re-imagining castoriadis's psychic monad

http://the.sagepub.com/Thesis Eleven

http://the.sagepub.com/content/83/1/5The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0725513605057133

2005 83: 5Thesis ElevenKarl E. Smith

Re-Imagining Castoriadis's Psychic Monad

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Thesis ElevenAdditional services and information for

http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://the.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://the.sagepub.com/content/83/1/5.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Oct 21, 2005Version of Record >>

at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 22, 2014the.sagepub.comDownloaded from at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 22, 2014the.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://the.sagepub.com/

http://the.sagepub.com/content/83/1/5

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://the.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://the.sagepub.com/content/83/1/5.refs.html

http://the.sagepub.com/content/83/1/5.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



RE-IMAGININGCASTORIADIS’S PSYCHICMONAD

Karl E. Smith

ABSTRACT Castoriadis portrays the psyche in its originary state as a ‘psychicmonad’ – an infantile psyche that experiences itself as omnipotent,omnipresent, undifferentiated and sufficient unto itself. According to Castori-adis, this totality is fragmented in a ‘triadic phase’ through the experience ofdesire, which brings to the fore the encounter with the Other. In contrast,Marcel Gauchet rejects the concept of the psychic monad, arguing that theunformed psyche enters the world with a primordial openness to being formedand transformed. Psychic tension does not arise from the immersion of theclosed monad in a hostile world, but from within the psyche itself, for thepsyche must form itself and be formed by the world. Gauchet’s understandingof an inherent psychic tension provides an important corrective to Castoriadis’stheory of the monad that nevertheless remains consistent with Castoriadis’santhropology.

KEYWORDS Castoriadis • Gauchet • monad • psyche • socialization

Castoriadis’s most important contribution to the reconfiguration ofpsychoanalytic theory is found in his positing of the dynamic interpenetra-tion of the radical imaginary and the social imaginary (Gauchet, 2002: 10).It is important to locate this hypothesis in the context of Castoriadis’sattempts to understand the social-historical, the world created throughhuman activity (1997b: 126–9). For Castoriadis, human subjects not only canbut must interpret the world that they have created (1987: 232; 1997h: 105–6).Language is central to this theory, for the world is created in and throughlanguage. But not only, for the world is also always already there,confronting and making demands upon the human subject. In Castoriadis’stheory, the human subject creates a world of its own, but not just any way

Thesis Eleven, Number 83, November 2005: 5–14SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513605057133

02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 5

at UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR on June 22, 2014the.sagepub.comDownloaded from


it chooses. So, too, society – each society creates its own world, but not justas it chooses. At the same time, the world constructed by a particular societyis both source and limitation for the world that the singular subject can create(1994: 141; 1997h: 105).

‘Reality’ for the subject, Castoriadis argues, is social (1987: 308–9). Realityfor society is created in language, in social imaginary significations. That is,language exists in the social imaginary, and is not reducible to the individ-ual. Indeed, it is crucial to Castoriadis’s philosophy to understand that societyis a ‘type of being’ that cannot be thought in the terms of conventional logic.Society and the social imaginary are complex entities that, contrary to receivedknowledge, are not reducible to, or constructible from, their ‘elementary parts’(1987: 167–9, 174). Thus, although inherited logic would maintain that theonly ‘really real’ existence of the social imaginary is the collective of singularimaginaries, such a claim, Castoriadis argues, is ‘an abuse of language’; bywhich he means a linguistic statement that ‘abuses’ that which it attempts tosignify. Thus we are caught in an unavoidable tension, living in a world thatperpetually exceeds the world created in language.1

Castoriadis is clear that no society can create a world in which, say, itis the bulls that bear the calves (1994: 141, 150). Let this stand as the evidencethat there is a ‘reality’ – a ‘world’ – that is not reducible to the one that asociety or a human subject creates for itself. The human subject here is thehuman-being-in-the-world, who is both subject to that world and subjects itto her own ends. The ‘and’ here is important. These two modes of being‘subject’ can be – and often have been – very differently weighted. WhatCastoriadis refers to as the modern ‘project of rational-mastery’ emphasizesthe capacity of the individual and society to subject the world to their ends,through their own efforts. But there is another dimension to this equation,which is closer to the focus of this discussion: human subjects are also subjectto the creations of their own psyches.

Here it is worth invoking Montaigne’s observations of the ‘extravagantchimeras and fantastical monsters’ that beset him when he set out to analyzehimself (cited in Taylor, 1989: 178). It is this dimension of human subjec-tivity that most desperately calls for a radical rethinking; yet Castoriadis’s radi-calization of psychoanalytic theory here remains overly beholden to Freud.Gauchet offers an important corrective to this. Gauchet regards Castoriadis’swork as ‘the best systematization of orthodox psychoanalytic theory’, butthen comments that both Freud and Castoriadis offer ‘polarizing models’ ofthe psyche, which are misguided (2002: 10). Castoriadis, however, is fullyaware of this polarity, noting that Freud remains a dualist, which causes him‘very grave problems’, and that one of the gravest of these problems is thatsuch dualism is ‘not eliminable’ (1994: 147; 1997d: 177). While my sympa-thies lie with Gauchet here, his alternative proposal of the unconscious asthe invisible dimension of the self in tension with itself does not eliminatethis dualism either.

6 Thesis Eleven (Number 83 2005)

02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 6



Nonetheless, Gauchet’s reinterpretation of the unconscious as theotherness of the self to itself breaks Castoriadis’s theory from its Freudianlimitations, and provides a fruitful direction for deepening our understand-ing of socialization. From this perspective I shall briefly outline Castoriadis’sunderstanding of the psyche, and then his conception of the psychic monadfragmented during the triadic phase. Using Gauchet’s conception of theotherness of the self to itself, I shall argue that the originary psyche is betterunderstood as always already open to the discourse of the other. Thisdiscussion must of course be understood as an attempt to understand thingswhich, as Brunner notes, have never been seen, and ‘cannot be grasped bythe senses’. It is an exploration of ‘something immaterial, without spatialextension’, and thus always remains an effort to elucidate ‘hypotheticalentities, whose existence is inferred speculatively’ (2002: 24–5; cf. Castori-adis, 1987: 168–9).

I

For Castoriadis, the psyche is for-itself, with the minimal requirementsof self-preservation and creating a world of its own. The psyche is ‘incarnatemeaning, materialized signification’ (1984: 10; Urribarri, 2002: 43). Urribarriexplains that for Castoriadis the ‘creation of meaning’ is the psyche’s ‘primarydynamic’, marking it as distinct from the ‘functional and ensidic meaning ofthe animal psyche’ as well as from the ‘social-historical’ (p. 43). The connec-tion between the psyche and meaning can be elucidated via an explorationof Castoriadis’s conceptions of the psyche’s ‘mode of being’.

To illustrate the relationship between representation and psyche –although, as we will see, ‘relationship between’ is an abuse of language –Castoriadis says: ‘We use these terms [representation, language, logic, etc.],as a galloping horse uses the ground beneath it; it is not the ground but thegallop that counts’ (1987: 278). His point is the inadequacy of language tofully elucidate the object of our study. We must understand the psyche inthis metaphor as both ground and gallop, which means that the psyche is aconsiderably different ‘ground’ from any other we encounter. It is both theground for representation and the driving force – the force that demandsrepresentations, that creates representations, and that interprets representa-tions – ‘the psyche is . . . the emergence of representations accompanied byan affect and inserted into an intentional process’ (1987: 282). But like thegalloping horse, each representation leaves impressions on the ground thatare interpretable. Castoriadis notes that the horse’s tracks might reveal thedirection, speed and weight of the horse, but will not reveal who the riderwas, or why s/he was going in that direction. Yet it is in the tracks left uponthe psyche that we find the human subject.

For Castoriadis, being ‘for-itself’ means that the psyche is ‘self-constituting’. Self-constitution is achieved via ‘three essential determinations’:

Smith: Re-imagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad 7

02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 7



‘the intention, the affect2 and the representation’ (1987: 274; 1997c: 146;1997e: 257; 1997g: 338). Importantly, while these ‘three determinants’ maybe seen as ‘internally’ generated by the psychic flux, they must also be seenas ‘externally’ stimulated – but not determined – by the shock of the subject’sencounter with the world, i.e. the world that precedes, and is independentof, the self-constituted ‘world of its own’ (1994: 139). The subject must distin-guish-separate-order-choose – that is, in Castoriadis’s terms, it must ensem-blize a world, creating one of its own with, from, and in the flux ofrepresentations, affects and intentions that is the psyche.

Castoriadis observes that the opacity of the psyche is not a result ofsome blurring of what can only be known after the fact, but rather, thepsyche is itself the ‘genesis of representations’ (1987: 276, 282) – the preciseprocess of which remains perpetually beyond the reach of the consciousintellect.3 The genesis of representations is an autopoietic psychic activity,an activity that perpetually remains beyond identitarian logic (beyondrational self-control, self-mastery, self-knowledge, objective knowledge, etc.).This brings us to the question of how the raw psychic flux is transformedinto the human subject.

II

Castoriadis portrays the psyche in its originary state – that is, the psycheof the newborn infant – as capable of referring only to itself, and incapableof distinguishing between self and other, or self and world (1987: 294). Heoffers a correction to Freud’s use of the term ‘primary narcissism’, for narcis-sism, he says, means a preference for the self ‘to the exclusion of all others’when what we are dealing with is a psychic state that precedes the verycapacity for distinguishing self from other; a state that Castoriadis refers toas a totalitarian inclusion (1987: 294). We are presented with an infantilepsyche that experiences itself as omnipotent, omnipresent, undifferentiatedand sufficient unto itself. According to Castoriadis, this totality is fragmentedthrough the experience of desire – which always already entails an absenceof that which is desired – and brings to the fore the encounter with the otherand another. Castoriadis calls this the ‘triadic phase’ (1987: 300). But the nowruptured fantasy of totality does not dissipate. It never dissipates. The fantasyof monadic closure, for Castoriadis, remains a driving force throughout life.

The theory of a monad that fragments in a ‘triadic phase’ implies thatthe newborn psyche is undifferentiated, homogeneous flux. Compare this tothe philosophical straw man of a tabula rasa upon which the ‘self’ isconstructed; an idea which implies that since we enter the world as a tabularasa we might somehow return to that state and start again. One possibleimplication, of course, is that the slate, the table, is passively awaiting theformation of a structure upon it – and that once an identity is instituted(written/narrated/constructed), the slate might be wiped clean such that a


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 8



new or different identity might be instituted in its place (cf. Castoriadis, 1987:174). Castoriadis’s argument is that in the fragmentation, as the psyche movesfrom a monadic to a triadic state, the primordial state is fundamentally altered– there can be no going back. Instituting form alters the ontological ground– a ground of meaning is woven-constructed-erected above the Abyss ofmeaninglessness, an order imposed upon the Chaos of being (1997f: 311–12).This must happen for all living beings, but for anthropos the new groundexceeds the simple binary means-ends logic of the survival instinct. Alludingto Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’, Castoriadis argues that a crucial differencebetween humans and other living beings is that the human psyche is ‘defunc-tionalized’ such that representational pleasure supplants organ pleasure(1987: 314; 1994: 145–6; 1997c: 150–1, 161–2; 1997d: 180). Which is to saythat representations, affects and intentions – the defining characteristics ofthe psyche itself – become valued (pleasurable) in their own right. They arenot reducible to the functional rationality of species preservation; theyforever exceed the minimal requirements of self- and species-reproduction,and are never a simple presentation of the ‘natural’ or ‘objective’ world.

Accepting the thesis of the defunctionalized psyche, Gauchet rejectsCastoriadis’s conception of the psychic monad, arguing instead that theunformed psyche enters the world with a primordial openness to beingformed and transformed (2002: 10). For Gauchet, psychic tension does notarise from the immersion of the closed monad in a hostile world, but fromwithin the psyche itself, for the psyche already demands (is inclined, needs)to be formed by the world (p. 10). Castoriadis tends to portray the monadicstate as the singular psyche’s innate and inarticulate belief in its own omnipo-tence, which becomes problematic when it finally has to come to terms withthe fact of its impotence in the face of a world not of its own making andbeyond its control (1987: 309–10). But at the same time, Castoriadis’s under-standing of the opening to the other recognizes that the singular psyche isnot sufficient in itself to satisfy its own need for institution and meaning(1987: 282; 1997h: 105). The capacity to make sense of one’s experiences –especially those involving interactions with the other and, under normalcircumstances, to differentiate representations arising from the encounterwith the world from those freely created by the radical imaginary(Montaigne’s chimeras and fantasies, for example) – is a defining character-istic of the socialized psyche (1987: 283). Thus while the psyche is a for-itself, which entails the need and capacity to create a world of its own, it isalso already being-for- and being-with-others – at least to the extent that theother is always already required to provide the materials and conditions forthe formation of the psyche as self.

Thus whereas Castoriadis refers to socialization (and sublimation)4 asan act of violence upon the psychic monad, forcing it to conform (at leastto some extent) to the world of others, Gauchet’s reinterpretation suggeststhat the structuring process need not be seen as violent – at least not in the


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 9



sense of an imposition of something that is wholly resisted – for (somedegree of) instauration of the world of the other is also a fundamentalnecessity for the psyche.5 In other words, instead of a primordial tendencytowards monadic closure, the psyche experiences a primordial tensionbetween openness and closedness (2002: 10). In short, the psyche wants itboth ways, from the beginning.6

The primary form(lessness) of the psychic flux is Chaos, the Abyss,Groundlessness (1997c: 151; 1997f: 311–12) – a chaotic flux, not a tabularasa. It is already a flux of representations, affects and intentions, and italready requires that this chaotic flux be formed into meaningful images –representations, affects and intentions that are meaningful in the tensionbetween self and other, between opening and closure. Socialization/subli-mation is the process through which form (eidos) is instituted, the flux struc-tured (1987: 311). The human subject comes into being in the process ofinstituting form in and from the psychic flux. But the institution of the psychicflux is not simply an external imposition, nor an autonomous expression ofan innate organization; it is rather a polylogical interaction between theradical imaginary of the singular psyche and the myriad others of the social-historical world. Which is to say that society presents, and attempts toimpose, various institutions, and that the psyche must institute meanings foritself – at least with reference to these social institutions. The two processesare inseparable and mutually irreducible. This is why, for Castoriadis,classical sociological questions concerning the relationship between the indi-vidual and society are misdirected: the individual always already is social atthe deepest level (1994: 148). The unformed, chaotic, groundless psychic fluxrequires formation – and the social imaginary is the source of the requisiteforms.

III

While the creation of meaning is the primary dynamic of the psyche,the social imaginary is the source of meaning. The meaningful institution ofthe unformed psychic flux requires openness to the other and to the social.Socialization is precisely the process of sublimating meanings available inthe social imaginary, forming one’s own psychic flux in accordance with theimaginary institutions of the social-historical world into which one has beenthrown (1987: 311–12; 1997c: 154–5). The instituting-institution formed in theinterpenetration of the singular radical imaginary and the social imaginary –formed by a somatic flux following a logic peculiar to its own polymorphousmode of being but which nevertheless drives it towards at least partialconformity to the others’ eidos – is the human subject.

While the newborn psyche enters the world as an unformed, chaoticpsychic flux of indistinct representations and a drive towards closure, theneed to create meaning drives an opposite move towards openness. In other


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 10



words, the unformed psyche tends towards monadic closure while at thesame time always already being open to new structures, meanings, insti-tutions, limitations and representations from which to form that closure. Byextension, and speaking loosely, we might say that the demand for meaningimposes a demand for resources from which to create meaning that theradical imaginary cannot supply for itself. Perhaps most important here is theradical imaginary’s incapacity to impose limitations upon its own represen-tations. Hence while it strives for closure, it does not intrinsically have theresources to institute the closure it seeks. It must therefore be open to theother to find the materials from which to construct its closure.7 The unformedpsyche must form itself, form itself as a self, but it is only in being-with-others that it acquires the necessary representations, limitations, meanings,etc. from which to construct itself as a self (1987: 108).

The multidimensional, polylogical magma of psychic representations,affects and intentions are created by the radical imaginary appropriatingelements from the social imaginary through cognitive processes that remainopaque. The horse and ground analogy is useful again: although the exactprocesses by which the psyche is both ground and drive remain opaque, thegalloping leaves prints, tracks, indentations – shifting metaphors: it leavesinscriptions, institutions, structures, forms that irreversibly alter the psychicflux from the unformed chaos of its originary state. ‘The psyche is a forming,which exists in and through what it forms and how it forms, it is . . . forma-tion and imagination’ (1987: 283).

IV

As already noted, the psyche’s openness to the world is explicitlyrecognized by Castoriadis – but it is also repeatedly contradicted. Forexample, he says that the ‘unconscious receives law as alien, hostile, oppres-sive’ and notes that ‘it is not the psyche that is able to create language; thepsyche must receive language and with [it] . . . the totality of the social-historical significations’ of its world (1997h: 105–6).8 From this perspective,it appears that sublimation/socialization is intrinsically a violent impositionupon an entity that remains hostile – or at least resistant – to the process(1987: 301). One of the implications of this ‘violence hypothesis’ is thesuggestion that the relationship between the individual and society is intrin-sically hostile – as is the relationship between self and other. While theserelationships are intrinsically problematic, nothing in his argument explainswhy they are necessarily hostile or violent, alien or oppressive. Given thatthe psyche must be formed, must be socialized by its own processes of subli-mating the social-historical, we must also allow that the relationship betweenthe individual and society, between self and other, is also embraced, desired,nurtured, etc. As Gauchet (2002: 7–8) puts it, the subject is ‘characterized byconstitutive polarities’. It is ‘caught up in a permanent instituting process’. It


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 11



‘exists only through the openness to the question of its being’. We constantlyfluctuate ‘between being-everything and being-nothing’ – not primarily at aphilosophical or existential level, but ‘even at the level of moods: betweenexcitement and depression, euphoria and anguish’. Constituted around acutecontradictions even ‘in the most ordinary moments of everyday life’, we livestrung ‘between two equally impossible and “mad” poles’.

In Castoriadis’s psychic monad hypothesis, this polarity appears as analmost pathological wound violently inflicted upon an essential unity. It is awound that can only be healed – if at all – through some form of reintegra-tion. Gauchet’s reinterpretation of the originary psyche indicates that it is notthe tension or contradiction that is pathological, but rather the refusal toaccept this tension as constitutive of being human. From this perspective,socialization should not be seen as an intrinsically violent imposition of thesocial imaginary upon the singular psyche, but a mutual interaction betweenirreducible and inextricable forces.

Karl E. Smith is a PhD candidate in the Sociology program at La TrobeUniversity, exploring conceptions of subjectivity and modernity through the worksof Charles Taylor and Cornelius Castoriadis. [email: [email protected]]

AcknowledgementsAn earlier version of this article was presented at the Thesis Eleven Symposium

‘Re-Imagining Castoriadis’, 27 August 2004 at La Trobe University. Thanks are due toSuzi Adams for initiating and organizing that event, and to the Thesis Eleven Centrefor sponsoring and supporting it. I am also grateful to Johann P. Arnason and ChrisEipper for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes1. Note here, too, that Castoriadis objects to treating ‘society’ and ‘history’ as

separate or separable, referring instead to the ‘social-historical’ as discussedabove (1987: 167–9). Likewise to refer to this as an ‘entity’ is problematic; buteach of these problems simply reinforces my point that language is inadequateto fully elucidate the world in which we find ourselves.

2. Urribarri considers the redefinition of ‘affect’ as one of the ways in whichCastoriadis most radically reconceptualizes Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective.Whereas Freud ‘was always ambivalent about the . . . status of affect’, Castori-adis considers it to be one of the constitutive elements of the radical imaginaryflux. This means that affect is both ‘defunctionalized and autonomized’, andthat it is not reducible to representation (2002: 44).

3. Gauchet refers to this ‘remaining beyond’ in terms of the invisible, noting thatthis phenomenon has historically been understood in religious terms, onlybeing rendered ‘the unconscious’ around 1900, with the increasing seculariza-tion of philosophy (2002: 17–19).

4. For Castoriadis’s equation of sublimation and socialization, see 1987: 311ff;1997c: 154ff. On this point Gauchet comments: ‘the concept of socialization


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 12



must be radicalized beyond the usual culturalistic understanding: it does notsimply refer to the adaptation to a given cultural environment, but – moresignificantly – to the psychic embedding of being-in-society’ (2002: 5). Gour-gouris (1997) considers this equation to be Castoriadis’s most fecund contri-bution to philosophy.

5. Which is certainly not to suggest that violence plays no role in the formationof the subject (cf. Wieviorka, 2003).

6. Society also experiences this tension between openness and closure, a particu-lar society’s position on this continuum being typically internalized by itssubject-members (see, for example, Castoriadis, 1997a: 86–7).

7. Society must also construct its own closure (even if, and preferably, as anopenness). Importantly – and central to Castoriadis’s argument – society is itselfthe only ‘real’ source of the ‘materials’ with which to effect this closure (1987:370ff.; 1997a: 86).

8. Note that Castoriadis directly addresses the argument that I (following Gauchet)am putting forward here and explicitly rejects it (1994: 146–7), but the contra-dictions noted in the text here undermine this position.

ReferencesBrunner, J. (2002) ‘Freud’s (De)construction of the Conflictual Mind’, Thesis Eleven

71: 24–39.Castoriadis, C. (1984) ‘Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul which has been presented

as a Science’, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth (trans. K. Soper and M. H. Ryle),pp. 3–45. Brighton: Harvester.

Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society (trans. Kathleen Blamey).Cambridge: Polity Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1994) ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, inGillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds) Rethinking Imagination: Culture andCreativity, pp. 136–54. London: Routledge.

Castoriadis, C. (1997a) ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in David AmesCurtis (ed. and trans.) World in Fragments, pp. 84–107. Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1997b) ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics’, in David Ames Curtis (ed. andtrans.) World in Fragments, pp. 125–36. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1997c) ‘The State of the Subject Today’, in David Ames Curtis (ed.and trans.) World in Fragments, pp. 137–71. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.

Castoriadis, C. (1997d) ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’, in David Ames Curtis (ed.and trans.) World in Fragments, pp. 172–95. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.

Castoriadis, C. (1997e) ‘Logic, Imagination, Reflection’, in David Ames Curtis (ed. andtrans.) World in Fragments, pp. 246–72. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1997f) ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, in David Ames Curtis (ed.and trans.) World in Fragments, pp. 311–30. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.

Castoriadis, C. (1997g) ‘Phusis and Autonomy’, in David Ames Curtis (ed. and trans.)World in Fragments, pp. 331–41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1997h) ‘Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics’, Thesis Eleven 49: 99–116.


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 13



Gauchet, Marcel (1991) ‘Democratic Pacification and Civic Desertion’, Thesis Eleven29: 5–13.

Gauchet, Marcel (1997) The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History ofReligion (trans. Oscar Burge). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gauchet, Marcel (2002) ‘Redefining the Unconscious’, Thesis Eleven 71: 4–23.Gourgouris, S. (1997) ‘Philosophy and Sublimation’, Thesis Eleven 49: 31–44.Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Urribari, F. (2002) ‘Castoriadis: The Radical Imagination and the Post-Lacanian Uncon-

scious’, Thesis Eleven 71: 40–51.Wieviorka, M. (2003) ‘Violence and the Subject’, Thesis Eleven 73: 42–50.


02 057133 Smith (to_d) 29/9/05 2:05 pm Page 14



re-imagining castoriadis's psychic monad

Documents