Chaos, kosmos, and the simulacrum: Reflections on Castoriadis, religion, and society as an imaginary institution

Abstract This essay explores some implications of Castoriadis’s chaos-kosmos metaphor for his understanding of society as an imaginary institution. It approaches the problematic from two directions. First, taking the question of “the real” as its thread, it maps three phases in his “roads beyond Marx”. This preparatory move brings the changes to his project wrought by the later introduction of the chaos-kosmos nexus into relief. Second, it reconstructs “The Institution of Society and Religion”, focusing on the questions of chaos, kosmos, the simulacrum, and meaning. It argues that the chaos metaphor not only introduces the problematic of truth, it also becomes a referent. This becomes clear in religious societies’ articulation of the chaos as a simulacrum. The essay identifies an implicit hermeneutics in the chaos-kosmos nexus and an incipient relativization of the autonomy/heteronomy polarization in Castoriadis’s thought, via reconsideration of the problematics of the world horizon and doing.