>If it eclipses, how can they fuse? Language is headin' for a holiday
>here Ken.
Nah. Every external victory results in internal renunciation. Freud, Civ and Dis.
>"...[A]ll scientific knowledge is deferred error. And yet it is more
>than that. What is it then? What is it we search for in knowledge?
>Must we say that, like every desire, this one too, is condemned to be
>perpetually deceived about it's object, to be ignorant of it and thus
>to miss it? Must this love suffer the same fate as the other one, of
>watching helplessly as it's acquisitions trickle away between one's
>fingers? But how can we think that the object of such eminently
>rational activity is essentially imaginary? If it were, would we not
>be trapped irredeemebly in a vicious circle? How could we ever release
>its hold on us except by means of that same rational activity, which,
>on this very hypothesis, it would continue to overdetermine? If the
>idea that knowledge can appropriate nature [or society IM] is itself a
>phantasy, then so too must be the idea that knowledge can appropriate
>knowledge. It is only in another dream, that of an absolute subject
>and a pure reflexivity, that one could escape this circle; and this
>dream--incoherent of course for daylight logic, and governed, as we
>should expect, only by the logic of desire--is the common, and
>unconscious dream of both absolute spiritualism and totalitarian
>scientism." [Cornelius Castoriadus 'Modern Science and Philosophical
>Interrogation' in "Crossroads in the Labyrinth" page 146-147]
I think Castoriadis uses the term anaclesis (spelling?) which means "leaning on." Our imagination significations 'lean on' something, what is it? Reality (the radical, primordial positing of the other). We can't just do anything with it, at the same time, our significations are imaginary. Although Castoriadis is no Lacanian, he does draw on Lacan's categories - imaginary, real, symbolic. I haven't read CL, it is missing from the library and it is out of print, I haven't mustered the fortitude to head over to inter-library loan. Other than that, my first published article was a Castoriadisian critique of Habermas... I very much like Castoriadis, I just wish he was a little less innovative - too damn accurate to be much of an object of criticism, but too eclectic and novel to work well with competing theories... thus, his is widely ignored to the bereft of us all.
ken