CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

objectively determining the form of the world, would have the form or logos of a
paranoid delusional system—a system of symbolic understandings that orders social
experience in a manner structurally analogous to what we find in individuals who suffer
from the clinical pathology of paranoia.
Admittedly, my appeal to Castoriadis’s notion of the radical social imaginary does
not resolve the question of how individual and social agency are connected—a question
that Adorno and Horkheimer do not theorize sufficiently, and which in any case falls
beyond the purview of this chapter. However, I think the appeal to Castoriadis is helpful
because it allows us to understand how it can be meaningful to talk of a specific
psychoanalytic pathology of the social order rather than of an individual, without
invoking some idea of a supra-individual, unified social subject. The social imaginary is
a unified repository of the meanings that unify a society; its order of significance gives
rise to the ontological form or eidos of the social. Moreover, the social imaginary
corresponds to the symbolic, rather than logical order that structures reality; its specific
content in a given socio-historical period arises contingently in relation to natural and
historical conditions but without being determined fully by these conditions, and this
content is not necessarily structured in a ‘rational’ or consistent manner. As a result, the
way in which the social imaginary gives rise to social meanings is different from the way
in which the Kantian transcendental subject or the Hegelian Geist produces social reality.
Rather, the radical social imaginary structures the world in much the manner in which the
individual’s unconscious structures the individual’s inner and outer world, and it
intersects the individual’s unconscious at the point at which the individual encounters and
constitutes herself in relation to the outer world. The activity of the social imaginary
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