On Castoriadis and the Social Imaginary Institution of the Real: Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Affinities and Critiques via His Dialogue with Merleau-Ponty

In his "Preface" to The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987 [1975]), Cornelius Castoriadis notes that the "properly philosophical aspect of the question of the imaginary and of the imagination" was reserved for another work-in­-progress - L'element imaginaire - which was to be published soon (1987: 6). Regrettably, this work remained unfinished and, apart from a few fragments, unpublished. Nonetheless, Castoriadis continued to develop his response to the question of the imaginary (and the imagination) throughout his intellec­tual trajectory. The imaginary element can be understood as the creative core of the human condition, which creates ex nihilo figures and forms that make the world - and this particular social world - possible. Castoriadis's approach brings the philosophical question of the creative imagination to bear on the sociological theme of social creativity within an overall theory of meaning. In so doing, he forges a distinctive framework for understanding the human condition in its twofold aspect of the radical imagination as psyche and the radical imaginary as social-historical. The radical imaginary is a dimension of society; it is transsubjective, unmotivated, and anonymous.3 As such, unlike the imagination, it is irreducible to a faculty of the mind or, more broadly, to a capacity of the embodied self. This chapter focuses on the imaginary ele­ment in its social-historical mode as a dimension of society, in general, and as instituting society as the radical imaginary, in particular.