The Imaginary Institution of Society
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975, French: L'institution imaginaire de la société) is a book by Cornelius Castoriadis.
In this book, Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named to be recognized. Otherness emerges in part from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form to what Castoriadis terms the magma of social significations allows the psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mental indeterminacy and alterity.
For Castoriadis, self-examination, in the Ancient Greek tradition could draw upon the resources of modern psychoanalysis. Autonomous individuals--the essence of an autonomous society--must continuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflexion. He writes:
...psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy. For, each person's self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannot have an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would not interrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes] tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn't exist outside the individuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society depends essentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society.
