The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse’s concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of psychic socialization. It will be (...) suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis’s appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory. (shrink)

Grounded in newer French socio-political philosophy, this text deals with the paradoxical situation in which the interpretation of society as well as the relation between the individual and the social remains ambiguous even though autonomy and interrogation of the social emerges: Autonomy remains trapped between transcendence and immanence. Modernity is when society claims to know that it has to produce its own myths. Traditional societies did not relate to their myths as if they were their own products. Nevertheless, as soon (...) as the traditional religious points of reference are disclosed and disappear, the community gives itself new points of reference in order to put the social at a distance. Thus the social creates a distance to itself and a mirror for itself in order to perceive itself and work upon itself. The article explores the questions of why this is so and the difference between heteronomous and autonomous autotranscendence. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from the vast breadth of Castoriadis’ oeuvre, this article provides an ongoing elucidation of the being of human as creation ex nihilo. It does so by engaging with Castoriadis’ reflections on the vis formandi pertaining to the human condition and his tentative introduction to the concept of the ‘human Nonconscious’. Across many of his essays, Castoriadis refers to the vis formandi of the being of human as an ‘a-causal’ and as a corporeal power of formation and of creation. (...) Associated with the defunctionalized and the corporeal dimensions of the radical imagination, these two domains of formation and of creation are, for Castoriadis, fundamental to the ontology of the being of human. By exploring Castoriadis’ theoretical and practical reflections on the vis formandi of the being of human and the role he accords the two dimensions of the radical imagination, this article offers a new mode of thinking about the being of human as creation ex nihilo – one that addresses the mind body divide by proposing that the human Nonconscious can be envisaged as the dominion of the embodied imagination. (shrink)