A talk given by Castoriadis at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on 7th December 1992. This has been written up, imperfectly, from the audio here to give this important and sometimes amusing talk another airing.

UPDATE: The original P&B transcription has been reread and edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s preferred translator. We are grateful to David for making our rough transcription, provided for information, into an altogether more elegant and accurate text.

I am not going to talk about psychoanalysis as such. I have to presuppose that, at least roughly, classical Freudian theory is more or less familiar to everybody here. Nor am I going to take very much into account post-Freudian theorisations, mostly because they are parasitic of particular fragments of Freud’s thought, not very productive, and only too often expressions of fashions and fads.

Now, the title, I think, of this talk has been announced as ‘Psychoanalysis and the Origins of Society’. Perhaps this title is misleading. It should rather be ‘Psychoanalysis, Society, and Politics’ or ‘Possibilities and Limits of a Contribution of Psychoanalysis to our Understanding of Society’.

Ideally speaking, we have four main themes here:

1. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the origins of human society? And this is more or less identical – I draw your attention to that – to the question: What does psychoanalysis have to say, as psychoanalysis, about the humanisation of the great apes?
2. Now, second, what about history? Is history, psychoanalytically speaking, just an epiphenomenon? Or else what, or why not?
3. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the content and structure of social and political institutions? In particular, here, domination and power, gender domination, labour, and knowledge.
4. What does psychoanalysis have to say as to the possibilities, and the desirability, of the transformation of existing institutions, or about the proper institutions of society, that is, politics in the genuine sense of the word?

All that follows will be outrageously sketchy, of course. I will be rather brief on Freud himself, because of the postulate of common knowledge on Freud; I take it that you are all experts on Freud’s thought. Nothing about his epigones. And I will concentrate on the aporias, critiques, and, egoistically, on my own views.

Now, as to the first question, that is, the origins of human society, or humanisation of the apes. There is a curious complexity or confusion in Freud’s attempts to give an account of the origins of society. Of course, the main text here is Totem and Taboo, which is the most psychoanalytical, and, after thirty years, the main strands of thought, more or less, you can find again in Moses and Monotheism. Now, in between, at the end of the 1920s, you have two other books The Future of an Illusion, about religion, and Civilisation and Its Discontents, as it has been translated into English,which present a quite different picture, though it is by no means contradictory or incompatible with the previous one.

Totem and Taboo recites an individual history. Totem and Taboo contains a myth, you all know: there is a horde or a Cyclopean family; there is an omnipotent father, omnipotent in the physical sense, who forbids any access to the available women under his power to all his sons, castrates them perhaps, except for the last one who succeeds him. Someday, perhaps, says Freud, because of some invention, technical or otherwise, the up to then helpless brothers gather, decide to murder the father, after which they are seized by deep guilt feelings, they erect the father as a totem and this totem is the origin of the institutions. They perform an oath, among themselves, an oath ceremony whereby they swear that nobody will attempt any longer to have all the women to himself or kill or castrate the others, etc., etc.

That’s the classical picture. It’s a myth, it’s obvious. It’s a very important myth, in a sense. An aside: in a certain way, it is of course a repetition of the Greek myth of Ouranos, Kronos, and Gaia. I am torn here between my Freudianism and my cultural chauvinism, but I think that the Greek myth is, in a certain sense, more complete. Why? Because there is a question with the myth of Totem and Taboo – why the hell is the father castrating the male children? And the only answer to this is that this primeval father has read Totem and Taboo [laughter]. And knows what awaits. But when Kronos in the Greek myth starts eating up his children or, rather, swallowing them, he knows very well why he is doing it, because he has already castrated his own father, Ouranos, at the incitation of his mother Gaia, the Earth, who was really tired of the incessant lovemaking of Ouranos. So, never mind. As in all myths, the myth is a totality and its beginning presupposes the end; otherwise, no sense can be made of it. But this is not an objection against the myth.

Now, the Freud of Civilisation and Its Discontents or of The Future of an Illusion is much closer, in many respects, to the run–of–the–mill, so to speak, sociological conceptions. Civilisation, says there Freud, is essentially a repression of drives. The civilising process is exclusively the work of minorities, which of course benefit from it as they go by ensuring privileges for themselves, and are or seem the only ones capable, after a while at least, of higher pleasures like sublimation, whilst the masses hate civilization, are hostile to civilisation, because it forces them to repress their drives. Now, Freud is very equitable in this respect; he says that the masses are absolutely right in hating civilisation. He has a sentence about a great experiment going on in some big Eastern country at that time but nobody knows what the outcome will be or if the results will be worth the cost, and we know there were no results but many costs. As the Communists used to say, to justify their murders, You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, to which I used to reply: But we can’t break eggs and make no omelette, right? So they have broken lots of eggs and didn’t make any omelette. Anyhow, Freud was very sympathetic to these attitudes of the masses, though you know very well how cultured a man he was and how he loved art and so on. He justifies them. There are many anarchistic accents, in some parts of the book, many Threepenny Opera aspects of the book. The only thing that helps the masses a bit to remain within civilisation are some slight elements of identification with the higher classes. Parenthetically, from the theoretical point of view, one should indicate here that this fundamental concept of identification, slowly elaborated from 1910 onward, has been very significantly and fruitfully put to use in another work of Freud’s, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego of 1920, despite the flaws of this work, which I won’t dwell on here, but one should retain this idea that this aspect of identification – whereby perhaps, I don’t know, the poorest English housewife somehow or other feels she participates in Queen Elizabeth – has always played a tremendous role in the cohesion of divided and dominated societies.

Now, in both cases – that is, Totem and Taboo and Civilisation and Its Discontents  – there is a view of human beings as exclusively directed and motivated by their drives, triebe he says in German; the otherwise excellent Standard Edition has monstrously translated triebe as instincts – something we ought to keep for animals. Drives (triebe)  – pushes, if you wish – are essentially or exclusively, as you know, sexual. Anyhow, they have to do with a pleasure principle which reigns without limits in the first stages of psychical development. Now, here arises a first aporia: animals, starting with bacteria, but we don’t need to go there, dogs, apes, lions have, of course, very strong drives or instincts and, in a sense, they are the same as humans‘ – sex and hunger. Why isn’t there a proliferation of animal societies? Why are humans humanised? Why do oxen, or lions not have totems or taboos?

On this, there is an implicit answer in Freud, which in fact doesn’t explain anything. And that implicit possibility of an answer has remained unexplored up to today, which I am presently going to take up. The implicit answer is that humans possess consciousness, in contrast to lions, oxen and bacteria. Freud states repeatedly that this is the main enigma of psychology. What is consciousness? He would like very much – of course, he is under a delusion – to explain, psychoanalytically, how consciousness can arise; of course, he never succeeds in doing so and nobody could. Anyhow, this element will not do to differentiate us from animals or from higher apes. Consciousness as such does not add anything to anything. More precisely, consciousness adds to what happens a passive quality; this happens and I happen to be conscious of what happens and that’s that. In order to make a difference, consciousness must at least be active, a sort of operating rationality, as perhaps Hegel would say. But we know that these two things are widely different. All of us know that animals, despite our silly talk about ourselves as humans, are much more rational than humans. I mean, animals never do stupid things; they do the things they have to do, right? They are instrumentally efficient and we couldn’t say that they are conscious in the usual sense of the term. And humans are conscious and, at the same time, monstrously irrational. All of human history is there, from the beginning to this very day. Most importantly, if the drives or instincts are the only forces, this consciousness, rational or not, would always produce the same, save perhaps for minute adaptations to changing circumstances. And this is not what we know; we know there is a human history in a very, very, very strong sense of the word. This is the black hole of history in the midst of psychoanalysis about which, unfortunately given the constraints of time, I can’t say anything more here.

Now, the unexplored possibility of an answer, in Freud, about the difference between humans and animals is in the very important and very profound 1915 text about Triebe und Triebschicksale  – Drives and Their Vicissitudes, as the Standard Edition translates it. (i) Freud does not elaborate the answer, but one can draw it from the text and it boils down, with some extension, to the following: Drives have their source in the body (this is Freud), soma, whether we talk about animals or humans. They aim at the satisfaction of some need or, more generally, procuring pleasure, discharge, and then tranquility. The action leading to satisfaction is necessarily mediated by the psyche, even animal psyche or human. If you prefer, if you are an adamant biological positivist, whatever goes on in the central nervous system in order to trigger the action that will bring about the satisfaction, the psyche has to be influenced, of course, by the somatic push, the drive, the instinct if you talk about animals.

Now, these two realms, that is the soma and the psyche, are heterogenous. Freud is adamant about this and rightly so, despite the many difficulties of the problem. In the one, in the soma, we have physical movements, charges and whatnot. In the other, we have, as he said already from 1896 in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, qualities and, mostly, representations (Vorstellungen); mind you, in German, in philosophy, Vorstellung doesn’t mean ‘representation’ in the sense you have an object which is fully formed in a signed photograph that you keep near your heart – the Vorstellung is that you create an image out of an X that is out there and about which nothing more can be said except by means of another image which again you create – through an electronic microscope or whatever. OK. There is something, but all you know are the successive Vorstellungen which you create about this something.

You have, then, these representations. Now, the somatic push can trigger the psychical world only by producing in it, or inducing in it, the appropriate image. This image is what Freud calls the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz des Triebes , that is, the representation, in the parliamentary sense, through representation, in the philosophical sense, of the drive in the soul (psyche). The somatic drive sends an ambassador, or makes emerge an ambassador, to the psyche because the drive can’t speak the language of the psyche. The language of the psyche is Vorstellungen, is representations. So the somatic drive has to have a representation which represents it; it is the M.P. of the drive with the psyche and has a psychical existence.

Here we get to the difference between animals and humans, which Freud at that time doesn’t mention – he is not interested. The difference is very simple. In animals, this representation is fixed, canonical, and biologically functional, e.g., excuse me, for the he-dog the image and the smell of the she-dog is the canonical representation of the sexual object and that is that. The same is true for food, shelter, and so on. In humans it is not. It’s not, because, as we know, we have the so-called ‘normal’ people, we have fetishists, we have sadomasochists, we have homosexuals, and you can go on. And even the same person in different periods of his life may like small men, tall men, large–breasted women, thin women, whatever you want. There is no canonical representation of the sexual object. Of course, there is a minimal canonicity, if I may say so; otherwise, the human species would have disappeared. But this is not what is essential about sexual life. The essential thing about the sexual life of humanity is not that, from time to time, couples have copulated, in the missionary position or I don’t know how, and the female got pregnant. OK. Everybody knows it, what else is new? The essential thing is all the other things, and these other things are what is typically human [sounds in room]. I hope I haven’t shocked you [laughter].

How does this difference emerge? There is only one possible answer in this. It is because, in the human psyche, you have a terrible, monstrous, almost cancerous outgrowth of a function, which has a functionality with animals, which stops having this sort of functionality with humans, and this is radical imagination.

So, humans are defined essentially by an imagination with the following traits: first of all, there is a free or unmotivated flux of representations – you stay there, I’m talking, your attention is distracted, then suddenly you think of your gas bill, for instance; that has nothing to do with what happens around you; secondly, and most importantly, the domination of organ pleasure by representational pleasure, which means that imagination is defunctionalised and pleasure itself is defunctionalised. Sexual pleasure for a dog – for a he-dog or a she-dog – is linked to the reproductive function; in humans, sexual pleasure is linked to the reproductive function – what? once in 10,000 times. Right? This settles the problem. That boils down to saying that humans are mad animals and fundamentally unfit for life if left to themselves. Not because they would indulge in unlimited physical or organic pleasure – that would be the point of Civilisation and Its Discontents – but because they would remain enclosed in what is the pristine form of their existence, that is, a self-enclosed, representationally autarkic psychical monad indulging in the limitless pleasure of representation, and that is the hallucination of the newborn. We positively know that this is the natural state of the newborns, and we know – but with difficulty we confess to ourselves – that this is the normal state of grownups, because most of our time we are daydreaming and when we sleep we dream as soon as we can separate ourselves from “reality” within quotation marks.

One more word on this: This monadic initial state of the psyche supplies that which will remain for all the life of the subject, and even for philosophy, the matrix of meaning. If you want to have an idea of what is ‘full’ meaning for a human being, you have to think of an autarkic representational state of self-pleasure where the subject is omnipotent because it can form at will his or her representations so that they conform to pleasure and so that there is nothing that escapes the subject. That is omnipotence of thought – Freud calls it magical omnipotence of thought; in a certain sense, he was not very strict because it is not magical, it is real omnipotence of thought. Why is it real? Because it is omnipotent in the psychical reality. It is not omnipotent in relation to the ape. But psychoanalysis does not talk about apes. It talks about psychical reality, and there thought is omnipotent. And it is this meaning, this sense, that is the recovery of such a type of state, which is the constant quest of the human psyche all of its life long, and which you find as well in religion, ecstatic states, Tristan and Isolde, and whatever you want.

Now, obviously this is a state that fully contradicts the requirements of the human being qua biological being. You cannot feed on hallucinations; you hallucinate the absent breast, then you suck your thumb, and after a certain time the somatical processes make the baby scream. Not always – we have anorectic babies who would rather die than accept the breast. But there you have the total prevalence of representation. Happily, in most cases this somatic need imposes itself, and you are never born alone. There is an other present, generally the mother; and this somatic need, on the one hand, and the other, the mother, violently break this monadic state and force the infant to enter into a process of socialisation that is of a humanisation in a second and more current sense.

Now, of course, a socialised mother must obviously already be socialised herself; for instance, she must talk. Can we derive language psychoanalytically? Obviously not. In brief, there is not and cannot be a psychoanalytical answer to question of the origin of society because society must be there for human subjects to live and construct it. There is nothing in the human Unconscious capable of producing what are the defining characteristics of society, that is, institutions and social imaginary significations. Institutions: language, law, religion, or whatever you want. Social imaginary significations: gods, God, virtue, commodity, capital, interest, falling rate of profit, General Secretary of the Party, national honour, the Queen, and whatever you want. Or, a commodity. A commodity is a social imaginary signification. A car is a physical object; it is not a commodity, it is a car. It is a commodity because social relationships exist which make out of it a commodity. This boils down to saying that the psyche is irreducible to society, though the socialised individual – you and me – is virtually nothing but successive deposits, strata of socialisation. Psyche irreducible to society and society irreducible to the psyche because, again, nothing in the Unconscious can produce institutions. Nothing in the Unconscious can produce, create language.

One fundamental restriction to this: There is and always has to be a minimal correspondence between the requirements of the psyche and those of society, and this boils down to the following: institutions and social significations must provide the socialised psyche or the social individual with meaning. That is, they must create a diurnal world – a day–to–day world, not a dreaming world – where things and people more or less hold together and where, for the individual, life and death have meaning. That is, each society creates its own world; this world has to hold together, not according to the criteria of today’s science but according to its own criteria; and for the individuals, this is the true world and in this world everything is more or less in its place, and if something is not in its place you do something about it – you call the sorcerer, you call the priest, or you expiate, you kill the firstborns of families, and so on and so forth. You redress the order and the meaning of the universe.

So, where does society come from? The only possible answer is that society is a collective creation, a creation of the collective anonymous or of the social instituting imaginary. This imaginary, which you have to imagine, to represent to yourself, as a sort of creative faculty of vis formandi inhabiting every human collectivity, has to reckon, up to a point of course, with the underlying physical and biological reality, and this it always does – almost always. But this is not the important aspect – that’s why we cannot explain society by saying, e.g., that all societies always have to provide for production and reproduction of material life or for the sexual reproduction of humans. These are perfectly true statements, but they are perfectly tautological, and they do not explain anything either about the fantastic variety of social forms – all societies have to eat, OK; what does this explain? – or about their self-alteration. We have to grant the original creativity of the social historical field qua radical instituting imaginary. To insist, to be tiresome: If Totem and Taboo was enough, one can’t understand why there has been history. And if Civilisation and Its Discontents had been enough, why has there been what Freud inaccurately characterises more or less as a progress in rationality?

Now the point about the structure and content of social and political institutions. First, religion – here, Freud is clear, and I think basically correct, though one could and should supplement this with some very important points. He sees – and in this he is not original because this starts with Plato and through Voltaire goes to Ivan Karamazov – the essential role in religion in the repression of drives. ‘If God did not exist, you would have to invent him’ (ii), said Voltaire in order to keep the people quiet, and any prefect of police would say the same thing. But Freud goes much further because he says that religion – though he doesn’t say it in these words; these are my words – supplies meaning. Freud says rightly, Illusion is an erroneous belief supported by desire. Not just an error. It is an erroneous belief, which is supported by desire.

What is desire here? Desire to know, desire to make sense, desire to protect the feeling of self that is threatened by the unfathomable vastness of the world. Desire for consolation, desire for a semblance of a solution to the most terrifying enigma, the enigma of death. And also, says Freud very correctly, giving meaning to the world. What is it for humans to give meaning to the world? Of course, it is to give to the world a human meaning. A meaning which makes sense, makes meaning for what humans mean by meaning. We could have an excursus on Heidegger, and Sinn von sein, here, but that’s not our point. Freud says very beautifully: With religion, Man fühlt sich Heimlich in umheimlich, ‘one feels at home with this extreme strangeness’ – when the extreme strangeness of the world becomes home, becomes Heimlich because it is, I don’t know, the Word of God or the ire of Zeus or anything. How does it do this? Of course, generally by the anthropomorphisation of the universe, mostly relying – and that’s true of infantile projection, especially, says Freud – on the paternal imago; that’s the Christian-Hebraic ancestry, but of course the same would be true, and has been true, for the projection of a maternal imago.

Freud thinks that religion can be superseded because, he says, humanity cannot remain eternally in the infantile stage; it must one day go out to the vast world. But he is very sparing as to the ‘How?’ this will happen. And this question is still with us, not only because of the persistence of religious creeds, but because behind this superseding of religion looms an enormous unknown. To put it very starkly, this unknown is this: Can human beings ever face frontally their limitation and their mortality? History has yet to answer this question. Theory cannot answer it. Historical experience shows one clear example and two half examples where they have more or less been able. The clear example, to my mind, is the Greek one, the proper Greek one, up to 400 [BCE]– not Plato, huh? Plato is not Greek [laughter]. Because up to 400 [BCE] there is no idea of a positive immortality in the Greek creeds. Either nothing is after death, or what is after death is worse than what is here on Earth. That’s that. So, here we are here, we do what we can do, and then after: nothing – and that’s why nobody is happy before they are dead (iv). And certainly there was no political role for religion, properly speaking. The half examples are the initial Buddhistic creed, but this boils down to acosmism, that is, retreat from the world, and it also did not last but became an ordinarily instituted religion with holy men, monasteries, and things like that. And Modern Times, of course, modern Western-European times, including North America, where nevertheless one has mostly seen a secular religion of progress, both in Liberalism and Marxism which are absolutely identical in this respect: there is a promised land, asymptotically for the Liberals or, precisely, would-be defined for the Marxists, with the known catastrophic conclusions and results. Or otherwise, this demise of religion has offered only the meaninglessness of life for the ‘normal’ (in quotation marks) individual in today’s society and the ludicrous compensations for this meaninglessness it finds in supermarkets and TV masturbation [laughter].

Now, gender domination. As is well known, there have been attempts to give a psychoanalytical answer to the question: Why the inequality of genders and what makes genders what they are – beyond anatomy, of course? This has been done either to justify the existing male domination – and here, certainly, the first culprit is Freud himself – or, more paradoxically in the recent period, especially among some American feminists, through some attempts to invert the Freudian scheme. But surely there is no reason why psychoanalysis could explain gender domination and the patriarchal organisation of society more than, say, the general asymmetric and antagonistic division of society between dominant and dominated strata. I mean, I have never seen a psychoanalysis trying to explain the birth of slavery by psychoanalytical considerations about, I don’t know what, the penis of the slaves or whatever. Anatomy, or destiny, says Freud. Freud makes a pastiche of Napoleon. Napoleon used to say, quite correctly: Geography is destiny; the place of France or the place of Germany is destiny. And Freud transforms it into saying ‘Anatomy is destiny’ (v).

It is true. You are born a boy or a girl; okay, in a sense. Now, this anatomy or destiny can explain, or rather give support, to an instituted difference of sexes, but not to the domination of the one sex over the other. I mean, there are lots of hidden postulates, which are – how to say? – taken in under the carpet in order to consolidate the argument. Can we have a psychical derivation of this domination? The explanations that Freud gives, or which one can derive from him, beg the question – the little boy retreats before the father in fear of castration and in the hope that one day he will take his place; the little girl expects from the father, or later the father substitute, the gift of a child as a penis substitute. All this implies both the already instituted dominant position of the father and the exorbitant valorisation of the penis – phallus, as the Lacanians would say – instead, e.g., of the swollen pregnant woman. Why not?

Freud rightly insists at times, rather inconsistently with what has just been said, about the inherent psychical bisexuality of humans. I think that this is fully confirmed by clinical experience. It’s a psychical bisexuality because certainly it is not a biological datum; it is true that there are elements of hormonal bisexuality in humans, but in this there is generally a normally canonical, gender–defined resolution. I mean: male hormones or female hormones prevail. But the psychical bisexuality is true and it is very important, and it corresponds also to the well-known perverse polymorphism of children and, also, the onmisexuality of sexual fantasies – I mean any psychoanalyst worth his or her salt knows that in a sexual fantasy the subject is in all the positions at the same time, and the same is true, for instance, for sadomasochistic relations – acted out, I mean. Thus, active as well as passive attitudes are there from the beginning in both sexes. That they become generally opposed and irreconcilable traits of genders, posited antinomically, is, again, an effect of socialisation, which has been posited by these significations as antinomic. Either you are passive or you are active. And women are passive – why? And men are active – why? There is a very nice sentence, a bit dirty, from Suetonius, I think, about Caesar, who, as you well know, was a quite important warrior and statesman and whatever, and who was known to be perfectly bisexual. And Suetonius reports that the Romans of the time were saying about Caesar – whilst putting him in triumph, and so on and so forth – that he was omnium mulierum vir and omnium virorum mulier, he was the husband of all the wives of Rome and wife of all the husbands of Rome (vi). So, where is passivity and where is activity?

To sum up, we can’t find any structural necessity for the patriarchal organisation of society. The only structural necessity is that the dual, face–to–face, almost fusional child/mother relationship has to be broken at some point. This certainly entails the entry on the scene of a qualitatively different figure, but certainly not of a dominant figure, of a dominant figure supplied with a penis. Now, given the fact that the institution of society must introduce some regulated relations of sexual reproduction, it must also certainly institute the social significations of man/woman as inseparable polarities, asymmetrical, but not necessarily unequal, one way or the other. And why this asymmetrical relationship has also been unequal is the explicandum in history that is not explained by psychoanalysis, by all the discourses. Male domination is, in the end, an arbitrary historical creation, which doesn’t make it less real, but does mean that it can equally well be done away with.

Now, domination proper. I think that the same is true about domination proper. I don’t mean by domination the division of society in general. There will certainly always be an articulation of society in various ways. I mean by domination the asymmetrical and antagonistic division, with monopoly of power and wealth on the one hand, obedience and poverty on the other. I will not enter into the criticism of the Marxian attempts to explain the birth of this, which, to my mind, fail miserably. The same is true of Freud’s attempt in Civilisation and Its Discontents, where he postulates that there is a sort of enlightened minority that imposes oppression on the ignorant masses and, in the process, draws most of the benefits of the oppression. Where does this minority come from? And why do the masses accept this situation? Because, as we know at least since La Boétie and Hobbes, of course the masses are physically much more powerful. The strongest man is extremely weak against ten weak men, or even five weak women. And here you have a sophism that very often you find both in anarchistic thinking and in feministic thinking in another way: Human nature is good but has been perverted by the dominant classes. Now, do the dominant classes not participate in human nature? From where did the dominant classes draw their own perversion, to pervert the others? So, this is nonsensical. The same is true here: you have a minority which is enlightened. Why is this minority enlightened? Why don’t they also indulge in – I don’t know what – limitless satisfaction of their drives? The fact of the matter is that domination cannot exist without the imposition of a system, or rather a magma, of social significations of a hierarchical character, and the emergence of these significations is a historical creation of which no explanation can be given. As I have written, it’s much easier to understand that, once you vanquish the enemy, you kill him, or you eat him (it’s very normal, zoologically speaking); it’s a totally perverse idea that you chain him up and you make him work for you – apart from the technical prerequisites. There is the true invention, a true creation, which cannot be explained. Normally, you should eat your enemy, that’s all. Now, to enslave him and make him work of course is more profitable in the long run but entails, requires the transformation of the imaginary signification from: This is an alien, hostile monstrous human being to the signification: This can become my property. This cannot be derived from any development in the productive forces or all this nonsense; all these are external conditions.

Now, the persistence and conservation of domination – that’s another point that is very important – presupposes the internalization, by the dominated, of the existing relationships of domination. And, of course, this internalisation presupposes that this relationship is already imaginarily and really instituted. This is the circle of creation. You cannot have domination unless the dominated have internalised domination. They can’t internalise domination unless there is domination. These two things go together. The attempt to explain one from the other is to introduce physicalistic or mechanistic attempts at explanation in history. All this is not to say that we can’t find in the psyche elements equivalent to or homologous with the social significations. We did so already, for instance, relative to the projection of omnipotence onto the godly figures. Or indeed, much more profoundly, in the psychical requirement that the institution and the social significations provide meaning for the psyche. But in the same way that this universal requirement does not tell us anything as to why this meaning of life and world is so different among, let’s say, Confucian, Hebraic, Greek, modern worlds, not to speak about the Azande or the Nambikwara. It doesn’t tell us anything, either, about the institution of the social or gender domination. To wit, what the psyche and its socialisation carry together into the world is, first, meaning as closure, self-sufficiency, omnipotence; second – this is the growing up of the infant – somebody else – an other – on whom – and this is the mother – meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotence are almost inevitably projected and who becomes the guarantor that there exists meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency, etc. So far, so good. Or, so bad.

But we know that further developments are possible. And they have existed. They have entailed a historical break and a new creation. Such as, for instance, the social imaginary signification that nobody embodies meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency and that such meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency as may exist are the creation of the collective, of the brothers and sisters; the latter, as we already said, have been historically repressed.

So, very briefly, I’ll finish with the last point. Does psychoanalysis anything to say about a proper form of human society and social institutions, that is, about proper politics? To this, one has to answer by asking another question: Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about what is a proper form of a human being? In other terms, does psychoanalysis know what its proper aims, its proper finalities, are? This question is much less idiotic than it may seem, given all the quarrels about the end of the analysis and the concept of normality or normalcy. I can only sketch briefly my own answer to this.

The aim of psychoanalysis, of course, is not knowledge per se. It’s knowledge insofar as it leads to a transformation of the analysand. This is why I call analysis a practical-poietical activity. Now, what is this transformation aiming at, or what ought it to be aiming at? I will not dwell on the repeated returns to Freud on the question of the end and the ends of analysis. There is only one answer that holds water. And this is: Psychoanalysis aims at the autonomy of the analysand. The meaning of this autonomy is not to eliminate the Unconscious, which is impossible and would be monstrous anyhow, nor even the domination of the Conscious over the Unconscious, but the instauration of another, new, different relationship between Conscious and Unconscious. This new relationship can be defined as one in which the subject is, as far as possible, aware of his or her unconscious drives; does not, strictly speaking, repress them; recognises them but can reflect upon them; and, through this reflection, deliberately decide if and how it will act them out. The motto of psychoanalysis ought to be: I know that this is my desire – to kill you, for instance; I desire it, but, all things well considered, I will not, or I will, I have come to realise. This means inter alia that the subject is capable of positing his or her own laws of conduct and of thinking. But no man or woman is an island. We are all social beings; therefore, our autonomy is necessarily limited and can even be a delusion if it ignores our participation in a society and therefore the fact that we are coming under collective laws. This would appear and be a fully heteronomous condition, because the laws are the laws of the others. Save in one case. If the subject can justifiably and reasonably say that these social laws are also his or her own laws, not because they have been imposed on him or her but because he or she has fully participated, on an equal footing with all the others, in their institution. In other terms, real autonomous individuals can exist only in an autonomous, fully democratic society; and, vice versa, you can’t have a democratic society with a nation of sheep.

In this sense, psychoanalysis can be consonant only with a democratic polity and an explicitly, lucidly self-instituting society. And to be fair to the deepest strands of Freud’s thought and attitudes, and despite his frequent pessimism, this is the meaning of his pronouncements about ‘our god Logos’ (vii) and the need to get out of the infantile situation of humanity, out in the wide world. And this is also the meaning of the other half of the myth of Totem and Taboo, the half usually omitted, neglected, or suppressed: the oath of the brothers following the murder of the father, according to which nobody will any longer seek totality of power or of its perquisites for himself alone. What is unfinished in this myth, though certainly historically accurate on a metaphorical level, is that the brothers – obviously Freud ignores the sisters, but we don’t have to ignore them – in their oath link the rules with the transformation of the dead father into a totem, into something transcending society and transcending their own power. That is, they totemise their institution. What is in front of us, what the ancient Athenians in their way, the Westerners in another way, have more or less attempted, without fully and finally succeeding, is the full detotemisation of the institutions, the recognition that there can be no human society without institutions, but that these institutions are and always have been our own creation under the given constraints, that we have to recognise this fact and stop the search for transcendent, extrasocial guarantees of meaning, knowing that meaning can be found and created only in and through our own free and lucid activity.

Thank you.

Notes

i Editor: The ‘correct’ Standard Edition title is:  Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. Clearly, Castoriadis has trouble bringing himself to using what he said above was the Standard Edition’s incorrect translation of Triebe as “instincts” (instead of “drives” or, his suggestion: ‘pushes’). 

ii Editor:  Voltaire [1768], from ‘Epître à l’auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs’(OEuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland [Paris: Garnier, 1877-1885], tome 10, pp. 402-405); English translation: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’ http://www.whitman.edu/VSA/trois.imposteurs.html 

iii Editor: The ‘question of the meaning of Being’ appears on the very first page of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. In, e.g., ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’ (1990; now in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], p. 99), Castoriadis says: ‘Once again, it was Plato who created this ontology wherein Being equals the Good equals Wisdom equals the Beautiful — which later led someone like Martin Heidegger to repeat that the task of philosophy is to seek the meaning of Being, without him ever once asking himself the question whether Being has or can have a meaning and whether this very question has any meaning (it does not)’. 

iv Editor: In ibid., p. 98, Castoriadis references ‘Herodotus’s story about Solon and Croesus’ (Histories, 1:30-33): ‘[W]hen Croesus complained to Solon that the latter had not mentioned him among the happy men Solon has known, Solon responded to him, among other things: But you are still alive, it cannot be said of you that you are happy; one could say that only after your death’. 

v Editor: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), trans. J. Riviere, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Pres, 1961), p. 178. 

vi Suetonius Divus Iulus 52. 

vii The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 54.

“Whoever obeys the laws lives as a stranger here on earth. Thus we read in Psalm 119:19: “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.” Staying true to the law means living as a stranger on earth, even in the Promised Land. The law circumscribes a counterfactual order that compels its people to dwell in the world without entirely being assimilated to it. Monotheism fosters an existential unhomeliness. This estrangement from the world is what is meant by “progress in intellectuality.” (1)

“Modernity has no foundation, since it emerged in and through the destruction and deconstruction of all foundations. In other words, modernity is founded on freedom. There is nothing new in this thought, for in fact all representative modern thinkers and all modern foundational documents (for example, constitutions) confirm and reconfirm it. What I wish to do is to interpret it. The modern world is based on freedom: that is, freedom is the arche of the modern world. Yet freedom is entirely unfit to serve as an arche, because it is a foundation that does not found. As a Grund – to speak with both Hegel and Heidegger – it opens the Abgrund: that is, the ground opens the abyss. And since the modern world is based on freedom, on an arche that cannot found, it remains a world without foundation, a world that continuously has to reinvent itself. This is one of the main reasons why all the constructed models of the modern world are abstract, in the Hegelian sense of the word, and by definition counterfactual, and why all coherent narratives ring true for no more than a few decades.” (2)

Paul Delvaux, Landscape with Lanterns (1958)

There is a common argument that says that the problem of the recent decades is the eclipse of class struggle politics (from the left) and the rise of cosmopolitanism, ‘identity politics’ (left and right of the political spectrum) and struggles for legal recognition of minority groups. It suggests that a majoritarian resentment has generated a backlash (true) in which forms of majoritarianism – from the resurgent nationalism, to populism and even a crass racist secularism – have arisen. Indeed, this argument is often presented as a form of conspiracy that saw global ruling class power defeat the nation state and/or working class organization and, incidentally or intentionally, promote these ineffectual new politics. However, it might be more true to say that ‘class struggle politics’ fell into meaninglessness following a titanic struggle when the system reconstituted itself while those that identify with this majoritarian resentment are not the victims of power but rather the ensnared in an infantile drama that occasionally serves constituted power and might be the handmaiden to a terrifying resurrection of the basest forms of politics that modernity has precipitated.

In light of 1968 and the various ‘movements of the sixties’ the more advanced representatives of capitalist power understood that a renovation of the apparatus of legitimation was needed. This meant sweeping away the fusty old order of censorship and ‘moral’ watchfulness – succinctly illustrated in France where the cinemas that could not show the banned Vivre Sa Vie ten years before now played Contes Immoraux– while allowing the logic of commodification to colonise growing parts of social life. A mercurial intervention that expanded the horizon of freedom while distorting its meaning and praxis. The economic shocks of the seventies signalled the need to reconstitute the economic foundations of the old order as well.

So, this reconstitution had a number of fronts that are interrelated but not determinate of each other. The end of the social democratic era and the turn toward cosmopolitan capital under American hegemony took place at the same time as the struggles for recognition fought the political representatives of economic transformation. Despite Thatcher and Reagan being socially reactionary, society, including to some degree the future stewards of the system, ultimately decided in favour of the struggles for recognition (minimum programme). How much the ideology of cosmopolitan capital and the notion of human beings as anonymous, fungible and autonomous economic agents dovetailed with the social movements demanding the prising open of the closure of inherited identities, is a moot point that deserves further investigation.

With the fall of the consumerist dream that replaced the social democratic one, some have taken cosmopolitan capital and the struggles for recognition as not only allies but as essentially synonymous. With the end of these dreams and the certainty of an unknown future and the possibility it will not be pacific but malign and tempestuous, the desire for a ‘genuine’ place in the world not threatened by the Other arises from the infantile interior of the self. Due to a general crisis of meaning and ends in modern society, people on the right and left overwhelmingly  look for some kind of monolithic power to take them in hand.

No quarter must be given to this tendency. Democracy was forged by working class struggle because the impoverished masses knew they were strangers in this world. The bureaucratisation of the workers movement ended its revolutionary role in so far as it found a place in the world for significations created by a movement of people that were not so much practicing a rejection of the world as were rejected by the world. Similarly, in repudiaing inherited identity, the struggles for recognition of the post-68 era intimated that they were strangers in a world who needed to reconstitute or found themselves as subjects anew. Our groundlessness in this world, the fact we don’t know why we are here, and that we have to give meaning to our own lives, ends and projects, is the very condition of freedom. If being a stranger in the world led in the Axial age to a progress in intellectuality, it also stands for an opening of possibilities.

Letting traditional forms of identity circumscribe us smothers freedom and leads to its opposite, a harsh regime that imposes society’s goals and its subject’s identities from above (and ultimately in heteronomy). The project of human autonomy must always include the struggle for economic equality but economic equality in itself is not the project for human autonomy, as the human personality has needs that overshoots the bodies requirement for decent sustenance and shelter.

The revolutionary project has more than once been broken by an abstract rejection of the world and the concomitant danger of millenarianism. Thus, we cannot reject the world as constituted in toto. A conceptualization of ourselves as strangers in a world that is not our own, and as human beings who can only make good this baffling situation by creating society as autonomous individuals, a situation that cannot be naturalized or justified, nor escaped or overcome, but can only be worked upon is the Archimedean point for the project of human autonomy.

By Joseph Aylmer

(1) Jan Assman, The Price of Monotheism (2010, Stanford University Press).

(2) Agnes Heller, The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination (May 2005, Thesis Eleven Volume 81).