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Autonomy
Andreas Kalyvas
The concept of autonomy has been a central normative principle in modern polit-
ical thought and a constitutive feature of democratic politics. Today, however, it
is either absorbed, and thus neutralized, in the individualistic and formal liberal
ideal of “moral autonomy,” or fiercely attacked by heteroclite political and philo-
sophical positions – some versions of feminism,1 poststructuralism,2 and commu-
nitarianism.3 Despite their many differences, they agree that autonomy, an
anachronistic residue of modernity, has come full circle. The foundational
assumptions of autonomy, they argue, organized around the mythical sites of a
transparent Subject, a universal Reason, and a masculine Will, have irrevocably
been corroded. By revealing the fragility of ultimate grounds, they claim to have
exposed the normative nakedness of the category of autonomy.
These attacks have no doubt disclosed the limits and hazards inherent in the
traditional elaborations of individual and political autonomy. While the first, an
idealization of the disembodied, male private entrepreneur, incarnated the ratio-
nal, monological mastery of the “other of reason” and the repression of inner
nature, the second allowed the eradication of plurality and difference in favor of
a homogeneous sovereign collectivity. These original insights, however, gradu-
ally turned into a devastating critique, culminating in the total abandonment of
self-determination as a meaningful political category. This sheer rejection
deprived social criticism and radical politics of their normative content. The more
the appeal to social norms and general principles, inspired by the ideal of self-
determination, was identified with hidden forms of mastery, homogeneity, and
possessive individualism, the more difficult it became to justify democratic insti-
tutions and participatory practices, and the less effective became critique of the
structures of domination of the capitalist state.
Given this crisis of critical thought caused by the alleged “death of autonomy,”
Castoriadis’s project to rethink this concept, initiated four decades ago, acquires
today a totally new importance: it represents one of the most sustained and ambi-
tious efforts to open anew the question of autonomy and to revive the democratic
project. His attempt to relocate the category of autonomy – individual and politi-
cal – at the center of a post-metaphysical political theory with an emancipatory
content shows how we can go beyond today’s blocked and stylized debates and
dilemmas. Yet his promising effort remains surprisingly unnoticed within the
contemporary political-philosophical landscape, being marginal and peripheral to
Constellations Volume 5, No 2, 1998. © Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
162 Constellations Volume 5, Number 2, 1998
the main debates in the English-speaking world.4 This paper aims precisely at
reinscribing Castoriadis as a formative thinker with an original contribution to
make in the new orientations of contemporary political thought. Indeed, by build-
ing on Castoriadis’s conceptual innovations I hope to show that his contribution
opens once again the fundamental question of autonomy and democracy. His
work represents a focal point around which diverse modes of political inquiry
exhausted with poststructuralism and dissatisfied with the current state of critical
social theory can converge in the articulation of a new democratic project filling
the empty space of radical politics created by the crisis of Marxism.
Yet Castoriadis’s aim to revive the emancipatory dimension of political theory
with a normative content, to elucidate a post-metaphysical form of autonomous
action that can be justified without an appeal to ultimate foundations, is far from
unproblematic. It is a task that has not fully elucidated its own theoretical and
normative presuppositions. Although Castoriadis attempts to show that there are
a number of good reasons to prefer the value of autonomy even if we cannot
provide it with an absolute justification,5 he does not provide a conclusive and
systematic defense. His arguments are dispersed and his conclusions incomplete.
He has thus become the paradoxical target, on the one hand, of liberal critics who
point to the supposed lack of normative grounds and the ensuing relativistic
consequences6 and, on the other, of poststructuralism, which detects in his texts
the biases of “eurocentrism,” “logocentrism,” and “phallocentrism” typical of
modernity’s rational drive for mastery and omnipotence.7
Using Castoriadis’s theoretical framework and conceptual tools, I hope to
show, contrary to the above charges, that a recomposition of the normative core
of autonomy suitable for a theory of radical democracy is still possible. I will do
so by proposing a strategy of justification based on the conceptual resources
found in the two main thematic domains of his work: (1) that of the subject, and
(2) that of the dialectical relation of instituting and instituted power. In the first
part of this study, I highlight the origin and transformations of the concept of
autonomy and I present the tension in Castoriadis’s project. In the second part, I
interpret his innovative theory of subjectivity as the starting point for a fresh alter-
native definition and justification of individual autonomy and “negative liberties”
sharply distinguished from the liberal tradition. In the third part, I discuss his
formulation of political autonomy as the explicit and lucid self-institution of soci-
ety, located at the interstices of the instituting and the instituted power of society.
power of the society as a whole.8 Once Castoriadis abandoned Marxism and its
metaphysical and deterministic assumptions, he distanced himself from this early
formulation of autonomy. He rejected the tenets of a historically privileged work-
ing class, the immanent movement of history towards the realization of socialism,
and the subordination of politics to the economy and the paradigm of production.
Behind these theoretical transformations lies a critical and constructive
engagement with the antinomic theories of Marx and Freud. From Marx,
Castoriadis preserved the emancipatory project of the revolutionary transforma-
tion of society and the radical intuition that history is open and indeterminate,
susceptible to the struggle and creative action of self-organized collective actors.9
From Freud, he appropriated the extraordinary discovery of the unconscious,
which he developed into the theory of the radical imagination as the source of
genuine historical creation, thereby cleansing it of the reductionist and positivis-
tic tendencies found in traditional psychoanalysis.10 He also adopted the idea that
the “other of reason” can never be eliminated, totally illuminated, or mastered by
the rational or the conscious: it always remains a subterranean realm of indeter-
minate historical alterity and diversity. Castoriadis injected these two insights into
Kant’s moral philosophy, which supplied him with the concept of autonomy as an
act of self-legislation whereby individuals freely assign general principles to
themselves.11
Castoriadis, however, is deeply critical of Kant’s theory of moral autonomy,
and distances himself from it in three important ways. He detranscendentalizes
it by eliminating the rational mastery of inner nature, the unconscious, and the
repression of heteronomous desires. Autonomy, Castoriadis claims, is not
achieved through violence and constriction exercised by the conscious over the
unconscious. On the contrary, it consists “in another relation . . . in another atti-
tude of the subject with respect to himself or herself. . . . Desires, drives . . . this
is me, too, and these have to be brought not only to consciousness but to expres-
sion and existence.”12 Additionally, against the empty formalism of Kant’s
concept of autonomy as self-determination, Castoriadis argues for a substantive
reinterpretation of autonomy as self-realization. He reintegrates what Kant
excluded as inclination, that is, empirical existence. An adequate, more flexible,
less formal notion of autonomy must do justice to meanings and goals that were
previously stigmatized as instrumental or utilitarian. Autonomous individuals
are those who can clarify their needs and incorporate the ethical into an
expanded concept of morality. Finally, Castoriadis decenters autonomy by
avoiding the postulate that there is a “total man,” an “absolute subject” behind
the act of self-legislation.13 This critical and provocative synthesis takes the orig-
inal form of an explicit transformation of the relation to the unconscious, to the
“discourse of the Other,” through the self-reflective positing of new forms,
values, and meanings.
Though the concept of a nonrepressive, substantive autonomy has gained in
profundity and complexity, it has deprived Castoriadis of its traditional bases.
Once the Marxist framework that supplied Castoriadis with the “immanent”
normative and historical resources is abandoned, his position appears arbitrary,
verging on relativism and ethical decisionism. Can autonomy be justified, as
Castoriadis sometimes argues, by a sheer choice that we as individuals “are
aiming at because we will it”?22 Here, following Weber,23 Castoriadis seems to
claim that all normative principles, autonomy included, are equally nonrational,
derived solely from our will and desire to affirm and struggle for them.24 From
such a perspective, ultimately, “we are unable to justify this will . . . rationally
since such rational justification would presuppose” what we try to justify.25 By the
time we finish his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, we are
persuaded that the question of validity is not answered. It is difficult to see how
the normative content of autonomy can be deduced solely from individuals’
desires and volitions. If this were so, autonomy would fail to play the role of a
critical, impartial norm. As Habermas has claimed, the argument proposed in The
Imaginary Institution of Society does not properly address the problem of valid-
ity. It leaves no room in “which socialized individuals are accountable,”26 “brush-
ing aside the difference between meaning and validity . . . [that] no longer relies
upon the profane verification of its creation,”27 thus inviting Hugues Poltier to ask,
“How it is possible in this case to discriminate? Can we give good reasons for
preferring one social signification to another?”28 and Axel Honneth to conclude
rhetorically that Castoriadis’s “ontology of nature . . . fleeing from its own radi-
calism . . . leads in the end into a metaphysical cosmology which today can
scarcely be discussed with rational arguments.”29
What these criticisms miss, however, is Castoriadis’s explicit and emphatic
understanding of the concept of autonomy as a normative criterion with which
one judges, criticizes, and chooses between different institutional structures and
practices. Indeed, rather than lamenting the demise of ultimate foundations,
Castoriadis exploits this opportunity to explore new paths. His concept of auton-
omy emerges precisely as a viable response to the aporias of critical thought. With
the deployment of the concept of autonomy, Castoriadis directly intervenes in the
debate over the possibility of once again incorporating the idea of critique within
a normative political program, given the exhaustion of traditional, foundational-
ist modes of thought and the impasses of poststructuralist discourses. Autonomy
constitues a normative standpoint for the “critique of existing instituted reali-
ties,”30 thereby creating that “distance relative to the object”31 from which it will
still be possible to judge and to choose among plural values, institutions, and
norms.32
Castoriadis clearly distinguishes his theoretical position from relativism. There
is a rational component to the justification of norms. He does not reduce them to
blind emotional attitudes, sheer preferences, or power positions. Politics,
Castoriadis claims, is the reflective and deliberative activity that aims, through
the public practice of unlimited interrogation of the instituted reality, at the
creation and organization of a social and political order in accordance with “the
norm of the autonomy of the collectivity.”33 By embracing the “tradition of radi-
cal criticism,”34 Castoriadis adopts its two main presuppositions: first, that the
norm of autonomy must express something more than subjective preferences,
desires, or partial interests and, second, that it must overcome the distortions of
everyday life by creating a distance from the given, an “outside” of the real.
This commitment to the critical tradition, however, is not without conse-
quences. It is accompanied with dilemmas and tensions. On the one hand,
“putting things into question, criticizing them, requiring a logon didonai”
demands that a critical discourse “be provided with norms.”35 Consequently, the
issue of the validity of moral claims, the question of “how can we judge and
choose . . . how can we confront reasonably, if not ‘rationally,’ the question of
judging and choosing between different institutions of society,” is the “political
question par excellence,” a “nontrivial question.”36 Only by facing this challenge
can we aspire to delegitimate the real and reveal the hidden “brute and brutal rela-
tions of force”37 that dominate liberal societies. On the other hand, it is neither
possible nor desirable to seek refuge in an absolute source of ultimate authority
that would ground, once and for all, normative principles, transporting politics
from the realm of collective struggle to the sphere of abstract speculation, thus
ending political disagreements, oppositions, and conflicts. As “ethical or tran-
scendental purism” has proved to be “finally incoherent” and “the foundation of
nothing actual,”38 one has to accept, Castoriadis warns, that “it is vain to evade our
own will and responsibility.” Political decisions cannot but be “based upon . . .
our political will and political responsibility.”39
In his later writings, Castoriadis attempts to solve this tension within his theory
of autonomy, seeking to steer between normative foundationalism and ethical
relativism. To clarify his great philosophical project, the elucidation of the prac-
tice of autonomy, Castoriadis has to resolve the enigmatic and vexing relationship
between factum and jus, facticity and validity. In his critique of Habermas,
Castoriadis clearly states that “one can never legitimately pass from facts to laws”
and that “Habermas’s attempt ‘rationally’ to deduce, once again, right from
fact . . . appears to me just as untenable as the other attempts of the same kind that
have been made in the past, and which he repeats.”40 Similarly, in his discussion
of postmodernism, he claims that any critical project must accept a “sharp distinc-
tion between factum and jus.”41 Castoriadis here adopts the extreme anti realist
position that “reality possesses no privilege, neither philosophical nor norma-
tive.”42 By his refusal to theorize how the normative content of autonomy is
related to reality, he deprives himself of the necessary resources, failing to
account for a mediation between “de facto validity” and “de jure validity.”43
In a different context, however, Castoriadis adopts a surprisingly opposed
argument in favor of a balanced relationship between factum and jus. “If we
cannot think the possibility and the effectivity of a marriage between jus and
factum,” he claims, “we simply cannot think anymore.”44 He goes even further
to ask, “How can validity become effective actuality and effective actuality
validity?”45 Yet he does not fully develop this alternative line of argument. Apart
from his suggestive but highly elusive statement that “it is our free and histori-
cal recognition of the validity of this project, and the effectivity of its partial
realization up to now, that binds us to these claims,”46 we can nowhere find a
conclusive and systematic elaboration of a mediation between facts and norms.
Why? How are we to account for Castoriadis’s ambivalence? His argument for
a sharp separation between factum and jus does not only have a polemical,
strategic character to strengthen his critique of Habermas. Nor is his alternative
scheme introduced solely to emphasize his disagreements with the radical
the state in which “someone” . . . is explicitly, and, as far as possible, lucidly (not
“blindly”) author of its own laws. This implies that this “someone” instaurates a
new relation with “its laws,” which signifies, among other things, that this singular
. . . “someone” can modify that law, knowing that it is doing so.64
This “other relationship” with oneself is not an abstract moral ideal; it is a politi-
cal project with the critical potential for creating an alternative justification of a
normative theory of individual rights to that found in liberal discourses.
Individual rights become the condition of possibility for the full development of
one’s identity and the constitution of subjectivities. The construction of the
modern subject depends, to a crucial extent, on the cultivation and protection of
a real and symbolic private realm that will protect the process of ego-develop-
ment, the creation of one’s coherent and distinct identity. Individual rights corre-
spond to those constitutive minimal institutional preconditions that will respect
the topos for developing a subjectivity of one’s own and ensure that one’s differ-
ence and uniqueness are protected.
Individual autonomy is the self-reflective and lucid capacity to form, maintain,
and revise a coherent identity. Therefore, the protection of those “efficient condi-
tions for the subject’s activity”65 points to a new justification of “negative liber-
ties” emancipated from individualistic and property-oriented liberal formulations.
Castoriadis’s normative concept of individual autonomy provides a justification
of those individual rights necessary for the protection of imagination, creativity,
and otherness. It secures the preconditions – a sense of control over one’s iden-
tity, experimentation, self-confidence, value-creating power, bodily integrity,
access to oneself, and the inviolability of personality – for the individual to func-
tion as subject, that is, as a responsible moral agent capable of questioning the
instituting reality, of acting on the basis of reasons as the author of the political
and moral laws to which it is subject, and of participating in the instituting power
of society.66 The protection of the radical imagination from encroachments and
invasions of the instituted, explicit power, in the form of either social conformism
or state intervention, emanates from Castoriadis’s concept of the subject. Social
institutions, practices, and norms – and thus the institution of society as a whole
– must delineate a real and symbolic territory; it
must allow – or it is not able not to allow – the individual the possibility of finding
and of bringing into existence for himself a meaning in the instituted social signifi-
cation. But it must also allow him – and whatever it does cannot help but allow him
– a private world, not only as a minimum circle of “autonomous” activity but as a
world of representation (and of affect and intention), in which the individual will be
always his own centre.67
the one which made itself capable of recognizing and accepting this very multi-
plicity of human worlds, thereby breaking as far as possible the closure of its own
world.”78
It is the social institution of a democratic identity, structured around shared
political values, that constitutes the first materialization of political autonomy.
Indeed, the project of autonomy presupposes the constitution of a collective
subjectivity capable of bridging the differences among plural imaginary signifi-
cations, embodied in divergent collective agents and incarnated in distinct politi-
cal programs. Additionally, this effort to institute a democratic body requires the
piercing of the ideological mystification and social fragmentation imposed by the
rule of capital. The fabrication of a collective subjectivity is one of those institu-
tions by means of which and on the basis of which dispersed identities are
displaced and rearticulated to form a social actor “capable of participating in
social doing and representing/saying, and capable of representing, acting, think-
ing in a compatible, coherent, convergent manner.”79 Only such an “artificial”
collective agency can participate directly in the ground-power of the social
imaginary.
Even so, however, the collective democratic subject can never achieve a full
identity. It cannot exhaust or consume the instituting ground-power. The moment
of absolute coincidence is never realized. The instituting power cannot be located
in one instance of the social or incarnated by a transcendental subjectivity; it is
anonymous and spontaneous; it “operates implicitly, is intended as such by no
one, is realized through the pursuit of an undetermined number of particular
ends”80; it is mobile, fluid, and relational; it escapes all efforts to circumscribe it;
it can never absorb the plurality of the imaginary significations into a closed
organic unity. Political autonomy, therefore, cannot be identified with a subject
postulated explicitly in order to embody it,
whether this is called “group consciousness,” “collective unconscious,” or what-
ever. These terms were forged and the pseudo-entities constructed by exporting
them illegitimately from other spheres, or tracing them after other entities, by
reason of the inability to come to terms with the mode of being specific to signifi-
cations.81
to call the agents back, as Heidegger does, from their intramundane, subject-crazed
lostness into the sphere of the nonmanipulable, and thus into an auratic autonomy
vis-à-vis the primordial happening of a self-instituting society – and this would
amount only to an ironic inversion of praxis philosophy into another version of
poststructuralism.96
just as an individual cannot grasp or provide himself with anything at all – neither
the world nor himself – outside of the symbolic dimension, no society can provide
itself with anything outside of this second-order symbolism. . . . And, just as I
cannot call my relation to language a form of alienation . . . in the same way there
is no reason to call the relation between society and the social-historical imaginary
alienation. Alienation appears in this relation, but it is not this relation – just as error
and delirium are possible only in but are not language.99
NOTES
I am deeply grateful to Jean Cohen for her valuable discussion, criticism, and encouragement.
I would also like to thank David Ames Curtis for his constant help during the composition of the
manuscript. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Cornelius Castoriadis.
1. J.M. Murphy and C. Gilligan, “Moral Development in Late Adolescence and Adulthood: A
Critique and Reconstruction of Kohlberg’s Theory,” Human Development 23 (1980); C. Gilligan,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982); Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” Women and Moral
Theory, ed. E.F. Kittay and T.D. Meyers (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987); and J.
Benjamin, Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1988).
2. J. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34
(1953); J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Vol. II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); M. Foucault, The Order
of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Vintage Books, 197); and J. Derrida “Structure, Sign,
and Play,” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed.
R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
3. M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982); “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12 (1984); A.
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984);
Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
4. There are some exceptions. See for example D. Howard, “Introduction to Castoriadis,” Telos 23
(Spring 1975); B. Singer, “The Early Castoriadis: Socialism, Barbarism and the Bureaucratic Thread”
and “The Later Castoriadis: Institution under Interrogation,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory 3.3 (Autumn 1979) and 4.1 (Winter 1980); J. Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary:
An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 2.5 (September 1982); and H. Joas,
“Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis’s
Political Philosophy,” American Journal of Sociology 95.5 (1989). All these attempts to introduce to
the American audience the work of Castoriadis share the same interpretative approach: they focus on
the relevance of Castoriadis for a post-Marxist social theory. Recently, Thesis Eleven 49 (May 1997)
has devoted an entire issue to the work of Castoriadis on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
5. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), tr. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1987 [1975]), 99–101.
6. J. Habermas, “Excurses on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution,” The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. Frederick Lawrence (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1987); A. Heller, “With Castoriadis to Aristotle; From Aristotle to Kant; From Kant to Us,”
Autonomie et Autotransformation. La Philosophie Militante de Cornelius Castoriadis (Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 1989); A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Cornelius
Castoriadis’ Theory of Society,” The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and
Political Philosophy, ed. Charles Wright (New York: SUNY Press, 1995); and H. Poltier, “De la
praxis a l’institution et de retour,” Autonomie et Autotransformation. La Philosophie Militante de
Cornelius Castoraidis (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989).
7. R. Rorty, “Comments on Castoriadis’s ‘The End of Philosophy?’,” Salmagundi 82–83 (1989):
24–30; and V.E. Wolfstein, “Review Essay: Psychoanalysis in Political Theory,” Political Theory
24.4 (1996): 718, 726.
8. Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism II” (1957) in Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and
Social Writings, Vol. 2, ed. D.A. Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 95–8.
9. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 56–68.
10. See Castoriadis’s two “programmatic” essays: “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul which
has been Presented as a Science” and “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation” in Crossroads in
the Labyrinth (Cambridge MA: MIT Press and Brighton, 1984 [1978]). The definitive elaboration
is stated in The Imaginary Institution, 281–289.
11. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 93. Autonomy, recast in Kantian terminology, is the
will to “want the Law not to be simply given, but for me to give it to myself at the same time.” The
concept of the will, that plays a central role in this definition, has to be distinguished from the ratio-
nalist tradition of Western philosophy. It does not refer to self-control as the mastery of the lower
part by the higher and the gradual elimination of the former. It does not allude to a control of the
passions by reason that gradually restricts, manipulates, and supervises desires, feelings, and
emotions. Deliberate action is a subtle relationship, a delicate attachment to the representational flux
of the radical imagination. Not one of control or mastery, of elimination and oppression, but one of
sensitive intentional redirection, a thoughtful gesture of ordering and shaping. The subject can rede-
fine and renegotiate its identity. Castoriadis defines deliberate activity or will “. . . as the possibil-
ity for a human being to make the results of his/her reflective processes enter into the relays that
condition his/her acts. In other words, will or deliberate activity is the reflexive dimension of what
we are as imagining (that is, as creative) beings, or again: the reflective and practical dimension of
our imagination as source of creation.” Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” Thesis Eleven
24 (1984): 28.
12. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 104.
13. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 79; “The Greek Polis and the Creation of
Democracy,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (Oxford University
Press, 1991 [1983]), 121. This point will be discussed in detail in the next section.
14. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis,” 87 and The Imaginary Institution, 196, 267, 332.
15. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis,” 87.
16. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Equality” (1982), Philosophy, 125–8.
17. Castoriadis, “Preface,” Crossroads in the Labyrinth, xiii, xxiii; and The Imaginary
Institution, 100.
18. “What can be the measure if no extra-social standard exists, what can and should be the law
if no external norm can serve for it as a term of comparison, what can be life over the Abyss once
it is understood that it is absurd to assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an idea, a value,
or a meaning determined once and for all?” Castoriadis, “Institution of Society and Religion”
(1982), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 329.
19. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 26.
20. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 100.
21. Ibid., 79.
22. Ibid., 373.
23. M. Weber, Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
24. Castoriadis, “The ‘End’ of Philosophy?” (1988), Philosophy, 32.
25. Castoriadis, “The Nature and Value of Equality,” 125.
26. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse, 330.
27. Ibid., 321.
28. H. Poltier, “De la praxis a l’institution et retour,” 434–5.
29. A. Honneth, “Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology,” 183.
30. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy: Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism”
(1990), Thesis Eleven 31 (1992): 22.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. The interpretation of the concept of autonomy as a critical norm restricts its use to a
principle for testing the validity of rules, laws and institutions of existing liberal, capitalistic
democracies. This is a restricted and partial interpretation of the concept of autonomy.
Autonomy does not consist only in providing a point of view, a distance, from which a critique
of the modern instituted societies is possible. The concept of autonomy cannot simply
be reduced to a critical norm. It is also a practical political project, a model of democratic