La prassi, l’istituzione, l’immaginario in Castoriadis

In this paper I discuss the notions of practice, institution and radical imaginary in Castoriadis. In section 1 I clarify the premises of my essay by contrasting Castoriadis with contemporary social ontology and an Aristotelian concept of practice. In section 2 I approach the problem of institution by distinguishing between production and creation (the dialogue between Ricoeur and Castoriadis is the background of this distinction) and highlighting the crucial problem of the new ontology of magma with its distinctive temporality as opposed to the traditional identity logic and ontology of determinacy. In section 3 I deal with autonomy and the psyche, by focusing especially on Freud and the monad. In section 4 I try to identify the heart of the novelty of Castoriadis’s treatment of imagination in its relation with the symbolic. I conclude in section 5 with a discussion of the meaning of representation and its internal difficulties.