Article

Thesis Eleven
2018, Vol. 148(1) 77–88
Window into chaos ª The Author(s) 2018
DOI: 10.1177/0725513614535698
journals.sagepub.com/home/the

Cornelius Castoriadis

Translated by Andrew Cooper

University of Warwick, UK

Abstract
This is the first English translation of a remarkable two-part lecture given by Cornelius
Castoriadis at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in January 1992. The
lecture features within a series on social transformation and the task of creative forms of
labour. In this installment Castoriadis explores the significance of art through a creative
reading of Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy in the Poetics. He rejects Aristotle’s
dependence on the mimetic tradition in search for a vision of art as the unveiling of the
creative resources that lie within the human being. Yet he retains Aristotle’s vivid
depiction of art as a form of production that is at once cognitive, emotive and social. Art,
for Castoriadis, affects a transformation on the level of imagination that opens us anew
to the fundamental questions of human being and doing. Through his extensive knowl-
edge of western forms of artistic production Castoriadis draws lucid connections
between Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, Hegel, Greek sculpture, renaissance painting,
modern literature and folk music to explore the work of art as a ‘window into chaos’, a
creative production that gives form to what cannot be formed: the ground of creativity at
the heart of the imagination.

Keywords
aesthetics, Aristotle, art, Poetics, tragedy

Corresponding translator:
Andrew Cooper, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.
Email: andrew.cooper.1@warwick.ac.uk
This paper was given over two lectures on 22 and 29 January 1992 at the École des hautes etudes en sciences
sociales. It was originally published as Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Fenêtre sur le chaos’, in Fenêtre sur le chaos, Éditions
du Seuil, Paris, 2007, pp. 133–156. I would like to thank Seuil for securing reproduction rights for the translation,
and Vrasidas Karalis for keenly editing an early draft. And particular thanks to Zoe, Cybèle and Sparta Castoriadis,
along with Association Castoriadis, for granting permission to reproduce the text online. AC.
78 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

Now a few words about art, where I will try to elaborate on what I mentioned at the
beginning of the year. What we will see is that the specific mode of being of art is ‘giving
form to Chaos’ [le ‘donner forme au Chaos’]. I am going to give particular attention to
the relationship between the subject and the artwork. I will suggest that the attitude of the
subject when faced with the work of art is not one of explanation, although in the work of
art there are some elements that fall under ensemblist-identitary logic. Neither is it one of
comprehension, for the subject has no hidden meaning deposited within it beforehand
that awaits its imitation or herme`neia, the interpretation in the subject. And it is not even
one of elucidation. The attitude of the subject – I can see no adequate word in French – is
Zaubertrauer, ‘pleasurable mourning’ (which may be one of the meanings of Aristotle’s
katharsis) or ‘delighted mourning’. Any attempt to translate Zaubertrauer is, of course,
unsatisfactory, since Zauber does not only mean magic or enchantment but also the fact
of being struck by something beyond the normal course of events. What mourning means
here is another story; we might talk about this later.
By way of introduction, I would like to invoke the puzzle regarding the difference
between great art – the masterpiece – and the averageness of artistic production. Why
this difference, and why is it important? The question is not why Bach is a better
composer than, say, Saint-Saëns. Rather, it is why there is such an abyss between Bach
and Saint-Saëns. Perhaps this is a bad example because Saint-Saëns is deplorable. We
can consider beautiful sculptures and paintings in the same way. What differentiates
the sculpture of La Victoire de Samothrace from a painting of Rembrandt? It is not the
popular or folk character of the art that is decisive, for there are great paintings just as
there are average ones. For example, in my opinion the Greek folk song called ‘The
Dirge of Albanians’ – you know that half of the Greeks are more or less Albanian – is a
piece of ‘great’ music in the same way that the flamenco style cante jondo is great.
I would give everything – 19th-century Italian opera, Gounod and all the rest – for
10 minutes of real cante jondo. In short, the products of ‘folk’ art can be great, while
99 per cent of ‘known’ art is not. To begin, we will try to elucidate art in the two aspects
that traditional aesthetics has always attempted to cover: the side of the object and the
side of the subject. That is to say that we will try to answer these two questions: what
is a great work of art, a masterpiece? What is its specific mode of being? And, on the
other hand, what is the relation of the subject (I am not talking about the creator, but the
audience or spectator) to the work he or she encounters?
To develop a response to the specific mode of being of the work of art, we must look
back to the philosophical significations we have discussed at length in previous lectures.
We said that being is both chaos and cosmos. For human beings, this chaos is generally
covered by social institutions and by everyday life. A first glance at the question of great
art would be to say that it is the unveiling of chaos through a ‘giving form’ while at the
same time creating a cosmos by giving form. I say the unveiling of chaos because great
art tears apart everyday experience, the ‘holding-together’ of these experiences, and
ruptures the normal course of life. If we love and understand the music we listen to or the
painting we contemplate, the time of habit and the everyday is broken. But at the same
time, art cannot conduct the unveiling of chaos without giving form. And giving form is
the creation of a cosmos: the creation of a form against its own background. This is a
huge problem that unfortunately we cannot explore here, for in one sense a great work of
Castoriadis 79

art is absolutely closed in on itself. It does not need anything. Materially, it needs
painters, violinists, coloured pigments or curators, but in fact it lacks nothing. And this is
what the theologians say of God. . . . At the same moment, it presents itself yet it is not
only itself; it is not only chaos but also a cosmos in chaos. It is clear that any great
painting is the fragment of a world that you can continue into the present. You can
continue the La Ronde de nuit or Les Me´nines into the present. It is said that when
Stanislavski wanted to develop the technique of his actors, he would take them into a
house next to St Petersburg and lock them there for 15 days and say: ‘now, we are not
going to practise our parts – we are going to live as if we were in The Three Sisters or
Macbeth’. This is a ‘trick’ of the director, of course, but one that allows the actors to
understand that The Three Sisters or Macbeth are ‘ripped out’ from a universe that can be
continued into the present.
It is in relation to the creation of a cosmos that we can understand why Plato, followed
by Aristotle and others, misguidedly came up with the theory of mimesis, of imitation.
Yet there is a grain of truth in Plato’s idea. The only mimesis that there is in art – if we do
not talk of the material and secondary elements, and I’ll come back to this – is its
imitation of being in general: for being is vis formandi, just as art is vis formandi. Giving
form is the power of creation, but it is not an act of mimesis. Dance, architecture, and
music do not imitate. Rather, they create a world. ‘Imitative’ music is obviously the most
mediocre kind of music. When Beethoven wrote the ‘Pastoral’ symphony, I recall that he
said of the first violin that ‘it was a question of expressing the affect and not of capturing
it’. He does not attempt to give a portrait of pastorality but the affect of man in nature.
But can we say that music imitates human emotions? I believe not. The music brings into
being the emotions, or at least it does give them form that does not exist elsewhere. No
one has already experienced the feelings they undergo while listening to Bach’s The Art
of Fugue. The Art of Fugue creates an absolutely unique type of feeling that we try
somehow to bring together in the word ‘sadness’ or some poor equivalent. But it is a kind
of feeling created by the music itself, and again it is a matter of giving form to chaos.
Of course, the use of material cannot provide any support to the idea of mimesis. For
example, can we say that in a great novel, say A` la recherche du temps perdu or
L’E´ducation sentimentale, art imitates life? There is material that is drawn from life, as
you might paint with colour on a painting. Yet there is no imitation here. There is the
creation of form, of a story. A world is created, so much so that it is a delight, in Balzac or
Proust, to follow the characters, their encounters and to imagine others. Like great
painting, great literature shows something that was there and yet nobody saw; yet at the
same time there is something that was never there and exists only as a function of the
artwork. This is true for painting and for music, and also for dance and for architecture
(le Parthénon, Chartres or Reims, Cologne, etc.). Take a novel like Kafka’s The Castle.
Nobody has existed in a world in the manner that Kafka depicts, and yet we all lived in
this world while we read The Castle. This is most certainly a creation. Or take the
fantastic painting called Le Monument aux oiseaux, where Max Ernst recreates both the
birds and the creation of the birds. There is no imitation there: the birds do not appear
materially. For when we speak of great art, it may appear to be mimesis but it is in fact the
use of matter that, very often (but not always, far from it), and at degrees of qualification
and of different formation, is already there, as colour and as sound, for example.
80 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

The strongest example in my opinion – but we could find others – is one I just
mentioned: Kafka’s The Castle. This novel creates a world that has many points of
contact with our world, with the empirical world, but Kafka’s genius – genius which is
perhaps unprecedented – is that while everything is taken from within the habitual world,
we know from the very first pages that we have entered another world. If we consider the
genre of Kafka’s narrative it is about something as material as bureaucracy, yet it is
other. And if we look closely we find that – this is something that Milan Kundera said two
or three months ago in an article in the New York Review of Books – we always obscure the
strong dimension of sexuality in The Castle. And he is right. Remember the famous scene
where the surveyor and Frieda embrace each other on the floor of the café in the midst of
spit, cigarette butts and pools of beer. . . . However, this is not the issue, for even that
sexuality is other. And all that happens in The Castle is other, but at the same time, from
the moment we entered The Castle, we find this shift from precise, measurable reality to
the imperceptible twist that makes this world. All of its pieces could be taken from reality,
but it will never be the world of everyday reality; it is more real.
Now, we must not always ignore what others have said on the topic. We are some-
times obliged – which is mostly fertile, sometimes painful – to address, discuss, and
eventually to refute what others have said. Take Deleuze and Guattari’s book that was
released last autumn, What Is Philosophy? The title is not very original, but is perfectly
valid, for Heidegger has already used it. It states that if ‘philosophy creates concepts’
(that ‘it creates’ is not a very great discovery. It is already in the Preface to the Cross-
roads in the Labyrinth. The idea of concepts is a stupidity, but should be discussed at
length) ‘then art creates percepts’. However, it is clear that The Castle does not create
any percepts, except in a stupid and vulgar sense. I read the book, thus bringing into play
the optical apparatus, the nervous system, knowledge of the language, etc. A` la recherche
du temps perdu, Le Pe`re Goriot, do not create any percepts. And when we talk about the
percept – because, of course, there is something sensible in literature, sculpture, archi-
tecture and dance – the process of being seen or felt is there, again, OsperulZ, ‘as
matter’, as Aristotle would have said. Of course, matter is not separable from form. But
this goes for everything, for as Aristotle also said, it is stupid to ask whether the knife is
iron or is different to iron. When iron takes a certain shape it is a knife; or a knife is iron
when it has been given a certain form. The question of separating them is meaningless.
There is no percept in this case, or you are a table and I am a table. For example, you can
take a photograph to be either trivial or wonderful. Here again we find this distinction:
some photographs are great works of art, despite the mechanicity of the procedure, and
others – tourism, family, parties, weddings – are a kind of mimesis, a replication more or
less of what was there. But, again, there is no percept as such: it is a form and an
adequation of the matter in this form, and also of the form of this matter, for form and
matter are inseparable.
After the orchestral prelude to Act III of Tristan, the first scene begins with an
incredible melody, a sadness – the word sadness is stupid, by the way – that announces,
that in a certain way is the grief for what happened and what will happen, what,
inevitably, must happen. The melody is very beautiful, for Wagner was a beautiful
melodist, yet he is also a great orchestrator: from the very first chord we know that it was
composed by Wagner. But here there is no orchestration, for this melody is assigned to a
Castoriadis 81

single instrument. And the instrument is not just any – it is the English horn. To describe
the sound would make bad literature. All the same, we might say that it is very nostalgic,
very sad and a little bittersweet. And again, it is a stroke of genius. I am making this
digression to say that here, perhaps, we could introduce the categories of form and matter
and apply it to the shape of the melody. In one sense, the melody is something com-
pletely abstract. Bach wrote the The Art of Fugue without specifying which instruments
would interpret each part (except for one part, which is clearly written for the harpsi-
chord). This means that every group who play The Art of Fugue makes its own
orchestration. In terms of the instruments, the melody of Wagner we were talking about
is an abstract form. But form and matter require each other, and Wagner chose the
English horn. Again, this form is like an embodiment of a specific meaning, and it is this
meaning that bespeaks the artwork. It is only in such a form that this meaning – the
content of the work of art is more material, so to speak – can be conveyed. Its mode of
being is sui generis, and that is why it is absolutely impossible to translate into another
language. And what I said just now about the beginning of the third act of Tristan is bad
literature: an awkward attempt to describe in language what can only exist in a per-
formance of the artwork itself. Since we are speaking of Wagner, we know that Wagner
wanted to make a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), a musical drama that is both
poetry and music, a spectacle combining painting, sculpture, dance, architectural
elements. . . . This combination of elements may or may not have been achieved. Most of
the time, when you put poems to music it is ridiculous. But there are some miracles
where poems become a new work. For example, the Lieders of Schubert form wonderful
new works. Sometimes, the poems themselves are magnificent: Margaret at the Spin-
ning Wheel, The Ogre, a few of the cycles of ‘The Winter Journey’. Sometimes they are
of secondary importance, as in Heine, although Heine has also written beautiful poems –
Der Doppelgänger or Die Stadt for example. Here the poet returns to his hometown and
it is the same city and is no longer the same. . . . The poetry is almost banal, but with
Schubert’s music it becomes quite another thing: a magnificent work. It can sometimes
be said that in the booklets Wagner wrote for his dramas, as for Tristan, there are
passages of great poetry, and we can certainly read them in this way.
I’ll now go back a little and return to our discussion of mimesis. We will agree, I think,
that there is no mimesis in architecture, dance, poetry, the novel or tragedy. None of these
imitate, but use the elements of the world that are given ‘as matter’. However, at the roots
of this problem we have Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy, which determined the
future of the word mimesis. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, Aristotle
leads us on a bizarre digression, one that leads us to even more digressions. I have
already mentioned that Whitehead, the English philosopher and logician (the co-author
with Russell of the Principia Mathematica, but who firstly wrote Process and Reality –
one of the few important books about metaphysics of the 20th century) that the best way
to understand the history of western philosophy is as a series of footnotes to Plato. And
he was partly right, because between this story of mimesis, of poetry, and what I mean by
poetics and creation is a strange ballet.
Plato wrote about art on several occasions: in the Phaedrus, in the Ion and elsewhere.
He says, for example, that the poet is possessed by a divine madness, by inspiration (Ion,
533–4). Here we see the equivalent of my radical imagination, for Castoriadis is a small
82 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

footnote of Plato after all. . . . And not only Castoriadis, for all those who talk about
inspiration are in dialogue with Plato. However, Plato says something quite amazing in
the Symposium (205c1): ‘we call poie`sis (poetry or creation) that which makes some-
thing pass from non-being into being’. For something to pass from non-being into being
we have precisely what I have called creation. Plato talks about this as something obvi-
ous and natural, which is indeed the case, and yet he mentions it here and never again.
And when he addresses what is in his eyes the absolute creation par excellence, that is,
the demiurge, the world’s creation in the Timaeus (a dialogue that you can read 50 times
and still find something new), this creation is not a creation but an imitation. The
demiurge of the Timaeus looks to a paradigm, a model of a perfect world, and with the
materials available to him (space and matter) that are neither imperfect nor perfect, nei-
ther rational or irrational, he manufactures a world that is perfect insofar as it is possible,
kata to dunaton.
Plato does not often discuss the notion of mimesis, except, of course, in the Republic.
It is his student Aristotle (both friend and mortal enemy) who discusses imitation at
length in the Poetics, the first book to systematically explore the topic of art. The Poetics
was intended to have two sections – one on tragedy, which we have today, and a second
on comedy, that has been lost (Umberto Eco wrote about this in his very amusing novel
The Name of the Rose: a fanatical monk burns the only copy left because he could not let
‘the Philosopher’ deride serious things by speaking of comedy). It is in the Poetics
(1449b 24–28) that Aristotle gives his famous definition: ‘A tragedy, then, is the imi-
tation (mimesis) of an action (praxeos) that is serious (spoudaias) and also, as having
magnitude, complete in itself (teleias)’. Teleias poses a problem. We say ‘perfect’ or
better still, ‘complete’, yet there is an ambiguity here because telos, especially in
Aristotle, also means the ‘goal’, a meaning that opens us to the process of entelechy.
Telos is therefore the goal that is imminent to something when it comes to completion.
And now follows a technical phrase: ‘in language with pleasurable accessories
(he`dusmeno) . . . ’. This is to say that tragedy is performed with music and not as a mere
recitation. But what does this mimesis achieve? It presents ‘incidents arousing pity and
fear (di’ eleou kai phobou), wherewith to accomplish its catharsis (katharsis) of such
emotions (te`n ton toiouton pathe`maton katharsin)’. One might even say the katharsis of
‘these sufferings’, for pathe`mata also has this meaning. When it comes to the meaning of
katharsis, however, Aristotle continues to fill libraries.
As I mentioned, Plato refers to a transition from non-being to being – which is com-
pletely contradictory to his whole philosophy in which there is no such transition when
true being is eternal – and Aristotle could have seized this definition of poie`sis in order to
speak of tekhne` in general, art in the ordinary sense, technique as well as art (in Greek the
two words go together, and elsewhere tekhne` also means knowledge). But he does not.
Rather, Aristotle’s definition of art wagers on imitation, on mimesis. This move opens
yet another sub-labyrinth. In his definition, teleia obviously cannot mean ‘perfect’ in
Aristotle’s regular sense. It does not lead to its telos, because his idea of telos contains
the idea of value, even if value in this sense is unknown to Aristotle. Why? What is the
teleiôsis, the culmination of the tragic action, the object of which the tragic action imi-
tates? It is patricide, matricide, fratricide, infanticide, all the ‘cides’ you can imagine,
like the slaughter of the innocent prisoners in Euripides’ Trojan Women. While all this
Castoriadis 83

happens amongst kings and queens, it involves entire kingdoms, states and poleis. And to
introduce his notion of teleia, Aristotle gives a definition of what constitutes tekhne` (art
in general) in the Physics (11, 199a, 15–17). Here (and this is why I said that Aristotle
was riding on the ancient Greek world and nothing else) he writes that tekhne` is the ‘per-
forming what is impossible for nature to accomplish (epitelei ha he` phusis adunatei
apergasasthai) or imitate (ta de mimeitai)’. We find ourselves now at another crossroad
in the labyrinth (see my text on ‘Technique’ [Castoriadis 1978] mentioned earlier), for if
there are things that nature cannot accomplish then we are no longer in Aristotle’s phi-
losophy. For Aristotle, everything that can be accomplished is nature, is phusis. Yet he
oscillates between nomos and phusis, and here we see nomos take the appearance of
tekhne`. It is, we might say, human creation. But of course a pure and hard Aristotelian,
like a rigorous Thomist for example, would say, ‘No sir, you are mistaken on the trans-
lation of Aristotle’s phrase. Epitelei does not mean ‘‘accomplish’’, even if this meaning
exists in Greek, but simply ‘‘perfect’’, or ‘‘provide the finishing touches to’’. In contrast
to you, good sir, in regards to the things that nature adunatei apergasasthai, ‘‘does not
have the ability to accomplish’’, I translate it simply as ‘‘draw to the end’’.’ However,
I believe that it is not me but the Thomist in question who is mistaken. Not that my inter-
pretation is the only one, for both meanings are contained within the text. And it is true
that the simple and hard Aristotelian interpretation would be better in accord with any
single aspect, with the core of Aristotle’s ontology. But it is also true that the Thomist’s
interpretation would not include the problems that Aristotle meets on his way, particu-
larly that of human creation in general, the human world, the nomos, the polis; since he
claims, for example, when speaking of the polis, the political collective, that there is
always one form that is by nature the best, one that we never encounter in reality. The
sphere of human creation, however, has nothing to do with the Aristotelian concept of
phusis. Aristotle would never have said that there is an animal called the horse, which
has four legs, which runs very fast, on which you can climb, that this is the nature of
a horse but, unfortunately, there is actually no horse in empirical reality. No, the horse
as it is defined by its nature is the horse, and we encounter its nature in reality. Of course,
there might be monstrous horses that are born with three legs or five, but this is irrele-
vant. Aristotle knows the monsters and he excludes them. They are para phusin, against
nature, and are destined to disappear. And the same goes for a human monster.
And so, the question we must ask is whether the polis, which is a human creation, can
imitate nature? Certainly not. Does the polis simply complete what nature could not draw
to completion? Intrinsically, this does not make sense. How is it that there are an infinite
variety of poleis? In tekhne` politike` – what Aristotle says is the most architectural of all –
we encounter a tekhne` that realizes precisely, that does something beyond nature and that
nature is unable to achieve. It is, however, not about nature but about human praxis. Does
human praxis belong to nature? The question in general remains open. But is it in human
nature to sleep with your mother, to kill your father, to kill your brothers, etc.?
Twenty-three centuries after Aristotle we say ‘yes’: such acts are in human nature.
But for Aristotle this is certainly not the case. Nevertheless, they are the ‘important and
perfect actions’ being done by human beings in the tragedy, and that tragedy imitates.
So we have something that is not ‘natural’ in the object. But is the tragedy itself an
imitation? It certainly is an imitation, once again, if we consider tragedy in terms of
84 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

Aristotle’s Osper  ulZ – as the material human action that it contains. But there is also
the tragic form. And especially, for example, the whole story of Oedipus (assuming that
there was indeed a character who was exposed, who killed his father without knowing
who he was, who unknowingly returned home, who met a sphinx) has certainly never
been compressed into an hour and a half performance, with a chorus who represent the
citizens of the city, with masked actors, etc. Still, in Aristotle’s definition we have a
collision at a linguistic crossroad: between an important, complete action (praxis) and
‘these passions’ (tôn toioutôn pathe`matôn), between the embellished speech (logos
he`dusmenos) and, on the other hand, the means of creating pity and terror (eleos kai
phobos), and also between a complete praxis and the completion of the katharsis of
tragedy. Note the parentheses on the argument regarding the interpretation of ‘these
passions’. Aristotle wrote tôn toioutôn pathe`rnatôn, and we might think that this is what
happens to the tragic heroes – pathe`mata also contains this meaning. This little word,
toioutôn, this species of passion, has a much simpler meaning if it is attributed to the
action of the tragic heroes. However, this argument fails for reasons of overall coherence.
The passions that katharsis achieves are those of the audience because, on the stage, you
cannot speak of katharsis for one or two heroes.
And now, after a few important digressions, we come to my main point: the end of
tragedy – its meaning – is not mimesis but katharsis. It is the same with Aristotle, and this
is why the commentators who return again and again to his theory of mimesis deceive
themselves and get lost for ideological reasons – theological reasons in fact – for stating
that the goal of tragedy is katharsis means that it ends in purgation or purification. There
is absolutely no doubt that the term is medical, and if you take Bonitz’s Aristotelian
index there are two columns of its use in a medical context, and only 10 lines of its use in
the Poetics. Katharsis is the purgation or removal of bad moods. But it is no coincidence
that Aristotle chooses this term, and we will see what kind of removal he means. In any
case, it operates by the means of pity and terror, which are the affects of katharsis. But it
is very strange, for what exactly are these moods? They are the passions, or we might say
the compassions of the viewer while the action takes place (there is a distance that
provides the tragic effect, but not a distancing, rest in peace Mr Brecht) that, in a
crescendo of pity and terror, will lead to purification. Where is the imitation there?
Imagine seeing in reality a son who kills his mother while his sister yells from the next
room ‘strike again, if you please’. You may feel pity, or fear, or anger, but it will not
produce katharsis. Or suppose you witness an old man who wanders into a freezing,
thunderous storm because the two girls that he divided his kingdom amongst have him
thrown out of the gates and treated like a beggar. Perhaps you will then have compassion
for him, or be filled with anger against Regan and Goneril, but you will know nothing of
katharsis. Now, the end of tragedy is precisely this katharsis. And mimesis, as far as there
is mimesis, is the simple means of affecting katharsis.
I will repeat this point later, but I would like to finish talking about mimesis by raising
the issue of what we call the figurative arts, such as painting or sculpture. We are
obsessed with a very brief moment in the history of art. Our interest spans from the fifth
century BC to the third century AD, and rekindles during the Trecento [14th-century
Italy], at least from Giotto up until 1880. There seems to be a kind of realism that is
essential for our interest in the visual arts. It is hard to deny (but I suppose it depends
Castoriadis 85

on taste) that Apollo of Belvédère, Hermès of Praxitele and Vénus of Milo are beautiful
specimens of humanity in the perfection of their form. It is even hard to deny that the
Laocoon from the Hellenistic era is a perfect sculptural representation of the pain and
terror of death. But this is only one period of art. There is no realism of this kind in
Lascaux, in Altamira. There is no realism in the Cycladic statuettes, nor in the Mayan
statues, nor in African masks, just as there is no realism in the impressionists. The famous
Bride Stripped Bare does not imitate anything. Kandinsky, Klee, Brancusi, Giacometti,
etc. – where is the imitation in their work? What you find in these artists is the human form
as a material in the second degree; it is used as a kind of material for something else.
That said, it is true that in the human form there is something more than materiality.
And this is not only in abstract art, for the large portraits in the ‘realist’ period give a
particular impression of truth. I don’t know what would happen if the painting from
antiquity was preserved, for we only have a few copies which are not very good. Of
course, this is not the case for the sculpture of antiquity. But consider the portraits of
western painting – there are hundreds that are absolutely fantastic, and some by
secondary artists. We might mention Man with a Glove by Titian in the Louvre, all the
self-portraits by Dürer, Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Portrait of a Man in a Turban by Jan
van Eyck, the face of Eve in Masaccio’s Eve Expelled from Paradise. . . . In such works
we have the impression of having access to the truth of being human. But what truth?
In this regard, let me read to you a fragment from the young Hegel’s Jena lectures that
I first encountered in translation while reading Jacques Taminiaux’s Naissance de la
philosophie he´ge´lienne de l’E´tat. This is a remarkable text that is worth reading for itself,
regardless of our discussion. In The Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel speaks of the human
being, the Self, and the image that Spirit retains of itself within its treasury in its night
without consciousness (bewusstlos) – though this might be a Freudian representation.
And then there is this extraordinary passage:

The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its sim-
plicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it
directly, and none of which are not present [‘present’ here means ‘present to conscious-
ness’]. This is the Night, the interior of nature, existing here – pure Self – and in phan-
tasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up
and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we
look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. Here the night of
the world falls on us. (Hegel 1983: 87)

And there, in the margins of Hegel’s work: ‘self-positing, consciousness, internality,

making, splitting (Entzweien)’; and: ‘the power to remove the images of the night, or
to sink them’ (Taminiaux 1984: 194–5). However, in the portraits we have mentioned
(I wanted to bring some of Vermeer’s work. Take The Girl with the Pearl Earring: in
the eyes of the young girl there is everything and there is nothing) what we have, what
matters, is not imitation. What we find in the portrait, especially in the rendering of the
eyes in a great portrait, is effectively the ‘night’ mentioned by Hegel, this abyss, the
unlimited possibilities of representation. This is what we find through paying attention
to the gaze of the subject. And the term ‘imitate’ loses any importance, for it is
86 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

meaningless to speak of imitating the abyss. It is not imitation but the presentation of the
abyss, leaving absolutely nothing hidden.
Before I conclude I would like to say a few words about what is happening within the
subject. For Aristotle, as we have seen, what tragedy provokes in the spectator is
katharsis, purification, the purgation of their passions through pity and terror. Now it
certainly looks nothing like this when we contemplate the Parthenon. However, if we
could jump back 23 centuries, things would have been otherwise. Kant said something
completely different in regards to art (he should have reflected on this difference) and
speaks of pleasure: beauty, on the subjective side, is pleasure or ‘disinterested satisfaction’
(uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen) (Kant 2000: 91). When faced with the artwork, we feel a
pleasure that has nothing to do with having eaten well, having made money, having slept
with someone. Kant believes that aesthetic pleasure is not related to desire. This may seem
somewhat pale after Aristotle, but it is the idea of disinterestedness that is important here.
In the German, the adjective that describes the noun ‘satisfaction’ is ‘without interest’. But
the real power of the words must be reversed: through a certain kind of pleasure, a kind of
satisfaction, we arrive at a disinterestedness, with which I will conclude.
Before this pleasure is effectively already there, where does it come from? For my part,
aesthetic pleasure comes from a certain way of experiencing the meaning of the artwork.
And this meaning or signification in the great moments of art (and I will not play with
words, not like a Parisian or a Hegelian would do) is the meaning of meaningfulness and
the meaningfulness of meaning. Reread the Iliad, reread any Greek tragedy, reread
Shakespeare, reread Balzac’s Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes or his Illusions per-
dues, L’E´ducation sentimentale or the Recherche, Kafka or Joyce’s Ulysses, or listen again
to Tristan or Mozart’s Requiem, or any Bach: what we experience is the meaning of
meaningfulness and the meaningfulness of meaning. This experience reveals art to be a
window into the abyss, into chaos, and the giving of form to this abyss. It is the moment of
meaning, the creation of a cosmos by art itself. And great art is not phenomenal but
transparent, for nothing remains hidden behind something else. The infinite wealth of a
great work of art is not something that stands in front of and hides others; it is unlike things
that can only lead us to other things. And this is why there is no phenomenality, that there is
absolute transparency (in a difference sense of the word, of course), in great art. There is an
abolition of the difference by the very means of the difference.
As for the disinterestedness of pleasure, we must remember what I said in a previous
lecture regarding the definition of the law in Aristotle. Here Aristotle states that there
may be ‘a thought without desire’ (Politics, III, 16, 1287a30–32). Similarly, in the case
of a great work of art (and this corresponds to the katharsis of tragedy) we can speak of
an affect, albeit indescribable and specific. Again, sadly, we can try to put it into words
by saying that it is a mixture of joy and sadness, pleasure and grief, unending reversals
and recognition. When describing the sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil in the
Recherche, Proust speaks of ‘the adequacy of the questions and the evidence of the
answers’. And it is true, this is always at work in art. But what ultimately arises as the end
(in every sense of the word: finality, completion and termination) for the subject, the
spectator, the listener, the reader of a work of art is the affect of the end of desire. And I
think that this is the meaning of katharsis. When we go to a performance of Oedipus Rex,
Macbeth or King Lear, when we hear the Requiem performed or the St Matthew Passion,
Castoriadis 87

at least for a few moments we desire nothing and we experience the affect that
accompanies the end of desire. And its relation to death is that we would like it to never
stop, or that everything stops in this moment. And this is not only true for the works that I
have mentioned. This is what takes hold of you when you first enter the room in Olympia
where you are presented with Hermes of Praxiteles, or the Louvre when, despite the
crowd, you can admire La Victoire de Samothrace, or a portrait by Clouet, the Titan that I
mentioned earlier, or Las Me´nines in the Prado, the View of Delft in The Hague, or Franz
Hals’ Les Re´gents de l’hospice des vieillards in Haarlem, The Night Watch in Amster-
dam – everything stops. You are there before the artwork and you desire nothing. This is
truly an extraordinary state.
Now back to Aristotle. Certainly, during the tragedy there is a constant stream of pity
and terror. And, curiously, Jean Anouilh (a writer who is for me quite second-rate) put it
well in his Antigone. At the beginning the chorus explains the difference between tra-
gedy and drama in a definitive way. In drama, he says, the plot could have happened via
an alternate route and things could have turned out differently – if the police had arrived
earlier, if the drug had not failed, if the letter had been discovered . . . There is suspense.
In tragedy, however, there is no suspense for the spectator. We watch while knowing in
advance what will happen. The Athenians who went to see Oedipus Rex knew what
would happen. The same goes for us when we go to see a performance of Macbeth. If
there is suspense it lies in the play itself. But this is a different kind of suspense, for we
know what the tragic hero does not know. But, precisely, one of the dimensions of
Oedipus (as it is with Macbeth – this is why Shakespeare is the greatest writer of the
West) is that Oedipus is the actor of his own destiny. There is no author because it is his
own destiny. But he is simultaneously the discoverer by his actions of his truth and his
destiny. It is by doing exactly what it is predicted he must do, what he is going to do, that
Oedipus discovers the ambiguity of these predictions. And it is the same with Macbeth.
For the spectator, pity and terror still occur because his participation is absolutely
inescapable, and there is finally this katharsis – once we have gone through pity and
terror – that is the affect of the end of desire.
We could summarize the affect of great art in a few words. Firstly, there is enchantment
and mourning. More specifically, when we are stilled before the amazing, miraculous thing
there is what in German we call Wunder and in ancient Greek thaumazein. Such an
experience attracts far more than surprised admiration but gets you out of the state you are
in, for it contains not only an emotional but a cognitive dimension in which one wants to
know (Aristotle said that thaumazein is the beginning of philosophy). And at the end there
is – to use a word that Freud uses in a different context – Versöhnung, a sort of recon-
ciliation. To be precise, it is the reconciliation with the end of desire.
To finish I will quote two poets, August von Platen and Rainer Rilke. August von
Platen was a German writer in the early 10th century. In Tristan he wrote the following:

Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen,

Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben.
[The one who looks at beauty with her eyes
Is already given over to death.]
88 Thesis Eleven 148(1)

In these verses we find neither ‘Romanticism’ nor whimpering, but precisely the affect of
the end of desire. And I think that this is also why Rilke wrote the famous lines in the first
Duino Elegy:

Denn das Schöne ist nichts

Als des Schrecklichen Anfang.
[For beauty is nothing
other than the beginning of the terrible.]

The terrible is this end and this openness toward something else – in my terms, a window
into chaos – which is at the same time the end of desire.

Translated by Andrew Cooper

References
Aristotle (1984) Poetics. In: The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. II, ed. Barnes J. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Castoriadis C (1978) Technique. In: Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Soper K and Ryle M.
London: Harvester Press, 229–259.
Hegel G.W.F. (1983) Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the ‘Jena Lectures on the
Philosophy of Spirit’ with Commentary, trans. Rauch L. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
Kant I (2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Guyer P. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Taminiaux J (1984) Naissance de la philosophie he´ge´lienne de l’Etat. Commentaire et traduction
de la Realphilosophie de Ie´na (1805–1806). Paris: Payot.