Castoriadis: Evil and the Social Imaginary
This chapter engages with Cornelius Castoriadis’s analysis of the ways in which the meaning of (moral) concepts is generated. It starts by outlining Castoriadis’s critique of Lacan’s symbolic account of meaning generation to show that he rejects Lacan’s claim that it occurs through anonymous differential linguistic symbolic relations, to instead claim that it happens through the anonymous, collective, social-historical imaginary of each society. With this, Castoriadis suggests that existence and meaning ‘evil’, including the narrative and myths associated with it, depends on the social imaginary of each society. Evil is then part of the ways in which a society and the individuals composing it create a narrative to construct its/their self-understanding.