Critical Horizons 2:1 (2001)© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001

John Rundell

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension1

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to examine two turns towardsthe idea of the creative imagination in contemporarycritical theory in the works of Axel Honneth and CorneliusCastoriadis. Honneth’s work subsumes the idea of thecreative imagination under the paradigm of mutual recog-nition. Castoriadis constructs the idea of the creativeimagination from an ontological perspective. However,Castoriadis’ idea of the primary autism of the creativeimagination can be thrown into relief by Hegel’s JenaLectures. Hegel’s and Castoriadis’ work opens onto a subjectivity in tension, that is, a subjectivity that is forgedout of a combination of subjective interiority, as well asthe patterns of interaction that are multidimensional intheir scope and create social spaces that force the sub-ject beyond an initial closure.

KEYWORDS: Imagination, subjects, intersubjectivity,Honneth, Hegel, Castoriadis

Introduction

In recent critical theory, there are many direc-tions from which the ‘linguistic turn’, espe-

cially the one identified with Habermas’ work,has been challenged.2 Two are of particular

note and will be the subject of our discussions. In his own work on inter-

subjectivity, 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 WhilstHonneth draws our attention to the Jena period of Hegel’s work as a basis

for the interrogation of an intersubjectively constituted struggle for recogni-

tion, his interrogation of this struggle will be suspended in the following dis-

cussion 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 inter-

subjectively constituted. Winnicott’s 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 sig-

nificant importance, which points to an implicit imaginary turn in Honneth’s

work.4

However, Honneth’s re-working entails that subject-formation is subsumedunder the paradigmatic weight of intersubjectively co-ordinated theorising,

which leaves to one side, the status of the subject sui generis. This entails thatHonneth (and Habermas) reproduce an over-socialised conception of the

human being. For Habermas, this oversocialisation is rendered as an ‘over-linguistified conception of the human being’, whilst for Honneth it is ren-

dered 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 alongsidesocialisation 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 oneconcerning the struggle for recognition. The ‘imaginary turn’ is a way of re-

thinking the over-socialised conception of the human animal, and not onlythe conceptualisations of its over-linguistification. It will be addressed pri-

marily 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 Honneth’s work, notwithstand-

ing, 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 andtension between the monadic core of the psyche and socially created con-

stellations of culture and social institutions that he terms social imaginarysignifications. These dimensions, for him, are constituted as imaginative or

imagining activities, rather than linguistic ones, that produce meaning bothas a creative flux, and a flux of creative interactions between these two dimen-

sions. The question of the internality of the subject is moved away from themetaphysics of the unconscious (Freud and Lacan), to a site that is posited

in anthropo-ontological terms, the emphasise of which is on the indetermi-nate creativity of human subjects and the equally historically indeterminate

creation of human societies.7 Castoriadis’ work continues and consolidatesan 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 theirreducibility of each side of subject-formation, his formulation of the sub-

ject, nonetheless, confronts the problem of the complexity of subjectivity. Itis in this context that Hegel’s 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 beyondan 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 termedhere, subjects in tension. By ‘subjects in tension’, I mean subjects who are

forged out of a combination of subjective interiority as well as the patternsof 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 oscillationbetween “metaphysical discourse” and “critical discourse.”10 This distinction

can also be read as a tension between three aspects that constitute a criticaltheorising. The first aspect refers to the, often, concealed anthropological prin-

ciples or basic human self-images of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity,

Imaginary 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 criti-

cal 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 Hegel’s Jena Lectures, theworks of G.H. Mead, and the paediatric psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in

order to posit a theory of intersubjectivity, otherwise couched in terms of adialectic of recognition. The aim of his theory is to investigate the way in

which the reflexive, democratic personality might be formed. Mead’s workis important for Honneth, because following Habermas’ use of it, it provides

the framework for a structure of interaction through which self-reflexivitydevelops. 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 object-

relation to oneself.11 As Honneth points out, in the formulation of that partof the self, which Mead terms the ‘me’, “[Mead] inverts the relationship

between the ego and the social world and asserts a primacy of the percep-tion 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 becomeits own object of self-reflection. The corollary of this self-reflection is the recog-

nition by society that the self is a social member. Moreover, this social recog-nition 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 theemergence 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 objec-

tification is a basic anthropological principle. In this way, the person parti-

cipates in social life on the basis of mutual recognition gained by such

objectifying interactions. For Mead, as well as Honneth, though, the interac-

tions 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 ‘dia-

logue’ 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 dynam-ics of critique and its origins. For Mead, and in a homologous formulation

with psychoanalysis, there is part of the self “that is responsible to actionproblems . . . that can never as such be glimpsed” - the ‘I’.”13 However, as

Honneth points out, whilst the ‘I’ stands for “the sudden experience of asurge of inner impulses,” it is unclear whether it stems from pre-social

drives, the creative imagination, or the moral sensibility of one’s own self.14

It is here that a conceptual tension emerges in Honneth’s own work around

Mead’s, and his, basic anthropological principle. Both Mead and Honnethadopt the latter formulation of “a moral sensibility of one’s own self” as the

interpretation of the ‘I’. According to Mead (and Honneth), the ‘I’ is con-ceived as a “creative reaction potential” that establishes a friction that initi-

ates critique.15

However, Honneth not only follows Mead’s footsteps, but also confronts thelimits of his (Mead’s) formulation of the critically oriented impulse as a moral-

integrative one. Critique, for Mead, is mobilised as a form of creative devia-tion from societal norms. This version of critique, however, exposes Mead’s

own peculiar naturalistic functionalism, which simultaneously slips away from a theory of pragmatic psychological developmentalism to a theory of socie-

tal 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 Honneth’s argu-ment. For Honneth, at least in The Struggle for Recognition, the impulse towards

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 65

critique not only occurs as part of the self’s objectification, but also emerges

in the context of damaging intersubjective relations. Leaving to one side

Honneth’s own reworking of Hegel’s Jena Lectures, we will investigate theway in which he confronts the constitutive dimensions of the ‘I’ as critical

impulse, because for him it belongs to the capacity of human individuationand 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 ‘imagina-

tive’ dimensions of reciprocal recognition, in a way that not only foregroundsthis aspect, but transforms it into a necessary part of a developmental process.18

In order to pursue the themes of individuation and autonomisation, whichare internal to the ‘I’ as critical impulse, Honneth, at this point, departs from

Mead’s work and concentrates on the work of the paediatric psychoanalystDonald Winnicott with some unexpected results. These results point towards

an unacknowledged imaginary turn in Honneth’s work.

For Honneth, at least in The Struggle for Recognition, the fight for recognition

involves an increasing realisation of the differentiating inter-subjective dimen-sions of love, rights and solidarity that are built up in relations and encoun-

ters between self and other. In his view, the human faculty of the imaginationis 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 life-world in which the tripartite hierarchy of patterns of recognition are pre-

sent . . . he [or she] may anchor his [or her] relationship to self in the positivemodes of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem.”19 Honneth links the

faculty of the productive imagination to the struggle for recognition througha reading of Winnicott’s work. This is done by Honneth to make the pro-

ductive imaginative faculty the result of an intersubjectively orientated setof 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 mother’s loving recognition of herinfant.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 ofthe 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 avail-

able 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 expe-

rience of being merged and the experience of being separate, that is of being

by one’s self, or being alone, is crossed.22 To put it more strongly, for Honneth,

this relative independence should also include a capacity for mutual recog-

nition 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 rela-tion is forged. Following Winnicott, “the child’s creativity, indeed the human

being’s imaginative faculty as such, is tied to the presupposition of ‘a capa-bility 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, Honnethreiterates Winnicott’s thesis that “the human imagination emerges genetically

at that moment when the child acquires a capacity to be alone by trustingthe permanency of the mother’s devotion . . . that is that the imagination can

only develop in the context of loving recognition.”24 Imagination, trust, affir-mation, and mutuality go together for Honneth, and it is on this basis that

not only other areas of human expression are integrated - feelings and emo-tions - but also solidaristic forms of association as well as the creation of cul-

tural objectivations.

Notwithstanding the psychoanalytic insights derived from Winnicott’s work,

Honneth’s analysis of the imagination has rendered it into an intersubjec-tively conceived moment. However, Honneth’s subsumption of the creative

imagination under the umbrella of the paradigm of mutual recognition begsthe question of the status of the subject. At the deepest level this subsumption

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 67

must presuppose a primary acquaintance of the self with itself for interac-

tion to occur at all.25

For Honneth, imaginative, playful creativity, and thus reflexivity, are out-

comes of a developmental process rather than constitutive dimensions of thehuman being. In Honneth’s account, the creation of meaning and mutual

recognition stand in homologous relation with one another. This also entailsthat Honneth’s reconstruction of the struggle for recognition has a quiet func-

tionalism behind it in that a normal developmental path results from thishomology. 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. Honneth’s critique of Castoriadis, for example, is alreadybased on a pre-theoretical disposition that overstates Castoriadis’ loyalty to

the revolutionary paradigm at the expense of exploring the more fundamen-tal 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 posit-ing ‘a moral sensibility of one’s own self’ propelled by a creative imaginary

impulse, implicitly raises the question of the status of the subject and its pri-mary self-acquaintance.

Hegel, Castoriadis and Ontologies of the Creative Imagination

Whilst Honneth draws our attention to the Jena period of Hegel’s work as a

basis for an interrogation of an intersubjectively constituted struggle for recog-nition, another reading of Hegel’s work suggests the co-presence of the cre-

atively imagining subject and intersubjectivity, rather than a developmentalhomology. Moreover, this co-presence is constituted in a tension-ridden man-

ner. Tensions exist between this creatively imagining subject and the formsof intersubjectivity, and within forms of intersubjectivity themselves.

It is, first, worth looking briefly at Hegel’s 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 properlyhis positioning, of the three successive art forms - Symbolism, Classicism,

Romanticism - Hegel suggests that Romanticism establishes the authenticexistence of the inner world of the human being as a world sui generis.27 Hegel

68 � John Rundell

recognises the explosiveness of the Romantic movement’s 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 objectitself. It emphasises “free concrete spirituality” or the “spiritually inward” in

which art no longer works “for sensuous intuition.”28 Rather, it must “workfor 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 external”29 to the ex-tent that externality is viewed as a contingent factor. This means that the

imagination, in a strong critique of empiricism and realism, is at liberty todistort, 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 expressive-

aesthetic capacity. For Hegel, an aesthetically determined expression is notthe 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 imagination’s omnipo-tent, 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 Spirit’s treasury, in its Night. The image is uncon-

scious; 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 sim-

plicity - 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 phan-

tasmagoric representations it is everywhere . . . we see this Night when we

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 69

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 “treas-

ure” of the human imagination that is filled with the flux of representations.For Hegel, the imagination and its flux is ontologically posited, as the con-

dition and ground of human existence in its simplicity. Moreover, Hegel, inhis 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 imag-ination 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 creationin 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 anddeploys images of violence and cruelty, caprice, grief and despair. In other

words, as Hegel constructs it, this imaginative inner world is the place whereevil, as much as good imaginings may reign.

However, as an ontological moment or insight, this is as much as Hegel hasto say about the imagination before his move to a position of intersubjec-

tivity, 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 re-

working of the Freudian idea of the unconscious, Castoriadis implicitly reit-erates Hegel’s 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 momentof creativity. This is also a response to Heidegger ’s simultaneous re-open-

ing and re-closing of the topic of the imagination in a renewed theologicalmetaphysics 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 (Being’s)

concealed or partially recovered ‘other’ side, its difference. Rather, it is indi-cative of humanity’s capacity to create its own world, and to create it always

as a condition of altereity, as difference, sui generis. In this sense, Casto-riadis’ view of the imagination is simultaneously ontological and anthropo-

logical. As he says, “the living being is an emergence. In this emergence weread this formative potentiality of overall Being/being, a potentiality that

in itself has, of course, no personality, and no finality either; it is not tele-ological.”35

70 � John Rundell

For Castoriadis, the subject is not one of and by either language or inter-

subjectivity - he/she is an ontological creation, the ontology of which is co-

constituted by the creative imagination. In Castoriadis’ view, the creative-

productive, rather than associative, dimension of the imagination is the

constitutive and defining characteristic of the human animal. More specific-

ally, 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 thatattempts 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 animalin 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 ten-

sion between the asociability and closure of the radical imagination whichresists socialisation, and the sociability that is constituted through imaginary

significations required for human life and established and experienced inter-subjectively - 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 humanworld. 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 betweenthe 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 positedas a coalescence of four dimensions, each with its own internal complexity.

Whilst each does not presume or precede the other, human life, in any mean-ingful 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-ordercreative imagination; the social world, or socially instituted and instituting

imaginary significations and their collective representations, that is, the

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 71

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 quanti-tative terms, there is a qualitative mediation with nature, even at the most

seemingly organic level. Moreover, this mediation is one that is neither solelyenvironmental nor relational (that is, selective, in Darwinian terms, for exam-

ple). It is creative-interpretative in the sense that the mediated qualitativerelation 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 imagin-ation and together they form the defunctionalised ‘non-natural’, that is, non-

immediate 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 distortionsindicate, for Castoriadis, that at the level of the development of the long his-

tory of the species a shift occurred from organ pleasure to representationalpleasure, or more specifically when representational pleasure came to dom-

inate over organ pleasure.41

In Castoriadis’ view, the interior world of the human being exists, ontologi-

cally speaking, in a state of ongoing representational activity that does notknow time or space, logic or symbolic order. It is “an unlimited and unsta-

ble flux, a representational spontaneity,” that creates meaning out of itself foritself, and in this sense is a closed world.42 Moreover, because of its sponta-

neous, fluxing and orderless state, it is fragmented. At this primary level, itcreates meaning rather than imposes or controls it. This development entails

that, for Castoriadis, the human animal is the one who mediates all dimen-sions of his/her existence by means of this imaginary, representational pleas-

ure, or its objectifying products. In this context, there is no world of ‘firstnature’ 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 imagination’s irreducibility to a category of either func-

tional schematisation (in Kant’s cognitive scheme), or functional psycholog-

ical 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 ofthe 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 betweenthe imaginings and their (unstable and re-interpretable) symbolic and insti-

tutional 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 his-

torical - 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 andundetermined 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 simulta-

neously one that concerns the multiplicity and hence the relation of theseimaginary creations. Thus, according to Castoriadis, there is “a heterogeneous

multiplicity of co-existing alterities” which emerge from or in poietic imag-inary space, “space unfolding with and through the emergence of forms.”48

His emphasise on the ontological primacy of the creative imagination entailsthat at this level of his theorising, the theory is indifferent to what these

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 73

creations are and what form they take. In other words, at this level, his the-

ory 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 mean-ing or imaginary significations that are constitutive of human existence. One

is psychic meaning that is projected outward upon the world which a pre-sent 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 sat-

urated 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 rela-tion 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 under-goes both a radicalisation and relativisation. In Castoriadis’ view, the emer-

gence of new forms and constellations which may or may not be benign, isan 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 sociabilityfrom 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 worldof 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 ten-sion between the asocial (rather than the pre-social) radical imaginary, and

the social imaginary. The asociality of the radical imagination works againsta completed socialisation that would normalise the living human being. It,

thus, works against the world of the social and the creation of the subject asa 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 psyche’s entry into society cannot occur taken-for-

grantedly, 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 andopens itself to the social-historical world, depending, too on its own work

and its own creativity.”49 As Whitebook has pointed out, “this statement pre-

supposes 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 fur-

ther 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 simul-

taneously closed and open, against the thrust of Castoriadis’ own formula-tions. 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 Hegel’s ter-minology of the Jena Lectures. In Castoriadis’ own reworking of psychoanalysis,

this transformation ‘stratifies’ the psyche. The so-called stratification of thepsyche is its social positing, a positing that begins from birth through which

the monadic core of the subject is cracked open, social identity formed andconsolidated, and social relations established. The intrapsychic conflicts that

exist in the human animal are formed instances of the co-existence of thesephases, and thus the historicity of the subject. In this sense, these phases are

neither developmental, nor dialectical in the sense that one phase precedesanother 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 imaginary’s work as an opening. As Castoriadis acknowledges, the passage from the closed

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 75

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

the subject’s 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 recog-nises other human beings as subjects. This recognition of other subjects, and

to which Hegel’s Jena Lectures was one response, alerts us to the further issueof the creative opening of the subject qua inter-subjectivity. In some ways,

Castoriadis recognises this in his discussion of the social-historical dimen-sion 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-func-

tionalist theory, is to take the mother, as “the first and massive representa-tive 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 thebearer of social imaginary significations specific to that society.”52 In other

words, the infant is bathed, so to speak, in social imaginary significations ofwhich the mother is the first representative.

Whilst all of this is correct, Castoriadis’ reference to the mother figure as rep-

resentative occludes an investigation into the dynamics of openness, as well

as the forms of relation that are established between self and others. It is atthis juncture that we can return to Hegel’s Jena Lectures.53 The Jena Lectures

are instructive, because, for Hegel, the constitutive ontology of the creativeimagination is supplemented by a paradigm of outwardly orientated sub-

jectivity that recognises non-identity or negation of the other as one of thesubject’s relational forms. The difference between Honneth’s, Hegel’s, and

Castoriadis’ positions is that whilst Honneth views the creative imaginationas the product of a relational process, Hegel and Castoriadis view it as onto-

logically primary. Hegel, though, recognises nonetheless, that self-formationis one that also requires an outward movement in order to escape the terror

of the Night or self-enclosure here.

Hence, this reading moves Hegel’s and Honneth’s 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 positionof enclosure in which the creative imagination is posited as its source. The

position of openness itself is also one of interdependence - or at least thepotential of its recognition - through which this closure is fractured and world-

relations established. In the Jena Lectures, at least, the position of possibleopenness precedes the normative horizon of what now can be viewed as sec-

ond-order autonomy, or more accurately, for Hegel, freedom. For him, free-dom is the specific form of second-order, reflexive interdependence, the result

of which is relations of symmetrical reciprocity. In the Jena Lectures, Hegel’smore usual immanent connection between philosophical anthropology and

the normative horizon of second order autonomy (freedom) is, for the briefestof moments, suspended.

Whilst the struggle for openness is experienced, according to Hegel, as anactivity of self-objectivation or externalisation through the developmental

process of learning a language, the weight of his analysis of the process of itis posited in relational terms, that is, in the context of the self’s relations with

others. Hegel argues that the self’s fracturing towards openness occurs throughmulti-dimensional modes of intersubjectivity. Hegel privileges three - love,

work and politics. According to Hegel, each in their own way provides boththe constitutive intersubjective groundwork and institutional settings for this

struggle. In the context of this paper, love work and politics are of interestless 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 owninternal moment of tension where the stress or emphasis of subjects under-

going opening is experienced not solely as something positive, but also assomething antinomic.

In the Jena Lectures specifically, Hegel attempts to conceptualise the movefrom the Night of self-enclosure to the day of openness and otherness, by

making a distinction between desire and drive. Although it belongs to firstnature 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

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 77

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, nonethe-

less, the human being who is commanded by desire makes its own being-

for-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 movesbeyond its own interiority (in Castoriadis’ terms, its own autism) and works

upon the world in the context of, and with others. The consummation of thiswork is the self’s self-objectification. This self-objectification contains two

moments, for Hegel. In the first moment, the self develops a capacity forreflexivity and thus mediated world relations. In this context, Hegel posits a

model of self-consciousness as a form that is three-dimensional. The threedimensions of self-consciousness that Hegel posits in the Jena Lectures are that

it is externalising, it acquires increasing capacities for self-detachment andreflexivity, 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 moregeneral, for in this externalising reflexively self-detaching mediation with the

world, the self confronts others. And this is the second moment, and can becaptured, 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 aninsight, as well as a double limit to Hegel’s own reflections. One limit is at

the level of his anthropology; the other is at the level of his critico-norma-tive theory with systemic intent. Each limit pushes his work towards both

the metaphysical-ontological and historical-hermeneutical paradigms, withtheir own internal features, dynamics and problems.

Love requires the recognition of otherness. Hegel’s image of love is one in

which the Night of the self-generating and creating imagination is located ina specific social space, that of intimacy in a way that not so much transposes

the imaginary force, but transforms it because in Hegel’s terms it is a formof 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 impor-

78 � John Rundell

tant point about love, for Hegel, is that it is an externalising, reflexively self-

detaching 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 dialec-

tic of reflexive othering, otherwise known as the dialectic of recognition, Hegel

resists the great temptation posed by the Romantic version of love, as typi-

fied by Goethe’s 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 one’s

essence in another- because one knows oneself in the other, negating one-

self as being-for-oneself, as different. This self-negation is one’s being for

another, into which one’s immediate being is transformed. Each one’s self-

negation 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 inti-mate ties that are expressed in relational form - a shared life together, care,

child bearing, child raising and commonly acquired and held goods and prop-erty. As Hegel again states, it “is a total movement in itself - being recog-

nised, . . . 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 admix-ture of personality (as the practice of reflexive detachment) with the imper-

sonality of first nature.61

Yet, Hegel alerts us to love’s own internal point of tension that moves itbeyond the dialectic of mutual or symmetrical recognition. There are points

of tension that Hegel alerts us to, and makes us suspicious that love cannotbe the basis for a version of practical rationality in the way that is inter-

nal to the structure of the Jena Lectures, and that Honneth, too, proposes. Inthe first instance, the relation of love between two people presupposes a

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 79

dimension of exclusivity or particularity, in the sense that it (the love rela-

tion) becomes the point of reference. By being exclusive, an initial equality

that is established between two different selves in the mutuality of recogni-

tion, 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 other’s 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-feel-

ing - 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 neg-

ative aspect, the thing, but rather the self-knowledge of the other. A dis-

tinction 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 Hegel’s Jena Lectures, as in the more developed, yet less nuanced master-

slave dialectic of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the recognition of the otheralways contains its oppositional moment. The importance of crime, for exam-

ple, for Hegel, is not that it points to the functional limit of the sacred or themoral 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 experienceof domination, for Hegel, and hence the master/slave dialectic belongs

here and as one that can only be constituted as a relationship between selfand other. In this context, and as Hegel shows in a delimited form in The

Phenomenology of Spirit, violence, power and domination only occur in thecontext 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 noth-

ing but a singularity. In Hegel’s terms, it is the movement towards self-con-

sciousness 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-preserv-

ation.”65 In this sense, cruelty is the second-order reflexive autism of the cre-

ative 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 Sade’s work, but also

occurs only from the vantage point of the self’s own reflexive, yet self-enclosed

and self-referential imaginings with the purpose of annihilating another’s.

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 rela-tional forms in which social individuals, each with their own radical and

social imaginings interact with others and together create and re-create theserelational 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 dynamicsthat presuppose, at an equally constitutive level as the radical and social

imaginaries, the simultaneity of co-presence, recognition and reciprocity, butnot symmetricality. In this sense, interactions between human beings take

form in ways that have meaning for the subjects involved, meaning that canbe imposed or agreed, understood or misapprehended, acquiesced or con-

tested. In this formulation, intersubjectivity is both a space, an interstice con-stituted by imagining subjects, and a relation grounded in the recognition and

reciprocity, or otherwise, between ego and alter. Because intersubjectivity isa space between ego and alter, it is a space that can remain either closed or

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 81

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, sym-

metricality and asymmetricality that are expressed at any one time, that is,

historically. In other words, intersubjectivity is the space in which co-pres-

ence 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-recog-nition, reciprocity and non-reciprocity, symmetricality and asymmetricality

give range to imaginarily constituted intersubjectivities in both unsociableand 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 boththe radical and social imaginaries. In this sense, love, friendship or power

are doubly constituted as meaning figurations in both psychogenetic andsociogenetic terms. From the side of psychogenesis, they are creations of the

radical imaginary; from the side of sociogenesis they are socially and histor-ically instituted and instituting collective imaginings. As relational figura-

tions, 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 oropen ways with one another through spatially conceived relational forms. In

this sense, the notion of the social individual is a field of tensions in whichthe 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, nei-

ther as a transcendentally conceived first principle, nor as a privileged rela-tion 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 throughwhich it occurs through relations between self and others lay the ground for

the possibility of critique. In Castoriadis’ view, though, critique is positionedas an ontologically and historically privileged dimension of the creative imag-

ination - 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, evenmomentarily.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.2 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, 1999.3 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Cambridge, UK., Polity Press, 1995.4 In this context, it can be suggested that Honneth’s position with regard to his cri-

tique of Habermas’ work is similar in many ways to Schiller’s own critical posi-

tion 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.5 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 Whitebook’s critique

in Perversion and Utopia, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995.

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 83

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

Sociological Review, vol. 26, no. 1, April 1961, pp. 183-193.7 See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Anthroplogy, Philosophy, Politics,” Thesis Eleven, 49,

May, 1997, pp. 99-116. 8 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 Kant’s 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 Schiller’s The

Aesthetic Letters on the Education of Man, and August and Friedrich Schlegel, espe-

cially their Atheneum Fragments. However, an “imaginary turn,” which empha-

sised indeterminate creativity sui generis, can be viewed as a parallel current that

accompanied Kant’s 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 Hegel’s early work, espe-

cially his Jena period, Freud’s ‘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 Schlegel’s 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 (1805-

6), 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 Schnadelbach’s account of the history

of philosophy as an oscillation between metaphysical discourse and critical dis-

course 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 Honneth’s 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 repre-

sentative of the community, the ‘me’ embodies the conventional norms that one

must constantly try to expand, in order to give social expression to the impul-

siveness and creativity of one’s ‘I’. Mead thus introduces into the practical-rela-

tion-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 subject’s social environment.”18 In this context, social critique, and the dynam-

ics of the reflexive personality, occurs not only merely at the seam between sys-

tem 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.

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 85

19 Ibid., p. 720 For Honneth, Winnicott’s 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 can-

not 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: Jürgen

Habermas and Dieter Henrich in Debate,” The Limits of Disenchantment, pp. 169-

193, especially p. 173.26 See Honneth’s “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 sys-

temics 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 Nietszche’s work), and thus move away from

first nature. Following Taylor’s interpretation in his Hegel two directions emerge

86 � John Rundell

in Hegel’s 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 teleo-

logical logos of reason is actually metasocial - society and the human life which

encapsulates it are but intermediary stages or stations on the way to reason’s self-

knowledge” (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-onto-

logical dialectic can never posit the possibility of a positive decomposition, a deto-

talisation, 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 reason’s cunning.

Unlike the ontological dialectic, Charles Taylor, for one, argues that another ver-

sion - 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 devel-

oped 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 Hegel’s philosophy of rea-

son becomes an action theory, or more specifically a historically centred reflexive

action theory in which the anthropology and the normative horizon are internally

related. Reason’s self-consciousness is internally related to humankind’s 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 recon-

structed in the Philosophy of Right.34 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in R.M. Zaner and D. Ihde, Phenomenology

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 87

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/fab-

ricate 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 “Merleau-

Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Imagination” are also of particular sig-

nificance.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 mean-

ing. This emphasis on meaning takes into account the autism of the radical imag-

ination and ‘purely’ physiological damage, both of which impair sociation. What

one does about this impairment is an issue about values and their imaginary hori-

zons. 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, accord-

ing 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 imag-

ination 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 func-

tionality. In other words, the homologous and correspondent relation between the

imagination and the organism, which occurred associatively, was broken. This rad-

icalisation 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 co-

presence, between the psyche and the social-historical within each individual has

entailed that the forms of the social-historical, which take place as intersubjectivi-

ties 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 Hegel’s own philosophical anthropo-

logical distinction between first and second nature. Notwithstanding this distinc-

tion and from the vantagepoint of his image of ‘the night’ of enclosure, Hegel’s

insight is to ask how the subject “breaks the barrier of his implicit and immedi-

ate character.” So the dilemma becomes whether this combination of ‘animalic

first nature’ and imaginary creation entraps humans in their animality, and a per-

manent internality with its combination of chaos, creation and dis-articulation like

Werther in Goethe’s 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 Hegel’s work, especially

Taylor’s in Hegel in which he posits the metaphysical-ontological and the histor-

ical-interpretivist dialectics (see footnote 31 above). Notwithstanding each of these

currents, though, another reading of the Jena Lectures indicates that it is the dou-

ble positioning of the imagination qua imagination and outwardly posited inter-

subjectivity that is central to Hegel’s 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 frac-

ture 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 Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 100.56 Ibid., p. 101.

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 89

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 love’s 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 counter-

factual 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 impor-

tant 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 love’s particular form of intersubjec-

tivity with the institutional form of the family. It is here that the ‘glide’ or occlu-

sion occurs because the family form is absorbed into Hegel’s 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 sym-

metrical reciprocity or mutual recognition. The world of Objective Spirit, and the

position that subjects hold to one another intersubjectively, is the world of poli-

tics 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 love’s ethical form of life, or its Sittlichkeit , both

internally and externally. When once acknowledged, marriage enables the part-

nership to move from exclusivity to inclusivity on the basis of the co-existence,

yet difference between love and friendship. Love constitutes the relationship’s

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 pre-

supposes an opening onto the world, albeit in asymmetrical terms. Cruelty, alter-

natively, and as indicated above, is indicative of enclosure.65 Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 105.66 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 imagi-

nary 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 artic-

ulated from many vantage points. This means that there is an intersection of cre-

ative 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 inter-

pretation 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

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory � 91

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 poten-

tially 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