Embedded rupture: Castoriadis on creating the new

Abstract

This chapter shows that Cornelius Castoriadis offers a particularly innovative response to the question of the socialized individual’s capacity to create newness. To outline this, I first identify that Castoriadis decenters the individual from the foundational role often attributed to it through a two-stage processg in which the individual is conceived of as (1) an effect of what he calls the radical imaginary, itself expressive of Being’s chaotic becoming, and (2) arising from the complex interplay between two expressive dimensions of the radical imaginary: the social imaginary, which includes the ideas, narratives, norms, values and so on through which a collective is both created and defined, and the radical imagination, which designates the psyche’s capacity for creative, autonomous expression. Second, I then highlight that Castoriadis conceives of the subject in terms of a unified, albeit fluctuating, psychic monad that must be turned into a differentiated individual through a process of socialization, itself premised on both violence done to the psychic monad and the latter opening itself to its other. From this, I argue that, rather than annihilate the psychic monad, this process sublimates the psychic monad within the socialized individual, with the consequence that (1) it is necessary to find ways within each social imaginary for the psychic monad to express its radical autonomy, and (2) the individual is always able to “use” its chaotic psychic monadism originally and creatively. It is precisely because the sublimated primal unconscious continues to subtend the socialized psyche that the individual is always able to affect a fundamental and violent rupture from the social imaginary/social unconscious with this rupturing permitting the creation of genuine newness and, indeed, being its condition; that is, it is only because of this rupture that something can be considered to be genuinely creative and new.