[CRIT 13.

1 (2012) 12-28] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917

doi:10.1558/crit.v13i1.12 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

Imagination and Tragic Democracy

Nathalie Karagiannis
nk47@sussex.ac.uk

Peter Wagner
University of Barcelona
peter.wagner@ub.edu

Abstract: Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political
philosophers modern and ancient for whom a concept of imagination is
truly central. In his work, however, the role of imagination is so overarching
that it becomes difficult to grasp its workings and consequences in detail, in
particular in its relation to democracy as the political form in which auton-
omy is the core imaginary signification. This article will proceed by first sug-
gesting some clarifications about Castoriadiss employment of the concept.
This preparatory exploration will allow us in a second step to discuss why
the idea of democracy is closely linked to tragedy, and why this linkage in
turn is dependent on the centrality of imagination for human action. In a
third conceptual step, finally, we suggest that any concept of imagination
will need to take into account the plurality and diversity of the outcomes of
the power of imagination. Thus, the question of the nature of the novelty
that imagination creates needs to be addressed as well as the one of the agon
in the face of different imagined innovations in a given democratic political
setting. As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, to be elaborated further,
one will be able to say more about one question of which Castoriadis was
well aware, which he never addressed himself in detail, though: the decline
and end of polities and political forms, the question of political mortality.
Keywords: Cornelius Castoriadis; democracy; imagination; ontology;
political philosophy; tragedy.

Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political philosophers
modern and ancient for whom a concept of imagination is truly central.1

1. The major other such thinker, in whom the centrality of imagination though is somewhat
more difficult to detect, was Hannah Arendt. For recent works discussing Arendts thought
in this light see Svjetlana Nedimovic, Being to the World: an Inquiry into Philosophical
Implications of Hannah Arendts Political Thought, PhD thesis at the European University

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 13

While imagination (under this and other names) has been discussed widely,
in most cases it was seen as a problem, as a potentially dangerous human
capacity, which had to be assigned its proper place and kept in that place
this place in most cases being clearly outside of politics.2 In response to such
a widespread marginalization of the imagination, however, Castoriadis chose
to give the concept such an overarching place in his thinking that the precise
ways in which the imagination shapes politics are not easy to identify in his
work. Characteristically, the concept of imagination organizes the text that
is often considered as his major work, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit,
first published as such in 1975 (and translated into English as The Imaginary
Institution of Society in 1987). In later writings, the term and its relatives,
such as most importantly the imaginary, recur frequently, but their use
is subsumed, in not always self-evident ways, to Castoriadiss concern with
autonomy, democracy, tragedy.
For this reason, this paper, which aims at extending the usage of the
concept of imagination in social and political thought by starting out from
Castoriadiss work, will proceed by first suggesting some clarifications about
Castoriadiss employment of the concept. This preparatory exploration will
allow us in a second step to discuss why the idea of democracy, via its basic
commitment to human autonomy, is closely linked to tragedy, and why
this linkage in turn is dependent on the centrality of the imagination for
human action. While this interpretation remains Castoriadian in spirit, we
shall argue, thirdly, that further conceptual steps need to be taken of which
hardly any elements can be found in Castoriadiss work. In particular, we
suggest that any concept of imagination will need to take into account the
plurality and diversity of the outcomes of the power of imagination. Thus,
the question of the nature of the novelty that the imagination creates needs
to be addressed as well as the one of the agon in the face of different imag-
ined innovations in a given democratic political setting.
As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, to be elaborated on further in
the future, one will be able to say more about one question of which Casto-
riadis was well aware, which he never addressed himself in detail, though: the

Institute, 2007, in particular chapters 5 and 6; and Angela Lorena Fuster Peir, La imagi-
naci arrelada: Una proposta interpretativa a partir de Hannah Arendt, PhD thesis at the
University of Barcelona, 2010 (Barcelona, forthcoming).
2. The example most often referred to also by Castoriadis is Immanuel Kant, with the
relation between the first and the second edition of the first critique as well as the relation
between the first and the third critique being the key issues of interpretative dispute. While
we will not enter into these debates, we refer to Kant here because we will briefly come
back to his modern view in comparison with Castoriadiss reading of the ancient Greek
perspective.

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14 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

decline and end of polities and political forms, the question of political mor-
tality. In the recent past, we have witnessed the end of Soviet-style socialism,
and Castoriadis himself raised concerns about our democracies, in which
the commitment to autonomy may have evaporated from the dominant
political imagination. Thus, if imagination is important for understanding
novelty and change, as Castoriadis maintained, then this concept should
also help us in grasping these socio-political transformations of the recent
past and the present time something which Castoriadis, however, seems
to have been doubtful about.
We anticipate two conceptual observations that have guided us in the
elaboration of the following reasoning. Reading Castoriadis, who is certainly
an eminently political thinker, first, one needs to note that he predominantly
refers to the social imaginary, not the political one. The social imaginary,
in its instituting mode, is at the basis of the institution of society. It is the
source of radical creation.3 When rarely Castoriadis refers to the political
imaginary, he sees it as the embodiment of the social imaginary into politi-
cal institutions. An exploration of the significance of imagination in social
and political thought should not fail to address explicitly the conceptual
distinction between the social and the political.4 Conflating the two
leads to undue conceptual domination of the one over the other, as is very
frequently the case in contemporary political thought (see below section 1).
Secondly, Castoriadiss work makes a strong distinction between two
types of settings, autonomous and heteronomous societies. In political
terms, societies in which the imaginary signification of autonomy prevails
are democracies, ancient or modern. This suggests that under conditions of
democracy there will be a specific relation between politics and imagina-
tion, clearly distinct from the one that prevails in heteronomous societies,
and in particular that political autonomy invites, maybe even presupposes,
struggles over the collective outcome of the imagination. In other words,
one may see the work of imagination as that which constitutes politics under
conditions of autonomy, thus democracy (below section 2).

1. Castoriadiss Imagination

The concept of imagination assumed a central role in Castoriadiss think-

ing because of a certain lack in all other social and political thought, from

3. Cornelius Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 53238.

4. See further, Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, Varieties of Agonism: Conflict, the
Common Good and the Need for Synagonism, Journal of Social Philosophy 39(3) (Fall 2008).

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 15

philosophies of history, Marxist or not, to the social sciences, critical or

not. Castoriadis takes two observations for granted: that there is a diversity
of modes of human social organization, and that societies undergo change,
at times radical change. Social and political thought, however, has little or
nothing to say neither about the original emergence of any of those diverse
societies, nor about the ways in which those societies can radically change.5
The concept of imagination is developed to provide an account of both this
plurality and this radical type of change we may say it takes its role by
default because, excluding recourse to transcendental explanations, it is the
only force in human societies that is strong enough to make such plurality
and change come about.
In other words, imagination is the name for the creative potential, the
vis formandi that is immanent in human beings and human communities.6
It is the name for creatio ex nihilo, that is, the making-to-be (faire tre) of
forms that did not previously exist. In Castoriadiss view, this potential exists
in two kinds, the understanding of which is derived from what we may call
his basic ontology. Aiming to avoid the conceptual distinction between
individual and society, which has marked much of the history of the social
sciences, he works with a distinction between the psychical and the social-
historical, each of which have the potential for creation.7

5. For the former reason, the intention to understand radical diversity, Castoriadiss thinking has
been found useful in the recent debate about multiple modernities, even though only by few
contributors to this debate, most significantly Johann P. Arnason. With regard to the latter
reason, the intention to understand radical change, no one would deny that social change has
been a key concern of the social sciences for the past two centuries. However, most theories of
social change work with more or less strong versions of determinism, thus deriving the novel
social configuration from features of the old. In other words, such theories do not allow for
any moderately strong notion of historical contingency, of unpredicted change and/or of the
emergence of anything truly novel. The so-called agency-structure debate of the 1970s and
1980s, with Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu among the key contributors, aimed at
challenging such determinism, but only few social-science scholars, maybe most importantly
William Sewell, Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformations (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2005), have extended the reasoning towards emphasizing collective
creativity.
6. From its beginnings, one notices in history the emergence of radical novelty, and if one does
not want to make recourse to transcendental factors to explain this, then one will have to
posit a power of creation, a vis formandi, which is immanent to human collectivities as well
as to individual human beings. It has since become fully natural to call this faculty of radical
innovation, of creation and of formation imaginary and imagination (Cornelius Castoriadis,
Imaginaire et imagination au carrefour, Figures du pensable. Les carrefours du labyrinthe VI
[Paris: Seuil, 1999], 94). All translations are our own. It may be noted that this is a rather
late formulation of an issue that occupied Castoriadis from early on.
7. We will not deal here in any detail with the implications of this distinction, which has been
widely discussed and certainly was central for Castoriadiss self-understanding in his two main

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16 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

Throughout his work, Castoriadis frequently uses the terms imagina-

tion and imaginary accompanied by the adjective radical. It occurs, for
instance, both at the end of Linstitution imaginaire and in Imaginaire et
imagination, which stems from 1996, both as quoted above. This suggests
that he makes a distinction between radical and non-radical uses or modes
of imagination, but to the best of our knowledge, there is no explicit discus-
sion of this distinction.8 Trying to capture the gist of his reasoning, we sug-
gest that imagination is or can be radical for two main different reasons.
First of all, as said above, it is the potential to create that which does not yet
exist, thus to bring novelty into the world. Secondly, though, it is radical also
because it escapes the control of its own agents. Individual human beings
have fantasies and relate to an imaginary world that they cannot rule; and
similarly there are imaginary significations created socio-historically that are
not mastered by any existing collectivity.
Castoriadis always situates the imagination in the social realm. At all
times, the social imaginary is at work and creates imaginary significations of
society. Unlike other philosophers have thought, there is neither a point in
limiting or channelling the range and substance of this work of imagination
as a matter of philosophical or politico-theoretical reasoning, nor a possibil-
ity of doing so. It is precisely the variety and unpredictable creativity of the
social imaginary that is at the root of the plurality of modes of human social
organization and of social change.
While Castoriadis appropriately in our view rejects the limitation of
the role of the imagination by most of philosophy, he might have investi-
gated more explicitly the reasons why philosophers were inclined to do so.
At this point, we arrive at the distinction between the social and the politi-
cal that exists in Castoriadiss work but the consequences of which have not
been sufficiently spelt out. If imagination is a social phenomenon, how
does it relate to political matters? For the mainstream of (social and politi-
cal) philosophy, we may say that the role of imagination for politics needed
to be limited precisely because of its radical nature. A good institutional
order from Plato to Kant to Habermas needs institutional safeguards
by means of which human beings prevent social life from getting out of
control. Within those political institutions, thus, the imagination needs

areas of work, as a practicing psychoanalyst and as a social and political philosopher. Below,
we will only return to it in as far as it is relevant for understanding the plurality of imaginary
significations of society and the struggle over them.
8. See the contributions by Paul Ricoeur, Imagination in Discourse and Action, and Johann
Arnason, Reason, Imagination, Interpretation, in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Cre-
ativity, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds), (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 11835
and 15570 respectively, for attempts at elaborating a typology of forms of imagination.

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 17

to be banned. Once such a good order is established, furthermore, radical

novelty is undesirable because it puts accomplishments at risk. Thus, the
time-honoured answer to the above question is: the social imaginary can put
a good political order at risk, and for that reason its role needs to be tightly
limited. Critics of democracy have entertained such ideas from ancient
Athens onwards, and liberal thought has elaborated on them over the past
three or four centuries.
It is against such views, precisely, that Castoriadis develops his ideas about
the place of the imagination in socio-political life, but he, too, needs to dis-
tinguish between the social and the political towards his own ends. The key
to answer the question how the social imaginary relates to political matters
in his work lies in the distinction between the instituting moment in social
life and the situation of an instituted society. In Castoriadiss terms, the
work of the social imaginary underpins the instituting of society the mise
en forme as one could say, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, follow-
ing him, Claude Lefort. However, it is not identical with such form-giving.
Rather, the term politics is reserved for the conscious action of society upon
itself, the self-institution and self-transformation of society. Thus, it is the
mise en question of any given institution of society, as a project of auton-
omy. Its source is the social imaginary in all its manifoldness; it springs
from the instituting imaginary, which is neither locatable nor formalizable.9
But it draws on this source in a reflexive, self-conscious, lucid way by aim-
ing at the giving of institutional form, to arrive at an instituted society that
is conscious of its self-institution, its autonomy, and thus also capable of
self-transformation.
Thus, we can say that Castoriadis, though rarely being explicit about this,
works with a conceptual distinction between politics and the social in which
the former is ontologically subordinated to the latter.10 Elsewhere we have
proposed to use the term social to refer to all kinds of relations between
human beings, whereas the term political should refer to action that deals
with matters to be handled in common.11 Castoriadiss understanding of this

9. Cornelius Castoriadis, Pouvoir, politique, autonomie, in Castoriadis, Le monde morcel. Les

carrefours du labyrinthe III (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 136.
10. Probably the most explicit place is the above-mentioned essay Pouvoir, politique, autono-
mie. In contrast to much current usage, Castoriadis speaks about politics (la politique) as
conscious self-institution rather than about the political (le politique) which, if one wanted
to use that term at all, according to Castoriadis would be synonymous with imaginary insti-
tution of society in general (12526). The most striking contrast here is to Claude Leforts
usage, an author with whom Castoriadis worked together in Socialisme ou barbarie.
11. Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, Towards a Theory of Synagonism, The Journal of
Political Philosophy 13 (September 2005).

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18 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

distinction is rather close, but he introduces two particular emphases that are
important for the discussion here (and with which we would not disagree):
he stresses the imaginary element within the social, and he focuses on the
instituting work of the political as action that springs from the social in
terms of translating imagination into institution.
At this point, it can be concluded that there is a significant contribution
to political philosophy that emerges from Castoriadiss ontological reflec-
tions. Castoriadiss position is, however, ambiguous: On the one hand, he
clearly stresses that attempts at controlling the imaginary should be avoided
a normative position whose most striking descriptive translation lies in
the idea that the defences of society are weakest against societys own imagi-
nation.12 On the other hand, he does have in mind processes of crystalli-
zation that allow any particular imaginary signification to linger on, have
effects etc.13 Thus, there is a tension between the omnipresence of the radi-
cal imaginary, which can upset any instituted society, and the persistence
of given instituted societies and their imaginaries. This tension needs to be
explored further, against and beyond the common observation that Casto-
riadis elaborated a forceful ontological perspective but showed weaknesses
when translating these insights into socio-political analysis.14 Of particular
interest, obviously, is the investigation of the particular political form to
use a Lefortian term with which Castoriadis was most concerned because
it embedded the understanding of politics as a project of autonomy, namely
democracy.15

12. Castoriadis, Pouvoir, politique, autonomie, 121: Society can never escape from itself A
radical imaginary is always flowing underneath the established social imaginary The point
at which the defences of instituted society are most weak is without doubt its own instituting
imaginary.
13. For example, Castoriadis, Pouvoir, politique, autonomie, 13539, where indeed a distinc-
tion between ontological and political considerations is made.
14. Many otherwise sympathetic readers have diagnosed in Castoriadiss work an emphasis
on ontology at the expense of more concrete socio-political analysis (see, for instance, the
contributions by Waldenfels, Joas and Honneth in Autonomie et autotransformation de la
socit. La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis, Giovanni Busino et al., [Genve:
Droz, 1989]). While such criticism is not entirely unjustified, it tends to rely on an unprob-
lematized understanding of the relation between philosophy and the social sciences, and in
particular between political philosophy and sociology. In the present paper, our argument
will proceed from now on mostly in the genre of political philosophy, suggesting that there
is more than ontology in Castoriadis, but also more implicitly that the relation between
political philosophy and social analysis needs itself to be part of the conceptual inquiry.
For Castoriadiss own early view on this issue, see part two of Linstitution imaginaire de la
socit (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
15. We use the term form for everything (temporarily) instituted, thus stabilized over time.
The term is not common in Castoriadis (but see, for instance, his reference to Rousseaus

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 19

2. Democracy and the Tragic Capture of the World

At this point, the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy becomes

central. For most of its time, in Castoriadiss view, human history is marked
by the magma of heteronomous societies, societies in which the view
prevails that the laws of living together are set by some external force. Up
to now, there have been only two major ruptures in this magma, the one
having occurred in ancient Greece between the seventh and the fourth cen-
tury BCE, the other one in what we refer to as Renaissance Europe after the
thirteenth century ce. These moments are ruptures because they introduce
a novel imaginary signification of society, namely the idea of autonomy, of
giving oneself ones own laws.16
We will come briefly to modern Europe later, but will first discuss the
role of the analysis of the ancient Greek imaginary in Castoriadiss thought,
since as the first rupture towards autonomy as a historical moment of radi-
cal creation it is crucially significant. Indeed, Castoriadis credits ancient
Greece with historical innovation that is at the same time radically transfor-
mative of conceptual languages. Greece of the polis is for him the historical
moment of the simultaneous invention of politics and of philosophy, two
inventions that are held together by the commitment to autonomy, by the
rejection of any external imposition.17
The invention of the political means precisely the introduction of
the idea that society can act upon itself. Historically, it was imagined as
a response to what we would call social problems, and it entailed the
instituting of forms of such societal action upon itself.18 Gradually, such
self-transformation was seen as needing to involve all citizens of the polity
in and for which such action was undertaken. Thus, the invention of the

expression forme dassociation, Pouvoir, politique, autonomie, 138) , but it is consistent

with his thinking and helps to move to socio-political analysis of existing (or historical)
polities.
16. See, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, Quelle dmocratie?, in Figures du pensable. Les
carrefours du labyrinthe VI (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 15556.
17. As succinctly argued in Castoriadis, Philosophy, politics, autonomy. This view resonates
with the findings of classic historians, maybe even increasingly so. See, for instance, Chris-
tian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1983);
or Kurt Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit (Munich: Beck, 1996); and now Johann
P. Arnason, Kurt Raaflaub and Peter Wagner (eds), The Greek Polis and the Invention of
Democracy: a Politico-Cultural Transformation and its Interpretations (Oxford: Blackwell,
forthcoming 2012).
18. For our own reconstruction in a different context, see Karagiannis and Wagner, The Liberty
of the Moderns Compared to the Liberty of the Ancients, forthcoming in The Greek Polis,
Arnason, et al.(eds).

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20 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

political was relatively rapidly followed by the invention of democracy as a

particular political form.19
The invention of philosophy, in turn, is related to the invention of the
political as an explicit exploration that puts into question the instituted
representations of the world, the place of human beings and of society in
the world.20 As this reflection was strongly motivated by undesired outcomes
of the workings of democracy, major strands of ancient Greek philosophy
are marked by a crisis of democracy and develop as the latters critique. This
notwithstanding, the key novelty brought about by the invention of phi-
losophy was the application of the principle of autonomy to the search for
knowledge. Thus, ancient Greek political and philosophical imagination are
held together by the commitment to autonomy as the key component of
the social imaginary.
Castoriadis tells us that of the three Kantian questions: what do I know,
what ought I to do, what may I hope for?, only the third one is given a
specific answer by the Greeks. The answer is nothing. The rejection of
any external source that imposes laws is liberating not least because of its
acceptance of human mortality. There is no afterlife, that is, one is free to act
here and now and responsible for ones actions.21 The full acknowledgement
of mortality, that is, the acknowledgement of the impossibility to transcend
death, is the mark of autonomy, of giving oneself ones own laws (changing
them and, last but not least, revoking them). In terms of the political col-
lectivity, mortality means that there is no hope to establish autonomous
institutions for eternity; it means an acute sense of the contingency of the
political construction. Because chaos is the ground of human existence, both
as singular human beings and collectively, any kosmos that can be built will
always remain dependent on the actions of the citizens that inhabit it.
Thus, the ancient Greek political imaginary, by contrast to the modern
one, translates into political institutions an insight that we here refer to as
the tragic capture of the world. The tragic capture of the world is the coin-
cidence of the wisdom that only the good life is worth living and of the
intuition that death, whilst inexorable, must be avoided. The genre that

19. On the oscillation between invention of politics and invention of democracy, see Cornelius
Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grce. 1. DHomre Hraclite (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 57.
20. Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grce. 1, 5759. In contrast to Jean-Pierre Vernant, who saw the rise
of philosophy as a response to the need for reasoning about politics in the polis, Castoriadis
sees a closer connection between the two genres: The constitution of the political community
is already philosophy in action (p. 59).
21. I can do everything that I can do, but I should not do just anything, and about that which I
should do the ontological structure of my personal temporality, for example, is for me of no
help at all (Pouvoir, politique, autonomie, 136).

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the Greeks invented to present and communicate this understanding of the

world is tragedy, even though there are tragic elements in the epos as well,
as Castoriadis points out.22 Tragedy underlines the possibility and even
need to act autonomously, but reminds the spectators that there are lim-
its to autonomy, through the presentation of hubris and hubristic action.
Castoriadis understands hubris not as arrogance or as the transcendence of
well-defined limits, but as a space beyond limits in which all of a sudden
one finds oneself. In other words, hubris cannot be foreseen; it cannot be
avoided; it befalls one. The extreme pole of the limits recalled by tragedy is
mortality/death.23
At first sight, it appears as if tragic choices concern singular human
beings, such as Antigone, even though the civic rules, may be one of the
key elements at stake in the choice. This is true in so far as every choice is a
choice that needs to be made by human beings. However, tragedy immedi-
ately addresses questions of the political, in particular under conditions of
democracy in which human beings autonomously and together choose their
rules for living together.24 Tragedy springs from democracy, that is, tragedy
is political and therefore democratic because it constantly reminds humans
of the need to limit themselves and, more specifically, of this needs radical
expression: mortality.25
It has often been observed that the genre of tragedy was historically born
in democratic society, namely democratic Athens, because tragic choices
require multiple possibilities of action and registers of justification we will
not explore this question further.26 Rather, the issue can be turned around in
terms of exploring why and in which sense democracy is a tragic regime. As
we have argued earlier, democracy is a regime that does not accept any norms

22. Cornelius Castoriadis, La polis grecque et la cration de la dmocratie, in Domaines de

lhomme: Les carrefours du labyrinthe II (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 300.
23. See Nathalie Karagiannis, Democracy as a tragic regime: democracy and its cancellation,
Critical Horizons 11(1) (2010): 3549.
24. It does so by its very form, by its way of presentation or presentification, as Castoriadis
used to say, which is close to Arendts manifestation by its audience, by its content. See
Cornelius Castoriadis, La polis grecque, 299301.
25. Cornelius Castoriadis, Limaginaire politique grec et moderne, in Castoriadis, La monte de
linsignifiance. Les carrefours du labyrinthe IV (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 168: Democracy is certainly
a tragic regime, subject to hubris () it has to face the question of its self-limitation () a
constant recall to self-limitation by tragedy. Tragedy namely is also and above all the showing
of the effects of hubris, and more than this, the demonstration that contrasting reasons can
co-exist (). But above all tragedy is democratic by virtue of containing the constant recall
of mortality, that is, of the radical limitation of the human era.
26. For recent reflection on tragedy and politics, see the contributions by Egon Flaig, Nathalie
Karagiannis and Tracy Strong in The Greek polis, Raaflaub et al. (eds).

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22 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

from outside itself; it has to set its own norms. Thus emerges the possibility
of hubris, which does not only presuppose freedom; it also presupposes the
absence of fixed norms, the fundamental imprecision of the ultimate ref-
erence-points of our actions. () There is no norm of the norm that would
not ultimately be a historical creation. And there is no means to eliminate
the risk of a collective hubris. No one can protect humanity from madness or
suicide.27 Facing persistent uncertainty, indeed often indeterminacy, about
the appropriate action to take, democracy is always at risk at risk of mak-
ing an inappropriate choice, and more radically, at risk of self-revocation or
self-destruction as a consequence of such choices. That such risk can become
reality is shown by the decline and fall of the Athenian polis at the end of
the fifth century. Thus, the situation of action in democracy mirrors for a
collectivity that which a singular human being faces in tragic theatre: the
simultaneous existence of different sets of criteria for good action, the lack
of criteria for determining the distinction between them, and the need to
act under conditions of such uncertainty and indeterminacy.
Taking a second look at the two other questions by Kant, which Cas-
toriadis does not conceptualize as answerable in a specific Greek way, we
can propose traces of a Greek answer that both Castoriadis and we need in
order to arrive at the tragic capture of the world. Clearly, like in Kant, these
two questions what do I know? what ought I to do? are answered by
reference to the principle of autonomy, but in highly different ways in two
respects. First, there is no sense in which these questions could be asked and
answered by an individual on his or her own in ancient Greece. The human
being as Castoriadis, too, would insist is always a being in society. Thus,
these questions are answered with reference to the collectivity of which one
is a member: what do we know, what ought we to do?28 Secondly, while
Kant saw a need to introduce reason as that second principle that limits
and frames the workings of autonomy, ancient Greek thinkers, while well
aware of the question whether there are limitations, by and large rejected
the adoption of any such second principle.29 Where Kant was employing
reason as a means to restrain the working of the imagination (from which
reason itself sprang), the power of imagination is accepted as the source of

27. Castoriadis, La polis grecque , 297.

28. This is why Antigone and Kreon are accused of monos phronein; but this is also why, at the
same time, being part of their socio-political context, they speak in the name of ancestral
law and in the name of civic law.
29. Platos Republic can be seen as the key exception in which the allegedly superior insights from
philosophical knowledge dominate over and are meant to limit political action, but this text
needs to be read within the larger frame of Platos thought, and this latter by assessing Platos
position within Greek philosophy.

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 23

creation and innovation, and thus the potential for solutions to problems
of living-together in ancient Greece.
The radical imagination brought about personal and collective self-deter-
mination, as a crucial moment of human and historical creation. This is
not to say, however, that whatever emerges from the social imaginary is
always immediately an adequate response to problems and an element of
their solution. To be so, rather, one could say in the light of Castoriadiss
understanding of politics, human beings would need to turn the imaginary
reflexively onto itself in a movement that would not anymore be radically
imaginative, however, as it would be controlled. In other words, the basic
ontology that has informed the reasoning up to this point needs to be inter-
preted as elucidating the condition for conscious action, and in particular
for the reflexive collective action with a view to elaborating common rules
and solving common problems, that is, politics.
We may try to elucidate the specificity of this perspective by compar-
ing it to a standard modernist view. In liberal-democratic theory, as briefly
mentioned above, the building of political institutions is often understood
as the answer to the question of the need for order, or for domestic peace.
Thus, institution-building is supposed to create a setting for political action
that could be sustained even if it were inhabited and used by devils, as Kants
famous maxim has it. This is exactly why the work of imagination needs to
be limited: as far as the limits hold, even devils will live freely and peacefully
together. The perspective proposed here, drawing on Castoriadiss reading of
ancient Greece, does accept the need to build order (kosmos) of some kind.
That is why the reasoning cannot stop at the mere assertion of the creative
power of the social imaginary. But it does not assume or expect that chaos
will disappear, or at least permanently be dominated. In contrast, it precisely
sees the attempt at instituting society as the persistent work of creating kos-
mos in the midst of chaos. The chaos of the origins persists in, through and
despite the successful attempts at beauty, order, wisdom of kosmos.

3. Creation, Agon, Death

In our view, the connection Castoriadis establishes between democracy and

tragedy is highly fruitful for political theory and political diagnosis. In his
own reasoning, however, he seems to arrive at it by leaping over certain
conceptual issues that would need to be explored further to fully reap the
potential of that connection. In particular, Castoriadis does little to expli-
cate the link between politics and democracy in his perspective. Clearly, not
every instituting activity is democratic, or in different terms: not every work

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24 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

of imagination aims at bringing about or sustaining a democratic political

form. Even though imagination is geared towards the novel and towards
change, one should not rule out political imagination that aims at pres-
ervation or even at reaction against autonomy and democracy. True, the
basic distinction between autonomous and heteronomous societies partly
addresses this issue, as heteronomous societies are themselves instituted by
some social imaginary, but nevertheless radically different from autono-
mously instituted societies. However, with his definition of politics as
explicit self-institution, to which we referred earlier, Castoriadis tends to
conflate some general self-understanding of society as setting its own rules
with a democratic regime in which self-questioning is a permanent part of
political life. It is for this reason, possibly, that his socio-political analysis
of the present oscillated between the critique of liberal oligarchies in which
generalized conformism reigns and the potential reassertion of the commit-
ment to autonomy about the conditions of which, however, he had little
to say.30
Secondly, even though Castoriadis emphasizes the social-historical as
the locus of the radical imaginary, he says rather little about what we may call
the kinds of social relations that more or less lend themselves to sustaining
democracy as a political form relations for which the term solidarity is
useful, even though it is in need of conceptual re-elaboration and historical
specification.31 If we are not able to distinguish between different kinds of
such relations, the investigation of which remained an outsiders concern
in political thought from Alexis de Tocqueville to Claude Lefort, then the
distinction between imaginary significations of autonomy and those of het-
eronomy remains our only tool in, for instance, distinguishing democratic
from totalitarian regimes and reflecting on the ways in which the one can
be transformed into the other.32
The introduction of a notion of agon (struggle) into the reasoning could
provide help in exploring how political imagination is related to the ques-
tion of mortality in a political sense, namely the death of a polity, the end
of a political form.

30. For instance, Castoriadis, Quelle dmocratie?, 154.

31. For further discussion of this issue, see Nathalie Karagiannis, Multiple Solidarities: Auton-
omy and Resistance, in Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, Karagiannis and
Wagner (eds), 15472 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), and European Solidarity,
Nathalie Karagiannis (ed.), (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
32. A rare, explicit discussion of these issues can be found in Castoriadis, La polis grecque ,
e.g. 29394, also with reference to Hannah Arendt. See furthermore Karagiannis, Democ-
racy .

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 25

Castoriadis himself appears to have rejected this conceptual move. He

criticized Arendts definition of agon, and her understanding of Greek
democracy as agonistic because to him it confined democracy to manifes-
tation. As is the case for autonomy, he argues, an agonistic manifestation
is not an end in itself. There are always substantive aims towards which
agon and autonomy are directed.33 Even though the critique of Arendt may
be justified, however, a stronger emphasis on agon appears wanted.34 Not
least, it suggests that there is not necessarily a single social imaginary that
provides the self-understanding of a society and a polity, but a plurality of
them that are in contest with each other. And among those imaginaries in
dispute, there will be a need to discriminate between them on substantive
terms on a first order maybe between the degree to which they indeed
commit themselves to autonomy or succumb to heteronomy, and on a sec-
ond order with regard to substantive commitments that are taken (and can
be carried through across time) or rejected.35
Secondly, a stronger emphasis on agon may enlighten the understand-
ing of political mortality. Despite his illuminating view of hubris and the
acknowledgment of mortality in tragedy, Castoriadis did not explore the
death of political forms. He acknowledged as a matter of conceptual prin-
ciple that this question posed as big a problem as the emergence of a form
but he did not analyse it any further.36 To merely resort to imagination
for the end of the instituting/instituted process is unsatisfactory because it
merely maintains the conceptual device that describes the beginning with-
out posing the question if and how beginning and end may differ. Prima
facie, it appears more plausible to invoke lack of imagination as a reason for
the demise of a polity or a political form. If one raises the question of the
substantive features of the work of imagination, alternatively, one can relate
the death of a political form to the specific nature of innovation that political
imagination brought about in the declining period and, importantly, to the
agonistic struggle between different components of the imaginary.

33. Castoriadis, La polis grecque , 304.

34. In his seminars on epos, Castoriadis mentions Burckhardt and agonistic elements.
35. Castoriadis may have conceived the social imaginary in overly strong terms, namely as in
the process of instituting society determining that which exists and that which does not for a
given collectivity, thus making any struggle over elements or interpretations of an imaginary
signification difficult to envisage. (The institution of the common world is necessarily the
institution of that which is and is not, see Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit,
535).
36. See, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, Institution premire de la socit et institutions sec-
ondes, in Figures du pensables. Les carrefours du labyrinthe VI, Castoriadis, (Paris: Seuil, 1999),
121; on hubris and the fall of democratic Athens, see, Castoriadis, La polis grecque,
29697.

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26 NATHALIE KARAGIANNIS AND PETER WAGNER

It is surprising that Castoriadis did not lead his reflections into these
directions. After all, his observation of the double rupture in the magma
of heteronomous societies directly raises the question of that other kind of
rupture that spelt the end of autonomy, in each case. For ancient Greece,
historical investigation can instruct us. It was probably a combination of the
hubris of the Athenians and their lack of political imagination at a certain
point that precipitated Athenss fall. Athenians had come to see their demo-
cratic polity, not least because of its democratic nature, as so superior to any
other kind of polity that they could not imagine any occurrence, even less
any misjudged action on their own part, that could destroy it.37
What about so-called modern democracy then? Castoriadiss own view
was peculiarly ambivalent. On the one hand, he referred to contempo-
rary Western societies as liberal oligarchies, as noted above, thus suggest-
ing that democracy indeed had come to an end. On the other hand, he
underlined that the commitment to autonomy was still alive and that its
reactivation was possible, in principle, and could lead to a much-needed
new Renaissance. Either way, though, there is a strong suggestion that
the meaning of democracy had weakened and that the democratic spirit had
evaporated from the political institutions of contemporary Western societies.
But which are the reasons for this decline? Was it due to an earlier period
of excessive agonism expressed in a strong and strongly competitive use of
political imagination such as in aggressive nationalism and in class struggle
perceived as antagonistic? Or was it due to a subsiding of the power of politi-
cal imagination, a substantive emptying out of the institutions that frame
life in common, leaving nothing but hollow containers? Both explanations
have some plausibility, but without criteria for choosing between them, wise
political action is difficult and democracy may move again towards its tragic
fate.

Nathalie Karagiannis is a freelance author living in Barcelona. She is the author of

Avoiding Responsibility. The Politics and Discourse of EU Development Policy (London:
Pluto, 2004), editor of European Solidarity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007)
and author of numerous articles.

Peter Wagner is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona and author
of Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) and Modernity as
Experience and Interpretation. A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner co-edited Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Glo-

37. Such a lack of imagination is both, internally, the cause for the failure to challenge slavery
and the unequal status of women and, externally, the failure to adapt the institutions of the
polis to the new imperial era.

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 Imagination and Tragic Democracy 27

balization (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) and numerous articles, most
recently What is to be thought? What is to be done? The Polyscopic Thought of Kos-
tas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis, forthcoming in European Journal of Social The-
ory. Peter Wagner acknowledges support from the European Research Council for the
project Trajectories of Modernity (TRAMOD) under the European Unions Seventh
Framework Programme as Advanced Grant no. 249438 for research on this article.

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