John Rundell Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension

John Rundell
Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining

Subjects in Tension1
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to examine two turns towards
the idea of the creative imagination in contemporary
critical theory in the works of Axel Honneth and Cornelius
Castoriadis. Honneths work subsumes the idea of the
creative imagination under the paradigm of mutual recognition. Castoriadis constructs the idea of the creative
imagination from an ontological perspective. However,
Castoriadis idea of the primary autism of the creative
imagination can be thrown into relief by Hegels Jena
Lectures. Hegels and Castoriadis work opens onto a
subjectivity in tension, that is, a subjectivity that is forged
out of a combination of subjective interiority, as well as
the patterns of interaction that are multidimensional in
their scope and create social spaces that force the subject beyond an initial closure.
KEYWORDS: Imagination, subjects, intersubjectivity,
Honneth, Hegel, Castoriadis
Introduction
In recent critical theory, there are many directions from which the linguistic turn, especially the one identified with Habermas work,
has been challenged. 2 Two are of particular
Critical Horizons 2:1 (2001)
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001
note and will be the subject of our discussions. In his own work on intersubjectivity, Honneth argues that the phenomenal-affective or emotional forms
through which the subject is formed intersubjectively are as significant as the
linguistic ones. In this sense, it is not so much the linguistic mediation of
emotions that is important here, but the emotional content itself.3 Whilst
Honneth draws our attention to the Jena period of Hegels work as a basis
for the interrogation of an intersubjectively constituted struggle for recognition, his interrogation of this struggle will be suspended in the following discussion in order to interrogate another issue that accompanies it - that of
subject formation itself. For Honneth, following the works of G.H. Mead and
Habermas, subject-formation can only be understood as a process that is intersubjectively constituted. Winnicotts work is also important to Honneth not
only because it provides a framework of primary sociation, but also because
it addresses the interior world of the subject, which is, itself, intersubjectively
constituted. Here the creative imagination plays a developmental role of significant importance, which points to an implicit imaginary turn in Honneths
work.4
However, Honneths re-working entails that subject-formation is subsumed
under the paradigmatic weight of intersubjectively co-ordinated theorising,
which leaves to one side, the status of the subject sui generis. This entails that
Honneth (and Habermas) reproduce an over-socialised conception of the
human being. For Habermas, this oversocialisation is rendered as an overlinguistified conception of the human being, whilst for Honneth it is rendered as the over-mutually-determined conception of the human being.5
As is well known, the critique of the image of over-socialisation posits that
there is a non-social dimension of the human being that exists alongside
socialisation itself. In other words, this critique works with an image of the
human being as a social animal without being entirely a socialised animal. 6
It is this problem of over-socialisation, and hence the status of the subject,
that will be the entry point for our current discussion, rather than the one
concerning the struggle for recognition. The imaginary turn is a way of rethinking the over-socialised conception of the human animal, and not only
the conceptualisations of its over-linguistification. It will be addressed primarily through Castoriadis idea of the monadic core of the subject. From
the vantage point of the interior world of the subject, Castoriadis work
62 John Rundell
exposes the dilemma of oversocialisation in Honneths work, notwithstanding, as we shall see, his own imaginary turn drawn from the work of
Winnicott.
In Castoriadis work, the subject is constituted by an irreducible relation and
tension between the monadic core of the psyche and socially created constellations of culture and social institutions that he terms social imaginary
significations. These dimensions, for him, are constituted as imaginative or
imagining activities, rather than linguistic ones, that produce meaning both
as a creative flux, and a flux of creative interactions between these two dimensions. The question of the internality of the subject is moved away from the
metaphysics of the unconscious (Freud and Lacan), to a site that is posited
in anthropo-ontological terms, the emphasise of which is on the indeterminate creativity of human subjects and the equally historically indeterminate
creation of human societies.7 Castoriadis work continues and consolidates
an imaginary turn in critical theorising that is part of the longer history of
the dialectic of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.8
Yet, notwithstanding Castoriadis anti-functionalist insight concerning the
irreducibility of each side of subject-formation, his formulation of the subject, nonetheless, confronts the problem of the complexity of subjectivity. It
is in this context that Hegels Jena Lectures are once again instructive. To be
sure, Honneth draws our attention to them in The Struggle for Recognition.
However, here it is not their normative content that is instructive, but the
weight that Hegel gives to the forms of sociality that move the subject beyond
an initial self- enclosure. In this context, and in a critical dialogue with
Castoriadis work, the Jena Lectures are drawn on to posit what will be termed
here, subjects in tension. By subjects in tension, I mean subjects who are
forged out of a combination of subjective interiority as well as the patterns
of interaction that are multidimensional in their scope and create social spaces
that force the subject beyond an initial closure.9
Moreover, this paper also traverses what has been termed an oscillation
between metaphysical discourse and critical discourse.10 This distinction
can also be read as a tension between three aspects that constitute a critical
theorising. The first aspect refers to the, often, concealed anthropological principles or basic human self-images of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity,
Imaginar y Turns in Critical Theory 63
and the relations and tensions between them. The second aspect refers to the
impulses and horizons that give rise to a critical stance, whilst the third aspect
refers to the paradigmatic nature of the critical theory as a system of thought
itself. Theorising has its own metaphysical predisposition to bring these
dimensions into alignment, in other words to systematise them and close
over basic dilemmas in, and tensions between, them. In the rush for a critical theory - to protect critical theorising itself - the basic dilemmas of the
who, the mobiliser of critique, are often closed over. This essay will touch
on the second aspect, and leave to one side the third in order to elucidate
the dilemmas of the first - the anthropological in a way that does not assume
the normative primacy of critique, and hence, the critical subject.
Honneth and the Intersubjective Development of the

Critico-reflexive Self
In The Struggle for Recognition Honneth draws on Hegels Jena Lectures, the
works of G.H. Mead, and the paediatric psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in
order to posit a theory of intersubjectivity, otherwise couched in terms of a
dialectic of recognition. The aim of his theory is to investigate the way in
which the reflexive, democratic personality might be formed. Meads work
is important for Honneth, because following Habermas use of it, it provides
the framework for a structure of interaction through which self-reflexivity
develops. According to G.H. Mead self-reflexivity occurs as an outcome in a
proto - or real - dialogic interaction between self and others. More accurately,
a reflexive self occurs out of a process of learning to put oneself in an objectrelation to oneself.11 As Honneth points out, in the formulation of that part
of the self, which Mead terms the me, [Mead] inverts the relationship
between the ego and the social world and asserts a primacy of the perception of the other to the development of self-consciousness.12 In other words,
the perceptions that are given to the self by others enable the self to become
its own object of self-reflection. The corollary of this self-reflection is the recognition by society that the self is a social member. Moreover, this social recognition is the basis for self-respect. In other words, there is an internal relation,
for Mead, between the inner imposition of the generalised other and the
emergence of a reflexive self which is simultaneously one who receives respect
as well as gives it to itself.
64 John Rundell
For both Mead and Honneth, then, this dynamic of reflexivity through objectification is a basic anthropological principle. In this way, the person participates in social life on the basis of mutual recognition gained by such
objectifying interactions. For Mead, as well as Honneth, though, the interactions that occur between the me and the generalised other of community
norms should not necessarily result in a conventional attitude being taken.
Rather, the reflexive self is simultaneously a critical one in the form of a dialogue that proceeds along two fronts - externally and internally.
According to Mead, it is the dialogue between the self and the internalised
generalised other that initiates the critique. For Honneth, though, the way
that Mead structures this internal dialogue raises the issue of both the dynamics of critique and its origins. For Mead, and in a homologous formulation
with psychoanalysis, there is part of the self that is responsible to action
problems . . . that can never as such be glimpsed - the I.13 However, as
Honneth points out, whilst the I stands for the sudden experience of a
surge of inner impulses, it is unclear whether it stems from pre-social
drives, the creative imagination, or the moral sensibility of ones own self.14
It is here that a conceptual tension emerges in Honneths own work around
Meads, and his, basic anthropological principle. Both Mead and Honneth
adopt the latter formulation of a moral sensibility of ones own self as the
interpretation of the I. According to Mead (and Honneth), the I is conceived as a creative reaction potential that establishes a friction that initiates critique.15
However, Honneth not only follows Meads footsteps, but also confronts the
limits of his (Meads) formulation of the critically oriented impulse as a moralintegrative one. Critique, for Mead, is mobilised as a form of creative deviation from societal norms. This version of critique, however, exposes Meads
own peculiar naturalistic functionalism, which simultaneously slips away
from a theory of pragmatic psychological developmentalism to a theory of societal evolution.16 Whilst critique functions at the seam between the I and the
me it only does so on the basis of an integrative principle of re-integration.17
It is here, too, that we are confronted by the nodal point of Honneths argument. For Honneth, at least in The Struggle for Recognition, the impulse towards
critique not only occurs as part of the selfs objectification, but also emerges
in the context of damaging intersubjective relations. Leaving to one side
Honneths own reworking of Hegels Jena Lectures, we will investigate the
way in which he confronts the constitutive dimensions of the I as critical
impulse, because for him it belongs to the capacity of human individuation
and autonomisation.
In The Struggle for Recognition, conflicts and struggles over recognition remain
ultimately pseudo-dialogic in the manner laid down by Mead. However in
Imagination and Recognition Honneth turns his attention to the imaginative dimensions of reciprocal recognition, in a way that not only foregrounds
this aspect, but transforms it into a necessary part of a developmental process.18
In order to pursue the themes of individuation and autonomisation, which
are internal to the I as critical impulse, Honneth, at this point, departs from
Meads work and concentrates on the work of the paediatric psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott with some unexpected results. These results point towards
an unacknowledged imaginary turn in Honneths work.
For Honneth, at least in The Struggle for Recognition, the fight for recognition
involves an increasing realisation of the differentiating inter-subjective dimensions of love, rights and solidarity that are built up in relations and encounters between self and other. In his view, the human faculty of the imagination
is linked to each of three patterns of recognition - love, rights and solidarity.
The result of this linkage is that, if the subject participates in a social lifeworld in which the tripartite hierarchy of patterns of recognition are present . . . he [or she] may anchor his [or her] relationship to self in the positive
modes of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem.19 Honneth links the
faculty of the productive imagination to the struggle for recognition through
a reading of Winnicotts work. This is done by Honneth to make the productive imaginative faculty the result of an intersubjectively orientated set
of experiences, and ones that are linked to the earliest years of life.
According to Winnicott and Honneth, the creative or productive imagination
can only develop within the context of the mothers loving recognition of her
infant.20 To cut a long and very complex story short, the first phase of absolute
[mutual] dependence comes to an end when a new possibility on the part of
the mother occurs. She returns to the independence that everyday life offers,
66 John Rundell
which also offers a possibility of relative independence to occur on the part

of the infant. Winnicott argues that two psychic mechanisms must be available to the infant for this potential of relative independence to be successful destruction and transitional phenomena. Both are saturated with meaning
for the infant. In this context, aggression is neither negatively nor injuriously
interpreted; rather it is the constructive means through which the infant comes
to recognise the mother as other and integrate both aggressive feelings and
this knowledge beyond his or her fantasies of omnipotence.21 In Imagination
and Recognition, however, Honneth places more emphasis on the phase
where transitional objects are selected and played with by the infant, a phase
in which another mediation between self and world is forged. To put it
slightly differently, during this phase the bridge between the primary experience of being merged and the experience of being separate, that is of being
by ones self, or being alone, is crossed.22 To put it more strongly, for Honneth,
this relative independence should also include a capacity for mutual recognition by the infant.
It is here that Honneth locates the role of the creative imagination as part
and product of this developmental process in which the new mediated relation is forged. Following Winnicott, the childs creativity, indeed the human
beings imaginative faculty as such, is tied to the presupposition of a capability of being alone in the context of a basic trust in the willingness of the
loved person to devote him or herself to the other.23 In other words, Honneth
reiterates Winnicotts thesis that the human imagination emerges genetically
at that moment when the child acquires a capacity to be alone by trusting
the permanency of the mothers devotion . . . that is that the imagination can
only develop in the context of loving recognition.24 Imagination, trust, affirmation, and mutuality go together for Honneth, and it is on this basis that
not only other areas of human expression are integrated - feelings and emotions - but also solidaristic forms of association as well as the creation of cultural objectivations.
Notwithstanding the psychoanalytic insights derived from Winnicotts work,
Honneths analysis of the imagination has rendered it into an intersubjectively conceived moment. However, Honneths subsumption of the creative
imagination under the umbrella of the paradigm of mutual recognition begs
the question of the status of the subject. At the deepest level this subsumption
must presuppose a primary acquaintance of the self with itself for interaction to occur at all.25
For Honneth, imaginative, playful creativity, and thus reflexivity, are outcomes of a developmental process rather than constitutive dimensions of the
human being. In Honneths account, the creation of meaning and mutual
recognition stand in homologous relation with one another. This also entails
that Honneths reconstruction of the struggle for recognition has a quiet functionalism behind it in that a normal developmental path results from this
homology. Deformations are traced to damaged and dysfunctional relations
and patterns between forms of intersubjectivity and the creation of meaning,
which itself is grounded in the autonomisation of the subject and his/her
recognition of others. Honneths critique of Castoriadis, for example, is already
based on a pre-theoretical disposition that overstates Castoriadis loyalty to
the revolutionary paradigm at the expense of exploring the more fundamental issue of the constitution of the subject.26 However, in the context of the
formation of a reflexive-critical self, it can be argued that Honneth, in positing a moral sensibility of ones own self propelled by a creative imaginary
impulse, implicitly raises the question of the status of the subject and its primary self-acquaintance.
Hegel, Castoriadis and Ontologies of the Creative Imagination

Whilst Honneth draws our attention to the Jena period of Hegels work as a
basis for an interrogation of an intersubjectively constituted struggle for recognition, another reading of Hegels work suggests the co-presence of the creatively imagining subject and intersubjectivity, rather than a developmental
homology. Moreover, this co-presence is constituted in a tension-ridden manner. Tensions exist between this creatively imagining subject and the forms
of intersubjectivity, and within forms of intersubjectivity themselves.
It is, first, worth looking briefly at Hegels Introduction to his later Lectures
on Aesthetics (1820) before turning to the earlier Jena Lectures (1805/1806)
in order to further present our problem. In his discussion, or more properly
his positioning, of the three successive art forms - Symbolism, Classicism,
Romanticism - Hegel suggests that Romanticism establishes the authentic
existence of the inner world of the human being as a world sui generis.27 Hegel
68 John Rundell
recognises the explosiveness of the Romantic movements prioritisation of

the idea of the imagination, especially the way it depicts the tension between
inner and outer realities.
Romanticism, in his view, rightly fractures an assumed formal unity between
that which art is to mean (that is, the Idea) and the form of the art object
itself. It emphasises free concrete spirituality or the spiritually inward in
which art no longer works for sensuous intuition.28 Rather, it must work
for the inwardness which coalesces with its object simply as if with itself, for
subjective inner depth, for reflective emotion, for feeling, which as spiritual,
strives for freedom in itself and seeks and finds its reconciliation only in the
inner spirit. Inwardness celebrates its triumph over the external29 to the extent that externality is viewed as a contingent factor. This means that the
imagination, in a strong critique of empiricism and realism, is at liberty to
distort, mirror, play or concoct any reality out of its own inner directed and
inner-forming world.
In the Jena Lectures, especially Spirit According to its Concept, though, Hegel
conceptualises this inner chaotic world in a human self-image that gives
priority to an ontology of the imagination and not only to its expressiveaesthetic capacity. For Hegel, an aesthetically determined expression is not
the only form through which humans issue themselves upon the world. Both
Kant and Hegel confront the power of the productive-creative imagination.
Kant, whilst recognising this power attempts to minimise it; Hegel adopts
another strategy: dread in the face of the productive imaginations omnipotent, creative power.30
To quote:
This image belongs to Spirit. Spirit is in possession of the image, is master
of it. It is stored in the Spirits treasury, in its Night. The image is unconscious; that is, it is not displayed as an object for representation. The human
being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity - a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which
occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This is the Night,
the interior of human nature, existing here - pure Self - and in the phantasmagoric representations it is everywhere . . . we see this Night when we
look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night that turns terrifying . . .
Into the Night the being has returned. 31
As Hegel has just declared, this Night is not an empty nothing, it is the treasure of the human imagination that is filled with the flux of representations.
For Hegel, the imagination and its flux is ontologically posited, as the condition and ground of human existence in its simplicity. Moreover, Hegel, in
his Jena Lectures not only lays open the existence of the imagination sui generis,
but also reflects on its content. In so doing, the existence of the creative imagination is not limited to its deployment as a faculty in the service of either
cognition, as it is for Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, or aesthetic creation
in the Critique of Judgement, or playful, solidaristic forms of life, as it is for
Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.32 It also originates and
deploys images of violence and cruelty, caprice, grief and despair. In other
words, as Hegel constructs it, this imaginative inner world is the place where
evil, as much as good imaginings may reign.
However, as an ontological moment or insight, this is as much as Hegel has
to say about the imagination before his move to a position of intersubjectivity, a move which we will have cause to return to later.33 It is in Castoriadis
work that this imaginary turn takes full flight. Beginning from his own reworking of the Freudian idea of the unconscious, Castoriadis implicitly reiterates Hegels idea or image of it as the Night of dread and self-enclosure,
and adds that it is also the site of the ontological and very human moment
of creativity. This is also a response to Heidegger s simultaneous re-opening and re-closing of the topic of the imagination in a renewed theological
metaphysics in which the trace of meaning is located near to language, and
it is only the privileged few who enter this house on the way to Being. 34
For Castoriadis, the imagination is neither a gift of Being, nor its (Beings)
concealed or partially recovered other side, its difference. Rather, it is indicative of humanitys capacity to create its own world, and to create it always
as a condition of altereity, as difference, sui generis. In this sense, Castoriadis view of the imagination is simultaneously ontological and anthropological. As he says, the living being is an emergence. In this emergence we
read this formative potentiality of overall Being/being, a potentiality that
in itself has, of course, no personality, and no finality either; it is not teleological.35
70 John Rundell
For Castoriadis, the subject is not one of and by either language or intersubjectivity - he/she is an ontological creation, the ontology of which is coconstituted by the creative imagination. In Castoriadis view, the creativeproductive, rather than associative, dimension of the imagination is the
constitutive and defining characteristic of the human animal. More specifically, the subject is constituted through two imaginaries which, in terms of
their deployment, co-exist and compete within any social subject, and yet are
irreducible to one another. These imaginaries are the radical imaginary of the
psyche, and the social instituting and instituted imaginary of society that
attempts to make/fabricate a social individual who inhabits a particular place,
time, and social formation.36
As such, the human animal is simultaneously a social animal, and an animal
in which the imagination is infused throughout his/her entire existence both
inside and alongside its sociability. It is only in the condition of its sociability,
of his/her thrownness into the world that begins from birth, that the tension between the asociability and closure of the radical imagination which
resists socialisation, and the sociability that is constituted through imaginary
significations required for human life and established and experienced intersubjectively - in the older Durkheimian language, collective representations is thrown into relief.
In an especially significant essay entitled The State of the Subject Today,
Castoriadis formulates the constitutive dimensions of the totality of the human
world. He lays out a groundwork for different orders of the imagination in
a more complex way than is usually posited by him as his distinction between
the radical imaginary (on the side of the psyche) and the social imaginary
(on the side of the social).37 In this essay the living human being is posited
as a coalescence of four dimensions, each with its own internal complexity.
Whilst each does not presume or precede the other, human life, in any meaningful way, cannot exist without them as a totality.38 These four dimensions
are the living being, with, what Castoriadis terms, its corporeal imagination;
the psychical being with his/her radical imagination; the social being or social
individual with his/her societal imagination and reflexive or second-order
creative imagination; the social world, or socially instituted and instituting
imaginary significations and their collective representations, that is, the
self-understanding of the social world, together with its imaginary horizon,

its ideality.39
There are three principles that Castoriadis posits in his idea of the human
corporeal imagination - finality, the creation of a world for it, and, thirdly,
that this world is one of representations, affects and intentions. Castoriadis
point here is that, against empiricist biology, which views things in quantitative terms, there is a qualitative mediation with nature, even at the most
seemingly organic level. Moreover, this mediation is one that is neither solely
environmental nor relational (that is, selective, in Darwinian terms, for example). It is creative-interpretative in the sense that the mediated qualitative
relation with nature is experienced as a series of shocks, rather than natural
processes that are blind sensations which are only later incorporated as
cognition. In this sense of the shock, for Castoriadis, there are no passive
sensations.40 The activity of the body goes hand in hand with the radical imagination and together they form the defunctionalised non-natural, that is, nonimmediate world, of, and for, the living human being. The human being qua
animal is one in which natural processes can no longer be taken for granted;
in his view what is taken for granted are their distortions. These distortions
indicate, for Castoriadis, that at the level of the development of the long history of the species a shift occurred from organ pleasure to representational
pleasure, or more specifically when representational pleasure came to dominate over organ pleasure.41
In Castoriadis view, the interior world of the human being exists, ontologically speaking, in a state of ongoing representational activity that does not
know time or space, logic or symbolic order. It is an unlimited and unstable flux, a representational spontaneity, that creates meaning out of itself for
itself, and in this sense is a closed world.42 Moreover, because of its spontaneous, fluxing and orderless state, it is fragmented. At this primary level, it
creates meaning rather than imposes or controls it. This development entails
that, for Castoriadis, the human animal is the one who mediates all dimensions of his/her existence by means of this imaginary, representational pleasure, or its objectifying products. In this context, there is no world of first
nature as a substrate separate from this imaginary flux. Instead of referring
to this aspect of the human being as first order nature (Hegel), we could,
following Castoriadis, refer to this aspect as first order autonomy.43
72 John Rundell
The power of an imaginary world to create that which was otherwise not
present indicates the imaginations irreducibility to a category of either functional schematisation (in Kants cognitive scheme), or functional psychological organisation.44 As Castoriadis wittily states, animals are certainly more
logical or rational than humans; they never do something wrongly or in
vain.45 In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis refers to humankind
as the mad animal, rather than the rational (Hegel) or sick one (Nietzsche).46
Notwithstanding the way in which this characterisation can mislead the reader
away from its basic insight, Castoriadis is at pains to emphasise and draw
out the dysfunctionality of the human animal, which is grounded, for him,
in the creative flux of its imagination.
For Castoriadis, there is a constitutive gap between the dysfunctionality of
the imagination and the forms through which it is represented, as well as the
ways through which it takes institutional shape. It is in this space between
the imaginings and their (unstable and re-interpretable) symbolic and institutional forms that new forms emerge and take shape. According to Castoriadis,
something is new when it is in a position of a form neither producible or
deducible from other forms . . . [It] is created ex nihilo as such. . . . That does
not mean that it is created in nihilo or cum nihilo . . . [Humans] create the
world of meaning and signification, or institution upon certain conditions . . .
But there is no way we can derive either this level of being - the social historical - or its particular contents in each case from these conditions . . .
Creation entails only that the determinations over what there is are never
closed in a manner forbidding the emergence of other determinations. 47
Thus, these creations are other than what was there before, separate and
undetermined by them, yet leaning on but not reducible to a pre-existing
context. Thus, irrespective of what appears to be an ontology of the subject,
Castoriadis reworking of the imaginary dimension entails that it is simultaneously one that concerns the multiplicity and hence the relation of these
imaginary creations. Thus, according to Castoriadis, there is a heterogeneous
multiplicity of co-existing alterities which emerge from or in poietic imaginary space, space unfolding with and through the emergence of forms.48
His emphasise on the ontological primacy of the creative imagination entails
that at this level of his theorising, the theory is indifferent to what these
creations are and what form they take. In other words, at this level, his theory is importantly indifferent to the content of the imaginary creations and
how they are represented emotionally, or in socially objectified ways.
As already mentioned, in Castoriadis formulation there are two sets of meaning or imaginary significations that are constitutive of human existence. One
is psychic meaning that is projected outward upon the world which a present psyche creates, and the social meaning which is introjected, learnt and
re-interpreted by way of this originary projective dimension, outward again.
The primary tension here, then, is between two meaning constituted and saturated sites - a defunctionalised psyche and a functionalising social frame,
which itself is constituted as an imaginary horizon. Castoriadis constructs a
trenchantly anti-functionalist image of the human subject, and his or her relation with the social-historical world into which he or she is thrown. To return
to the opening topic of the relation between self and other, each side undergoes both a radicalisation and relativisation. In Castoriadis view, the emergence of new forms and constellations which may or may not be benign, is
an activity of the permanent othering of any self of its self, as well as of
others. This implies there are always contexts of interaction or sociability
from the vantagepoint of particular imaginary horizons.
Subjects in Tension: Between Closure and Openness

In Castoriadis formulation, whilst imaginary chaos belongs to the world of
the radical imagination, time space and relational forms belong to the world
of the social-historical. There is, then, the dissociable existence of two worlds
that are permanently in conflict. In other words, what is posited here is a tension between the asocial (rather than the pre-social) radical imaginary, and
the social imaginary. The asociality of the radical imagination works against
a completed socialisation that would normalise the living human being. It,
thus, works against the world of the social and the creation of the subject as
a social individual.
It is at this point, though, that a major difficulty arises in Castoriadis work.
In his stronger formulation of the autistic, radical and creative imagination,
the psyche is a closed entity unto itself. There is, however, a formulation in
Castoriadis work that lessens the emphasis on primary autism. Whilst he
74 John Rundell
wants to argue that the psyches entry into society cannot occur taken-forgrantedly, but rather takes place in a highly contingent and uncertain way,
there is a moment in his thought that posits a different image of the radical
imaginary - one that is not inherently closed. As he says, [socialisation] is
the history of the psyche in the course of which the psyche alters itself and
opens itself to the social-historical world, depending, too on its own work
and its own creativity.49 As Whitebook has pointed out, this statement presupposes the existence of a potentiality immanent in the psyche - dare we
say an Anlage - which not only lends itself to socialisation, but which can
support and induce it as well.50 It is not so much that Castoriadis cannot
incorporate or theorise this other dimension in his work, as Whitebook further points out, but that the less extreme version provides an interpretative
opening to interrogate this dimension in terms that are both with and against
Castoriadis. 51
We can, in the light of the above quote posit a radical imaginary that is simultaneously closed and open, against the thrust of Castoriadis own formulations. The radical imaginary is an unthought field in which the subject can
both somatically and creatively turn against itself and be closed. Simultaneously,
it can also become a creative and interpreting opening towards the world
outside, inhabited by others, transforming desire into drive, to use Hegels terminology of the Jena Lectures. In Castoriadis own reworking of psychoanalysis,
this transformation stratifies the psyche. The so-called stratification of the
psyche is its social positing, a positing that begins from birth through which
the monadic core of the subject is cracked open, social identity formed and
consolidated, and social relations established. The intrapsychic conflicts that
exist in the human animal are formed instances of the co-existence of these
phases, and thus the historicity of the subject. In this sense, these phases are
neither developmental, nor dialectical in the sense that one phase precedes
another and is brought up into the following stage in a sublated manner.
Rather, each is unfinished, and stands in tension with the others.
In this sense, as far as the radical imaginary is concerned a double creation
occurs - one from the side of closure, another from the side of an opening.
The ability to inhabit time and move in social space, as well as create an array
of outwardly directed meanings all indicate the radical imaginarys work
as an opening. As Castoriadis acknowledges, the passage from the closed
creative world of the radical imaginary to thought, as well as to others beyond

the subjects asocial autism, is one that posits another mode of being, one that
occurs alongside the other, and which also invites an alteration, that is, the
simultaneous formation of the social individual.
From this interpretation, the opening that the psyche emits takes place as the
creation of outwardly directed meaning. Moreover, it is meaning that recognises other human beings as subjects. This recognition of other subjects, and
to which Hegels Jena Lectures was one response, alerts us to the further issue
of the creative opening of the subject qua inter-subjectivity. In some ways,
Castoriadis recognises this in his discussion of the social-historical dimension of the human being as infant. As Castoriadis notes, the human being as
infant has an outside, so to speak, and this outside is the mother. However,
his point, in an understated re-functionalisation of his otherwise anti-functionalist theory, is to take the mother, as the first and massive representative of society for the new born baby . . . if she speaks she is a social individual,
and she speaks the tongue of such and such a particular society; she is the
bearer of social imaginary significations specific to that society.52 In other
words, the infant is bathed, so to speak, in social imaginary significations of
which the mother is the first representative.
Whilst all of this is correct, Castoriadis reference to the mother figure as representative occludes an investigation into the dynamics of openness, as well
as the forms of relation that are established between self and others. It is at
this juncture that we can return to Hegels Jena Lectures.53 The Jena Lectures
are instructive, because, for Hegel, the constitutive ontology of the creative
imagination is supplemented by a paradigm of outwardly orientated subjectivity that recognises non-identity or negation of the other as one of the
subjects relational forms. The difference between Honneths, Hegels, and
Castoriadis positions is that whilst Honneth views the creative imagination
as the product of a relational process, Hegel and Castoriadis view it as ontologically primary. Hegel, though, recognises nonetheless, that self-formation
is one that also requires an outward movement in order to escape the terror
of the Night or self-enclosure here.
Hence, this reading moves Hegels and Honneths analyses away from an
intersubjectively based quest for recognition, to a notion of subjects based in
76 John Rundell
forms of tension. In terms that posit the explicit reference point of this paper, this
dialectic of recognition may be better stated as a tension between closure and
openness.54
Behind the fight for recognition is a fight for an openness from the position
of enclosure in which the creative imagination is posited as its source. The
position of openness itself is also one of interdependence - or at least the
potential of its recognition - through which this closure is fractured and worldrelations established. In the Jena Lectures, at least, the position of possible
openness precedes the normative horizon of what now can be viewed as second-order autonomy, or more accurately, for Hegel, freedom. For him, freedom is the specific form of second-order, reflexive interdependence, the result
of which is relations of symmetrical reciprocity. In the Jena Lectures, Hegels
more usual immanent connection between philosophical anthropology and
the normative horizon of second order autonomy (freedom) is, for the briefest
of moments, suspended.
Whilst the struggle for openness is experienced, according to Hegel, as an
activity of self-objectivation or externalisation through the developmental
process of learning a language, the weight of his analysis of the process of it
is posited in relational terms, that is, in the context of the selfs relations with
others. Hegel argues that the selfs fracturing towards openness occurs through
multi-dimensional modes of intersubjectivity. Hegel privileges three - love,
work and politics. According to Hegel, each in their own way provides both
the constitutive intersubjective groundwork and institutional settings for this
struggle. In the context of this paper, love work and politics are of interest
less for their formal content, and more for what they indicate as moments of
complex opening of the subject to others. Each opening will have its own
internal moment of tension where the stress or emphasis of subjects undergoing opening is experienced not solely as something positive, but also as
something antinomic.
In the Jena Lectures specifically, Hegel attempts to conceptualise the move
from the Night of self-enclosure to the day of openness and otherness, by
making a distinction between desire and drive. Although it belongs to first
nature and is animalic, desire, for Hegel, is already constituted through the
work of the imagination alone. Desire is the expression of a will that exists
only for itself, and has extinguished all foreign content within itself [and]
is left without an other.55 Although it feels a need for otherness, nonetheless, the human being who is commanded by desire makes its own beingfor-itself its own end, and thus encloses itself within itself. In other words,
according to Hegel, not so much that particularity reigns here, but that it is
a particularity in which difference, or as he says, contrast, disappears.56
In contrast, being with another, experiencing contrast or difference, for Hegel,
is experienced through the drives. In the work of the drives, the self moves
beyond its own interiority (in Castoriadis terms, its own autism) and works
upon the world in the context of, and with others. The consummation of this
work is the selfs self-objectification. This self-objectification contains two
moments, for Hegel. In the first moment, the self develops a capacity for
reflexivity and thus mediated world relations. In this context, Hegel posits a
model of self-consciousness as a form that is three-dimensional. The three
dimensions of self-consciousness that Hegel posits in the Jena Lectures are that
it is externalising, it acquires increasing capacities for self-detachment and
reflexivity, and it is increasingly mediated by world-relations.57 Hegel draws
on the image of the tool and human labour here; and yet the point is more
general, for in this externalising reflexively self-detaching mediation with the
world, the self confronts others. And this is the second moment, and can be
captured, in one of its dimensions, through the experience of love.
Hegel uses the experience of love as an ideal-type in order to establish the
dialectic of openness. Yet, in a similar way to Honneth, this indicates an
insight, as well as a double limit to Hegels own reflections. One limit is at
the level of his anthropology; the other is at the level of his critico-normative theory with systemic intent. Each limit pushes his work towards both
the metaphysical-ontological and historical-hermeneutical paradigms, with
their own internal features, dynamics and problems.
Love requires the recognition of otherness. Hegels image of love is one in
which the Night of the self-generating and creating imagination is located in
a specific social space, that of intimacy in a way that not so much transposes
the imaginary force, but transforms it because in Hegels terms it is a form
of cognition. This understates the case that Hegel makes for the importance
of love, though. Whilst the image of the drives is internal to it, the impor78 John Rundell
tant point about love, for Hegel, is that it is an externalising, reflexively selfdetaching mediation of a specific world relation that forces the self to give
up its dream of autistic independence. 58 For this reason, the condition of love
is a dissatisfied condition, as the self is no longer satisfied in itself, but seeks
satisfaction in another. Moreover, it is not only the recognition of otherness
that is crucial here, but recognition of the difference that the other brings to
it, a difference that is external and remains so. By concentrating on the dialectic of reflexive othering, otherwise known as the dialectic of recognition, Hegel
resists the great temptation posed by the Romantic version of love, as typified by Goethes Werther - the mergence of the one with the other. As Hegel
states, love
is the condition of not being satisfied in oneself, but rather having ones
essence in another- because one knows oneself in the other, negating oneself as being-for-oneself, as different. This self-negation is ones being for
another, into which ones immediate being is transformed. Each ones selfnegation becomes, for each, the others being for the other. Thus, the other
is for me, that is, it knows itself in me. There is only being for another, i.e.,
the other is outside itself.59
Love is given concrete existence and finds expression as mutual love or mutual
recognition according to Hegel, in the totality of the many sidedness of intimate ties that are expressed in relational form - a shared life together, care,
child bearing, child raising and commonly acquired and held goods and property. As Hegel again states, it is a total movement in itself - being recognised, . . . regard in care, activity, work, recapitulation in the child, procreation . . .
therein a dissolution of [individuality].60 In this sense, for Hegel, love and
its concretisation in the socially objectified form of marriage, is the admixture of personality (as the practice of reflexive detachment) with the impersonality of first nature.61
Yet, Hegel alerts us to loves own internal point of tension that moves it
beyond the dialectic of mutual or symmetrical recognition. There are points
of tension that Hegel alerts us to, and makes us suspicious that love cannot
be the basis for a version of practical rationality in the way that is internal to the structure of the Jena Lectures, and that Honneth, too, proposes. In
the first instance, the relation of love between two people presupposes a
dimension of exclusivity or particularity, in the sense that it (the love relation) becomes the point of reference. By being exclusive, an initial equality
that is established between two different selves in the mutuality of recognition, generates an inequality on the part of those who are excluded from this
relation, and its objectified form, the family. Hence, the other of this new form
of interdependence is not the emotional economy of mutual recognition, but
the emotional economy of envy and resentment. As Hegel states:
The excluded party spoils the others possession, by introducing his excluded
being-for-himself into it, his [sense of] mine. He ruins something in it,
annihilating [i.e., negating] it as desire, in order to give himself his self-feeling - yet not his empty self-feeling, but rather positing his own self in
another, in the knowing of another. The activity does not concern the negative aspect, the thing, but rather the self-knowledge of the other. A distinction in the knowledge of the other is thereby posited, which only puts
one in the existence of the other. He [the excluded] is also angered thereby;
he is divided in himself, and his exclusion from being is turned into an
exclusion of knowledge. He becomes aware that he has done something
altogether from what he intended. His intention was the pure relating of
his being to itself, his impartial being-for-itself. 62
The important point here is that this point of tension is itself a relational form.
In Hegels Jena Lectures, as in the more developed, yet less nuanced masterslave dialectic of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the recognition of the other
always contains its oppositional moment. The importance of crime, for example, for Hegel, is not that it points to the functional limit of the sacred or the
moral law, but that it also internally constitutes relations between self and
other. Crime is a recognition of the other in its antinomic state, for Hegel,
and these antinomic states, for example, envy and resentment, belong as
much to self-consciousness as rational self-detachment does. In other words,
in the confrontation with the realisation of otherness, the self experiences a
tension between, as Hegel says, driving and being driven.63 The experience
of domination, for Hegel, and hence the master/slave dialectic belongs
here and as one that can only be constituted as a relationship between self
and other. In this context, and as Hegel shows in a delimited form in The
Phenomenology of Spirit, violence, power and domination only occur in the
context of this relationship, and generate their own emotional economies.64
80 John Rundell
In this context a distinction can be made between domination or power, and

cruelty. What Hegel terms evil, or what also might be termed cruelty, is nothing but a singularity. In Hegels terms, it is the movement towards self-consciousness which is still, as he says, enclosed in itself, subterranean, knowing
what is there in the light of day, and watching something accomplish its own
destruction by its own efforts, or else turning actively against the thing, thereby
introducing a negative element into its being, indeed into its self-preservation.65 In this sense, cruelty is the second-order reflexive autism of the creative imagination.66 Cruelty is beyond desire and constitutively different from
the asocial autism that is indifferent to social-moral ordering. Rather, cruelty
is self-conscious and deploys reason in the service of itself. This deployment
is not only calculative, in the manner portrayed in de Sades work, but also
occurs only from the vantage point of the selfs own reflexive, yet self-enclosed
and self-referential imaginings with the purpose of annihilating anothers.
There can be no self-reflexivity of the type portrayed by G.H. Mead or Honneth
that results in mutuality here.
In order to separate the normative horizon from the anthropological one, the
dialectic of recognition may now be viewed as the fight for interdependence in
the context of the tension between imaginary openness and closure. Provisionally
put, patterns and tensions of intersubjectivity indicate the space and the relational forms in which social individuals, each with their own radical and
social imaginings interact with others and together create and re-create these
relational forms. In other words, intersubjectivity, here, refers to a relational
space.
The space indicates both this meeting place between social individuals, each
with their own radical and social imaginings, and the interactive dynamics
that presuppose, at an equally constitutive level as the radical and social
imaginaries, the simultaneity of co-presence, recognition and reciprocity, but
not symmetricality. In this sense, interactions between human beings take
form in ways that have meaning for the subjects involved, meaning that can
be imposed or agreed, understood or misapprehended, acquiesced or contested. In this formulation, intersubjectivity is both a space, an interstice constituted by imagining subjects, and a relation grounded in the recognition and
reciprocity, or otherwise, between ego and alter. Because intersubjectivity is
a space between ego and alter, it is a space that can remain either closed or
open. It may also contract or expand. It can also be ignored. In this sense,
the space has a meaning for the subjects involved, grounded in the patterns
of recognition and non-recognition, reciprocity and non-reciprocity, symmetricality and asymmetricality that are expressed at any one time, that is,
historically. In other words, intersubjectivity is the space in which co-presence is given form as both empirical-phenomenological patterns, as well as
figurations of meaning, that is, as social creations in their own right.
Furthermore, because intersubjectivity is theorised in terms of the relative,
spatial forms of closure or openness, it cannot be reduced to one form alone.
Closure or openness - and in the case of the latter, recognition and non-recognition, reciprocity and non-reciprocity, symmetricality and asymmetricality
give range to imaginarily constituted intersubjectivities in both unsociable
and social forms. In the light of the formulations outlined above, the closed
or open nature of these forms is structured as horizons of meaning by both
the radical and social imaginaries. In this sense, love, friendship or power
are doubly constituted as meaning figurations in both psychogenetic and
sociogenetic terms. From the side of psychogenesis, they are creations of the
radical imaginary; from the side of sociogenesis they are socially and historically instituted and instituting collective imaginings. As relational figurations, they are structured in terms of modes of recognition or non-recognition,
reciprocity or non-reciprocity, symmetry or asymmetry between ego and alter.
In this way, these imagining subjects in tension co-exist in either closed or
open ways with one another through spatially conceived relational forms. In
this sense, the notion of the social individual is a field of tensions in which
the corporeal imagination, the closed and open radical imaginary, the social
historical, and the relational forms between subjects coalesce and meet.
It is within this spatial and imaginary complexity that critique enters, neither as a transcendentally conceived first principle, nor as a privileged relation to the world, but as one possible moment among many others. To be
sure, the move to ontological openness by the subject, and the forms through
which it occurs through relations between self and others lay the ground for
the possibility of critique. In Castoriadis view, though, critique is positioned
as an ontologically and historically privileged dimension of the creative imagination - the capacity to put itself and its creations into question. However,
from the perspective of subjects in tension, the capacity to put into question
82 John Rundell
is mobilised from a variety of vantagepoints, of which the stronger claim to

second order autonomy (Castoriadis) is one such claim among others. In the
context that posits the horizon beyond this paper, the critical subject is one
who discloses him/herself in the midst of this tension, and by invoking at
least one value with which to step outside the existing social field, even
momentarily.67
*
John Rundell is Director of the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory, University of
Melbourne, Australia
Notes
1
This paper grows out of a series of seminars that were given in The Department
of Sociology, University College Dublin in 1999. The author would like to thank
members of the department for their hospitality, and for criticisms of aspects of
this work. I would like to thank the reviewers, especially Maeve Cooke, for their
own criticisms. Thanks also go to Danielle Petherbridge and John Cash for their
comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe and Albrecht Wellmer, Cultural-Political
Interventions in the Unfinished Project of the Enlightenment, trans., Barbara Fultner,
Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1992; Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Communicative
Action, trans., Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge, U.K., Polity Press,
1991; Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas Pragmatics, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press, 1994; Maeve Cooke, ed., On the Pragmatics of Communication,
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998; Peter Dews, ed., Habermas A Critical Reader,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1999.
Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Cambridge, UK., Polity Press, 1995.
In this context, it can be suggested that Honneths position with regard to his critique of Habermas work is similar in many ways to Schillers own critical position to Kant. Both draw on notions of the creative imagination drawn from an idea
of play to give substance to notions of subjectivity that have been emptied out at
the hands of formalistic philosophy.
As far as Habermas is concerned this aspect of over-socialisation is a theoretical

disposition that is structured even into his earliest work. See, for example, Toward
a Theory of Communicative Competence, Recent Sociology, no. 2, ed., Hans Peter
Dreitzel, London, Macmillan, 1970, pp. 115-148, and his reading of Freud in Knowledge
and Human Interests, London, Heinemann, 1974. See also Joel Whitebooks critique
in Perversion and Utopia, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995.
D. Wrong, The Oversocialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology American

Sociological Review, vol. 26, no. 1, April 1961, pp. 183-193.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, Anthroplogy, Philosophy, Politics, Thesis Eleven, 49,

May, 1997, pp. 99-116.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments, ed. & trans., David Ames Curtis,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997; Philosophy Politics, Autonomy, ed., David
Ames Curtis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991; The Imaginary Institution of
Society, trans., Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987; Anthropology,
Philosophy, Politics, Thesis Eleven, no. 47, May, 1997, pp. 99-116.
Castoriadis imaginary turn shifts an interpretation of the imagination from one
interpreted in predominantly aesthetic, fictive terms. Whilst it is beyond the scope
of this paper to provide a genealogy of modern notions of the imagination, in
brief, this particular interpretation was cemented in the context of the conceptual
division of labour that emerged in the dispute between the Enlighteners and
the Romanticists. If one views Kants work as paradigmatic in the case of the
Enlighteners, the faculty of the imagination plays a central yet suppressed role.
In Romanticism, the imagination predominates, especially if it is interpreted from
an aesthetic perspective, as is the case, for example, in the works of Schillers The
Aesthetic Letters on the Education of Man, and August and Friedrich Schlegel, especially their Atheneum Fragments. However, an imaginary turn, which emphasised indeterminate creativity sui generis, can be viewed as a parallel current that
accompanied Kants uneasy reflections concerning the faculty of the imagination,
and in the wake of these reflections attempted to rework these reflections beyond
the Romantic paradigm. This parallel current includes Hegels early work, especially his Jena period, Freuds discovery of the unconscious, and Castoriadis
own critical engagement with Aristotle, psychoanalysis and Marxism.
For the first current see I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans., Norman Kemp Smith,
London, Macmillan, 1978; Critique of Judgement, trans., & Introduction by Werner
S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. The Romantic current
includes Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde and the Fragments, trans., & Introduction by
Peter Firchow, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1971; Friedrich Schiller,
On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans., Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A.
Willoughby, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967. For the third current see G.W.F.
Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, eds. and trans., H.S. Harris
and T.M. Knox, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1979; Hegel and the
Human Spirit, a translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (18056), with a commentary by Leo Rauch, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1983;
84 John Rundell
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, New York, Basic Books, 1965; Cornelius
Castoriadis, see footnote 3 above, especially The Discovery of the Imagination
in World in Fragments.
See also James Engell, The Creative Imagination, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University
Press, 1981; Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, London, Hutchinson, 1988;
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition,
London, Oxford, 1953; Rethinking Imagination Culture and Creativity, eds., Gillian
Robinson and John Rundell, London, Routledge, 1994.
9
The notion of tension is taken from J.P. Arnason Modernity as Project and a Field
of Tension, Communicative Action, pp. 181-213. The idea of intersubjectivity
in tension has also been explored by me in The Hermeneutic Imagination
and Imaginary Creation: Ourselves, Others and Autonomy, Divinatio, Volume 8,
Autumn-Winter, 1998, pp. 87-110.
10
See Dews suggestive discussion of Herbert Schnadelbachs account of the history

of philosophy as an oscillation between metaphysical discourse and critical discourse in Modernity, Self-consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy in The
Limits of Disenchantment, London, Verso, 1996, p. 190.
11
See G.H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1972,
especially pp. 199-246.
12
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.
13
Ibid., p. 74.
14
Ibid., p. 81. See also Moral Development and Social Struggle, in Cultural-Political
Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment.
15
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 82.
16
See G.H. Mead, On Social Psychology, especially pp. 4-18.
17
At a fundamental level for Honneths reading of Mead, this inner friction between
the I and the me represents the outline of the conflict that is supposed to be
able to explain moral development of both individuals and society. As the representative of the community, the me embodies the conventional norms that one
must constantly try to expand, in order to give social expression to the impulsiveness and creativity of ones I. Mead thus introduces into the practical-relation-to-self a tension between the internalised collective will and the claims of
individuation, a tension that has lead to a moral conflict between the subject and
the subjects social environment. 18 In this context, social critique, and the dynamics of the reflexive personality, occurs not only merely at the seam between system and life-world (Habermas), but also and more significantly, at the seam between
the I and the me.
18
A. Honneth, Imagination and Recognition, 1991, unpublished paper.

19
Ibid., p. 7
20
For Honneth, Winnicotts work is a supplement to the insights put forward by Hegel
and G.H. Mead in their own versions of the dialectic of recognition. According to
Honneth, what distinguishes Winnicott from the tradition of orthodox psychoanalysis
is that the symbiotic and interdependent relation between infant and mother cannot be captured by the term primary narcissism. Rather, the first phase of the human
life cycle indicates, for Winnicott, that there are two parties in interaction who are
completely dependent on each other for the satisfaction of their needs, without at
all being able to demarcate themselves individually from the other. ibid., p. 8.
21
D.W. Winnicott, From Dependence towards Independence in the Development

of the Individual, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment,
London, Karmas Books, 1990, pp. 83-92.
22
D.W. Winnicott, The Capacity to be Alone, The Maturational Processes and the
Facilitating Environment, pp. 29-37.
23
Honneth, Imagination and Recognition, p. 14.
24
Ibid., p. 15.
25
Dews, Modernity, Self-Consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy: Jrgen

Habermas and Dieter Henrich in Debate, The Limits of Disenchantment, pp. 169193, especially p. 173.
26
See Honneths Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: on Cornelius Castoriadis

Theory of Society, Thesis Eleven, no. 14, 1986, 62-78.
27
Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, trans., T.M. Knox with an Interpretive Essay by

Charles Karelis, Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 79-81.
28
Ibid., pp. 80-81.
29
Ibid.
30
See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 487; R. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation
in Kant, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1990; J. Rundell, Creativity and
Judgement: Kant on Reason and Imagination, Rethinking Imagination, especially
pp. 88-96.
31
Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 87.
32
See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, second edition, especially the B Deduction; Critique
of Judgement, especially p. 98; Schiller, The Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,
especially letter 15.
33
In the Jena Lectures Hegel either absorbs the work of the imagination into a systemics of Being, which requires language and the dialectics of negation in order
to achieve an openness to the world, or lays the groundwork for the activities of
love, work and politics, through which humans become historically ruminating
animals (to use a phrase taken from Nietszches work), and thus move away from
first nature. Following Taylors interpretation in his Hegel two directions emerge
86 John Rundell
in Hegels work on the dialectic - the ontological and the historical interpretivist.
In the former, reason functions as the central motif in which it creates itself in
order to bring together the practice of knowledge and its conceptualisation. The
dialectical play of the categories, which is laid out in the Logic, for example,
denudes the significance of humankind as a plurality of actors who form the world
through their actions. In this strong metaphysical version, humankind becomes
only a subordinate moment of Geist, which mediates its own teleological impetus
through a spiral of self-consciousness. As has been stated elsewhere, the teleological logos of reason is actually metasocial - society and the human life which
encapsulates it are but intermediary stages or stations on the way to reasons selfknowledge (J. Rundell, Origins of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, p. 37).
Not only is it systemic, its truth content is also immanent, and dependent on the
idea of the articulation of reason as whole. In this way, the metaphysical-ontological dialectic can never posit the possibility of a positive decomposition, a detotalisation, a domination or a cruelty. The latter, if they exist for Hegel, are ultimately
in the service of reason. There is neither apocalypse nor power on horseback, here,
only reasons cunning.
Unlike the ontological dialectic, Charles Taylor, for one, argues that another version - the historical-interpretivist - begins with no realised purpose, but finishes
with one. This version places the emphasis on history as an interpretative project,
which must convince its audience that reason has proceeded in the most rational
and necessary course. It does this through the study of world history, and the
truth content belongs to the plausibility of the historical interpretation that is developed by the interlocutor (in this instance Hegel, through the eyes of Charles Taylor).
The point though, is that although history is looked at with the eye of reason, it
is substantiated reason made visible, because it is being made conscious through
an interpretation of it. (Rundell, The Origins of Modernity, p. 38). This also entails
that humankind becomes a substantial actor, and that Hegels philosophy of reason becomes an action theory, or more specifically a historically centred reflexive
action theory in which the anthropology and the normative horizon are internally
related. Reasons self-consciousness is internally related to humankinds struggles
towards reflexive action, and away from the worlds of self-incurred tutelage. The
result, for Hegel, is a combination of politics, historicity and reason. For Hegel,
this is the story of how humankind creates its own possibilities for freedom, which
are brought forward as real historical moments, for example Athenian democracy,
and the modern constitutional corporate state. The latter is ideal-typically reconstructed in the Philosophy of Right.
34
Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in R.M. Zaner and D. Ihde, Phenomenology

and Existentialism, New York, Capricorn Books, 1973; Richard Kearney, Poetics of
Imagining, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
35
Castoriadis, World in Fragments, p. 184; see also Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics,

Thesis Eleven, pp. 99-116.
36
See The Imaginary Institution of Society and Radical Imagination and Social Instituting
Imaginary in Rethinking Imagination. This current essay leaves to one side the
dimension of social imaginary significations in Castoriadis work, which mould/fabricate the psyche into the social-historical. I have explored this aspect in From
the Shores of Reason to the Horizon of Meaning: Some Reflections on Habermas
and Castoriadis Theories of Culture, Thesis Eleven, no. 22, 1989.
37
The essays in World in Fragments, published in English in 1997, represent, more

so than the Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis systematic working through
of his reformulation of the anthropo-ontology of the creative imagination. Although
interpretative weight is given to The State of the Subject Today in this current
essay, From Monad to Autonomy, The Construction of the World in Psychosis,
The Discovery of the Imagination, Logic, Imagination, Reflection, and MerleauPonty and the Weight of the Ontological Imagination are also of particular significance.
38
Meaningful way is the key term here as it assumes dimensions and capacities
for sociation. Sociation is not simply an interaction but one saturated with meaning. This emphasis on meaning takes into account the autism of the radical imagination and purely physiological damage, both of which impair sociation. What
one does about this impairment is an issue about values and their imaginary horizons. As a further aside, the dead human being is a repository of corporeality that
decays, as well as specific imaginary significations from the side of the living,
even in the specific archaeological re-discovery of a specific body.
39
Castoriadis, World in Fragments, pp. 143, 178.
40
Ibid. pp. 178, 148.
41
Ibid. p. 151.
42
Ibid. p. 151.
43
This domination of representational pleasure over organ pleasure occurred, according to Castoriadis, when the imagination became autonomous. Autonomy here
does not refer to Castoriadis other political rendition of this term. Rather, in this
anthropo-ontological context, autonomy refers to both the separation of the imagination from the functionality of the organism. It also refers to the imagination s
radicalisation, in that it was no longer enslaved to the requirements of this functionality. In other words, the homologous and correspondent relation between the
imagination and the organism, which occurred associatively, was broken. This radicalisation that the human imagination undergoes also radicalises the affects and
88 John Rundell
desires, making each quasi-autonomous in that they are mediated by the creative,
representational flux of this radicalised imagination.
44
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, especially pp. 18-187.
45
Castoriadis, Radical Imagination and Social Instituting Imaginary, Rethinking

Imagination, p. 137.
46
Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 199.
47
Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p. 56.
48
Ibid. p. 59.
49
Castoriadis The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 300.
50
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 178.
51
Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia. Castoriadis emphasis on the distinction, but copresence, between the psyche and the social-historical within each individual has
entailed that the forms of the social-historical, which take place as intersubjectivities or relational imaginaries, has been under-theorised.
52
Castoriadis, World in Fragments p. 155.
53
This reading of Hegel will concentrate on the intersubjective dimensions, whilst

remaining within the orbit of Castoriadis formulation of the mediating creative
imagination. In this sense it will suspend Hegels own philosophical anthropological distinction between first and second nature. Notwithstanding this distinction and from the vantagepoint of his image of the night of enclosure, Hegels
insight is to ask how the subject breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character. So the dilemma becomes whether this combination of animalic
first nature and imaginary creation entraps humans in their animality, and a permanent internality with its combination of chaos, creation and dis-articulation like
Werther in Goethes The Sufferings of Young Werther, or whether they can establish
a relation with an outer reality.
54
It is here that we can depart from some other readings of Hegels work, especially
Taylors in Hegel in which he posits the metaphysical-ontological and the historical-interpretivist dialectics (see footnote 31 above). Notwithstanding each of these
currents, though, another reading of the Jena Lectures indicates that it is the double positioning of the imagination qua imagination and outwardly posited intersubjectivity that is central to Hegels theoretical concerns, and not necessarily the
structure of Being, nor the hermeneutically formed historical consciousness, as
such. Rather, he is interested in the way in which forms of intersubjectivity fracture enclosure. These modes of intersubjectivity, and the ways that the subject is
opened onto the world through their relational forms, is conventionally thought
of as the dialectic of, or struggle for, recognition.
55
56
Ibid., p. 101.
57
Ibid., p. 101.
58
Ibid., p. 107.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid., p. 134.
61
Ibid., p. 135.
62
Ibid., p. 115.
63
Ibid., p. 105.
64
In the context of the dialectic of domination, though, Hegel and Honneth, glide
over the issue of loves permanent potentiality for tension, and, thus, for its own
potential for domination. Although Hegel does not say this explicitly, love is a
dialectic of asymmetrical recognition. To put it another way, in this register it is
an intersubjective form of both exclusivity and bestowal and has as its counterfactual interiority the always ever-present potential of denial, withdrawal and
absence. For this reason, and against Honneth and Winnicott, love cannot be the
basis for a dialectic of practical rationality, although it is one basis, and an important one, for identity formation. As an intersubjective form, it is the basis for the
dialectic of human enrichment, creativity or fertility - in other words, the internal
dialectic of Eros, as well as agape.
Nonetheless, Hegel and Honneth combine loves particular form of intersubjectivity with the institutional form of the family. It is here that the glide or occlusion occurs because the family form is absorbed into Hegels normative systemics
with its structure of Subjective Spirit, Objective Spirit, and Absolute Spirit. Given
this systemic emphasis, he concentrates on the formal recognition of legal entities
that inhabit the world of Objective Spirit in a real or potential position of symmetrical reciprocity or mutual recognition. The world of Objective Spirit, and the
position that subjects hold to one another intersubjectively, is the world of politics and the practices of practical reasoning. In other words, both Hegel and
Honneth attempt to resolve a point of tension that sits at the intersection of love
and practical reason by subsuming the particular intersubjectivity of love under
its institutional form. Its institutional form - that is, marriage as the public face of
the intersubjectivity of love - is used by Hegel to build a bridge into the world of
the political sui generis, that is to open onto the structure of civil society and the
forms of sociation or intersubjectivity and their antinomies that are present there.
To be sure, marriage opens onto loves ethical form of life, or its Sittlichkeit, both
internally and externally. When once acknowledged, marriage enables the partnership to move from exclusivity to inclusivity on the basis of the co-existence,
yet difference between love and friendship. Love constitutes the relationships
internal horizon, friendship its external one.
90 John Rundell
However, it is friendship, or symmetrical reciprocity, and not love that constitutes

the particular intersubjective horizon of practical reasoning. It is this image that
finds its way into The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right, but itself
is generated in a way that alerts us to the internal tensions of political modernity
along the fault lines of democracy, juridification, administration and nation-state
formation. Moreover, each will have its moment of non-symmetricality, voiced
through neither register of love nor friendship, but that of power. In the spirit of
the above remarks power can be conceptualised as a form of sociability that presupposes an opening onto the world, albeit in asymmetrical terms. Cruelty, alternatively, and as indicated above, is indicative of enclosure.
65
66
See also the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel interprets evil as a singularity,
which cannot negate itself, that is consider something that might exist outside of
itself. Kant indicates something similar in his notion of radical evil in Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone where it (radical evil) is viewed as a perversion
of practical reason that makes itself its own transcendentally construed absolute.
See also S. Zizek, Kant with (or Against) Sade? New Formations, no. 35, Autumn
1998.
67
For Castoriadis work on the idea of the questioning of radical and social imaginary creations see, for example, Logic, Imagination, Reflection, World in Fragments,
ed. & trans., David Ames Curtis, California, Stanford University Press, 1997,
pp. 246-272; and The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy, Philosophy
Politics Autonomy, ed., David Ames Curtis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991,
pp. 81-123.
However, the activity of putting into question, which, for Castoriadis denotes
what has been reconstructed here as second order autonomy, intersects or leans
on value horizons or hermeneutic contexts, which may be constituted and articulated from many vantage points. This means that there is an intersection of creative interpretation with second order autonomy and the value horizons, which
themselves may be constituted in either closed or open ways. This intersection
makes interpretation an active principle, which itself is established and articulated
in terms of the relational space between ego and alter.
In this context, ideal-typical distinctions can be made between modes of interpretation along the following lines: the interpreter as genius creator who overlays
the world with his/her creations as a god, and thus treats the other as a thing of
indifference. Creativity here is the myth of auto-creation in an enclosed way that
resists relational forms. The interpreter can also exist as controller/legislator who
brings in other interpretations and assembles them only from his/her perspective,
or legislates paternalistically on behalf of others. In both cases, the space between
self and other is relatively open but from the position of power, and as such, can
always, potentially at least, be disassembled. Another mode of interpretation is
the wry and ironic creator who reads the space between ego and alter as simply
an ontological condition of disjuncture and difference. In this sense, there is a
detached sensibility on the part of the wry creator on the basis of the recognition
of this disjuncture. The creative-interpreter as interlocuter has a sensibility that is
similar to the former, but assumes that the space between ego and alter is potentially at least always open as a relation in which something new can occur. This
form can be termed dynamic autonomous creation in which disagreement, as
much as agreement, is mutually present.
See Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, Rationality of Reason, Rationality of Intellect,
The Power of Shame, London, Routledge, 1985, pp. 71-250; J.P. Arnason, World
Interpretation and Mutual Understanding, in Honneth et al. Cultural-Political
Interventions in the Unfinished Project of the Enlightenment, pp. 247-267; H.-G. Gadamer,
Truth and Method, second revised edition, trans. & revised by Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall, London, Sheed and Ward, 1989.
92 John Rundell

John Rundell Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension

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John Rundell

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining

Honneth and the Intersubjective Development of the

which also offers a possibility of relative independence to occur on the part

Hegel, Castoriadis and Ontologies of the Creative Imagination

recognises the explosiveness of the Romantic movements prioritisation of

self-understanding of the social world, together with its imaginary horizon,

Subjects in Tension: Between Closure and Openness

creative world of the radical imaginary to thought, as well as to others beyond

In this context a distinction can be made between domination or power, and

is mobilised from a variety of vantagepoints, of which the stronger claim to

As far as Habermas is concerned this aspect of over-socialisation is a theoretical

D. Wrong, The Oversocialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology American

See Cornelius Castoriadis, Anthroplogy, Philosophy, Politics, Thesis Eleven, 49,

See Dews suggestive discussion of Herbert Schnadelbachs account of the history

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 82.

See G.H. Mead, On Social Psychology, especially pp. 4-18.

A. Honneth, Imagination and Recognition, 1991, unpublished paper.

D.W. Winnicott, From Dependence towards Independence in the Development

Honneth, Imagination and Recognition, p. 14.

Dews, Modernity, Self-Consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy: Jrgen

See Honneths Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: on Cornelius Castoriadis

Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, trans., T.M. Knox with an Interpretive Essay by

Ibid., pp. 80-81.

Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 87.

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in R.M. Zaner and D. Ihde, Phenomenology

Castoriadis, World in Fragments, p. 184; see also Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics,

The essays in World in Fragments, published in English in 1997, represent, more

Castoriadis, World in Fragments, pp. 143, 178.

Ibid. pp. 178, 148.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, especially pp. 18-187.

Castoriadis, Radical Imagination and Social Instituting Imaginary, Rethinking

Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 199.

Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p. 56.

Castoriadis The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 300.

Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 178.

Castoriadis, World in Fragments p. 155.

This reading of Hegel will concentrate on the intersubjective dimensions, whilst

Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 100.

However, it is friendship, or symmetrical reciprocity, and not love that constitutes

Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 105.

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