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Autonomy and alienated subjectivity: A re-reading of Castoriadis, through Žižek

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Abstract

In a time of political passivism in the Western democracies, this article argues for the value of Cornelius Castoriadis’s radical theory of autonomy as a means of conceptualising (wo)man’s ability to pro-actively create new social institutions ex nihlo. In making this argument, however, it also seeks to ‘correct’ a key flaw within the model of subjectivity underlying this theory of autonomy. Castoriadis’s attempts to bypass the notion of alienation as a metaphysical given led him to an internally contradictory conception of subjectivity based around an originary monadic psyche. Through a critical re-reading of Castoriadis’s position through that of Slavoj Žižek’s ‘transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity’, this article shows how (re)inserting alienation into the former’s work as a constitutive element of the autonomous subject makes it possible to overcome the aforementioned contradiction while maintaining a concept of radical autonomous social change that goes beyond Žižek’s own rather inactive idea of ‘the Act’.

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Notes

  1. See also the special issue of Subjectivity, 10 (3) edited by Derek Hook and Calum Neill (2010).

  2. For Castoriadis, the term ‘institution’ – so important in his work – designates both ‘the instituting process … and the concrete institutions of a given society all at one’. It can, therefore, be seen as being double-jointed in its meaning (Arnold, quoted in Castoriadis, 2007, p. 272).

  3. To further clarify, the ‘Big Other’ is a modality of ‘the Other’, the symbolic that blocks the closure of ‘the Subject’ (hence, the Lacanese matheme of the barred S sign: $ for the ‘barred-subject’). This blockage is constitutive, as, paradoxically, the Subject persists only in as far as its full identity is blocked (by the Other) (Žižek, 1990, pp. 252–254).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors, anonymous referees and to Nick Turnbull and Andrew Crines for their helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, 1 West North, BA2 7AY, UK

    David S Moon

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Moon, D. Autonomy and alienated subjectivity: A re-reading of Castoriadis, through Žižek. Subjectivity 6, 424–444 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.11

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