Imagination and the Symbolic:Castoriadis and Lacan

I only met Cornelius Castoriadis once, when he visited the Philosophy Department at Essex University in the spring of 1990 to give a series of lectures and seminars over several days. The impression he made was unforgettable. Here was clearly one of the last of a venerable line of philosopher-militants – someone whose political commitment to the deepest kind of thinking made the usual round of academic debate pale into insignificance. I have frequently found the polemical tone of Castoriadis’s writing, even when dealing with abstract theoretical issues, one of the least comfortable aspects of his work, a stylistic residue of the Lenin of Materialism and Empiriocriticism. But one has to acknowledge also the immense strengths which this passionate engagement implied. Castoriadis’s often caustic dismissal of his opponents – what one of the other distinguished speakers in our final-day conference at Essex described as the “piss and vinegar” – was part of the whole extraordinary package. It was the style of someone for whom philosophy was still connected to the idea of changing the world. This personal and political commitment helps to explain the immense weight which is put on the concept of the imagination in Castoriadis’s work – a weight which increased over the years. For it is the unforeseeable creativity of the imagination which forms the core of his notion of autonomy as a revolutionary goal. A subsidiary motive for this stress on imagination was undoubtedly Castoriadis’s need to distance himself from the influence of Lacanian thought, which was so pervasive in France in the 1960s, when he turned towards psychoanalysis. But this is not to say that his attitude to Lacan was unremittingly hostile. On the contrary, he pays tribute to him on a number of occasions, in particular for his reformulation of the significance of the Oedipus complex, with its clear detachment of the symbolic paternal function from the actual person of the father. But Castoriadis does take strong exception to the Lacanian notion of the “symbolic order,” because of what he regards as its threat to the ideal of autonomy: