In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Anthropological Aspects of Subjectivity The Radical Imagination Castoriadis’s philosophical anthropology of the subject is found in the chapter of the IIS called ‘‘The Social-Historical Institution: Individuals and Things.’’ Here an elaboration of the psyche as radical imagination is placed in the foreground.1 The imagination was an incipient theme common to Kant, Freud, and the phenomenological movement, but with Castoriadis it was radicalized to become the very cornerstone of subjectivity and selfhood . In some ways, parallels with the chapter on legein and teukhein are discernable in that both chapters investigate the borderlands between the social and the natural.2 At first glance, a focus on the mode of being of the singular psyche might seem out of place in a reflection on the social-historical , yet from its beginnings psychoanalysis also incorporated an endeavor to comprehend society, history, and civilization.3 In this vein, Castoriadis’s foregrounding of the psyche is not a move away from the social-historical. Instead, the psyche is articulated primarily as the basis for addressing philosophical and anthropological aspects of subjectivity by way of the radical imagination, and thus to open a complementary perspective on the socialhistorical .4 The move to elucidate the mode of being of the psyche marks a split in the creative imagination: For Castoriadis, it consists of the two, mutually irreducible poles of the radical imagination of the psyche, on the one hand, and the radical imaginary of the social-historical, on the other. Connecting them, as will be discussed, is Castoriadis’s specific notion of sublimation as socialization. The chapter on the psyche continues the Kantian motif; here we see Castoriadis interrogating Kant and proceeding to 83 deeper layers and questions of subjectivity. Overall, Castoriadis situates himself between phenomenological and structuralist approaches to subjectivity . Like the structuralists and poststructuralists (although in varying ways) before him, he, too, takes off from Freud; or more strongly, he leans on Freud to develop his own thoughts. Castoriadis approaches subjectivity through the lens of psychoanalysis, and builds on Freud’s explicit as well as implicit legacy. Castoriadis’s analysis of the psyche seeks to show that the creative imagination is not only at the very center of the institution of the social-historical, it is also the basis of subjectivity. For Castoriadis, however, the philosophical interpretation of subjectivity had to begin with the psyche rather than the individual; the individual in this sense is always the ‘‘fabricated social individual’’ located betwixt the psyche and society.5 His critical engagement with structuralist debates continues to be apparent, but this time the emphasis shifts from Lévi-Strauss to Lacan. Castoriadis proposes a reinterpretation of Freud and psychoanalysis, yet in these respects he is somewhat selective and brief. There is no attempt to ground his theory in clinical experience, nor is there any sustained attempt to link his theory to Lacan.6 It is the only part of his philosophical elucidation that properly ‘‘leans on’’ another modern discipline (that is, psychoanalysis), but Castoriadis’s argument does not ultimately depend on the psychoanalytic universe. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis is used as a theoretical launching pad from which Castoriadis builds a polarizing model of psyche and society, in which they are not only mutually irreducible but in a fundamental sense also in the end inaccessible to each other. For Castoriadis, ‘‘society’’ is characterized by social-historical modes of being that are unreachable by inherited methodologies. The psyche, on the other hand, is part of nature, but because of its defunctionalized character it is simultaneously more than nature. Despite the polarization of the radical imagination and the radical imaginary, Castoriadis also finds points of mutual interplay—for example, some psychical drives are better understood to be social-historical institutions. Castoriadis’s main argument proceeds along two paths: The first re- flects on the construction of the psychic monad and its implications for subjectivity; the second considers the social-historical content of sublimation (in the triadic phase, the monadic closure is broken and its unity is now in the background), and how the two aspects connect. Another way of approaching this is to look at the mode of being of the unconscious as the flux of representations of the radical imagination and its link to a radically other mode of being: social-historical signification. The first approach is transcendental, in a broad sense, in that it critically examines the presuppositions and preconditions of subjectivity. Simultaneously it 84 Nomos [18.216.32.116] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share