The dimension of the imagination is essential to the work of Ricoeur and Castoriadis, each in their own way.1 In the first sentences of his introduction to an anthology of the works of Ricoeur, Michael Foessel emphasises the difficulty of defining Ricoeur’s philosophy by one central theme due to its abundance of ideas. He identifies, however, a possible thematic unit centred on the question of the imagination. ‘It is through the works of the imagination that we can reconstruct our sense of the human experience’ (Foessel 2007, 8). If Ricoeur did not achieve a poetic of will, as announced in his major thesis, he progresses towards this in his subsequent works, in which he unceasingly stresses the need to rehabilitate in philosophy the dimension of what is imaginary, linking it to other dimensions of human existence and unfolds it on each occasion as a form of action: ‘The imagination is the means through which meaning is understood, the world speaks and action is performed. These are the three powers of the imaginary that the philosophy of Ricoeur exhibits masterfully’ (Foessel 2007, 10). This idea is in close proximity with that of Castoriadis, who places the radical imagination at the level of the individual and social imagination at the collective level at the heart of the social-historical. Both find themselves breaking away from the Marxian understanding of the imaginary as being relegated to ideological distortions of the superstructure. For Ricoeur and Castoriadis, everything originates in the social imaginary, which constitutes the fundamental background of praxis.
DUAL DISCONTENT REGARDING INHERITED THOUGHT ABOUT THE IMAGINARY
Ricoeur’s conviction that action is only known and understood indirectly, through mediation, is re-encountered in his treatment of the question of imagination. Images, symbols, and myths play the role of mediators through which access to the ontological dimension of human action can be gained. To underpin this mediating function of the imagination, Ricoeur leans on the decisive contribution of Kant, which he considers a turning point in the history of thought regarding the imagination: ‘The essential breakthrough towards a modern philosophy of imagination is to be found in the work of Kant. For him, the problem of imagination as the production of images prevails over imagery as a reproduction of things’ (Ricoeur 1974, 9). He thus breaks with a philosophical tradition which, until that point, positioned the imagination on the side of a force whose existence is certainly recognised, but which is considered as being deceptive and misleading to reason, which must dominate it and tame it so as to better abate it. For Kant, the imagination supersedes image and becomes inseparable from the question of doing, from that of productivity. It is striking to note that Kant also represents for Castoriadis a similarly decisive, fundamental break. According to Castoriadis, the dimension of the imaginary could not emerge from purgatory before Kant and his discovery of transcendental imagination in The Critique of Pure Reason. However, this release remains incomplete, as Kant neglects his discovery and confines the imagination to the domain of the senses. ‘The imagination of which Kant speaks is a secondary imagination’ (Castoriadis 2008a, 277). Castoriadis, nonetheless, recognises great merit in the Kantian conception of imagination for having put forward the idea of a schematisation of mediation between categories and sensory data. Furthermore, the imagination is also present in The Critique of Judgement, linked to the creation of a work of art.
Ricoeur similarly distanced himself from the narrow conception of objectivity formulated by Kant. The Kantian simplification allows conceptualisation of the mediation that exists between understanding and the sensory, but pure imagination has no ‘for itself’. By highlighting a new form of imaginative mediation, Ricoeur suggests a way out of this aporia. ‘When Ricoeur underlines the fact that sentiment conjointly operates a schematisation of our vital tendencies and a schematisation of our aspiration to reason, it is possible to interpret this schematisation of human duality as a work of the imagination’ (Amalric 2013, 208). The sentiment that operates this mediation does not pertain to the representation of an object or of a symbol, but rather to the relation between self and others, between self and the world. In situating the act of freedom in the potentialities of the imagination, Ricoeur meets with Sartre’s (2004) contemporaneous vision of the imaginary. Sartre’s contribution is to link the imagination with the exercise of freedom, given that, in order for the individual consciousness to imagine, it must visualise an absent or unreal object. ‘According to Sartre, the consciousness is capable of escaping the world, because unlike things that are “in the middle of the world,” the individual consciousness is a “being of the world,” capable of extracting itself from the existing present and the given, by denying it’ (Amalric 2013, 269–70). In Ricoeur’s eyes, the merit of Sartre’s philosophy lies in the central place it confers upon the imagination. For Sartre, the imagination holds the capacity to release mankind’s freedom, thus concentrating consciousness, in its entirety, on the task of undertaking its own liberation.
At the same time, Sartre does not, however, carry his reasoning on the function of the imagination to its conclusion, as he limits its function to its potential to negate. According to Ricoeur, he fails to acknowledge the overriding purpose of the imagination, its function of mediation. Ricoeur considers that, in limiting his approach to the reproductive function of the imaginary, Sartre is ultimately retreating from the Kantian conception that insists on its productive function. Sartre extends to the imagination a philosophical tradition which confers primacy to perception and for which the imagination plays only a derivative and degraded role next to what is considered as true thought, reason. ‘The image carries in itself a spurious persuasive power which comes from the ambiguity of its nature’ (Sartre 2004, 120). Sartre considers the act of imagination as an act that has its place in the register of magic, moving it to a secondary place behind the noble act of philosophical understanding. According to Ricoeur, the disparagement Sartre casts on imaginative potentiality stems from his having failed to recognise a capacity for mediation between the visible and the invisible within imagination and he thus remains imprisoned within the sphere of perception.
Ricoeur, on the other hand, insists on the creative capacity of the imagination, including the mediation of the symbol, which ‘induces thought’ as it manifests a capacity in the productive imagination.2‘Unlike the two other modalities of the symbol, hierophanic and oneiric, the poetic symbol shows us expressivity in its nascent stage. In poetry the symbol is caught at the moment when it is a welling up of language’ (Ricoeur 1967, 13–14). Dissatisfied by the manner in which Sartre accounts for an imaginary reduced to its function of ‘nihalation’, Ricoeur turns to Gaston Bachelard, who allows the imagination to be linked not with perception, but with linguistic capacity and semantic innovation. For Bachelard, the poetic image ‘places us at the origin of the speaking being’ (1994, xix). Bachelard’s poetic is situated on the side of symbolism’s creative productivity, of its inventive power. Ricoeur thus intends to go beyond the limitations that Kant attributes to the imagination, namely that it is a component of a rationalisation upon which it is conditional. Furthermore, the subjectification of the problem of the imagination in Kant prevents one from attributing any ontological impact to the imagination. These failings encourage Ricoeur to turn to Bachelard: ‘The most interesting part of the Bachelardian theory of the imagination is that it leads us instead to see in images a production at once original because it is the source of innovation, and originating, because it truly corresponds to the creation of a new being’ (Amalric 2013, 346). Indeed, according to Bachelard, perceptive reality does not precede imagination, which ‘is in the human psyche the very experience of opening and newness’. What becomes important with Bachelard is what he refers to as ‘the realism of irreality’ (Bachelard 1988, 5). Ricoeur thus identifies in Bachelard a solid platform from which to show that the symbol not only suggests thought,3 but is also the bearer of what gives meaning and therefore ontological impact, as demonstrated by Ricoeur in The Symbolism of Evil (1967).
The position affirmed by Ricoeur in 1960 in The Symbolism of Evil converges with the parallel evolution of Merleau-Ponty concerning the imagination and the critical distance that he expresses towards Sartre’s conception in his last works presented in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Both challenge the radical division which Sartre institutes between perception and imagination, leading him to see the imagination as no more than a ‘non-being’. The perceptive experience studied in his Phenomenology of Perception becomes ‘perceptual faith’ in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘For us, the “perceptual faith” includes everything that is given to the natural man in the original in an experience-source, with the force of what is inaugural and present in person, according to a view that for him is ultimate and could conceivably be more perfect or closer’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 158). Ricoeur then leaves behind the aporias of solipsism when he opens his theory of the imagination onto the notion of the collective and that of history and identifies an ethical–mythical imaginary that structures the beliefs of a people in the form of a social imaginary. In the philosophy of Ricoeur, which is one of action, the imaginary is not the opposite of the real, but can lead to it in a creative way. The imaginary can be placed upstream from action and empower it by helping it become free of its own constraints. It can also become a driving force of historicity: ‘Imaginative mediation is what empowers subjectivity to develop, at the same time that it supports the process of its self-understanding’ (Amalric 2013, 454).
The later works of Merleau-Ponty were of interest to Castoriadis just as they were to Ricoeur. In 1971, Castoriadis contributed to the journal L’Arc, to the issue that paid homage to Merleau-Ponty and placed an excerpt of the latter’s work at the beginning of his article (Castoriadis 1984). Castoriadis welcomes the author’s attempt to define a path different to that of traditional ontology and its egology. He follows Merleau-Ponty’s lead in distancing himself from the eidetic approach of Husserl in order to depart from the classical discussion of representations, and substitute for it a form of thinking defined by its crossings-over and reversibility. Admittedly, the orientation Merleau-Ponty defines in The Visible and the Invisible is not fully satisfactory in the eyes of Castoriadis, but he acknowledges its central merit, that of having tried to escape from the privilege formerly afforded to the object, of having explored the dimension of the imaginary, even if this attempt remains unfinished, interrupted by his untimely death in 1960: ‘Thus ... in his last writings, do the term and the idea of “imaginary” return frequently – even if these remain indeterminate due to their equivocality’ (Castoriadis 1997, 275). Castoriadis nevertheless perceived in the later works only a partial step away from the overall coherence of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which remained largely dependent on the inherited tradition.
Castoriadis recognises, however, the merit Merleau-Ponty had of having perceived with lucidity and vigour the importance of the imaginary when he claimed that ‘perceiving and imagining are now only two modes of thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 29), or that ‘the narrow circle of objects of thought that are only half-thought, half-objects or phantoms that have no consistency, no place of their own, disappearing before the sun of thought like the mists of dawn, and that are, between the thought and what it thinks, only a thin layer of the unthought’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 30). If Castoriadis is not satisfied with the floating sense that Merleau-Ponty accords to the imaginary, he acknowledges its contribution; that of having challenged the common conception of representation as it had been thematised since 1938 by Heidegger, then taken up and considered by his followers as a mask to be removed through philosophy.
According to the later works of Merleau-Ponty, the mind has no representations, but is itself a representative flux, the constant presentation of something that is not here for anyone or anything. ‘Perception, dreams, reverie, memory, phantasm, reading, hearing music with eyes closed, thought are first and foremost that, and they rigorously enter under the same heading’ (Castoriadis 1997, 281–2). If this is the case, the dimensions of the visible and of the invisible then cannot be separated. Both are caught in a network of inextricable connections through which one cannot speak of the visible without passing through the invisible and thus the imaginary, the subjective, the social: ‘When one gauges what speaking means and everything that it conveys, the inherence, in perceiving, of speaking-thinking is nothing other, in a sense, than the shake-up of the distinction posited as absolute, between real and imaginary’ (Castoriadis 1997, 302). Over the course of the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty progressively succeeded in performing the beginnings of a fundamental reassessment when he noted that the imaginary completely runs over into the field of perception: ‘Our real life, in so far as it is directed at beings; is already imaginary’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 147).
THE LIVING IMAGINATION IN PAUL RICOEUR
In 1976, Ricoeur expanded on his stance with respect to the role of the imagination, central to his philosophy, by introducing his general theory of the imagination (Ricoeur 1991a). He then drew attention to his planned poetics of the will, which was to shift the concept of the productive imagination beyond the sphere of discourse to that of action, occupying a key position on the border of theory and practice. Ricoeur deplores, as will Castoriadis later, the relegation of the function of the imagination inherited from traditional philosophical thought which suffers ‘from the bad reputation of the term image, after its misuse in the empiricist theory of knowledge’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 169). The imagination allows for the creation of a field of diverse possibilities with respect to the world of perception as well as action. Metaphoric statements seem to break completely from all referential links. Further, a break away from the aporias of theories of perception is allowed through the connection of the imagination to a certain use of language that is more open to semantic innovation. What is truly abolished, however, is the obligatory relationship with ordinary discourse, allowing for an expression of profound belonging to the world of life. Through metaphor, ‘the ontological tie of our being to other beings and to being is allowed to be said by poetic discourse. What is thus allowed to be said is what I am calling the second order reference, which in reality is the primordial reference’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 175). Being is not envisaged by Ricoeur on a contemplative or purely discursive plane. It opens up onto action, onto the formulation of motivations and projects through which the internal and intimate rapport between action and imagination is established: ‘There is no action without imagination’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 177). Further, it allows space for ideology and utopia, the inseparable poles of the social imaginary. ‘The truth of our condition is in the analogic link which makes fellow man accessible to us across a number of imaginative practices, such as ideology and utopia’ (Ricoeur 1991a, 181).
In Ricoeur’s thesis dealing with ‘The Philosophy of the Will’, Jean-Luc Amalric traces the origins of the importance placed on the imagination (Amalric 2013, 109). He demonstrates that Ricoeur attributes the role of mediator, essential to the act of existing, to the imagination despite the break with the cogito. He perceives an increase in the power of the imagination, which primarily plays the role of operator of choice at the intersection of need and desire, and which will become central in Fallible Man (Ricoeur 1986). The imagination thus finds itself at the heart of Ricoeur’s definition of desire. His phenomenological approach reveals a movement from the involuntary to the voluntary. This movement is only made possible by the actions of the imagination, which plays the role of mediator between need and desire, as well as between thought and action. In this first approach, the imagination remains subordinate to perception: ‘Imagination cannot charge need’s intentionality unless perception appraises it of its object and of the way to obtain it’ (Ricoeur 1966, 95). The placement of the imagination as secondary to perception, however, is only a superficial view, as the Ricoeurian understanding of perception and attentive focus amounts to being activities of the imagination. ‘For Ricoeur, it becomes apparent that focused imaginings are the very condition of our freedom’ (Amalric 2013, 109). Above any consideration of the strictly creative potential of the imagination, Ricoeur assigns a nodal place to the imagination’s anticipatory ability, which places representative resources at the service of action. ‘Imagination is also, and perhaps primarily, a militant power in the service of a diffuse sense of the future by which we anticipate the actual-to-be, as an absent actual at the basis of the world’ (Ricoeur 1966, 97). Jean-Luc Amalric defines the Ricoeurian philosophy of the imagination as an attempt, stemming from the ontology of being as act, to join two domains that traditional philosophy has a habit of separating: poetic discourse and imaginative practice. ‘It is this poetico-practical imagination which precisely constitutes the generative tension of human action, because it represents at the same time a support for our acts and a call to work on the active transformation of ourselves and the world’ (Amalric 2013, 496). This same attempt to articulate with and open towards historicised action is encountered in the work of Castoriadis, Ricoeur’s theory being not far removed from his notion of the social-historical.
In the 1960s, Ricoeur faced a challenge to his hermeneutics in the popularity of structuralism. He was to reveal his response in three stages. After grafting hermeneutics onto his work, and prior to making a detour through a discussion of the historical dimension mid-way between these two tasks, Ricoeur demonstrated how one cannot impose self-closure on a text. With the publication of La Métaphore vive in 1975 (see Ricoeur 2003). Ricoeur demonstrates a turnaround from the upstream to the downstream of the text, reopening it to a field of multiple possibilities in its imaginary poetic dimension. The poetic dimension has always been claimed as essential by Ricoeur. The concept is at the horizon of all of Ricoeur’s works following his thesis ‘The Philosophy of the Will’. (Already at the time of its completion, he announced his intention to publish a poetic of will.) As well as insisting on the hermeneutic circle, the circular link which binds belief and understanding, Ricoeur establishes a complementarity between the creative behaviour of metaphor and the speculative behaviour of concept. ‘Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of the imagination into a “thinking more” at the conceptual level. This struggle to “think more,” guided by the “vivifying principle” is the “soul” of interpretation’ (Ricoeur 2003, 358). Creation is linked to speculative work and Ricoeur goes so far as to assign to this poetic emergence, to this autopoiesis, a truly central place in his theories.
In the days of structuralism, where everything was resolved using stylistic tropes, in particular metaphor and metonymy, which served as an excuse to establish the limits of a text’s closure, Ricoeur chose to focus on the study of metaphor. This allowed him to show how in its most intimate essence, metaphor is associated with the connectivity of the verb ‘to be’ and opens onto a referent, a dimension external to language which confers upon this dimension the same tensional role as the notion of truth. He thus assigns a major role to metaphor while at the same time imposing limitations: ‘To ground what was called metaphorical truth is also to limit poetic discourse’ (Ricoeur 2003, 6).
Ricoeur reminds us how the genre to which metaphor belongs, rhetoric, fell into disuse even though Aristotle associated it with a grand ambition, that of governing public discourse. Contrary to the popular idea of considering form as being secondary to message, which relegates metaphor to the status of gratuitous ornament in thought, Ricoeur demonstrates the extent to which Aristotle’s metaphor, repositioned in the context of mimesis, partakes of a double tension: ‘On the one hand the imitation is at once a portrayal of human reality and an original creation; on the other, it is faithful to things as they are and it depicts them as higher and greater than they are’ (Ricoeur 2003, 35). From the conclusion of his first study, which explores the rapport between rhetoric and poetic in the theories of Aristotle, Ricoeur opens up the question of action, of the possible awakening of the dormant potential and buried capacities of action, as the very locus of the ontological function of metaphoric discourse.
Metaphors refer back to a meaning, to a referent, and, as such, need to be contextualised. They are subject to the wearing effects of time and then most often fall into the language of common usage. From this moment on, they are but dead metaphors, assimilated, fully absorbed into the language which has forgotten their metaphoric component. So it was, for example, with the common expression ‘the leg of the chair’. In the same way ‘“Comprendre” [comprehend, understand] can have a philosophical sense because we no longer hear “prendre” [take, take hold]’ (Ricoeur 2003, 346). When the poet asserts that ‘time is a beggar’ or that old age is like ‘a straw of dried hay’, new meanings appear; however, a new world seems to reveal itself to the reader through such metaphors, which one can classify as live, based on their capacity to upset the conventions of language and refresh our perspective. The live metaphor does not stand on the side of simple resemblance; its place of predilection is to be found in its distance from common identification. ‘Only authentic metaphors, that is living metaphors, are at once meaning and event’ (Ricoeur 2003, 115). Metaphor is simultaneously a form of distance and a means of reducing that distance in so far as it carries within itself a conflict – between an old meaning that is resistant to replacement and a new meaning that clears its own path to potential relevance. While metaphor can appear as a fusion of meaning, it is in fact the very subject of a conflict between old and new meaning. Ricoeur thus locates in the trope that is metaphor (the stylistic icon which consists of substituting one signifier with another, both being similar), an internal dynamic of change and of resistance to change. ‘Metaphor is the process through which the speaker reduces the deviation by changing the meaning of one of the words’ (Ricoeur 2003, 179).
This modification of meaning is conceived by Ricoeur as ‘the response of discourse to the threat of destruction represented by semantic impertinence’ (2003, 179). It is thus in the surplus of meaning that this creativity resides, carried towards other possible worlds. In this leap towards new possible meanings, the threat which weighs over the destruction of the initial, literal meaning must find a way through, must find a creative opening. Metaphor does not commence from a nothingness of writing, but from sedimental meaning. The new gap takes its force from this existing meaning in order to innovate. Metaphor signals the arbitrary nature of the break between the traditional and the new, and indicates the pertinence of the Gadamerian concept of tradition as live tradition, revisited by the questions of present modernity. Its function is that of expressing singularity, of revealing. It thus connects with an ontological dimension found in the last of Ricoeur’s studies, as already outlined at the end of the first section dedicated to Aristotle. Philosophical discourse is thus able to account for the semantic ambition of poetic discourse, thanks to its reflexive capacity. ‘Far from locking language up inside itself, this reflective consciousness is the very consciousness of its openness’ (Ricoeur 2003, 360). The poetic horizon leads directly to an ontology, a kind of promised land much more than an identity base. At the origin of this process of metaphorisation, the ‘ontological vehemence’ of the semantic aim only has at its disposal indications of meaning, not determinate meanings (Ricoeur 2003, 354). This suspending movement reopens onto a referent, within a return to a world which sits within the phenomenological tradition.
Marx plays a definite role in Ricoeur’s thinking regarding the necessary task of unveiling meaning, regarding the unfolding of a philosophy of suspicion. In the manner of Freud, Marx brings to the social and political landscape the weapons of critical analysis and suspicion, thus forging a necessary passage away from initial naivety. He also contributes by enriching what Ricoeur, in the middle of the 1970s, came to call the social imaginary; ideology and utopia being considered as its two indispensable expressions. While these two forms of the social imaginary are particularly disparaged – ideology being in fact dismissed as a simple dissimulation of science and utopia as an escape from the real – Ricoeur finds in Marx a means of restoring their double integrative and subversive function. He defines three usages for the notion of ideology (Ricoeur 1991b). The first is envisaged as a means of concealment, like a reversed image of reality which transforms praxis into the imaginary, an idea to which the younger Marx resorts in The Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. The second meaning, however, passes through a process of legitimisation, though a universalisation of particular interests. ‘Marx says that the ruling class imposes its ideas as the ruling ideas by representing them as ideal and universal’ (Ricoeur 1991b, 317). A third function, that of integration, can be added to these two, manifesting itself notably on occasions of commemorative ceremony. Ideology thus carries positivity, a constructive aim. At the same time, the three levels can fuse; ideology can degenerate by transforming itself from its first manifestation as falsifying into a legitimising dimension. In the context of the 1970s, this re-evaluation of the role of ideology represents an alternative to the contemporary, dominant Althusserian reading of this concept which was purely negative, restricted to its first meaning of illusory living and dissimulation.
In the same way, with regard to utopia, Ricoeur envisages three levels of efficiency in a complementary relationship with ideology. Faced with the integrative function of ideology, utopia is his ‘elsewhere’, his alternative. It can be a source of inspiration for pathological versions, claiming to announce proven eschatologies. At the same time, utopia can rediscover a liberating function while maintaining the field of possibilities. ‘Utopia is what prevents the horizon of expectation from fusion with the field of experience. It is this that maintains the separation between hope and tradition.’4
In another piece, Ricoeur examines the coupling of science and ideology, central to the works of Althusser and based on a theme of rupture (Ricoeur 1991c). Here again, he opposes a restrictive definition of ideology, such as that employed by Marxism, which assimilates this dimension with a simple, social instrumentalisation in terms of lies, illusions, and falsification. Behind this strategy which denounces the normative other, Ricoeur reminds whoever adopts this approach of suspicion that he also does so in the name of implicit values, themselves masked by an overhanging stance. It is thus presupposed that ‘ideology is the thought of my adversary, the thought of the other. He does not know it, but I do’ (Ricoeur 1991c, 248). Aristotle first challenged such a pretentious statement in the name of a science seen as disengaged from all contamination by the Platonists: opposing it with pluralism of methods and degrees of truth. Granted, Ricoeur does not renounce any form of opposition between science and ideology, but it is on the condition that it be reformulated and that it should part with the peremptory character of Althusserianism.
Ideology holds several functions and its interpretation by Marx is only one of the connecting pieces that make up a pluralist phenomenon: its dissimulative, negative side, its distortion of the real. Marx thus marks out a component of ideology that is of clear importance, referring to the symbolic constitution of the social bond (Ricoeur 1977) on which its mystifying function attaches itself and which makes of it ‘an unsurpassable phenomenon of social existence, insofar as social reality always has a symbolic constitution’ (Ricoeur 1991c, 255). Renouncing all overhanging positions, Ricoeur proposes a more modest discourse of symmetrisation and historicisation of the knowing gaze: ‘The elements of a solution seem to me to be contained in a discourse of a hermeneutical character on the conditions of all historical understanding’ (Ricoeur 1991c, 266). The coupling of science and ideology is thus fundamentally transformed on the basis of a number of presuppositions: objectifying knowledge is preceded by a relationship of belonging. A margin of autonomy can thus be seen in this coupling, as the act of detachment is completely necessary. Yet if the critique of ideologies is freed from its engrained constraints, it can only be partially. ‘The theory of the ideology is here subsumed to an epistemological constraint of noncompleteness and nontotalisation, which has its hermeneutic justification in the very condition of understanding’ (Ricoeur 1991c, 268).
Ricoeur also dealt with the philosophy of suspicion in his encounter with the work of Freud between 1960 and 1965, which led him to publish his essay on Freud, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (Ricoeur 1965).5 He follows Freud in his ambition to confer a psychic reality to dreams and fantasy and, beyond this, to the whole imaginary dimension of the drive. The imaginary remains located at the point of origin of desire, in all its manifestations. Freud’s work is held yet more closely by Castoriadis, who ended his Freudian journey by becoming a professional psychoanalyst in 1973.
In his masterful trilogy, Time and Narrative, published between 1983 and 1985, Ricoeur demonstrated that narrative is the guardian of time, thereby going against structuralist concepts of the eclipse of the narrative in historical discourse and the absence of diachronic logic in synchronic studies. Ricoeur rediscovers the founding character of the reconfigurative power of narrative, starting from an imaginary that reconfigures time, whether it be that of fictional or of historical narrative. On this occasion, Ricoeur delves into fictional narrative in order to examine in what way the latter will achieve a configuration of time. At the crossroads between the prefiguration and refiguration of time, he situates himself within a sole configuration of time, a configuration of a time liberated from the need for documentary archive. This fictional experience of time, detached from all lieu-tenance (standing-in)6 of the text, continues to be placed under the mimetic sign and corresponds to the stage which Aristotle defines as Mimesis II. In this respect, the narrative of fiction is related to the historical narrative in a common formulation of plot: ‘In this sense, we have simply returned to literature what history had borrowed from it’ (Ricoeur 1985, 157). The fables of time explored by Ricoeur in three works, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, function due to a kind of Ariadne’s thread which brings into being a temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous and manages to bring discordance and concordance together, within a narrative configuration. The comparison of these three works presents the innumerable possibilities that reside in the imaginative variations on time.
With Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf insists on the plurality of the experiences of time, caught between the time that is monumental and the time that is mortal. Time is therefore what renders possible the networking of forms of consciousness that remain fundamentally solitary. ‘This experience of time is neither that of Clarissa, nor that of Septimus, it is neither that of Peter, nor that of any other character. Instead, it is suggested to the reader by the reverberation of one solitary experience in another solitary experience’ (Ricoeur 1985a, 112; emphasis added). In Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, a novel about time marked by a progressive abolition of chronology, the hero, Hans Castorp, gets sucked into the universe of a sanatorium. The whole structure of the novel amounts to this temporal deconstruction, comprising a suite of seven chapters covering a seven-year period. The split between the motionless time of those above and the world of those down below grows bigger, as seen in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. ‘Now that the law of those up above has won out, all that is left is to bury oneself deeper in the thickness of time. There are no more witnesses from down below. The time of feeling has eliminated clock time’ (Ricoeur 1985a, 121). In Search of Lost Time, by Proust, is caught in the tension between the foci of an ellipsis. On the one hand, there is the lost time, perceived as a suspension of time that has been recovered, as eternity and as an extra-temporal form of being. On the other hand, there is the act of regaining the time that has been lost. The final decision to write abolishes this duality and brings about a second meaning in the time that has been regained, that of a lost time resuscitated, a fugitive moment anchored in a sustained piece of writing. The novel succeeds in locating this lost impression through the usage of metaphor, which renders it possible to cross the temporal distance separating vision from recognition. The last word of In Search of Lost Time reminds the reader that the ambition of this entire quest was a returning of men to their place ‘in Time’ (Proust 2003, 532).
From this study of fictional narratives, there appears a major difference in the treatment of time as compared with the manner in which it is employed in a historical narrative. ‘Fictional narrative loosens time, enlarging the arch of imaginative variations, historical narrative contributes to loosening time by unifying and homogenising it’ (Mongin 1998, 156). On another level, that of refiguration (Mimesis III ), is found the time recounted by the historian. Situated between cosmic and intimate time, it reconfigures time through specific connectors. Ricoeur thus places the historical discourse within a tension specific to it, the tension between narrative identity and the ambition of truth. The poetic of narrative appears as a means of transcending the aporias of a philosophical apprehension of time.
Whereas there was a tendency in the 1990s, and with increasing prevalence ever since, for the past to be memorialised and institutionalised as heritage, once more Ricoeur reacted to preserve the imaginary dimension of a possible future, one that would not be the simple conservation of the past, to retain a future turned towards creativity, towards the void of the new. This is one of the principle motivations behind his writing and publication in 2000 of Memory, History, Forgetting. In this work, the concept of représentance amounts to something which has occurred, to a factual reality, but not in the fashion of a simple representation or reflection. Between the latter and historical writings, there is, once more, a major role for the imagination, that of the historian as well as of the reader. ‘The idea of a deep structure of the imagination owes its indisputable fruitfulness to the tie it establishes between creativity and codification’ (Ricoeur 2000, 253). In this reconfiguration of the past in its aftermath, the imaginary finds itself mobilised to allow the historian to successfully perform a presentation of the past. Ricoeur thus places emphasis on delinearisation within the relationship with the past which no longer necessarily follows the classic, logical line of consecution for ‘one can speak of a rebound-effect of the future onto the past even within the retrospective viewpoint of history. The historian has the opportunity to carry herself in imagination back to back to a given moment of the past as having been present’ (Ricoeur 2000, 381). The effort necessary to immerse oneself again in the present of past societies has important epistemological effects. It allows for the reopening of all fields of possible outcomes, whether eventuated or otherwise, which constitute the present of past societies. This amounts to a movement away from fate and a downplaying of strict forms of historical determinism, which reintroduces contingency but without denying the field of constraints; of explored expectations, hope, fears, and predictions which have left their mark on the men of the past. This approach, which effectively renders our space of experience more indeterminate, seeks to make the horizons of expectation more closely determined by new imaginative variations, reinvigorating hope in the future.
THE IMAGINARY BETWEEN CHAOS AND INSTITUTION IN CASTORIADIS’S WORKS
The recourse to the imaginary is equally fundamental in Castoriadis’s works and allowed him to distance himself from Marxism. Its importance was realised by Castoriadis between 1963 and 1964, when he attended Lacan’s seminar and shifted his interest from Marx to Freud, while critiquing Marxism with increasing openness. This shift through which Castoriadis left this worthless surround is a moment of major emancipation which led him to conduct an extensive project about human creation. Through the concept of the imaginary, Castoriadis leaves the theory of reflection which links infrastructure and superstructure in a more or less complex manner. Admittedly, Althusser allowed superstructures to be seen as autonomous through the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, which he conceived as dominant authorities in some modes of production. Ultimately, however, the economic field remains decisive. While Marxist determinism has the effect of relegating all cultural expressions of societies to a secondary position, Castoriadis claims their primal importance for an understanding of the historical process: ‘History is impossible and inconceivable outside of the productive or creative imagination, outside of what we have called the radical imaginary as this is manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution, before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146).
During the 1960s and 1970s, a tendency developed, notably among historians under the sway of the third-generation paradigm of the Annales, to consider ideological phenomena, mentalities, and culture as authorities that have their own endogenous coherence. Despite this, however, they remained only secondary entities when compared with the socio-economic substrate. Castoriadis, for his part, made the imaginary a crucible of his ontology and gave it a prevalent position in his conception of the social-historical, as attested by the title of his great work, The Imaginary Institution of Society, published in 1975. He thus precedes and announces the evolution of the French historical school of the Annales that had, under Braudel, favoured social and economic history and then adopted the notion of mentalities, which experienced its peak of influence in the 1970s. This notion continued to be utilised as an extension of categories in use in economic and social history, thus giving rise to a social history that transposes socio-professional divisions on to the level of culture. Only a few years later did the imaginary dimension come to be actually explored, when restoring the world as a representation became a concern, at the time of the ‘critical turning point’ of the Annales in the years 1988–1989 (see Delacroix, Dosse, and Garcia 2007).
Over the course of this evolution, George Duby assumed the role of precursor, as he had in other fields. He expressed his debt to Castoriadis, even when the latter was far removed from the sphere of historians, if not for some Hellenists such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet. From 1973, Duby devoted his seminar to the exploration of a topic in a way that resulted, in 1978, in a publication entitled The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Duby 1980). When interviewed, he attested to the role that Castoriadis’s publication had in the choice of the title: ‘As for the word “imaginary,” I believe I was indebted to Castoriadis, whose book The Imaginary Institution of Society, published three years before mine, developed the idea of a society that institutes itself through the image it has of itself’ (Duby 1996, 174–92). The connection between Castoriadis and historians could have been fulfilled in 1978, when he was called upon to contribute a text (L’Arc, 1978):
The next issue of L’Arc will be dedicated to Georges Duby, and it is strongly hoped that you will participate. It was decided with Georges Duby that this instalment would deal with a question of interest to him rather than with himself ... It will be about ‘the link that exists between the mental plane and the functioning of society’ and ‘how the imaginary and the concrete go together in the life of societies’. (Cordier 1997)
Castoriadis, overwhelmed by his activities, did not follow up and this connection has remained imperceptible.
For some young historians among the new generation coming after the ‘critical turning point’, this relatedness became particularly inspiring. Such was the case of the current managing director of the Annales, Etienne Anheim. As a medievalist, dissatisfied at the time by the usages of the notions of ideology or mentalities, he considered the notion of the imaginary, as it was defined by Castoriadis, as an operational heuristic instrument for historical research. Etienne Anheim discovered the work of Castoriadis through his friend Vincent Azoulay in 1992, when he was in the preparatory classes for admission to the Grandes Écoles.7 In 1993, Anheim entered the École normale supérieure, a teacher training college in Paris. He was principally interested in attempting to formulate a social history of cultural forms and in reflecting on cultural objects in a transitional phase. As he positioned his work within the perspective of a social history of high culture, Castoriadis became a major reference for Etienne Anheim when, in 1998, he began his thesis devoted to patronage and the court culture of the Popes in Avignon during the mid-fifteenth century. The relationship established in the works of Castoriadis between the institution and the imaginary thus became fundamental for Etienne Anheim.
The centrality of the theme of the imaginary in Castoriadis’s works stems especially from his conversion to psychoanalysis, from the influence of Lacan, as well as from the critique of Lacan’s views. Although he attended Lacan’s seminar, he refuted the Lacanian schema of the symbolic–real–imaginary triad, which strongly favours the symbolic dimension at the expense of the dimension of the imaginary:
That which, since 1964, I have termed the social imaginary – a term which has since been used and misused in a number of different ways – and, more generally, that which I call the imaginary has nothing to do with representations currently circulating under this heading. In particular, it has nothing to with that which is presented as ‘imaginary’ by certain currents in psychoanalysis: namely, the ‘specular’ which is obviously only an image of and a reflected image, in other words a reflection, and in yet other words a byproduct of Platonic ontology (eidolon). (Castoriadis 1987, 3)
Castoriadis did not endorse Lacan’s conception of a master-signifier pertaining to the symbolic. For him, as he shared the approach of Piera Aulagnier, who became his wife in 1968, the imaginary dimension is fundamental. This approach is based on the pictogram, the foundation for the construction of the subject. It is here that Castoriadis locates what he later calls the radical imaginary, in a moment where it owes nothing to the socius, invalidating any undertaking that reduces the unconscious to its social substrate. This radical imaginary that defines the psyche remains therefore irreducible to its social destiny.
Castoriadis considers Freud’s contribution to the question of the imaginary as being fundamentally ambivalent in as much as he seldom uses the noble term that designates the imagination in German. Instead, he repeatedly uses the terms Phantasy and Phantasieren. However, ‘there is nothing in Phantasy, or in phantasm, that the subject has not already perceived; phantasm is reproduction’ (Castoriadis 2008a, 292). These phantasms then, in Freudian theory, are not of an original and creative character. Rather, they have a secondary role of combining pre-existing elements. Here, Castoriadis sees a paradox: Freud has only ever addressed elements taken from the imagination; however, he makes this activity secondary and places it in the position of matrix. As Castoriadis points out, for a long time, Freud remained attached to his theory of original trauma based on a supposed primitive scene of real seduction revealed through therapy. However, he came to the recognition that there was no difference in the unconscious between effective perception and representation: ‘There are no “indications of reality” in the unconscious. In and for the unconscious the “real” is purely imaginary’ (Castoriadis 2008a, 306). While trying to correlate these two dimensions, Freud, however, remained caught in a dualistic perspective opposing the soul to the body, the psyche to the soma.
Beyond Lacan, an entire intellectual context gave precedence to the structuralist paradigm, the formalism of binary relations around structural linguistics and, at its core, the Saussurean algorithm defined by its break with reality. The main scholar of reference for this group is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in his anthropological approach, favours the symbolic dimension at the expense of the content of expressed meaning. Castoriadis thus found himself confronted by the challenge that the fruitfulness of this research approach presented in the field of social sciences, at a semiological, ethnological, and psychoanalytical level. Like his friend Edgar Morin, he understood very early on its limits and aporias. The imaginary dimension not only allows him to emphasise the importance of any other stratum than that of the symbolic, but it also shows that structures remain captive to history, change, and diverse projections of meaning, all carried out by collectives that underpin the instituting dimension. Castoriadis does not abandon the dimension of the symbolic, but places it on the side of the instituted society: ‘Everything that is presented to us in the social-historical world is inextricably tied to the symbolic ... Institutions cannot be reduced to the symbolic but they can exist only in the symbolic; they are impossible outside of a second-order symbolism’ (Castoriadis 1987, 117).
Contrary to what has been attempted by a number of researchers, such as Wilhelm Reich, doubly influenced by Marx and Freud and far from asserting a double determinism, Castoriadis insists rather on the irreducibility of the psyche to conditioning by the social-historical. While Lacan supports the theory of absolute domination of the symbolic over the imaginary, ‘What we call the symbolic dominates the imaginary’ (Lacan 2006, 686), Castoriadis supports the opposite theory, erasing, over the years, the symbolic in favour of the imaginary. His quest for meaning has the imaginary as its mainstay, especially as ‘meaning overflows all rational or functional symbolism, and the term “imaginary” beckons towards the dimension in that which it is rooted, or that comprises it’ (Fressard 2006, 132).
For all this, the mediation of the symbolic is not denied, but rather is considered as indispensable to the expression of the imaginary: ‘The imaginary has to use the symbolic not only to “express” itself (this is self-evident), but to “exist,” to pass from the virtual to anything more than this’ (Castoriadis 1987, 127). To grasp the meaning of a society, it is necessary to articulate different levels that are indispensable to each other. Even if there is a dimension that is rational, conscious of the lawmakers who establish the institutionalised rules of society, beyond this mastery, ‘[i]nstitutions have drawn their source from the social imaginary. This imaginary must be interwoven with the symbolic, otherwise society could not have “come together”; and have linked up with the economic-functional component, otherwise it could not have survived’ (Castoriadis 1987, 131). Society, according to Castoriadis, must necessarily find its limitations and be able to break its own closure. This break is actually that through which a society appears in its singularity. Its historicity unfolds across this original chasm, that from which it comes and what it has instituted, which serves to cover the abyss without ever really successfully eradicating it.
As against the structuralist closure, Castoriadis reminds us of the double dimension of the symbolic, which pertains to a logic both ‘ensidic’ and imaginary. Ricoeur considers two planes of meaning to be complimentary: the semiological level of rationality, which operates through its combination of signs, and the hermeneutic level, which refers to interpretative plurality through its multiple variations. In the same vein, Castoriadis also brings into consideration the necessary complementarity between the ensidic and the imaginary. While Ricoeur emphasises this function of the imaginary, it also operates in Castoriadis’s writings, between Chaos and institution: ‘The world as a magma of significations is characterised by a radical “indeterminacy” thanks to which new determinations can emerge’ (Legros 2008, 139). Castoriadis opened a new perspective into which, from 1975 onwards, he never ceased to delve. This perspective rejected simplistic alternatives and hyperbolic conceptions, whether they consider that the function of institutions wholly explains society or whether they see in the symbolic the explanatory crucible of the society that is studied. Neither of these levels can be neglected, and he does not question the relevance of functionality any more than the efficiency of the symbolic, provided that they are not understood as covering over the totality of meaning that spills over from all directions:
Not freely chosen, not imposed upon a given society, neither a neutral instrument nor a transparent medium, neither an impenetrable opacity nor an irreducible adversity, neither the master of society nor the flexible slave of functionality, not a direct and complete means of partaking of a rational order – symbolism determines the aspects of social life (and not merely those it was supposed to determine) while simultaneously being full of interstices and of degrees of freedom. (Castoriadis 1987, 125)
Castoriadis acknowledges the fact that Marx had a strong grasp of the role that the imaginary dimension plays in society when he spoke of ‘commodity fetishism’. Marx refers to something that is not within the realm of tangible reality, but does not follow his analysis through to the end: He limits the imaginary to its simple function as expression of alienation, failing to see its opposite pole, which is situated on the side of creation. In the 1970s, faced with the structuralist trend and the success of the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Castoriadis, distanced himself from the conception dominating anthropology which aimed at conceptualising a rationality endogenous to symbolic systems cut off from their institutional and functional substrate: ‘Nor can institutions be understood simply as symbolic networks’ (Castoriadis 1987, 136). The question unresolved by structuralism is that of knowing why such a system of symbols has prevailed here and not there, as well as the nature of the meanings these symbols carry: ‘It is only relative to these significations that we can understand the “choice” of symbolism made by every society, and in particular the choice of its institutional symbolism’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146).
From the perspective of Castoriadis, the imaginary dimension allows history and the emergence of the new to be given again a genuine role, whereas synchronic studies of structuralism marginalise the temporal logics specific to the course of history: ‘History is impossible and inconceivable outside of the productive or creative imagination’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146). This role of the imaginary is not limited to archaic societies, but also accompanies the progressive rationalisation of social relationships, and thus modernity. Additionally, it is advanced by the increase in the needs created and maintained by contrivances further and further distanced from the natural necessities required for the survival of the species: ‘More than any other society, too, modern society permits us to see the historical manufacturing of needs that are produced today before our own eyes’ (Castoriadis 1987, 156–7).
As with the synchronic studies of structuralism, the phenomenological tradition is also not satisfactory for Castoriadis, as it rests upon a realist illusion according to which consciousness is consciousness of something. It thus finds itself paradoxically condemned to being a solipsistic consciousness in so far as it is impossible to know what goes on within what is other than the self: ‘From a strict phenomenological view, I have no access to the experience of “other people”; they and their “experiences” exist only as “phenomena” to me’ (Castoriadis 2008a, 235). As such, the phenomenological approach remains captive to an egological point of view. The evolution of Husserl towards the world of life, as noted in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (1967), is no more satisfactory, as it swaps the egological view for a self-centred view, on a larger scale. It is true that in contemporary times, Sartre and Bachelard both gave the imaginary a place in their philosophy; however, for Castoriadis, this place is absolutely essential. It is the very matrix of his ontology and occupies a crossroad position in his thought (Castoriadis 2007). For him, Being does not pertain to any system, but to Chaos, to the Abysmal. It is not within time because it is itself time, and it is the source of the creation and the destruction of created forms. According to Castoriadis, being first emerges from its origins in the psyche, and then, second, ‘as a socialised individual’ (Tomès and Caumières 2011, 157). It is from this that the major role played by the institutions enables the socialisation of a psyche that was formerly unsuited to survival.
Castoriadis clearly intended to deepen his own notion of the imaginary, starting with the Freudian input. He saw in Freud someone who had escaped inherited thought and, with his discovery of the unconscious, managed to break the established division between the real and its representation. Freud embodied a new approach when he claimed that nothing allows one to distinguish, within the psyche, a reality and a representation vested with affect, and when he stated that the unconscious has no experience of time. Herein lies the contradiction: Manifestations of the unconscious lie in interconnections that are neither within nor outside of the subject.
In the course he delivered at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty expressed his point of view regarding the institution and advocated for a necessary link with a historical dynamic, constantly reusing the past to justify a renewed meaning. Castoriadis’s conception is not far different: ‘Therefore, by institution, we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 77). This anchoring in a praxis that is historically contextualised cannot help but invoke the constant work of the instituting over the instituted in Castoriadis. One also finds, in the work of Merleau-Ponty, the encroachment of the imaginary on perception, ‘namely the fact that our perceptive relation to the world is steeped in unconscious meanings constituting our past, and which the institution has crystalised in the density of our physical being’ (Réa 2006, 80).
To illustrate the magmatic pole included in an abundance of possibilities within creation, Castoriadis takes as a concrete example that of the medieval city, referencing the works of Yves Barel (Castoriadis 2008b), with whom he had formed an amiable relationship in 1981 during the decade of Cerisy, dedicated to ‘self-organisation’. For Castoriadis, the complexity of objects is due to their initial nature, which is related to magma: ‘We will say that an object is magmatic when it is not exhaustively and systematically ensidisable – in other words, reducible to elements and relationships pertaining exclusively and in homogenous fashion to ensidic logic’ (Castoriadis 2008b, 256).8 With temporality located next to the emergence of new principles, Castoriadis sees in the historical process, and notably in its periods of change, a terrain that is ideal for identifying these objects of magmatic origin. Around the tenth century, the Western world developed new principles that came to govern the medieval world, in which the city would play a central role. Castoriadis sees in this period a major rupture in the closure, which recalls what Greece realised in Antiquity: One witnesses a decisive step towards social and individual autonomy. Unlike the Athenians of the fifth century, who saw the establishment of a democratic regime, these medieval cities yearned to conquer their autonomy, developing oligarchic systems in what Yves Barel has termed an ‘order of urban patricians’ (Barel 1978). Castoriadis stands close to Yves Barel, as the major question posed by his study of the medieval city is to know what holds together a society and why the new emerges in history: ‘The answers that Yves Barel offers in his case study are essentially true. The appearance of the medieval city is recognised as a “major discontinuity” (Barel 1978, 74, 165ff.), where one can see the “emergence of new elements” (Barel 1978, 169). The discontinuity is interwoven with a “continuity”’ (Castoriadis 2008b, 266). This self-creation cannot be related back to determinations that would explain its upstream meaning. According to Yves Barel, if one nevertheless seeks what can make this more intelligible, it is necessary to examine the ‘urban imaginary’ (Barel 1978, 182).
The meanings of the social imaginary do not, according to Castoriadis, correspond to the ‘ideal types’ defined by Max Weber; they are not the result of a ‘subjectively targeted’ meaning, but are, in contrast, the condition of possibility for concrete, subjective goals: ‘[S]ocial imaginary significations are “immanent” to the society considered in each case’ (Castoriadis 1987, 367). These meanings acquire presence in the institutions that are the gateway into the social imaginary that they support. Castoriadis thus breaks with the theory of reflection. ‘The difficulty lies in understanding . . . that the social imaginary is not a substance, not a quality, not an action or a passion; that social imaginary significations are not representations, not figures or forms, not concepts’ (Castoriadis 1987, 369). Every society gives itself a global meaning that founds the singularity of its being-together. The common world that society constructs is the result of the constant interplay between the instituting and the instituted that defines its temporal being. The social-historical imaginary both resists the ensemblistic-identarian logic and, at the same time, needs it to exist, to be present and embodied in the instituted, without the instituted escaping the injunctions of innovation conveyed by the instituting.
The social-historical constitutes a dual restriction to the creative powers that echoes the constraints of the present, as much as those of the traditions anchored in the past. This is all the more so, since, according to Castoriadis, certain creations embedded in time constitute ‘historical quasi-transcendentals’. Castoriadis does not share Sartre’s idea of a philosophy of absolute creation in history. On this level, he is more closely aligned to Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, and their concept of ‘concrete freedom’, which is to say, the exercise of a freedom that finds ‘a support in things’, with man being ‘a product-producer, the locus where necessity can turn into concrete freedom’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 134).
As Laurent Van Eynde stresses, Castoriadis’s thinking around the notion of imaginary must be linked back to a philosophical anthropology whose intention is to consider how singularity can modify the essence while continuing to constitute the essence. In other words, how to understand the constitution of universality through singularity: ‘The thought of the possible always leads to reducing singularity to the a priori of the universal. At the very least, it is then up to singularity to surprise us and lead us to discover, in its own emergence, the power of the universal’ (Van Eynde 2006, 65). According to Laurent Van Eynde, Castoriadis’s thinking reaches beyond this insistence on the meaning that disruptive revelations can have over the course of time. He strives to overcome the traditional division between the transcendent and the empirical, which explains his global critique of all that he qualifies as inherited thought. Even if he breaks with transcendentalism, Castoriadis does not mean to adopt relativist stances and to give up on the question of the universal. It is from this perspective, which considers singularity at the same time as universality, that he focuses on the required components of effectiveness and on the concreteness of effectiveness, hence his interest in studies of concrete historical situations: ‘All of which means that Castoriadis’s thought is an anthropology of effectiveness or, if preferred, an ontology of human creation’ (Van Eynde 2006, 67). Thus, it is human creation in history that links the dialectical relationship between the instituting and the instituted, as found at the heart of the historical dynamic:
The anthropology of the imagination in Castoriadis then truly becomes the centre of all philosophical undertaking because it recognises in the imaginary the impulse for philosophy – the desire to know – and, in my view, allows at the same time a synthesis between the Greek ideal of a philosophy, whose advent is linked to that of democracy, and the Aufklärer ideal of individual and social emancipation, synthesis which to my mind is all the more relevant today. (Van Eynde 2006, 74)
Castoriadis explained most clearly this essential position of the imaginary, found at the heart of philosophical reason, in a talk he gave in 1991, published in the journal Diogène in 1992: ‘At the two extremes of knowledge, but also constantly in its centre, we can find the creative power of the human being, which is to say the radical imagination’ (Castoriadis 2008c, 147). Significantly, this point of paradoxical linkage between the two notions most often opposed to each other, those of passion and knowledge, is supported by a connection to the characteristics of the psyche, which Castoriadis can invoke to contradict Aristotle with the claim, ‘What the psyche, as well as society, desires, and what both need, is not knowledge, but belief’ (Castoriadis 2008c, 164).
A REAL PROXIMITY BETWEEN RICOEUR AND CASTORIADIS
This juxtaposition of Ricoeur and Castoriadis with regard to the notion of the imaginary can appear surprising, given their differences. There is a real proximity, however, between the two. In fact, Castoriadis visited the University of Nanterre in 1967 in order to request from Ricoeur that he supervise his thesis dedicated to L’élément imaginaire dans l’histoire [‘The Imaginary Element in History’], which never reached completion. When, in 1970, Ricoeur, holding the position of Dean of the University of Nanterre at the time, had rubbish bins emptied over his head, Castoriadis reacted immediately, expressing his support and indignation:
Regarding the odious incident that took place this week in Nanterre, allow me to express to you all my friendship and at the same time, it must be said, the esteem in which I hold your response. Alas, imbeciles and bastards can be found everywhere. In refusing to respond directly, in revealing in your actions that you do not confuse some maniacs – probably ill, by the way – with their generation nor with a current of ideas, you have not only shown your intelligence in this situation, you have, I believe, also adopted an attitude which will prove to be most profoundly effective in the long term.
The Archives of Paul Ricoeur (Le Fonds Ricoeur) hold a dossier written by Castoriadis containing a manuscript in part drafted under the title ‘The Foundations of the Social-Historical in the Imaginary’. Undated, this manuscript was sent from Castoriadis’s home at the time, Quai Anatole France, prior to 1977. It was read closely by Ricoeur, who has underlined the passages that appeared to him to be the most important.
These epistolary exchanges between Ricoeur and Castoriadis attest to a profound and reciprocated esteem. In 1978, Castoriadis wrote to his supervisor, who spent a good part of each year in the United States, to convey his dissatisfaction at not obtaining a greater response from him:
We are now friends enough for me to allow myself to tell you of my disappointment before the silence that has met my regular correspondence, for six years at least, and everything I have published during this period? ... You are one of those rare people to whose opinions and reactions I attribute importance. Be sure, in any case, that I will welcome with joy any sign coming from you. (Castoriadis 1978)
Several days later, Ricoeur replied to him:
I happily accept your friendly protests, for I feel guilty of having neglected to write, but not of neglecting to read. I read with passion all that you write. I have delivered a course at Nanterre on your Institution Imaginaire de la société and I have on my desk your last contribution to Esprit (Thibaud and Mongin know how much I rejoice that this journal supports your work). (Ricoeur 1978)
Only on one occasion did Castoriadis and Ricoeur have the opportunity of speaking together in public, at the radio program Bon Plaisir on France Culture broadcast on 9 March 1985 (see chapter 1). This exchange discussed the question of the discontinuity of meaning as against the continuity of existence. They agreed on the need to distance themselves from the notion of the radical break inherent in Michel Foucault’s epistème, as well as to state that there exists discontinuities in history: ‘If you accept discontinuity on the level of sense but not on the level of existence, that suits me perfectly. If I were polemical, I would say that you are granting me what I need’ (see chapter 1, p. 7).9 Ricoeur confirms not having perceived a genuine difference in appreciation with Castoriadis. He admits that each configuration is as such new in comparison with all others, that it hasn’t simply arisen from nowhere, and that it links with antecedents. ‘And through a sort of retroaction of our new creations on the old moments, we can deliver possibilities that had been prevented’ (11).
But the real debate between Ricoeur and Castoriadis was in fact never to take place. This debate should have centred on the question of the imaginary, for each has, in their own way, thoroughly explored this dimension, completely essential to both. Moreover, the reasons that explain their common distance from structuralism pertain precisely to the exclusion of the creative dimension of the imaginary from the repetitive and binary logics of closed systems.
—Translated by Natalie J. Doyle
NOTES
1.Translator’s Note: My thanks to Elodie Génin, Léa Giry, Shana Heslin, and especially Fleur Heaney, graduate students of the program in Translation studies at Monash University, for all the valuable support they gave me in the preparation of this translation. Additional thanks must be extended to George Sarantoulias and Erin Carlisle for their valued assistance in the finalisation of the manuscript. Already published English translations of French texts have been used and referenced. Where no English translations were already available, the quotes have been translated especially for this chapter, with the references to the original French texts being provided.
2.Translator’s Note: The author uses the French expression donner à penser, normally translated as ‘to suggest’. The French expression, however, conveys a meaning which is not encapsulated in the verb ‘suggest’.
3.Translator’s Note: Here again, Dosse uses the French expression donner à penser, discussed in note 2.
4.Translator’s Note: This line does not appear in the English translation of Ideology and Utopia.
5.Translator’s Note: Dosse is referring to the original French-language publication of De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (Ricoeur 1965). This work was later translated into English as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (Ricoeur 1970). It is important to note here that Freud and Philosophy contains additional essays that were not included in the French original.
6.Translator’s Note: Here Dosse is playing on the etymology of the word lieutenance (lieutenancy, authority) from the verb tenir (to hold) and the word ‘lieu’ (place), which Ricoeur used in the third volume of Time and Narrative, along with the word représentance (representing), to translate the German word Vertretung and to refer to the reconstruction of the past performed by historical narratives.
7.Translator’s Note: Grandes écoles are selective higher education institutions specific to France. Established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have written and oral entrance examinations (concours), and limited positions available. Candidates normally sit for these examinations after two years of study in dedicated preparatory classes. Among the most prestigious are the Écoles normales supérieures, whose original mission was to train university teachers.
8.Translator’s Note: The term ensidique was coined by Castoriadis to refer in shorthand to what he called logique ensembliste-identitaire, translated as ‘ensemblistic–identitary logic’ (or ‘ensidic logic’), the logic exemplified in set theory which presumes fully determinable identities for both the sets and their components.
9.Hereafter, the references to the dialogue proper appear as single page numbers.
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