Creativity and Its Limits, Encounters With Social Construction Ism and the Political in Castoriadis...

Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with SocialConstructionism and the Political in Castoriadis

and Lacan

Yannis Stavrakakis

I

The lack of any seriousdialogue between Lacanian theory and the work by orinspired by Cornelius Castoriadis is perhaps one of the most striking characteris-tics of contemporary “non-conventional” political theory. After distancinghimself from the Ecole Freudienne, Castoriadis embarked on a vicious attack onLacan which can hardly be justified on any grounds (clinical, theoretical, evenpersonal). How is it possible to accept as plausible arguments sentences or viewslike the following: “Yes, Lacanianism is a monstrosity”; descriptions of Lacani-anism as “psychosis, abasement, contempt, enslavement, perversion” which,following Roustang, Castoriadis uses without even placing them in invertedcommas – whatever that might mean. And what about the idea that certain ofLacan’s “sophistries” take “psychoanalysis back sixty-five years”?1 Aside fromthis avalanche of ad hominem arguments, both Castoriadis and some of hissupporters or commentators have persistently failed to engage in a constructiveway with Lacanian theory and remain stuck in reiterating the same old –unfounded, I fear – criticisms. To give only one example, let me just refer to arecent article by Joel Whitebook in which he reiterates Castoriadis’s views on thesupposedly crippling structuralism which robs Lacanian theory of any theoreticalplausibility and political relevance:

His [Castoriadis’s] theoretical critique of le maîtrefollows more or less mutatismutandisfrom his criticisms of classical structuralism. If we disregard the adhominemconsiderations – namely, that Lacan was aristocratic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, misogynist and openly contemptuous of the idea of emancipation – histheories were also intrinsically anti-political on their own. For, like classical struc-turalism on which he drew, they systematically denied the possibility of anythingnew emerging in history and excluded the margin of freedom necessary for any sortof autonomous political action. More specifically, his hypostatization of the deter-minative powers of language – conceived as a machine-like ‘circuit’ – was every bitas ahistorical as the most biologistic doctrines of Freud.2

Whitebook is neither the only one nor the most violent in rearticulating such aview of Lacanian theory; in fact, in the third chapter of his Perversion and Utopia

Constellations Volume 9, No 4, 2002. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UKand 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

he articulates a very intelligent and thorough reading/criticism of certain aspectsof Lacanian theory.3 No doubt, the standpoint expressed in the quote is consistentwith Castoriadis’s views; he was the one to argue that “linguistic structuralism, anillegitimate extrapolation of someaspects of the organisation of language as acode, was pressed by Lévi-Straus into the service of ethnology, and by Lacan intothe service of psychoanalysis.”4 Nevertheless, it can only be based on a ratherselective reading of Lacan’s teaching, a reading which ultimately fails to take intoaccount some of the most simple and well-documented principles of Lacaniantheory.

In fact, Lacan’s project can be seen as radically reformulating classical struc-turalism as well as the Saussurian picture of signification: he introduces a concep-tualization of the symbolic which is not that of a closed circuit but that of analways lacking and incomplete ensemble. This is what he describes as “the lackin the Other.” This is what he has in mind when, in his seminar on The Logic ofFantasy, he points out that language cannot constitute a closed set, that there isno Universe of Discourse.5 The structure typical of structuralism is coherent andcomplete, while Lacan’s structure is antinomical and lacking.6 Furthermore, it isthis lacking character of sedimented meaning that makes possible the emergenceof the subject7 and the continuous (partial) recreation of “identity” (individual orcollective) through new identification acts. Besides, the last twenty years ofLacan’s teaching were consistently devoted to what accounts for this lack in thesymbolic; hence the importance of the register of the “real” (le réel) and of“enjoyment” (jouissance) in Lacanian theory, both of these (interconnected)concepts making abundantly clear the huge distance between Lacan and the struc-turalist omnipotence of closed linguistic structures. In fact, it is this constitutiveand unbridgeable gap between the symbolic/imaginary nexus (the field of socialconstruction and institution) and the always escaping real which also makeshistory possible: if it were feasible for a particular social construction to fullysymbolize the real, then history – the unending play between human creativity(desire) and social dislocation (lack) – would come to an end.

This is not to say, however, that most Lacanians took a more open attitudetowards a dialogue with Castoriadis or his followers. Unable to bypass Casto-riadis’s deleterious comments and misconceptions, they decided to condemnhim to oblivion, surrounding his work with a veil of silence. It is the startingpoint of this paper that something important was missed in this unfortunatereciprocation. A dialogue between Lacanian political theory and the socialtheory advanced by Castoriadis and his commentators is possible and mighteven prove to be quite fruitful. What I will try to argue here, then, is that Casto-riadis’s insistence on the creative role of imagination should not be consideredas something alien or antithetical to Lacanian theory, particularly to the Lacan-ian conception of desire and to Lacan’s theory of signification. In fact, it ispossible from a Lacanian point of view to interrogate and illuminate furtherthis creative/instituting dimension and its ethico-political implications. It is

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Creativity and its Limits: Yannis Stavrakakis 523

also possible to articulate a coherent account of the limits to imagination (thealienating side of human construction), limits which should not be ignored asis usually the case with a naïve, more or less romantic, reading of Castoriadis’swork. In the course of this paper I also hope to show the surprising proximityof the two projects while at the same time highlighting the distinct character ofeach.

Castoriadis himself, in the same text that constitutes his most virulent attackon Lacan, does not refrain from acknowledging the latter’s important contributionin breaking up the conformism, rigidity, and intellectual poverty of officialpsychoanalysis:

Although his undertaking already bore the signs of the deep ambiguities which wereto be resolved, as time passed, in the manner which has been described, nonethelessit has been his merit not only to have been the stone which broke up the stagnationof the pool, not only to have disturbed institutionalised drowsiness and shaken uppseudo-‘specialist’ cretinism by his appeal to disciplines ‘external’ to psychoanaly-sis, but also to have revitalised the reading of Freudian texts, to have restored to lifetheir enigmatic movement, and to have introduced some substantial extensions intopsychoanalytic research. Lacan’s decisive contribution, during this early period,was that he forced people to think. . ..8

Let’s see, then, whether Lacan can still make us think; let’s see whether, in thefirst instance, he can make us think productively vis-à-vis some of Castoriadis’sideas and insights.

II

We can start this exploration with something very basic from Castoriadis’s andLacan’s ontological apparatus, an element which seems to be common to both ofthem and which explains to a certain extent the topicality of their work. I amreferring to what could be called their social constructionism. In Castoriadis’swork, for example, it is clear that the human world, reality itself, in all its differ-ent forms, is socially constructed. According to his view, “society creates itsworld; it invests it with meaning; it provides itself with a store of significationsdesigned in advance to deal with whatever may occur.”9 Everything that consti-tutes our human world – society – is the product of social construction.10The self-institution of society entails the construction of the human world including thecreation of “things,” “reality,” language, norms, values, ways of life and death,“objects for which we live and objects for which we die.”11 Furthermore, thisprocess of social creation or construction is a radical process (it is a creation exnihilo – something to which we shall return), thus being directly related to whatCastoriadis calls the radical instituting imaginary. It is also continuous: “Societyis always historical in the broad, but proper sense of the word: it is always under-going a process of self-alteration.”12


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Two further points are extremely important here. First of all,this process ofsocial construction is also what creates the individual. The social-historical is what“shapes” individuals.13 Second, society always attempts to cover over the traces ofits contingent social institution. One of the ways it tries to do so is by presentingitself as the product of a presocial or extra-social, and thus eternal and unchangingor foundational, source: Gods, heroes, or ancestors are the likeliest candidates,14

and, more recently, the so-called “laws of nature” or the “laws of history.”What would be Lacan’s position here? Is Lacan articulating a similar construc-

tionist argument? In Lacan it is also the case that reality is always precarious andnot some kind of presocial given,15 although this is usually repressed in a varietyof social forms. From a psychoanalytic point of view, reality, the human world, is“upheld, woven through, constituted, by a tress of signifiers.” Reality alwaysimplies the subject’s integration into a play of significations;16 the whole ofhuman reality is nothing more than a montageof the symbolic and the imagi-nary,17 an articulation of signifiers which are invested with imaginary – fantas-matic – coherence and unity. As is very clearly pointed out in Encore, “everyreality is founded and defined by a discourse.”18 Furthermore, in his seminar onThe Psychoses (1955–6), it is made abundantly clear that this Lacanian construc-tionism is not only of psychoanalytic, that is clinical, relevance, but, like Castori-adis’s, implies a more general ontological standpoint. Here the psychoanalytictheorist reveals something that should have been clear to every philosopher:

On reflection, do we need psychoanalysis to tell us this? Aren’t we astounded thatphilosophers didn’t emphasize ages ago that human reality is irreducibly structuredas signifying?

Day and night, man and woman, peace and war – I could enumerate more oppo-sitions that don’t emerge out of the real world but give it its framework, its axes, itsstructure, that organize it, that bring it about that there is in effect a reality for man,and that he can find his bearings therein.19

It follows – and this is another crucial similarity between Lacan and Castori-adis – that the social individual, the social subject, is also something emergingwithin the field of social construction. The subject of the signifier, the socialsubject, is surely one of the nodal points of the Lacanian problematic, a particu-lar aim of which is to register the signifying dependence of this social subject.20

Any identity is constructed through a variety of identifications with socially avail-able objects, that is to say, images and signifiers. Both subjective and social real-ity are articulated at the symbolic and imaginary level.21

It becomes plausible to conclude, then, that a certain social constructionism(both as far as it concerns social reality as well as individual identity or individ-ual identifications) seems to be shared by Lacan and Castoriadis. However, whatare the specific characteristics of their respective constructionisms? Let’s have acloser look. My impression is that what is also shared is the idea that construc-tionism cannot be absolute.



Castoriadis, for his part, is very keen to stress that the social creation or construc-tion of reality through human signification should not be perceived as an intel-lectualistic view. As he points out, whenever he speaks about “social imaginarysignifications” he is not speaking about “intellectualistic” or “noematic” contents.These significations organize, articulate, and invest with meaning the world ofeach and every society by leaning each time upon the “intrinsic” ensidic organi-zation of the first natural stratum22:

The construction of its own world by each and every society is, in essence, thecreation of a world of meanings, its social imaginary significations, which organizethe (presocial, ‘biologically given’) natural world, instaurate a social world properto each society (with its articulations, rules, purposes, etc.), establish the ways inwhich socialized and humanized individuals are to be fabricated, and institute themotives, values, and hierarchies of social (human) life.23

In other words, Castoriadis’s constructionism is not of a relativist or solipsistkind. Not only is extra-discursive, presocial nature the subject matter of socialinstitution; it also poses limits and creates obstacles to human construction.24

A similar argument can be put forward from a Lacanian point of view focus-ing on the crucial distinction between “reality” and the “real.” Here, reality corre-sponds to the socially constructed identity of objects, whereas the real nameswhat is not part and parcel of discursive institution, what is impossibleto inscribein its totality into any discursive articulation. Reality is what societies constructutilizing their symbolic and imaginary resources. “Cancelling out the real, thesymbolic creates ‘reality,’ reality as that which is named by language and can thusbe thought and talked about. The ‘social construction of reality’ implies a worldthat can be designated and discussed with the words provided by a social group’s(or subgroup’s) language.”25 The real is what remains outside this field of repre-sentation, what remains impossible to symbolize. “What cannot be said in itslanguage is not part of its reality . . . The real, therefore, does not exist, since itprecedes language; Lacan reserves a separate term for it, borrowed from Heideg-ger: it ‘ex-ists.’ It exists outside and apart of reality,” both in the sense that it isthere before the articulation of social reality, before the socialization of the humaninfant, and in the sense of something which “has not yet been symbolized, or evenresists symbolization” and thus exists “alongside” our socially constructed real-ity.26 In fact, the gap between the real and reality is unbridgeable, but this is alsowhat stimulates human desire, the unending (ultimately failed) attempts of realityto colonize and domesticate the real, to fully represent it in discourse.

We can conclude, then, that both Castoriadian constructionism and theconstructionism characteristic of the Lacanian field are very cautious not tocollapse into solipsism. In fact, it seems that they also propose a very similararticulation or interaction – in actual fact, a relation of tension, incommensura-bility, or gap – between real and reality (Lacan), the natural world and socialimaginary significations (Castoriadis).



The importance of constructed reality and meaning in general for humans iswhat accounts for what Castoriadis calls the “defunctionalization” of the humanpsyche, a defunctionalization which makes possible “the detachment of the repre-sentation from the object of biological ‘need,’ therefore the cathexis of biologi-cally irrelevant objects.”27 For Castoriadis it is clear that human societies aremarked by this priority of meaning over biological need. In The Imaginary Insti-tution of Societyhe asks the following:

Is it not obvious that, once we leave the company of higher apes, human groupsprovide themselves with needs that are not simply biological? . . . A dog eats to live,but one could just as well say that it lives to eat: for it (and for the species, dog)living is nothing but eating, breathing, reproducing and so on. But this is meaning-less with respect to a human being or to a society.

And this because human societies have to articulate all these needs and can onlydeal with them within “a symbolic network” which is first encountered inlanguage.28 Moreover, this symbolic dependence is also what creates new “afunc-tional” or even “antifunctional” needs.29

Such a picture is definitely congruent with our everyday experience. Forexample, we know that procreation presupposes sexual intercourse, but that doesnot reveal much about the vast alchemy of desire and sexuality marking humanhistory. As was pointed out in a recent title for the Observer Review, “Birds do it,bees do it, and rabbits are at it, well, as rabbits. But none of them dress up inrubber.” One cannot but be struck, furthermore, by the proximity of the Castoria-dian view to the well-known Lacanian distinction between need, demand, anddesire. In Lacan, the level of need and of its unmediated natural, instinctual satis-faction is initially shared by all – human and non-human – animal life. Human-ity, however, by virtue of the symbolic character of society, is forced – orprivileged – to lose this direct, unmediated relation to need. Entering into thesymbolic, the world of language, the speaking subject forever loses all unmedi-ated access to a level of “natural” needs and their quasi-automatic satisfaction.Every need has to be articulated in language, in a demand to the Other (initiallythe mother). As is revealed in “The Signification of the Phallus” and “Subversionof the Subject and Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” it is thisdifference between need and demand that introduces the dimension of desire:“desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction [need], nor the demand for love, butthe difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, thephenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung).”30

In Lacanian theory desire is thus constitutive and not secondary, human life isstructured around this desire. In fact, human reality itself is articulated arounddesire in the sense that the emergence of reality (as incommensurable with thereal) presupposes the loss of our unmediated access to real need; it presupposesthe imposition of the symbolic. By imposing a gap between pre-symbolic needand demand, symbolic castration permits or, better, forces humans to pursue their



desire within socially constructed reality. This also explains why, according toLacan, desire is the essence of reality – but not the essence of man, as Spinozathought, since, as Lacan points out, this reference to man cannot be retained in ana-theological discourse.31This is crucial because it leads directly to Lacan’s rejec-tion of humanism, psychologism, and subjective essentialism: desire is always thedesire of the (lacking) Other; it is conditioned by its symbolic dependence – theimplication being that it is, by definition, unsatisfiable and alienating. Desire assuch can never be satisfied in the sense that desire is always structured around thequest for the pre-symbolic real, our pre-symbolic real enjoyment (jouissance) –something which is irretrievably lost as soon as we enter social life. The price forgaining access to reality (symbolic reality, socially constructed reality) and tosocially sanctioned pleasure is the sacrifice of this real (jouissance). No identifi-cation, no social construction or relation, can restore or recapture it for us. But itis exactly this impossibility which keeps desire – and history – alive. We neverget what we have been promised, but that’s exactly why we keep longing for it.Alienation is revealed as the other side – but also, and more crucially, the condi-tion of possibility – of desire, of human creation and historical action.

It is here, I suspect, that Lacan and Castoriadis start parting company. Startingfrom analogous versions of constructionism, they are led to quite differentconclusions. Although they both acknowledge the gap between real and reality,natural stratum and social imaginary significations, the conclusions they drawfrom this are very different: Castoriadis is led to celebrate the moment of creativ-ity, while Lacan is led to stress the constitutive alienation of human experience.How can we account for this paradox? And what are its implications for contem-porary ethico-political thinking? These questions will animate the final and mostextensive part of this essay.

III

First of all, it has to be stated very clearly that for Lacan creativity, construction,and alienation are two sides of the same coin. In actual fact, Lacan was very inter-ested in exploring questions of creativity. Everyone knows, for example, that heoften used literary and artistic creation in order to open new avenues for psycho-analytic research; some of his most famous seminars deal with the works ofSophocles, Poe, Joyce, Shakespeare, etc. Of course, the objection usually is thathe understood this creative force of humanity as secondary, severely limited bysome kind of structuralist conformism. What is Lacan’s reply, for example, to theex nihilo creativity put forward by Castoriadis? Well, it might surprise somepeople, but Lacan would probably agree with this ex nihilocharacter of humansymbolization (after all he devotes a whole session, 27 January 1960, todiscussing this topic – a session which is entitled “On Creation ex nihilo” andwhich forms part of his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis).32

He seems, however, much more careful than Castoriadis to also take into



account the price involved in human creation. He does so by avoiding a simplereplacement of the religious conception of creation ex nihilowith a subjectivistconception. As Chaitin has observed, Lacan’s view on creativity “differs fromthat of romanticism and humanism in that, instead of transferring the creativepower from God to the autonomous subject, Lacan has moved it onto the signi-fier itself.”33 Yes, for Lacan human creativity is the only way we can attempt torecapture the lost/impossible real – the jouissancesacrificed upon entering thesocial world of language, upon articulating need in demand. But since thisattempt can only take place through symbolization, through symbolic articula-tion (and imaginary representation); and since, furthermore, the symbolic is nota closed order but an inherently lacking space, ultimately incapable of bridgingthe gap between symbolic and real, then human creativity also entails aprofoundly alienating dimension.34 There is no creation without alienation – nocreation that is not, to some extent, alienating – which is, however, to be distin-guished from a position stating that there is “no alienation without creation.” Inthis sense, there is no point in glorifying creativity: by its own measure, by themere fact that creation relies on a medium which is unable to realize ourfantasies of wholeness, creativity loses its romantic and humanist gloss. This iswhy, instead of the creative psyche, Lacan stresses the subject of lack. Thesubject is lacking exactly because it is unable to recapture its lost/impossiblereal fullness through symbolic creation or imaginary representation. It is thisconstitutive impossibility, however, that keeps desire alive and historicalcreation open.35

Castoriadis, on the other hand, seems to be determined to ignore or downplaythis alienating dimension of creativity, of social construction. Although at first heseems conscious of the fact that every new social creation is quickly transformedinto a new – alienating – establishment (this seems to be one of the possiblemeanings of his distinction between the institutingand the instituted), the impor-tance of this distinction is compromised by the ambiguityof his position and bythe fact that he eventually seems to understand meaning – and also creativity,radical imagination in general – as emanating from some kind of overdetermin-ing source identified with the psychic monad. As Habermas has put it, “thepsychic streams of the imaginary dimension have their source in the springs ofeach’s own subjective nature.” Castoriadis’s explanation of social praxis is“compelled to begin from the premise of isolated consciousness.”36 It is possibleand instructive to trace both the origins and the theoretical side-effects of such astrategy, and here, I suspect, our argument will be quite different from the one putforward by Habermas.

Our starting point will be Castoriadis’s view of socialization. The same patternwe saw in the last section in fact repeats itself now. Castoriadis starts with a seriesof observations and insights which are remarkably close if not originating directlyfrom Lacanian theory – or from an interpretation of Freud very close to theLacanian one. Consider the following quote:



From the psychical point of view, the social fabrication of the individual is thehistorical process by means of which the psyche is coerced (smoothly or brutally;in fact, the process always entails violence against the proper nature of the psyche)into giving up its initial objects and its initial world (this renunciation is never total,but almost always sufficient to fulfil social requirements) and into investing(cathecting) socially instituted objects, rules and the world.37

Lacan could – and indeed has – very well put in very similar terms his view ofthe alienating imposition of the socio-symbolic field. The fact that they both useterms like “imposition” or “superimposition” to refer to socialization is indicativein this respect.38 He would definitely agree totally with Castoriadis’s point that“the social side of this process concerns the whole complex of institutions inwhich the human being is steeped as soon as it is born and, first of all, the Other– generally, but not inevitably, the mother – who, already socialized in a determi-nate manner, takes care of the newborn and speaks a determinate language.”39

This sentence, with its explicit reference to what seems to be Lacan’s Other, couldeasily originate from one of Lacan’s seminars. In general, Castoriadis’s view ofsocialization is very close to the Lacanian view of the (social) process in whichthe pre-symbolic real, “the infant’s body before it comes under the sway of thesymbolic order,” “is subjected to toilet training and instructed in the ways of theworld: In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or over-written with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones, while other zonesare neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behaviouralnorms.”40

The differences emerge when one inquires into the proper nature of thepsyche in Castoriadis’s terms and the implications of what he calls the nevertotal imposition of the symbolic. What Castoriadis understands as the propernature of the psycheis a monadic core, a unitary and self-enclosed subjectivecircuit pre-existing socialization, a psychic monad which, as we shall see, “is farfrom being immune from criticism.”41 Castoriadis’s description of socializationcan very easily lead to the conclusion that this original pre-symbolic state is radi-cally different or incommensurable with the socio-symbolic field, the field of(social) meaning. This is Whitebook’s interpretation when he stresses the factthat “owing to this monadic core, all socialization comes from the outside and isnecessarily violent.”42 If one considers Castoriadis’s view of socializationtogether with the fact that, at one point, he accepts that the monad is unsayableor unrepresentable,43 that nothing is lackingin this stage – which is almost iden-tical with definitions of the pre-symbolic real in Lacan – one is easily led to theconclusion that what exists before the imposition of the symbolic is somethingradically different, “heterogeneous” to use Castoriadis’s exact phrase, from thesymbolic, the forces of language and socialization. This is what leads Habermasto argue that Castoriadis posits a metaphysical opposition between the psycheand society, and therefore “cannot provide us with a figure of the mediationbetween the individual and society.”44 Without agreeing entirely with the



premises of Habermas’s criticisms, Whitebook also considers Castoriadis’s posi-tion ultimately incoherent.45

The problem, however, is where exactly the incoherence lies. From a Lacanianpoint of view, contra Habermas, the radical gap between the pre-symbolic realstate and the subjective identity as conditioned by socialization is far from beinga source of incoherence. In Lacanian terms, this presocial state of the infant’sbody can only be approached by means of the concept of the real; it is impossi-ble to describe it in any positive way precisely because any description can onlytake place through language and discursive meaning and this real state is locatedbefore the imposition of the symbolic. We suspect that the incoherence, the essen-tial ambiguity of Castoriadis’s work lies in the fact that, although at first thepsychic monad and the social meanings imposed through socialization seem radi-cally incommensurable, on the other hand, there is something very importantlinking the pre-symbolic psychic monad and socio-symbolic meanings, some-thing almost ignored or downplayed by both Habermas and Whitebook. It is herethat Castoriadis follows a course radically different from the one chosen byLacan. All this is evident in Castoriadis’s reply to Whitebook: although he insiststhat there is “ontological alterity” between the monadic universe and the “diurnaluniverse of signs,” of shared significations, he nevertheless accepts that there issomething in the psyche that renders it capable of language and amenable tosocialization, something associated with the fact that “from the outset, the psycheis in meaning.”46

Paradoxically, then, although the psychic monad exists before the imposi-tion of meaning (insofar as meaning is a social dimension), it is neverthelessalready in meaning. As Castoriadis puts it, “this mode of originary being of thepsyche . . . is the first matrix of meaning.” The paradox is, of course, as evenCastoriadis himself recognizes, that this “proto-meaning realizes by itself, justwhere meaning obviously cannot yet exist, total meaning.”47 This “meaning ofmeaning,” as Castoriadis calls it, refers to “the coincidence of self-image withthe representation of a satisfied desire and with the representation of all thatis.”48 The proto-meaning is what characterizes an inherent and irreducibleability to create representations: “the radical imagination pre-exists andpresides over every organization of drives, even the most primitive ones.”49 Inthis original monadic state, then, this proto-meaning as radical imagination is“all that operates within a psyche totally enclosed upon itself.”50 This self-enclosed monadic core is ruptured by the pressure entailed in somatic need andby the presence of other human beings (the Other in Lacan) as the psyche’scontinued existence in this monadic state is antagonistic to biological andpsychical survival.51 The “initial, monadic meaning” is disrupted throughsocialization and replaced by the meaning supplied by society: “Socializationis the process whereby the psyche is forced to abandon (never fully) its pristinesolipsistic meaning for the shared meanings provided by society.”52 In orderfor the psyche to be socialized, it has to abandon its own meaning and assume



the meaning (orientations, actions, roles) of society.53 This is how Castoriadissummarizes his own position:

What, then, is there ‘in common’ between psyche and society, where is the ‘medi-ation’ or the ‘point of identity’? For both, there is and there has to be nonfunctionalmeaning. . .. But this meaning is . . . of another nature in each of the two cases.Psyche demands meaning, but society makes it renounce (though never completely)what for the psyche is its proper meaning and forces it to find meaning in the [socialimaginary significations] and in institutions.54

It is here that a fundamental difference from Lacanian theory emerges. Whilein Lacanian theory the two states are incommensurable, marked by the constitu-tive gap between the real and the symbolic, Castoriadis seems to disavow thisgap, to disavow the constitutive alienation marking subjectivity (including allhuman creations) within the social world. He introduces a subjective continuity –continuity of meaning – which becomes in his schema the (undoubtedly essen-tialist) ground or source of creativity. According to Castoriadis’s view – an admit-tedly ambiguous view, which explains why Whitebook can offer an oppositeinterpretation to ours – the replacement of primal representations by thoseacquired through perception and the external, socially constructed environment,“is facilitated by the fact that the two levels of representations are considered assharing essentially the same modality.”55 From a Lacanian perspective, the inco-herence here is obvious: by stressing the continuity between pre-symbolic andsocio-symbolic meaning, in fact by introducing the essentialist idea of a para-doxical original (pre-symbolic) proto-meaning and positing it as the source ofcreativity, of an originary radical imagination, Castoriadis is led towards aromantic and vitalist Cartesianism which fails to account in a coherent way forthe dialectic of desire marking human life. By highlighting his “meaning of mean-ing,” the prototype of creativity that is the psychic monad, Castoriadis seems tobe revealing the true face of “the Other of the Other,” the lost prototype to whichevery meaning refers, the guarantee of truth in the real (our lost but possible jouis-sance?). Although – to be fair to his argument – he falls short of providing acomplete positivization (imaginarization) of the pre-symbolic real, there is littledoubt that, starting from a quasi-Lacanian account of socialization, he is eventu-ally led to exactly the opposite conclusions from Lacan, contaminating at thesame time his theory with a strong metaphysical and essentialist element.

This conclusion can be further corroborated by an examination of the Castori-adian account of the state of affairs following socialization. From a Lacanianpoint of view, the fact that the imposition of the symbolic is never total can onlymean that the real, being ultimately incommensurable with the symbolic, resistssymbolization and persists alongside our socio-symbolic identifications. In fact,it not only persists but also interacts with the socio-symbolic field. It returnsthrough the resurfacing of negativity, through the dislocation of subjective andsocial identities. By encircling these encounters with the real, Lacan seems to



register the importance of a moment that, in social and political theory, couldonly be described as the moment of the political par excellence. Thus, far fromentailing anti-political implications, Lacan’s insistence on the persistence andirreducibility of the real, a real which poses limits to human construction, to ourcreativity, but at the same time constitutes the condition of possibility for anycreative political reconstruction, constitutes an opening towards fully acknowl-edging the constitutivity of the moment of the political. The political here iscrucial in relating creativity to alienation, construction to dislocation. It refers tothe moment of failure of a given identity or social construction, a failure whichnot only dislocates the identity in question but also creates a lack stimulating thedesire for a rearticulation of the dislocated structure – stimulating, in otherwords, human creativity, becoming the condition of possibility for human free-dom.56 Unable to accept the argument that desire and creation are conditioned bydislocation and by the lack of the real, Castoriadis posits a metaphysical proto-creativity:

Castoriadis maintains that the answer to the paradox of representation cannot befound ‘outside representation itself’ and that an ‘original representation’ must beposited that, as a schema of ‘figuration,’ would ‘contain within itself the possibilityof organizing all representations’ and, as such, would be the condition of possibil-ity of all further representations in the psyche.57

But let us take one step at a time. At first it seems that Castoriadis himself ismoving in a direction similar to that of Lacanian theory:

Considered in itself, therefore, the instituting ground-power and its realization bythe institution should be absolute and should shape the individuals in such a fash-ion that they are bound to reproduce eternally the regime which has produced them.. . . We know however, that this is not true. . . . Seen as absolute and total, theground-power of the instituted society and of tradition is therefore, sooner or later,bound to fail.58

Every instituted social form, the symbolic, is always limited. Limited by some-thing which seems to resemble the Lacanian real:

the world qua ‘presocial world’ – a limit for any thought – though in itself signify-ing nothing, is always there as inexhaustible provision of alterity and as the alwaysimminent risk of laceration of the web of significations with which society has linedit. The a-meaningof the world is always a possible threat for the meaning of soci-ety. Thus the ever-present risk that the social edifice of significations will totter.59

What Lacan would call an encounter with the real, what we would call themoment of the political, takes in Castoriadis the form of a “shock.” If encoun-ters with the real can dislocate our constructions of reality, leading at the sametime to new symbolizations, shocks, according to Castoriadis, create the need for



new representations, representations of what Lacan would call the unrepre-sentable real, and which Castoriadis calls the “ultimately indescribable X ‘outthere’”: “The ultimately indescribable X ‘out there’ becomes something definiteand specific for a particular being, through the functioning of its sensory andlogical imagination, which ‘filters,’ ‘forms,’ and ‘organizes’ the external‘shocks’.”60

Up to here, then, Castoriadis and Lacan seem to be once more in agreement.From now on, however, they again part company. And this because Castoriadisintroduces something else, a supplementcontradicting the logic exposed up tonow. While Lacan views the inside and the outside as two intertwined dimen-sions (thus coining the term extimité), Castoriadis introduces a sharp distinctionbetween the “inside” and the “outside”: according to his view, “we do not haveto do only with representations provoked by external ‘shocks.’ In relative (andoften absolute) independence from these, we do have an ‘inside’.”61 Whereaswhen speaking about the outside Castoriadis seems to accept the Lacanianschema of an unbridgable gap between the real and the symbolic, a-meaningand meaning, when discussing the inside Castoriadis sees no gap. The inside ishomogeneous; it is described as “a perpetual, truly Heraclitean flux of repre-sentations cum affects cum intentions.”62 There is no a-meaning here; every-thing is reduced to a field of (different) representations. This homogeneity issustained despite the fact that this inside comprises two completely differentmoments. It comprises, first, what constitutes the human infant before the impo-sition of the symbolic, what Lacan would describe as a pre-symbolic real state– a real which, in opposition to Castoriadis’s view, should be taken in its total-ity, “both the real of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior tohim.”63 Second, it comprises the subject as it is produced through socialization,through, that is to say, the imposition of the symbolic order. It seems that, forCastoriadis, despite the crucial differences between these two states, there isalso a crucial continuity. As we have already seen, both states are related to thelevel of meaning. While in Lacanian theory the two states are incommensu-rable, marked by the constitutive gap between the real and the symbolic, Casto-riadis annuls this gap whenever it comes to relations of interiority. There heintroduces a subjective continuity – continuity of meaning – which becomes inhis schema the undoubtedly essentialist ground or source of creativity. Althoughhe sees socialization as entailing the replacement of the original monadic mean-ing by social meanings, he argues that the “constitution of the social individualdoes not and cannot abolish the psyche’s creativity, its perpetual alteration, therepresentative flux as the emergence of other representations.”64As we saw, thesubject’s original monadic creativity cannot be eliminated, wholly replaced bysocial meanings; the monadic meaning, the source of creativity, is never fullyabandoned or repressed; the imposition of the symbolic is never total; therenunciation of the psyche’s proper meaning never completelyeffected. AsUrribarri has put it, “the idea of the monad as original mode of being of the



psyche remains, even after its breakup, the background polarizing subsequentpsychical life.”65

The problems with maintaining such an – ultimately inconsistent – positionmust have by now become clear. The difference with Lacan is not only that inLacanian theory this original state belongs to the register of the real, the pre-symbolic real, while for Castoriadis it has to do with an original meaning (“theprotomeaning of the psychic monad”), a primordial symbolization, the “Other ofthe Other.” It is also that what in Lacan ultimately remains in the field of impos-sibility and can only thus function as the (absent) cause of desire and creationbecomes in Castoriadis a lost (but, in principle, retrievable?) possibility. Onlythus it can function as a meaningful prototype. Only thus it is possible to priori-tize an essentialist, subjectivist creativity and avoid acknowledging the constitu-tive alienation marking human life. What is taking place here is a disavowal ofthe real which is at the same time recognized as the limit in relations of exterior-ity but is suppressed when dealing with relations of interiority.

The only explanation for this inconsistent and contradictory position seems tobe Castoriadis’s desire to retain the continuity of the subjective space as a spaceof meaning, a space marked by the proto-meaning of the psychic monad which istransformed into the source of radical imagination par excellence. In Castoriadis’sschema, the ontological moment of social construction is not related to ourencounters with the political, to the moment of social dislocation and subjectivelack, but to a primordial source of human creativity associated with the pre-symbolic psychic monad. Thus Castoriadis is ultimately led to adopt what seemslike an essentialist and subjectivist view: “Castoriadis’s notion of imaginationremains within the existentialist horizon of man as the being who projects its‘essence’ in the act of imagination transcending all positive being.”66 Only theCartesian tradition could lie behind such an imaginary “super-subject” of the self-instituting society, and this Cartesian association is pointed out even by support-ers of Castoriadis’s views.67 The moment of the encounter with the political, themoment when the limits of human creativity become visible, limits which are dueto the fact that we are always attempting to recapture the impossible real throughour inadequate symbolic means, is disavowed by Castoriadis in favor of an essen-tialized subject.

Does that mean, however, that the radical politics promoted by Castoriadis arereduced to a mere impossibility? Is the only political option left to us some kind ofreactionary conformism? More specifically, what could be the future of radicalismafter recognizing the real limits to creativity? Lacan’s answer to these questions ishis elaboration of the category of the point de capiton, the nodal pointin Laclauand Mouffe’s vocabulary. The point de capiton, a concept which originates fromthe Lacanian understanding of psychosis, is used to describe the signifier which,in every chain of signification, serves as the point of reference, the “anchoringpoint” uniting a whole set of signifiers. For example, it is always a point de capi-ton which puts together an ideological discourse: “class” in Marxism or “nature”



in Green ideology. The new in politics is always related to the emergence of a newsignifier, a new ideal which comes to occupy the place of the organizing princi-ple of a discursive field and of associated subjective identities.68 For Lacan, then,in opposition to any structuralist or other conformism, “radical rearticulation ofthe predominant symbolic order is altogether possible – this is what his notion ofthe point de capiton(the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-signifier) is about: when anew point de capitonemerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, itsvery structuring principle changes.”69

This rearticulation is radical because it involves “the intervention of the Realof an act.”70 It does not, however, spring from any subjective essence or source.This rearticulation becomes possible due to the contingent dislocation of a pre-existing discursive order, due to a certain resurfacing of the traumatic real whichshows the limits of the social; the moment of the political quaencounter with thereal creates a lack in the discursive structure and stimulates the desire for a newarticulation.71 It is also something that surprises its agent itself. After an act ofthis sort, the reaction is always: “I myself do not know how I was able to do that– it just happened!”72 For Lacanian political theory, ex nihilo does not meanspringing from the remnants of primordial subjectivity, from the supposed proto-meaning of the psychic monad, but something radically transforming both for thesymbolic order and for subjectivity itself.

It follows that, within such a context, the role of political theory can only beto encourage the creation and institutionalization of political arrangementswhich make possible the continuous rearticulation of the socio-symbolic field,the real acts of capitonage. These arrangements can only be associated withthe democratic revolution. If today the radicalization of democracy is perhapsthe most pressing task for a progressive politics, this radicalization can befounded neither on some kind of romantic foundationalism nor on any kind ofsubjective essentialism. If democracy is marked, in Lefort’s classic definition,by the emptiness of the locus of power, an emptiness making possible thecreative rearticulation of the social order, then the radicalization of democracycan only pass through what today emerges in a variety of politico-theoreticalprojects as a self-critical, anti-essentialist, and pro-democratic ethos. Paradox-ically, certain aspects of Castoriadis’s view of autonomy and democracy seemto be directly associated with such a project, together with the Lacanian ethicsof psychoanalysis. Exploring this exciting angle, however, would requireanother paper.73

NOTES

I would like to thank my student and friend Alexandros Kioupkiolis who has read this draft andoffered me his feedback. Many thanks are also due to Jason Glynos and Andreas Kalyvas for theirvaluable comments.



1. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation,” Crossroads of theLabyrinth (Harvester, 1984), 48, 104, and 107.

2.Joel Whitebook, “Requiem for a Selbstdenker: Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997),” Constel-lations5, no. 2 (1998): 153.

3. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Social Theory(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

4. Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation,” 100.5. Jacques Lacan,The Logic of Fantasy, unpublished seminar, 1966–7 (tr. Cormac Gallagher),

16 November 1966.6. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Encyclopédie,” Ornicar? 24 (1981): 35–44.7. A concept which was deprived of any meaning in structuralism, in opposition again to

Lacanian theory within which it is assigned a prominent place.8. Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation,” 99.9. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,”Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames

Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 151.10. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” The Castoriadis

Reader, tr. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 332–33.11. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polisand the Creation of Democracy,” Philosophy, Politics, Auton-

omy, 84.12. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 333.13. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” 84.14. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 153.15. Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955–6, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. with notes R.

Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), 30.16. Ibid., 249.17. Lacan, The Logic of Fantasy, 16 November 1966.18. Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX. Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and

Knowledge, 1972–3,ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. with notes Br. Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 32.19. Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 199.20. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A. Sheridan

(London: Penguin, 1979), 77.21. Needless to say the “imaginary” is invested with quite different meanings in Castoriadis and

Lacan. In this paper, largely due to space limitations, we are suspending judgement on the issue ofwhich definition is more plausible. In any case we do not consider this issue of crucial importanceprovided that one makes the appropriate “translations” whenever necessary.

22. Castoriadis, “The Social-Historical: Mode of Being, Problems of Knowledge,”Philosophy,Politics, Autonomy, 42.

23. Ibid., 41.24. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society(Athens: Rappas, 1978), 336 (in Greek).25. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance(Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1995), 25.26. Ibid.27. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 328.28. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society(Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 116–17.29. Castoriadis, “Culture in a Democratic Society,” The Castoriadis Reader, 357.30. Lacan, Ecrits, tr. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1977), 287.31. Lacan,The Logic of Fantasy, 16 November 1966.32. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr.

with notes D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 115–127. This theme returns again in other semi-nars. See for example his seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis, unpublished, 1965–6 (tr.Cormac Gallagher), especially the session of 8 December 1965.

33. Gilbert Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), 64–5.



34. To return to our discussion on need which is relevant here since it is located at the source ofthis alienating dimension, according to Lacan, it is due to the fact that we speak, due, that is to say,to our symbolic dependence, that we are subject to a “deviation” of our needs, in the sense that “inso far as [our] needs are subjected to demand, they return to [us] alienated” (Ecrits, 286). Alienation,however, is not only linked with the symbolic but also with the imaginary. As it is clear in Lacan’sconception of the mirror stage, the imaginary identity acquired through the identification with themirror image entails a profoundly alienating dimension (4).

35. We will return to the Lacanian understanding of creativity towards the end of this essay.36. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity(Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 333.37. “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 148, my emphasis.38. Castoriadis in Fernando Urribarri, “The psyche: imagination and history. A general view of

Cornelius Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic ideas,” Free Associations7, pt. 3, no. 43 (1999): 385;Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 96.

39. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 149.40. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 24.41. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 164.42. Whitebook, “Requiem for a Selbstdenker,” 143.43. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 331; Castoriadis,

Imaginary Institution of Society(Greek), 425.44. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 334.45. Whitebook, “Requiem for a Selbstdenker,” 157n8.46. Castoriadis, “Done and to be Done,”The Castoriadis Reader, 377.47. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 299.48. Urribarri, “The psyche: imagination and history,” 379.49. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 287.50. Kanakis Leledakis, Society and Psyche: Social Theory and the Unconscious Dimension of

the Social(Oxford: Berg, 1995), 111.51. Urribarri, “The psyche: imagination and history,” 379.52. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 331, my emphasis.53. Ibid., 334.54. Castoriadis, “Done and to be Done,” 379.55. Leledakis, Society and Psyche, 132, my emphasis.56. For a detailed elaboration of this political reading of Lacan with reference to the work of

Laclau, Mouffe, Lefort, Beck, and others, see Stavrakakis,Lacan and the Political(London: Rout-ledge, 1999), esp. ch. 3.

57. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 171.58. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 151.59. Ibid., 152.60. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” 327. It is very

revealing that Zˇ izek occasionally uses similar expressions to refer to the Lacanian real.61. Ibid., 327.62. Ibid.63. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 118.64. Leledakis, Society and Psyche, 113.65. Urribarri, “The psyche: imagination and history,” 380.66. Slavoj Zˇ izek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology(London: Verso,

1999), 24.67. Kostis Simopoulos, “Imaginary autonomy or imaginary nowayout?,” Nea Estia147, no.

1722 (2000): 583 (in Greek); Whitebook, “Requiem for a Selbstdenker,” 143.68. For an example of the use of the Lacanian logic of capitonagein political analysis, see

Stavrakakis, “Green Ideology: A Discursive Reading,” Journal of Political Ideologies2, no. 3(1997): 259–79.

69. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 262.



70. Ibid.71. For an analysis of the emergence of a concrete ideological form along these lines, see

Stavrakakis, “On the Emergence of Green Ideology: The Dislocation Factor in Green Politics,” inD. Howarth, A. Norval, and Y. Stavrakakis, Discourse Theory and Political Analysis(Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2000).

72. Zizek, “From ‘Passionate Attachments’ to Dis-Identification,” umbr(a)(1998): 14.73. For the meaning of this ethics of disharmony and the implications of the ethics of psycho-

analysis on political institutionalization and the radicalization of democracy, see Stavrakakis, Lacanand the Political, chs. 4 and 5.



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