Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion

On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary

Suzi Adams

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786601360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This book features a highly significant discussion between Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis. Recorded for Radio France (Culture) in 1985, it is the only known encounter between these two great philosophers of the imagination. Their wide ranging conversation covers such themes as the productive imagination, human creation, social imaginaries, and the possibility of historical novelty; it reveals points of surprising commonality as well as divergence in their approaches. The dialogue is supplemented by critical essays by specialist scholars in Castoriadis and Ricoeur studies, and includes contributions from Johann P. Arnason, George H. Taylor, François Dosse, Johann Michel, Jean-Luc Amalric, and Suzi Adams. The book is a must read for all scholars interested in Ricoeur and Castoriadis studies, as well as those interested in debates on the possibilities and limits of human creation, and the importance of the imagination for social change.

Part I

Ricoeur and Castoriadis Radio Dialogue

Chapter One

Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary

Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis: Needless to say, how happy I am to speak with you, Paul Ricoeur, and how honoured that you have invited me to speak with you on Le Bon Plaisir.¹ You know this quite well, moreover, because I came to see you shortly after 1968 to propose a doctoral thesis topic on the imaginary element, which remains as it was then: elementary and imaginary ...²

Paul Ricoeur:You have published more than a few elements. And I have referred many times to the ‘imaginary production of society’³, because this issue of the imaginary foyer of social relations and of social production is, I believe, our shared interest.

C. C.Yes, indeed, but for my part I do not speak of production but of ‘institution’. Deliberately, of course. And I wanted to ask you about this, about this word ‘production’. This could have the air of a scholastic dispute, but I’m not looking to quarrel with you. Kant, when he speaks of the imagination, calls it ‘productive’ ...

P. R.That indeed is my lineage.

C. C.He only calls it ‘creative’ once, in passing, in the third Critique. This is surely no accident inasmuch as Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, is inspired by eighteenth-century literature and makes many references to English authors. But for me, this term ‘production’ is too closely linked to Marx, of course, but also to Heidegger.

P. R.Let me make this interjection ... Actually, I return to a pre-Marxian moment of the word, its Fichtean moment. Produzieren,⁴ that is Fichte. What drew me to the concept of the productive, rather than the creative imagination, is that I attached something infinitely more primordial to the idea of creation, something that would have a relationship with the order of a foundational sacred, whereas on the human scale, we are always in an institutional order. That is where I encounter a producing that is not a creating. The word ‘production’ should be paired with the word ‘reproduction’, it seems to me. In contrast with an imagination that only reproduces a copy of something that is already there, production is essentially a production of new syntheses and new configurations. This is what got me interested in metaphor on the level of language:⁵ We produce new meanings through the intersection of different semantic fields. Now that I’m working on narrative, I see the production of a story in terms of the production of narrative configurations by the plot.⁶ That is how I use the word ‘produce’.

C. C.We have immediately entered into what, at the same time, unites us and divides us the most. And I would like to take advantage of this programme to better understand you. You say production, reproduction – and reproduction even when it comes to the combination of things that aren’t already there! However, it is impossible for me to think of the polis, the Greek city, for example, or philosophy, which emerges in the sixth century BCE, as mere recombinations of elements that were already there. What institutes the polis as a polis is a meaning that it creates and through which it creates itself as a polis.

P. R.But we never experience production in this form! There you are presenting us with the myth of production. Let’s set aside the question of the Greek city in order to consider an experience that we can actually have, namely that of a production in the order of language. We do not know any other type of production than regulated productions, which is to say that we do not produce everything in what we produce. I completely agree with you that we cannot speak about ‘elements that were already there’. In my current analysis of narratives, I show that there are no prior elements in the sense that the events that are combined and compose the story do not exist as the variables of this story. For example, consider the different ways in which one can tell the events of the French Revolution: The event varies each time according to the story, depending on whether it is taken from the plot of Tocqueville, someone like Augustin Cochin⁷ or someone else like Furet.⁸ That is why we cannot speak of a combination of pre-established elements, which would be some type of associationist view.

C. C.But that is the structuralist view. Lévi-Strauss wrote it in black and white.

P. R.This is not my view, because it would imply that there are types of atoms that get combined differently ...

C. C.And each society throws the dice.

P. R.That is only the case in a static view, but not a productive one. By a static view, I mean the view that considers a combination as a set of fixed ‘elements’ which it redesigns, resulting in static structures that are discontinuous with each other. In contrast, in what I call emplotment, a process is set in motion where the ‘elements’ are reshaped by the lesson learned from an event. An event is determined by its role in the story that one is telling. Something might be an event for one story, but not for the other. In one plot, the storming of the Bastille is not an event; in another plot, it is an origin. Consequently, there are no elements that are somehow fixed in advance. But this is what I maintain: We can only produce according to rules; we do not produce everything that we produce, if only because we already have a language before we can talk. Others have spoken and have established the rules of the game. What we can do is to put them back into what Malraux called ‘coherent deformations’.⁹ We can proceed by coherent deformations, but this always takes place within a pre-structure, within something already structured that we restructure. That is why we are never in a situation that you would call creation, as if form could be derived from the absolutely formless.

C. C.And that is precisely why the idea of institution, rather than production, is at the centre of my work. The self-institution of society implies that we are always working within what is already established by changing or amending the rules but also by establishing new ones, by creating them. That is our autonomy.

P.R.The idea of absolute novelty is unthinkable. There can only be something new by breaking with the old: pre-established rules exist before us, and we deregulate them in order to regulate otherwise. But this is not a situation ... of the first day of creation.

C.C.That is precisely the whole problem, in the way of thinking about temporality and about being in temporality. According to one view, which is not necessarily yours, everything is predetermined, already logically pre-inscribed in a great book of possibilities. From these essential elements, both physical as well as spiritual or meaningful ones, certain combinations are produced, which allow for other combinations, and so on. But another way to think about temporality is to see the emergence of levels of being. One example that is as empirical as could be: The first living cell on Earth represents something new in relation to the primordial ocean. Of course, it is not absolutely new; it is regulated; it cannot violate a number of rules. The same goes for Wagner composing his operas: He cannot violate certain musical laws, or others concerning his biological metabolism, or his relations to others, etc. Nonetheless, he offers new harmonies that before him seemed absurdly dissonant. When the Greeks created mathematics – and regardless of the pioneering role of the Babylonians or Egyptians – they created the idea of proof on the basis of a minimal number of axioms and according to a set of established rules.

P. R.Ah, but I follow you! Earlier we were talking about what is more near and more distant between us. Here, I find myself very close to you. I never cease to plead in favour of the concept of an event in thought: There are events in thought, there are innovations. But here we have to think dialectically. One can only think about innovation under some conditions: First, there must have been previous configurations. This is not at all what you said when you mentioned an order of possibilities that would be immutable, as if we were going to tap into some sort of great treasure of possibilities. That does not exist. What does exist are the configurations prior to what we reconfigure – and we proceed in this way, from configurations to configurations. You just spoke about Greek rationality, about the Greek miracle ... but you should not go too far! There was something before ... that was done by tests, by trial and error. Around Plato, we see from other schools, the school of Eudoxus, how to find the five regular solids. All of that constitutes small developments that are cumulative but that emerge precisely from a prior set of failed tests and fruitless attempts. One sees that the cosmological representation of Copernicus and Kepler was anticipated ...

C. C.By Eratosthenes.

P. R.One is never in a passage from nothing to something, but from something to something, from one to another – which goes from the configured to the configured, but never from the formless to form. This is what I wanted to say by limiting the excesses of a kind of anarchism of reason. Reason follows after itself, but in a dialectic of innovation and sedimentation. There is the sedimentation of research and thoughts, and of the said, of what has been said before us. It is on the basis of these things that have already been said that we can say something else. Sometimes we say it better, but we remain in a sort of continuity of saying that is self-correcting and cumulative. I do not know if you are close to Michel Foucault, but this is a debate that can be had about his Archaeology of Knowledge¹⁰: Can we think of total discontinuity as the leap from one episteme to another? In Foucault’s case, this works well when you take three or four registers such as language, biological classifications, the economy, currency, etc. But when there is break in one line, there is continuity in anot...