The 1985 conversation between Castoriadis and Ricoeur offers an enthralling crystallisation of numerous themes that allows for closer examination of their similarities and differences. My title, ‘On the Cusp’, signifies three themes that this essay will pursue. First, the debate between Castoriadis and Ricoeur itself exists against a basically unstated background that they hold in common. Each grants the primordiality of the social imaginary in social life. This agreement needs our initial attention. They are both ‘on the cusp’ in being at the forefront boundary of the development of the ineluctability and significance of the social imaginary as a phenomenon. Second, the discussion between them is ‘on the cusp’ in revealing the boundary between them. I will focus on their differing attention to productive and creative imagination. I grant particular weight to Castoriadis’s promotion of a creative imagination and to Ricoeur’s insistence that the productive side of imagination must always arise out of a situated context rather than being simply free. Third, I will emphasise that the discussion between Castoriadis and Ricoeur is only ‘on the cusp’, as it provides a momentary snapshot of a boundary between them that needs contextualising against the larger careers of both thinkers. My argument here is that resources exist in each thinker’s corpus over time that may offer a greater sense of similarity between them, even if differences persist. In other of his work, Ricoeur offers much greater support for the creative imagination than he does in the present conversation, and similarly, in other reflections, Castoriadis modulates his position such that creative imagination arises ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo. I find that Castoriadis constructively elaborates his position over time, yet he does not accept modification, as the social imaginary would seem to entail, of creation as ex nihilo itself. And Ricoeur’s stance in the present discussion presents both an explicit debate with Castoriadis and an unnoticed debate with earlier stances of his own. I am more sympathetic to these earlier positions and their advocacy of a creative imagination.1 Nevertheless, the 1985 conversation remains singular, not only in the uniqueness of the recorded discussion, but in its focalisation of themes of interchange, and its publication should be celebrated for being on the cusp in this way.
THE PRIMORDIALITY OF THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY
I begin with the conversation’s largely unstated common background: the agreement that Castoriadis and Ricoeur share regarding the primordiality of the social imaginary.2 This common background is only briefly referenced, in Ricoeur’s opening comment in the dialogue: ‘[T]his issue of the imaginary foyer of social relations and of social production is, I believe, our shared interest’ (see chapter 1, p. 3).3 Given the decisive attention Castoriadis gave to the social imaginary throughout his corpus, the inexorability of the social imaginary in his work seems a commonplace, although I shall briefly return to his and Ricoeur’s differentiation from structuralism, Weber, and Marx. In Ricoeur, the attention to the social imaginary may be less familiar. More dedicated Ricoeur readers are aware that the imagination is a significant and continuing subtext in his work, as Jean-Luc Amalric has admirably shown in great detail (Amalric 2013; Kearney 2004). The publication of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur 2018), which I am co-editing, should demonstrate in systematic form his larger thesis in support of the productive (and creative) imagination. I return to this volume at greater length in the third part. As for Ricoeur’s more specific development of the social imaginary, it is important to appreciate that his volume, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, claims that discussion of ideology and utopia must be framed within the social and cultural imagination (Ricoeur 1986, 1).4 In these Lectures, Ricoeur argues for ‘a symbolic structure of action that is absolutely primitive and ineluctable’ (Ricoeur 1986, 77). Ricoeur returns to this theme in Time and Narrative, where he similarly claims that human action ‘is always already symbolically mediated’ (Ricoeur 1984, 57). I would contend that his work on metaphor pursues a comparable argument, in maintaining the existence of ‘a “metaphoric” at work at the origin of logical thought, at the root of all classification’ (Ricoeur 1977, 22). A more detailed analysis would need to demarcate more precisely the interrelations between the symbolic (or metaphoric) and the imaginary, interrelations that Castoriadis calls ‘deep and obscure’, but for present purposes, it suffices to recognise ‘the imaginary component of every symbol and of every symbolism’ (Castoriadis 1987, 127).5
Because the issue is only one of background importance, the greater significance of Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s emphasis on the ineluctability of the social imaginary can be presented rather succinctly, and by brief contrast to other personages or intellectual trends – to Marx, Weber, and structuralism. Structuralism was the subject of criticism by both Castoriadis and Ricoeur. They both rejected its presentation of a closed system that eliminated the innovative and dynamic event (Castoriadis 1987, 217; Ricoeur 1974; 1975; Dosse 2014, 265). The social imaginary also provides a resource for both thinkers to reject the Weberian assumption of the dominance of instrumental and bureaucratic reason (Castoriadis 1987, 156; 1991, 66–7; Dosse 2014, 253, 272; Ricoeur 1986, 213–14). Of perhaps greatest interest, Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s endorsement of the social imaginary rejects Marx’s argument, as customarily understood, for an economic infrastructure from which social and cultural phenomena emanate as superstructure. In the midst of Castoriadis’s lengthy critique of Marx in The Imaginary Institution of Society, he explicitly rejects a materialist conception of history whose primary motivation is economic and asserts that the reification of human activity is in fact an ‘imaginary meaning’ (Castoriadis 1987, 29, 140; Dosse 2014; 140; Michel 2015, 126). The economic and the imaginary are intertwined. Similarly, for Ricoeur, the imaginary is infrastructural. ‘Take into consideration any culture, and we find that its symbolic framework—its main assumptions, the way in which it considers itself and projects its identity through symbols and myths—is basic. It seems that we can call basic exactly what is usually called the superstructure’ (Ricoeur 1986, 153–4). Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur, then, emphasise the pursuit of and inexorability of human meaning rather than grant priority to structural or causal forces. In the present discussion, Castoriadis stresses the vocabulary of the ‘domain of meaning’ (12), and in Ricoeur’s work, citing Clifford Geertz, he gives primacy to analysis that is ‘an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (Ricoeur 1986, 255, quoting Geertz 1973, 5).6
If the present discussion between Castoriadis and Ricoeur concentrates on points of contention and agreement between them, we need to appreciate that the debate is an internecine battle between two figures who agree on the paramount and inextricable character of the social imaginary (Dosse 2014, 265; Michel 2015, 124). If it is obvious that the social imaginary is a fundamental concept for Castoriadis, so also is the imagination a continuing key concept for Ricoeur. While I remarked earlier that the imagination is a continuing subtext of Ricoeur’s work, I would insist more forcefully here, along with a number of other readers of Ricoeur, that the imagination and the imaginary are central thematics in his corpus (Revault d’Allonnes 1997, 13; Foessel 2007, 8; Amalric 2013, 13).7 As I will address in part three of this essay, publication of his Lectures on Imagination will make this import even more self-evident. Castoriadis and Ricoeur are ‘on the cusp’ – in the vanguard – in advancing the thesis that the imaginary is a ‘motor of history’ (Dosse 2014, 334). Angelos Mouzakitis contends that Castoriadis ‘is arguably the only contemporary thinker’ who has ‘turned creative imagination into the central theme of his theoretical construction’ (2014, 92). While scholars may debate whether the imagination and the imaginary are ‘the’ central themes in Ricoeur, it will be my task to show that the creative imagination – and not simply the productive imagination – is indeed central to Ricoeur’s writing also. If the present part underscores the priority that Castoriadis and Ricoeur grant to the social imaginary, it remains a separate task to show that in Ricoeur, as in Castoriadis, the social imaginary is creative and not just productive. We cannot assume that the social imaginary is creative by definition. Part two, to which we now turn, explores the discussion and debate in the present text on the differentiation between the productive and the creative imagination.
THE DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN PRODUCTIVE AND CREATIVE IMAGINATION
This part addresses on its own terms the discussion and debate between Castoriadis and Ricoeur in the present text. It draws on material external to this text simply to amplify the arguments made here. While in their dialogue Castoriadis and Ricoeur show signs of intersection and overlap, the discussion is marked more by different trajectories and ambits of their reflections. At a number of points, although not always, they seem to be arguing past one another. This part then attends principally the cusp of the differences between them that their dialogue reveals. I reserve to part three external material that may suggest the need for modification of theses presently articulated. That part will argue also that the points of intersection between the two thinkers can be amplified, given other parts of their corpora. I begin, in the present part, with Castoriadis and then address Ricoeur’s response.
Castoriadis
It is well known that Castoriadis rejects a deterministic view of society. I briefly want to develop this general theme and then will sharpen it to locate more precisely Castoriadis’s aim – and then Ricoeur’s objection. Castoriadis criticises what he types an ‘ensemblist-identitary’ social logic, where elements interrelate on a ‘well-determined’ and conclusive basis (Castoriadis 1987, 177). Instead, as in the present dialogue, Castoriadis advocates for social ‘self-institution’ and the ‘autonomy’ that comes from creating new rules (5). New social meanings and forms arise in human history, and they emerge as something other than a ‘result of a combination of pre-existing forms’ (8). New figures emerge (14), and the enquiry regarding this emergence is the one that most matters to him (14). Human being has ‘the potentiality of potentiality’ (11). The social imaginary is creative, because determination of what may be is never closed (Castoriadis 1997b, 393).
In his broader work, Castoriadis frequently adverts that he is elucidating the ‘radical imaginary’. I understand the meaning of this term to have three overlapping senses. First, whatever the political valences of the ‘radical’ imaginary, the term means more fundamentally something radical in the sense of going to the root. Castoriadis writes, ‘I hold that human history – therefore, also, the various forms of society we have known in history – is in its essence defined by imaginary creation’ (Castoriadis 1997b, 84). Humanity at its most basic, at the level of the radical imaginary, is what Castoriadis initially calls a ‘productive or creative imagination’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146) and then types more precisely as solely ‘creative’ (199). Given, as we shall see, that Ricoeur will markedly differentiate between productive imagination – which in the dialogue he endorses – and creative imagination – which he does not – it is vital to ascertain that Castoriadis reverses the priority and defends creative imagination over against productive imagination. If in the initial citation, he cites productive and creative imagination as correlative, this is in a lay, non-technical sense. In the second citation, Castoriadis explicitly rejects the productive imagination, because, as he notes, the term is limited by Kant to the empirical understanding. The productive imagination does not bring forward something new. For Castoriadis, humanity is, at bottom, creative.
The second implication of the radical imaginary is that it creates a divide or break with existing society. It cannot be encapsulated within prior norms or determinations. In our present text, Castoriadis goes so far as to speak of an ‘absolute rupture’, which marks the singularity within history; continuity is broken (14). This language echoes his vocabulary elsewhere: ‘[T]he social-historical element emerges, itself a rupture of being and an “instance” of the appearance of otherness’ (Castoriadis 1987, 204).8 In the rupture, ‘radical otherness’ and the appearance of the ‘absolutely new’ occur (172). We find a ‘radical destruction’ of society’s existing institutions (373). For reasons that I will return to in part three, I would underscore Castoriadis’s terminology that the creative imaginary ‘shatters’ existing social forms (Castoriadis 1987, 372; 1997b, 175).
The third implication of the radical imaginary returns us to his claim in the present dialogue of emergence: New forms emerge in history (Castoriadis 1987, 40–1). This emergence crystallises the creative imaginary. The emergence is not simply a deviation or break from the past but the rise of a new kind of behaviour (14). Castoriadis has metaphorically characterised this creative emergence as a ‘surging forth’ (Castoriadis 1997b, 183). If he characterises as ‘magma’ (14) the diverse, interrelated, but non-uniform underpinnings that animate the social imaginary (Castoriadis 1987, 182; 1997b, 7), the ‘surging forth’ evokes the way that magma breaks through the surface of the earth’s crust as lava. Something new, unplanned, and disruptive appears. Part of the ‘potentiality of potentiality’ (11) of the human condition is that the magma lying beneath the human surface may always surge forth.
Likely, the most forceful vocabulary Castoriadis uses for the social imaginary as creative is that it is ‘creation ex nihilo’, creation out of nothingness. Although Castoriadis does not use the term in the dialogue with Ricoeur, the concept seems present in Castoriadis’s language, already cited, of ‘absolute rupture’ (14). I want to address the terminology of ‘creation ex nihilo’ directly, both because it seems to summarise the central thrust of Castoriadis’s thematics – evident in the dialogue and in his larger corpus – and because, as we shall see, this concept seems to generate Ricoeur’s most critical response in the present conversation. The term ‘creation ex nihilo’ appears but four times in Castoriadis’s masterwork, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis 1987, 2, 3, 153, 361), and as I shall discuss in part three, Castoriadis subsequently modifies the terminology.9 But throughout his corpus, he retains the term ‘creation ex nihilo’, and in his masterwork, on which I focus here, the concept plays a pervading role, even if the term itself appears infrequently. In his principal volume, Castoriadis discusses how ‘the central or primary imaginary significations of a society create objects ex nihilo’ (Castoriadis 1987, 361). The emphasis, as previously remarked, is on the appearance in history of a ‘radical otherness’: ‘For what is given in and through history is not the determined sequence of the determined but the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty’ (Castoriadis 1987, 184). As radically other, the emergence comes from no determinate source; it is new, unanticipated, unheard of.
In some quite provocative ways, Castoriadis insists on the rise of the creative out of nothingness. The imaginary, like the symbolic, presupposes ‘the capacity to see in a thing what it is not’; the imaginary stems from the faculty of ‘positing or presenting oneself with things and relations that do not exist’ (Castoriadis 1987, 127). The radical imagination makes an initial representation ‘arise out of a nothingness of representation, that is to say, out of nothing’ (283). In later work, Castoriadis even more explicitly links creation ex nihilo with the ‘“is” not’ (Castoriadis 1997a, 305). The ‘radical otherness’ and the ‘absolutely new’ previously noted arise from what was not there before. As we now turn to discuss, the concept of creation ex nihilo seems quite alien to Ricoeur in the current dialogue and highlights the divergence – the cusp – between them. But the significance of the concept goes further than the seeming divide between the two figures. For in part three, we shall see how Ricoeur, in his independent work on the creative imagination, himself predicates the creative as arising out of the ‘nowhere’. For now, I want to insist that, in his dialogue with Ricoeur, Castoriadis remains firm in his sense of priority to the creative imagination as a break, a ‘cut’, something that arises out of nothingness. As he specifically states during the conversation, ‘This discontinuity alone is what interests me’ (7). Although, as we shall see, at points in the conversation Castoriadis appears to modulate his insistence on the autonomy, the self-predication, of the creative, on its emergence as ‘radical otherness’, I shall argue that his fundamental stance remains obdurate and unchanged.
Ricoeur
At the outset of our consideration of Ricoeur, it is critical to reinforce that any debate that he has with Castoriadis occurs within the context of a larger framework of similarity. As already noted in part one, they share an emphasis on the primordiality of the social imaginary. Further, while they debate over whether and to what degree a productive imagination can be extended to a creative imagination, they both insist that the productive or creative imagination permits some sense of newness and change. In this, as they recognise in their larger work, their thought argues against the history of Western thought, which in their view almost continuously endorses only a reproductive imagination (Castoriadis 1997a, 319; Ricoeur 2018). To be precise, both reject the limitation of the imagination to a weakened version of a perceptual image, the imagination as an ‘image of’ something else that exists (Castoriadis 1987, 3; Ricoeur 2018, 15.5).10 The imagination as ‘image of’ is a reproductive imagination, a replication of existing reality. By contrast, whether as productive or as creative, the imagination for Castoriadis and Ricoeur brings forward something new. In some of his opening lines in the discussion, Ricoeur contrasts an imagination that merely ‘reproduces a copy of something that is already there’ with one that engages in ‘a production of new syntheses and new configurations’ (4). He endorses the availability of a productive imagination.
During the debate, Ricoeur grants positive weight to the productive but not to the creative imagination. He finds the notion of creation to relate more to the powers of a ‘foundational sacred’, while a productive imagination relates to our inextricable existence within an institutional order (4). As we shall discern more in part three, it is odd that Ricoeur here relates the creative imagination to a religious origin, as he does not do so elsewhere. Perhaps, although this is speculative, he is reacting negatively to Castoriadis’s emphasis not only on the creative as absolute newness but on it arising ex nihilo, which has Christian theological overtones.11 In any event, Ricoeur’s stance in the dialogue is entirely consistent with the remainder of his corpus that the imagination is always situated; it always functions within an existing institutional order – within an existing social and cultural setting. As we shall determine, however, the implications that Ricoeur draws in the dialogue diverge from those he offers elsewhere.
I begin here with Ricoeur’s pronouncements on the productive imagination during the dialogue that come closest to Castoriadis’s on the creative imagination. I intentionally delay, for a moment, consideration of corresponding Ricoeur statements that modify or seem to pull back on these stronger statements. Ricoeur endorses that humanity proceeds through ‘ruptures’ and ‘discontinuities’ (7, 8); he acknowledges the appearance in human history of the ‘previously unexpressed and unheard mode of thought’ (14) and a ‘breakthrough of truth’ (14). He accurately indicates: ‘I never cease to plead in favour of the concept of an event in thought: there are events in thought, there are innovations’ (6). These statements are symptomatic of his larger corpus. As an eminent example of this broader consistency, one of the signal contributions of his book, The Rule of Metaphor, is that it demonstrates how metaphor may break the prison of language epitomised in structuralism. Yet, as Ricoeur also makes explicit during the debate, for him, innovation must always be conceived to exist in relation to sedimentation (6). This point, too, is one that Ricoeur maintains across his corpus. In the dialogue, he retains the language of the dialectic between innovation and sedimentation from his work Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1984, 68). He rejects the possibility of ‘absolutely novelty’ (5), of moving from ‘nothing to something’ (6). Ricoeur’s hermeneutics well reflects this stance (see Michel preface, p. xxxvi): Even as we seek to bridge across distance in our interpretation of the world of another, our interpretation necessarily begins as a situated one arising from our own culture and time. Ricoeur’s emphasis on the inextricability of the social imaginary also reflects our situated circumstance. In his larger corpus, Ricoeur describes this setting as one of ‘prefiguration’ (Ricoeur 1984, 53). During the debate, he speaks similarly of our always being located within the ‘pre-instituted’ (13), within a ‘pre-structure’ (5). The non-instituted is not available to us (13). In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur develops the notion of ‘configuration’ of what has already been prefigured (Ricoeur 1984, 64–6), and in the dialogue, Ricoeur repeatedly returns to the vocabulary of configuration and reconfiguration (4, 6, 8, 9, 13). We can never move from the formless to the form that we create (5); the configuration does not arise out of nothing (8); our attempt at innovation occurs only against an environment of existing configurations (6). We are always situated within existing configurations that we try to reconfigure (13). Ricoeur’s argument here in the dialogue is consistent with his larger work, and it is one with which I happen to agree. I return to Castoriadis’s response shortly.
More troubling, however, is Ricoeur’s extension of his stance on configuration in the dialogue to what he calls his ‘main argument’, on ‘retroaction’ (11). Admittedly, there is some power in Ricoeur’s differentiation between what he calls the continuity at the level of existence as over against the discontinuities at the level of sense (7). He finds in this continuity a general condition of humanity as ‘living-together’ (7). I hear echoes in this phrasing of comments outside of Ricoeur on how, genetically and socially, we are all ultimately one humanity in space and time. In our fractured age, these reminders remain potent. Yet there is a tonality to Ricoeur’s discussion, epitomised in his elaboration of retroaction, that I regret. I disagree with the tone and contend that it skews what in my mind should be a greater dialectic between continuity and discontinuity and a greater interrelation between the levels of sense and existence.
How is Ricoeur’s discussion of retroaction his main argument during the debate? No longer is the matter simply one of configuration, for the focus is on retrospection, retroaction. The term ‘retroaction’ is cited frequently (11, 12, 14). Through a ‘retroaction of our new creations on the old moments, we can deliver possibilities that had been prevented’ (11). We may establish the new by means of a recovery of our legacy from the past (12). Rupture and innovation is accepted but against the background of a ‘received inheritance’ which ensures a ‘basso continuo’ (7). Although Ricoeur maintains that through configuration we can now read the past otherwise (12), his analysis gives primacy to the continuity of human existence (7). From my perspective, Ricoeur’s tonality here is similar to that in Time and Narrative. As I have argued elsewhere (Taylor 2015a, 130), it is similarly disquieting in that text that Ricoeur’s description of narrative as ‘concordant discordance’ or as a ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’ (Ricoeur 1984, 66) grants priority to concordance and synthesis rather than to more of a tension between identity and difference. I would contend that the framework of figuration and the social imaginary does not limit us to configuration but remains open to the possibility of transfiguration – a recasting or re-envisioning of the old in light of the new, which can include rejection of the parts of the old and moving forward in a new trajectory.12 As I shall argue in part three, then, the critical differentiation between productive and creative imagination does not rest upon whether we place ourselves within Ricoeur’s framework of the symbolic mediation of action and the social imaginary. The dividing line is whether we permit a more robust sense of the transfiguration – the break, the rupture, the newness – that may occur within this framework of figuration. An absolute break with the past is not possible, but a significant break, a significant point of redirection may be. As I shall also pursue in the next part, this contention in favour of the creative imagination may readily draw upon arguments in Ricoeur’s corpus that are not attended in the present dialogue or in works such as Time and Narrative.
I close the present part with some comments on Castoriadis’s response to Ricoeur’s arguments in the dialogue. It seems obvious that in the debate, Ricoeur is intent on constant objection to any possibility in Castoriadis of the endorsement of moments of absolute newness in human history. My sense is that Castoriadis’s response is twofold: both ‘of course’ and ‘and yet’. These two sides of his response seem congruent with the two levels of Ricoeur’s argument I have developed. Castoriadis’s response is ‘of course’ in the sense that he agrees that all human existence is situated historically and culturally. We each function necessarily within existing languages and within existing institutions. Castoriadis acknowledges that ‘each sense or each new form that emerges is not the result of a combination of pre-existing forms, even if it does retain a certain reference to the past’ (8). To this statement, Ricoeur responds that the two of them are then on the same side (8). As another example, it is a source of continuing fascination to me that throughout his work, as in the dialogue, Castoriadis’s orientation to the new continually hearkens back to the lessons and insights of classical Greece (10). Because of the unavoidability of human existence within language and institutions, Castoriadis accepts that in this sense ‘there’s no absolute rupture’ (12).
At first glance, this seems a major concession to Ricoeur. Yet here Castoriadis’s additional response of ‘and yet’ seems to come into play. I noted at this essay’s outset that Ricoeur and Castoriadis have important points of overlap, including, as we have seen, the priority they grant to the social imaginary and now the rejection of our inability to extricate ourselves from the social imaginary. Yet as I also forecast, this overlap is part of ambits with quite different directions. Ricoeur moves towards retroaction, and Castoriadis persists in emphasising historical breaks. So, if in a general manner Castoriadis’s reaction in the dialogue to Ricoeur’s insistence on the inevitability of a situated existence is one of ‘of course’, his response includes an ‘and yet’ in the sense that Ricoeur’s insistence also misses the point. As previously noted, Castoriadis’s emphasis in the conversation is on the availability of historical discontinuity (7); his focus remains on the possibility of the ‘emergence of a new figure’ (14). After having agreed with Ricoeur that there is ‘no absolute rupture’ (12) in human language or institutions, a few pages later, he contends that a new figure’s emergence breaks with continuity and does present in fact an ‘absolute rupture’ that ‘marks the singularity of our history’ (14). While I would not insist on a consistency in vocabulary in the free flow of an intense conversation, there does seem to be a contradiction or at least tension in Castoriadis’s conceptual matrix. One question is whether Castoriadis’s larger framework can allow no absolute rupture, yet a rupture that is new. The same question can be asked of Ricoeur’s larger conceptual model as well. I return to this issue in the context of both thinkers and their larger body of work in part three. To anticipate, despite Castoriadis’s agreement with Ricoeur in the dialogue that the appearance of the new in human history is inevitably informed by references from the past (8), the debate does not appear to create a meeting of the minds. This lack of concord seems aptly reflected in a rare statement of Castoriadis on Ricoeur a few years after the conversation occurred. Noting the 1988 publication of the third volume in English of Time and Narrative, Castoriadis expresses his admiration for the ‘richness and solidity’ of Ricoeur’s analysis in that work of the philosophical tradition regarding time, yet he also emphasises his own continuing ‘obvious and central differences’ with Ricoeur (Castoriadis 1997b, 438, n. 1).13 From the perspective of the dialogue, Ricoeur restricts himself to the availability of productive imagination, because the imagination must always proceed by configuration, whose newness arises from what has gone before, while Castoriadis endorses the creative imagination, because newness not only arises from but also breaks away from the existing social imaginary.
THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION AND THE IMAGINARY EX NIHILO
In this third and concluding part, I move away from the Castoriadis–Ricoeur dialogue to the wider corpora of these two thinkers. I argue that the debate in the present text is only on the cusp of the larger potential interrelation between their thought, as their work as a whole permits some adjustment to the dialogue’s representativeness of the depictions of their arguments. In particular, I contend that in other of his work, Ricoeur does endorse a creative, and not just productive, imagination, and I also reference themes in Castoriadis’s broader corpus that situates – but does not eliminate – his endorsement that creation is ex nihilo. I reverse the order of the prior part and begin with Ricoeur and then turn to Castoriadis.
Ricoeur
My enquiry into the availability in Ricoeur of an endorsement of creative imagination focuses primarily on his unpublished Lectures on Imagination and also on his books The Rule of Metaphor and the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. It is relevant that the two volumes of lectures noted were each the product of sets of course lectures that Ricoeur delivered in 1975 (at the University of Chicago) and that the original French version of The Rule of Metaphor, La métaphore vive (Ricoeur 1975), appeared during that same year. My thesis in this section can be baldly stated as follows: Ricoeur’s 1985 debate with Castoriadis would have been significantly different if it had occurred in 1975. As his work of that year attests, he would have argued in favour of the existence of the creative imagination, even as he retained an insistence on the situated character of the emergent or new. My argument in this section proceeds in three steps. I first examine the vocabulary in the Lectures on Imagination that affirms the availability of the creative imagination. I then show that this vocabulary reflects indeed a substantive, not just terminological, variation from Ricoeur’s position in 1985. Finally, I expand the scope to show the substantive ties between the Lectures on Imagination, The Rule of Metaphor, the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, and other work of that time period. Part of the task will be to highlight Ricoeur’s vocabulary during this period that endorses, similar to Castoriadis, that the creative imagination may arise from ‘nowhere’ and that it may ‘shatter’ existing reality. For whatever reason, Ricoeur himself chose ultimately not to publish the Lectures on Imagination; the rationale was not due to a rejection of those lectures’ avowal of the creative imagination. Similar themes appear in his published work.
First, then, it is apparent throughout the Lectures on Imagination that Ricoeur’s object is to carve out a space for the creative imagination in the face of the weight of most of Western thought, which has concentrated solely on the reproductive imagination. The Lectures are replete with Ricoeur’s references to the positive role of creative imagination. He speaks of ‘the creative function of imagination’ (3.1, 4.9, 5.3, 5.11), ‘the full recognition of creative imagination’ (3.9), ‘the creative power of imagination’ (5.4), the ‘creative imagination’ as the positive thematic that he wishes to pursue (7.10), and the important implications of ‘the notion of creative imagination’ (17.15, 18.2). He wants to develop a ‘phenomenology of creative imagination’ (17.8, 17.9). At many points in these Lectures, Ricoeur extends the productive imagination beyond its role in Kant (the subject of lectures 5 and 6) and in fact equates the productive imagination with the creative imagination. He discusses ‘the problem of creativity, of productive imagination’ (4.7); he claims that imagination is ‘the bearer of all productive or creative functions’ (5.11); imaginative variation has a ‘productive, creative function’ (15.12); it is when ‘imagination is involved in a creative process of thought and language that imagination itself is productive’ (16.1).
My second comment is that Ricoeur’s vocabulary of creative imagination does reflect a substantive change from his 1985 discussion and not just a change in vocabulary. In language similar to Castoriadis, Ricoeur talks in the Lectures of the ‘emergence of something new’ (15.16, 16.6). More precisely, the great contribution of the Lectures lies in its development of Ricoeur’s theory that the productive and creative imagination is best located in a theory of ‘creative fiction’ (13.19), as fiction allows a distance from existing reality that allows for a refashioning of reality, a shaping of reality in a new way (13.17). In language offering some suggestive parallels to Castoriadis on creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothingness, Ricoeur contends that in a theory of fiction, ‘we have the full expression of the theory of nothingness’, where we seek not to reproduce but to ‘produce new entities’ (14.12). He argues for an ontological character of fiction. A creative fiction does not seek to reproduce reality, as would a reproductive image. Instead, fiction begins with the nothingness of an image, ‘an image without an original’, and so permits ‘a second ontology that is not the ontology of the original but the ontology displayed by the image itself, because it has no original’ (16.1). As I examine in more detail elsewhere (Taylor 2015b), Ricoeur extends the phenomenological concept of intentionality to argue for the fiction as consciousness of the ‘absolutely nowhere’ (14.15), and this nowhere has ontological implications. Again equating the productive with the creative, Ricoeur contends that ‘it’s the genius of productive imagination – of the fictional – to open and change reality. Productive imagination may enlarge and even create new world views, new ways of looking at things, and, finally, may change even our way of being in the world’ (15.5). The creative imagination can ‘reshape’ reality (16.4), open new dimensions of reality (19.2, 19.5). The larger ambition of Ricoeur’s thesis is to show that the power of the creative imagination extends not only to the poetic imagination but also to the epistemological imagination – for example, in scientific models – and to the social imagination – as in utopias (19.1). He addresses the epistemological imagination in the Lectures on Imagination and the utopia in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. I return shortly to the utopia as exemplary of the social implications of Ricoeur’s theory.
Finally, we should respond to any potential critique that Ricoeur may have refrained from publishing the Lectures on Imagination because of a decision not to affirm their implications in favour of a creative imagination. It remains the case, though, that he did publish some articles affirming the creative imagination. For example, consider the titles ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’ (Ricoeur 1991) and ‘Creativity in Language’ (Ricoeur 1978). And, more significantly, he published The Rule of Metaphor during this period and subsequently allowed publication of the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. In the Lectures on Imagination, Ricoeur devoted one full lecture to demonstrating the positive interrelation between his work on metaphor and his thesis in favour of the creative imagination. Just as the metaphor’s disruption of literal meaning allows for a metaphoric reference, so the creative imagination disrupts existing reality and opens a productive reference. There is a connection between the productive aspects of language and the productive conditions of the imagination (16.4). In his article ‘Creativity in Language’, Ricoeur sharpens the correlation in ways deserving emphasis: ‘[M]etaphor not only shatters the previous structures of our language, but also the previous structures of what we call reality’ (Ricoeur 1978, 132; emphasis added). We recall Castoriadis’s emphasis also that the emergence of the new arising from the creative imagination may ‘shatter’ existing social forms (Castoriadis 1987, 372; 1997b, 175).14
In the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur there too insists that the creative social and cultural imagination may ‘shatter’ present reality. In contrast to Castoriadis’s rejection of the utopia as ‘an act of faith’ or ‘arbitrary wager’ (Castoriadis 1997a, 170),15 Ricoeur asserts that the positive power of the utopia lies not in acting as an avenue of escape from reality but in the ‘claim to shatter’ reality (Ricoeur 1986, 309).16 The utopia has the ability to ‘break through the thickness of reality’ (Ricoeur 1986, 309). Ricoeur frequently reiterates in this volume that the utopia can shatter an existing order (Ricoeur 1986, 173, 179, 273, 285, 289). He returns to this thematic in the Lectures on Imagination. The utopia is literally the ‘nowhere’ and is another example of a fictional ‘nowhere’ that can shatter reality. The utopia, Ricoeur says, offers ‘the possibility of the nowhere in relation to my social condition’ (14.11). ‘The nowhere’, he continues, ‘is a starting point toward a new position.... Fictions may produce a new reality, because they don’t reproduce a previous reality’ (14.16–17).
The tonality in the Lectures on Imagination and other work of this period is quite different from that of the 1985 discussion with Castoriadis. The language of the ‘nowhere’ and of ‘shattering’ focus not on continuity with the old but on breaks and the appearance of something new. In the Lectures, the language is not one of ‘configuration’ but of ‘transfiguration’ of reality (17.1, 17.7) and of ‘restructuration’ of prior categorisation (16.12–13). We must ‘reshape’ prior concepts in order to encompass new situations (15.10). The vocabulary of restructuration and reshaping in the Lectures does reiterate Ricoeur’s emphasis in the debate with Castoriadis that no absolute rupture occurs. Ricoeur maintains in the Lectures that ‘naked creativity’ is not available (6.6, 6.14). But we must emphasise both terms in that phrase: Creativity is never naked, it is always situated; but it is creativity, not productivity, that is the subject of the discussion. The creative imagination must arise from the categorical, the structured, in order to be transcategorial (16.11). It is a myth of creativity that it is formless; it ‘proceeds from form to form’ (16.14). Ricoeur’s work on metaphor renders the transfiguration and transcategorial activity at work in the creative imagination quite precise:
Every metaphor, in bringing together two previously distant semantic fields, strikes against a prior categorisation, which it shatters. Yet, the idea of semantic impertinence preserves this: an order, logically antecedent, resists, and is not completely abolished by, the new pertinence. In effect, in order that there be a metaphor, it is necessary that I continue to perceive the previous incompatibility through the new compatibility. (Ricoeur 1991, 125; emphasis added)17
It may be that the differences in Ricoeur’s endorsement of creativity in the 1975 time period and his rejection of it in 1985, as he completes Time and Narrative, have to do with the larger subject matter of his works during these years. As he acknowledges in a 1981 conversation with Richard Kearney, analysis of the creative imagination deals with ‘creativity in its prospective or futural aspect’, while analysis of narrativity assesses it ‘in a retrospective fashion’ (Ricoeur 2004, 131). The language of retrospectivity resonates with the term ‘retroaction’ that Ricoeur used in the 1985 dialogue. Whatever the historical factors, in the 1970s, Ricoeur seems consistent in endorsing an imagination that is creative and not just productive. This imagination that can shatter and can arise from the nowhere seems close to Castoriadis, even if it is never a naked form of creativity. It is perhaps fitting to close the discussion of Ricoeur with his rare commentary during this period on Castoriadis, also drawn from his 1981 conversation with Richard Kearney. Ricoeur speaks of how the ‘imaginative and creative dimension of the social, this imaginaire social, has been brilliantly analysed by Castoriadis’ (Ricoeur 2004, 133; emphasis added).
Castoriadis
In this section, I address to what degree Castoriadis’s writings go beyond his statements in the dialogue with Ricoeur and respond to the critique levied by Ricoeur that creativity is always situated, never an absolute rupture. I examine first Castoriadis’s writings subsequent to The Imaginary Institution of Society and then return to that major text.18 In this longer view, I find greater concord between Castoriadis and Ricoeur than the dialogue itself reveals but still not a final commonality.
One of the most significant and commendable changes in Castoriadis’s vocabulary is that the language of creation ex nihilo that appeared in The Imaginary Institution of Society is modified in later writings to that of creation ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo (Castoriadis 1991, 64; 1997a, 321, 333, 370, 404; 1997b, 174, 392; Adams 2011, 129).19 It is essential at the outset to appreciate that Castoriadis does retain his insistence that creation occurs ex nihilo, out of nothingness. Although his elaboration of why creation is ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo is often brief, Castoriadis clarifies that creation ex nihilo remains uncaused or undetermined by external factors but yet under constraints (Castoriadis 1997a, 333, 370; 1997b, 393). Creation does not occur as a matter of a blank slate (Castoriadis 1991, 64; 1997b, 14). ‘Neither in the social-historical domain nor anywhere else does creation signify that just anything can happen just anywhere, just any time and just anyhow’ (Castoriadis 1997a, 370). The creation is not motivated by external factors but is conditioned by them; something already in existence is utilised. The creation ex nihilo of the classical Greek polis, for instance, made use of existing Greek mythology (Castoriadis 1997b, 174). In perhaps his most extended development of the meaning of creation ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo, Castoriadis identifies four kinds of constraints on creation ex nihilo (Castoriadis 1997a, 333–6). First, external constraints include biological and natural factors and instrumental uses of language. These are the products of material life. Second, internal constraints include psychological factors that affect how the psyche becomes socialised. Third, historical constraints relate creation to a past; it exists within a tradition. Finally, creation also faces intrinsic constraints; social imaginary significations must present a general sense of coherence (even if faced with internal tension and contradiction) and must also be complete. These factors do impose important restrictions on what creation ex nihilo may produce.
Yet as much as I admire the refinements in Castoriadis’s analysis, as I read these factors and the language of constraint, they all seem ultimately external to creation ex nihilo. Creation ex nihilo is preserved in ways that still seem, in my view, susceptible to Ricoeur’s critique that innovation always takes a situated form. Castoriadis discusses creation ex nihilo as the ‘emergence of a new ontological form – eidos – and of a new mode and level of being’ (Castoriadis 1991, 64; 1997a, 332). I have an image of creation in Castoriadis as a form like an architectural blueprint, whose achievement may be limited by terrain and the amount and kind of building materials, but the form itself is not affected. To use another metaphor, if magma erupts above the earth’s surface as lava, the lava flow will be channelled by conditions on the surface, but the constitution of the lava itself remains unimpinged. The creation as form is not modified. The creation’s meaning is substantively unaltered; it may be more, it may be less, it may be constructed in wood or in brick, but the creation ex nihilo is preserved. Castoriadis’s more complex phrasing of creation as ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo does not seem to go far enough in redressing the kinds of criticisms Ricoeur launches in the dialogue about the creative imagination – or in his vocabulary there, the productive imagination – always being situated and circumscribed by its conditions. In protecting creation as ex nihilo, Castoriadis does not seem to address how the meaning of the creation is itself framed and informed by its circumstances.20
To exemplify both the limitations and the potentiality of Castoriadis’s argument about creation ex nihilo, I return to The Imaginary Institution of Society and his discussion there of the role of institutions. My claim is that there seem to be resources in Castoriadis that would allow him to go further than he actually does. As a transition to this argument, I would like to address the challenge whether in his major text, the theme of creation ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo is present if not described explicitly in that terminology. My starting point for this enquiry is raised by a suggestive line that appears in Castoriadis’s later work. While identifying sources in his recent writings that elaborate on his more complex presentation of creation ex nihilo, he also asserts in a parenthetical that ‘innumerable passages from IIS [The Imaginary Institution of Society] show this’ as well (Castoriadis 1997a, 404). The implication seems to be that even if this earlier work does not use the same vocabulary regarding creation ex nihilo as his later writings, the same substantive stance is present. In consideration of this claim, I find particularly fruitful Castoriadis’s early emphasis that the social is both always instituted and always instituting (Castoriadis 1987, 112). Both parts of this statement deserve both acclaim and elaboration. That the social is always instituted has several significant implications. On the one hand, Castoriadis’s observation here recognises that institutions are necessary for human societies to operate (Castoriadis 1987, 113–14, 116); social organisation is indispensable. In the dialogue with Ricoeur, he repeats similarly that human communities cannot exist without institutions (12). Second, Castoriadis’s observation goes further in rejecting the Marxian claim that institutions are necessarily alienating and that the social goal is to eliminate them, as through the withering of the State (Castoriadis 1987, 114; Dosse 2014, 366). Ricoeur also denies that institutions are necessarily reifying, and it would be intriguing to work out here also the juxtapositions between him and Castoriadis on the human struggle to establish what Ricoeur calls ‘just institutions’ (Ricoeur 1992, 172).21 Castoriadis’s larger point is that our thought ineluctably belongs to history and to society; every thought ‘is but a mode and a form of social-historical doing’ (Castoriadis 1987, 3). The social imaginary must manifest itself in and through social-historical institutions (237).
At the same time, the social is always instituting. As we have seen, it is a persistent theme in Castoriadis that we are not limited to deterministic institutions. Creative moments within society and within history are available to us (114). Castoriadis often underscores that the creative arises through social instituting: ‘[T]he institution is nothing if it is not form, rule and condition of what is not yet’ (219). Particularly informative is Castoriadis’s example of language as an institution. While language can allow for treating the meaning it provides as determined and circumscribed, it also ‘always provide[s] the possibility of new terms emerging’ (353). The example of language is generalisable, as language ‘shows us how instituting society is constantly at work’ (218).
To retrieve the vocabulary of creation ex nihilo but not in nihilo or cum nihilo, we may say that in Castoriadis’s earlier framework, the creative can arise – it is new and instituting – but it will do so within institutions – it is not in nihilo or cum nihilo. This stance is similar to his later argument that ‘there can be no radical imaginary except to the extent that it is instituted’ (Castoriadis 1997b, 184). In this sense, Castoriadis’s conceptual framework regarding creation ex nihilo appears similar over time even if the vocabulary of the conception is expanded in his later work.
Yet, I would contend, when Castoriadis frames creativity across his corpus as inextricably arising within institutions, this conceptual structure presses substantively on the viability of the characterisation of creation ex nihilo.22 While, as previously argued, the concept of creativity as break and rupture can importantly be retained, it cannot be as absolute break or rupture. Significantly, this conclusion seems an implication of the very ineluctability of the social imaginary as envisioned by both Castoriadis and Ricoeur. We are never outside or independent of the social imaginary. All of human understanding is mediated and interfused by our social institutions. It is quite pertinent that in the dialogue with Ricoeur, Castoriadis agrees that ‘when you say that there’s no absolute rupture, that one always remains in the rules of language, that is certainly true’ (12). We cannot break absolutely with the framework of language as an institution. We are informed by it all the way down; there is no location separable from the work of language. In the twentieth century, continental philosophy witnessed how the struggle with Western metaphysics of such influential thinkers as Heidegger and Derrida was also a struggle with the language of Western thought; they could not escape how this language instituted even as their own vocabulary pushed it to become instituting in different directions. The same may be said of Castoriadis’s own neologisms, such as magma.
I want to retain, then, in both Castoriadis and Ricoeur the availability of the creative imagination and its ability to arise out of ‘nowhere’ and to shatter current structures of reality. I support Castoriadis’s persistent affirmation of the creative imagination and regret the limitations of Ricoeur’s apparent retreat in the dialogue and elsewhere to the productive imagination. On the other side, I think that Ricoeur has the better of the argument in maintaining the dialectic of innovation and sedimentation against Castoriadis’s defence of the creative as an absolute break. Ricoeur’s reflections on the operation of metaphor, the creative imagination as fiction, and the utopia as the shattering of reality also seem to offer more detailed consideration on how the creative may arise, even as he joins Castoriadis in regarding the creative occurrence as ultimately opaque (Ricoeur 2018, 18.20–1; Castoriadis 1997b, 14–15). The endorsement and development of the social imaginary that they both offer remains absolutely vital; in this way, their work remains, years after their death, very much on the cusp of intellectual enquiry.
In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur defines metaphor as the depiction of resemblance across difference (Ricoeur 1977, 196). The metaphoric bridging exhibits similarity at the same time that difference is preserved. In their dialogue, as in their writings as a whole, the thought of Castoriadis and Ricoeur offer many moments of metaphoric resemblance, where we experience bridges even as difference remains. Both the synergy of and the divergences between their thought offer rich resources for further reflection, and we can be grateful that their dialogue has brought these productive (and creative) tensions more keenly into focus.
NOTES
1.In other writings, I have argued similarly that tensions exist in Ricoeur’s work, such that arguments of which I am critical can be typically challenged by positions elsewhere in his work that I endorse (Taylor 2012, 2015a).
2.Johann Michel also addresses this point in his preface to the present volume. I generally will refrain from cross-citation to other commentary in this book.
3.Hereafter the references to the radio dialogue proper appear as single page numbers.
4.Greater delineation of the positions of Castoriadis and Ricoeur on the ineluctable background nature of the social imaginary would need to develop Ricoeur’s reference to this imaginary as both cultural and social. The social, Ricoeur relates, ‘has more to do with the roles ascribed to us within institutions, whereas the cultural involves the production of works of intellectual life’ (Ricoeur 1986, 32, n.1). In this passage, Ricoeur goes on to develop the differentiation at greater length.
5.For another quick reference to this problem, I have found useful in Castoriadis the following statement: ‘The social imaginary is, primordially, the creation of significations and the creation of the images and figures that support these significations. The relation between a signification and its supports (images or figures) is the only precise sense that can be attached to the term “symbolic” – and this is the sense in which we are using the term here’ (Castoriadis 1987, 238). In the debate with Ricoeur, Castoriadis ascribes the vocabulary of the symbolic to Ricoeur, while he prefers the language of the ‘domain of meaning’ (12). For further discussion of this differentiation, see note 5. As perhaps apparent, in both Castoriadis and Ricoeur, the references to the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’ are different from Lacanian vocabulary.
6.In this passage, Ricoeur goes on to interrelate the quest for meaning with the symbolic mediation of human action (Ricoeur 1986, 255–6). This challenges Castoriadis’s differentiation, cited in note 4, between his own focus on meaning and Ricoeur’s on the symbolic.
7.To underscore the argument in the text, it is worth quoting the authors cited: ‘[S]’il est un problème philosophique qui cristallise nombre de ses interrogations, c’est bien celui de l’imagination’ (Revault d’Allonnes 1997, 13); ‘En réalité, la pensée ricoeurienne, depuis l’interprétation de la ‘symbolique du mal’ jusqu’aux analyses sur la mémoire, se présente comme une meditation sur les productions de l’imaginaire’ (Foessel 2007, 8); ‘[L]a question de l’imagination ne correspond pas à un moment déterminé et limité de l’itinéraire philosophique de Ricoeur mais qu’elle est au coeur de son project philosophique depuis les premières oeuvres jusqu’aux dernières’ (Amalric 2013, 13).
8.Suzi Adams comments: ‘Creation, in Castoriadis’s sense, ruptures frameworks of being as determinacy – the eide as immutable and unalterable – and, as such, they cannot account for it’ (Adams 2011, 52).
9.I thank Suzi Adams for discussion of this topic.
10.In this and subsequent citations to Ricoeur’s forthcoming Lectures on Imagination, I refer to the text by lecture number and manuscript page internal to that lecture. The present citation, then, is to page 5 of lecture 15.
11.I agree with Johann Michel (see Michel Preface, pp. xxxvi–vi) that Ricoeur’s hesitations here have no necessary correlation with his own theological orientation to what may be the powers of a ‘foundational sacred’.
12.For development of this argument, see Taylor (2013).
13.In his comment, Castoriadis does not elaborate what these differences are.
14.I find quite suggestive the parallelism in the language of ‘shatter’ in both thinkers’ work, but emphasise the larger similarity in vocabulary and conception rather than the identity of the use of ‘shatter’ in itself. Other terms used in common, such as ‘rupture’, also depict this commonality. It is also of course pertinent that while Ricoeur’s invocation of ‘shatter’ initially occurred in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, which were delivered in English, in Castoriadis, I am referring to a translation of vocabulary originally written in French. In the first citation in the text, the English term is ‘shattering’ (Castoriadis 1987, 372), and the French original is ‘éclatement’ (Castoriadis 1975, 496). In the second citation, the English term is ‘shattered’ (Castoriadis 1997b, 175), and the French original is ‘rompue’ (Castoriadis 1997c, 88).
15.For a more extended comparison of the notion of utopia in Castoriadis and Ricoeur, see Michel (2015, 135–8). For development of Ricoeur’s concept of utopia, see Taylor (2017).
16.Ricoeur originally draws the term from Karl Mannheim (Ricoeur 1986, 173, quoting Mannheim 1936, 192).
17.Greater development of Ricoeur’s views across these time periods would need to assess whether the changes in part result to his latter work being framed by the concept of mimesis. It is of interest that the Lectures on Imagination begin to address that topic, and in that earlier work, Ricoeur differentiates between a reproductive mimesis, which he rejects, and ‘a productive mimesis, a creative mimesis’ (19.6), which he endorses.
18.Because Castoriadis’s later writings are often the product of reworking over time across the period, including the dialogue with Ricoeur, I make no effort to determine whether any might have responded to the challenges raised by Ricoeur in their conversation. For example, in the endnotes to one of the articles to which I refer, ‘Time and Creation’, which appears in World in Fragments, Castoriadis observes that the text was first presented in a 1983 lecture and then modified at points over time until published in 1990 (Castoriadis 1997b, 437).
19.In one of these passages (Castoriadis 1997a, 404), Castoriadis refers to two other articles in which he had also specified this broader concept: ‘PoPA’ (‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’, Castoriadis 1991, 143–74) and ‘ISRH’ (‘Individual, Society, Rationality, History’, Castoriadis 1991, 44–80). In the latter article, the reference to creation ex nihilo but not cum nihilo is explicit and cited in my text (Castoriadis 1991, 64); in the former, the vocabulary of creation ex nihilo appears to be absent and the reference seems more indirect (Castoriadis 1991, 144–45, 170). The diligent reader will note that in my references here and in the main text, I do not discuss separately when Castoriadis adds to creation ex nihilo that it is not cum nihilo or in nihilo or instead simply that it is not cum nihilo. Whether this differentiation has much signification or is more inadvertent is not a subject that I spend time pursuing here.
20.My argument is then sympathetic to Suzi Adams’s claim: ‘Castoriadis does not explicitly acknowledge that the circle of creation is always already a hermeneutical circle. We are always already inside the web of signification’ (Adams 2011, 118, emphasis deleted).
21.For my pursuit of this topic in Ricoeur, see Taylor (2014). In some of Castoriadis’s later writings, he extends his positive orientation toward the possibilities of institutions. He writes, for instance, that the object of politics should be to ‘[c]reate institutions which, by being internalised by individuals, most facilitate their accession to their individual autonomy and their effective participation in all forms of explicit power existing in society’ (Castoriadis 1991, 173, emphasis deleted).
22.My argument is supportive of Suzi Adams’s criticism that Castoriadis stumbled when he ‘radically separated significatory meaning from ensemblistic-identitarian organisation’ (Adams 2011, 69).
REFERENCES
Adams, Suzi. 2011. Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press.
Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2013. Paul Ricoeur, l’imagination vive. Une genèse de la philosophie ricoeurienne de l’imagination. Paris: Hermann.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1975. L’Institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
———. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Edited by David Ames Curtis. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1997a. The Castoriadis Reader. Translated and edited by David Ames Curtis. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 1997b. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. Translated and edited by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 1997c. Faire et à faire: Les carrefours du labyrinthe V. Paris: Seuil.
Dosse, François. 2014. Castoriadis: Une vie. Paris: La Découverte.
Foessel, Michaël. 2007. ‘Introduction: Paul Ricoeur ou les puissances de l’imaginaire’. In Anthologie de Paul Ricoeur. Texts chosen and presented by Michaël Foessel and Fabien Lamouche, 7–22. Paris: Points.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Kearney, Richard. 2004. ‘Between Imagination and Language’. In On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, 35–58. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Michel, Johann. 2015. Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists. Translated by Scott Davidson. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mouzakitis, Angelos. 2014. ‘Social-Historical’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts. Edited by Suzi Adams, 89–100. London: Bloomsbury.
Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam. 1997. ‘Avant-propos à l’édition française’. In Paul Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’utopie, 13–16. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. ‘Structure, Word, Event’. In The Conflict of Interpretations. Translated by Robert Sweeney. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1975. La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1977. The Rule of Metaphor. Translated by Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 1978. ‘Creativity in Language’. In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work. Edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart, 120–33. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
———. 1984. Time and Narrative (Volume 1). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1991. ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’. In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Edited by Mario J. Valdés, 117–36. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. [Originally published, in English, in 1979 in Man and World 12:2: 123–41.]
———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
____. 2004. ‘The Creativity of Language’ [1981 dialogue with Richard Kearney] in Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, 127–43. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
———. 2018. Lectures on Imagination. Edited by George H. Taylor, Patrick Crosby, and Robert D. Sweeney (in press).
Taylor, George H. 2012. ‘Ricoeur versus Ricoeur? Between the Universal and the Contextual’. In From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of Ricoeur’s Thinking. Edited by Todd S. Mei and David Lewin, 136–54. London: Continuum.
———. 2013. ‘Ricoeur, Narrative, and the Just’. Universitas: Monthly Review of Philosophy and Culture 470: 145–58.
———. 2014. ‘Ricoeur and Just Institutions’. Philosophy Today 58:4: 571–89.
———. 2015a. ‘Prospective Political Identity’. In Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique. Edited by Roger W. H. Savage, 123–37. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
———. 2015b. ‘The Phenomenological Contribution of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’. Social Imaginaries 1:2: 13–31.
———. 2017. ‘Delineating Ricoeur’s Concept of Utopia’. Social Imaginaries 3:1: 41–60.