Hostility overcome

Of all the theorists examined in this book, Cornelius Castoriadis is neither the most well-known nor the closest one to Lacan's legacy. However, the decision to put this chapter first is not entirely arbitrary. From a historical point of view, Castoriadis was one of the first major political and social theorists of the Left – a founding member of the famous Socialisme ou barbarie group – to engage so closely with Lacanianism, and already in the 1960s. More importantly, exactly because he was gradually led to a violent rejection of Lacanian theory, his work can function as an external frontier, helping us to delimit the emerging terrain of the Lacanian Left. However, and this is indicative of the force of Lacan's work, this external limit is by no means radically external. To determine clearly what is at stake, from the point of view of political theory, in the clash between what the names of Castoriadis and Lacan stand for, presupposes an understanding of what they both share – rather, of what Castoriadis retained from Lacan's theoretical apparatus even after taking his distance from Lacanian circles. And this is quite a lot. Yet there is also another important reason which justifies the location of this chapter.