-
ously was absent helps breaking with the paradigm of instrumental reason and calculative thinking,
thereby endowing the subject with the practical-poietic ability of “another relation” with inner
nature. Castoriadis, in one of his most brilliant discussions of the concept the subject, argues that
“the absolute condition for the possibility of reflectiveness is the imagination. It is because the
human being is imagination (non-functional imagination) that it can posit as an ‘entity’ something
that is not so: its own process of thought. It is because its imagination is unbridled that it reflect;
otherwise, it would be limited to calculating, to ‘reasoning’. Reflectiveness presupposes that it is
possible for the imagination to posit as existing that which is not . . . to see double, to see oneself
as double, to see oneself while seeing oneself as other. I represent myself, and I represent myself as
representational activity, or I act upon myself as active activity.” Castoriadis, “The State of the
Subject Today,” 35, 27.
69. One of the merits of this approach is that by deriving the normative content of autonomy
from the structure of the modern subject – and not from the psyche – it not only mediates between
the extremes of factum (the subject is a social-historical imaginary signification and institution) and
jus (individual autonomy as a normative principle), but is also avoids a regression to an absolute
foundation, a prior moral order, or an essentialist theory of the subject. This historicist justification
of individual autonomy as a critical norm remains contingent and open in the sense that it can ratio-
nally be revised in the light of subsequent changes in the structure of the subject, or because of the
emergence of new social-historical imaginary significations.
70. A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology,” 168–183.
71. A. Heller, A Theory of History in Fragments (London: Blackwell, 1993).
72. Ibid., 195.
73. A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology,” 183.
74. Castoriadis bypasses with remarkable dexterity the temptation of a naturalistic metaphysics
that would adulate the value of prediscursive referents. There is nothing of the form of an authen-
tic primordial essence that we should be able to rediscover underneath the subject. The psyche is
a psychoanalytical category with ontological implications, not a metaphysical-transcendental one.
Castoriadis’s theory of the constitution of the social individual is not a reproduction of the tradi-
tional scheme of a potentiality that becomes actuality. The psyche cannot generate the real; it
cannot even produce institutions. Castoriadis persistently denounces the derivation of the social
from psychical reality. Against the “sociological lethargy of psychoanalysts” (Castoriadis, “Done
and To Be Done,” 379), he posits the irreducibility of two independent realms: the social imagi-
nary and the radical imagination. The monadic core, when enclosed within itself, can account for
nothing but its own private phantasies. (Castoriadis, “Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics,”
105–106.) Only through the intervention of the institution of society is the unity of the psyche
broken and the representational flux released from its confinement. Without the break up of the
psychical monad there can be no history, no evolution, no alterity. The psyche can never generate

its own opening by itself because it “is in no way predestined by nature.” Castoriadis, The
Imaginary Institution, 300.
76. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 366–367.
78. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 142.
80. Ibid., 363.
81. Ibid., 366.
82. Ibid., 364.
83. Castoriadis, “The Crisis of Culture and the State” (1987), Philosophy, 222.
84. Castoriadis, “Intellectuals and History,” 4. The elements of deliberation and rational debate
can be found in Castoriadis’s early, Marxist writings, where he discusses the procedural mecha-
nisms of decison-making in the workers’s councils. The councils are general assemblies that permit
“a confrontation of views and an elaboration of informed political opinions . . . [where] preliminary
checking, clarification, and elaboration of the facts are almost always necessary before any mean-
ingful decision can be made. To ask the people as a whole to voice their opionions without such
preparation would often be a mystification and a negation of democracy. There must be framework
for discussing problems and submitting them to popular decision.” Castoriadis, “On the Content of
Socialism II” (1957), Political and Social Writings. Vol. II: From Workers’ Struggle Against
Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism, ed. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 140–141.
87. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy” (1988), Philosophy, 169.
88. Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime” (1991), Constellations
4.1 (April 1997): 14–16.
89. Ibid., 8–11.
90. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 173.
92. Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done,” 378.
94. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 153.
95. Ibid., 150.
98. Ibid., 143.
99. Ibid., 114.

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Norm and Critique in Castoriadis’s Theory of

I. Autonomy between Facticity and Validity

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

Very early he had to denounce the “foundational illusions” of Western meta-

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

relativism of deconstructionism. The problem, stated in more general terms, is

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

examined from an external perspective in order to determine which are justifiable

II. Individual Autonomy

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Contrary to the extreme, oversimplified depictions of the subject as the passive

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

individual was immersed in all-encompassing social practices that suspended

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

Two very important distinctions should be made.68 First, Castoriadis’s

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

criticized for introducing a transcendental foundation by the back door in the

III. Political Autonomy

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develop a substantive theory of democracy against liberal and proceduralistic

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

In addition, Castoriadis alludes to a conflictual model of politics according to

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omnipresent sovereign people, but “a struggle over the institutions, a struggle

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Create the institutions which, by being internalized by individuals, most facilitate

Though this redefinition of political autonomy dispenses with the myth of

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

Consequently, Habermas concludes, Castoriadis’s theory of the instituting

The originality of Castoriadis’s version of political autonomy, as I have tried to

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 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

61. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 105.

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 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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