The system of thinking transcends the choices of any individual user said Castoriadis, and therefore has stability...
The true opposition is not "the individual versus society," mediated by "intersubjectivity," but psyche and society as mutually irreducible poles, for the original psychical monad cannot by itself produce social signification.
In creating "social imaginary significations" that cannot be deduced from rational or real elements or forces, each society institutes itself - though usually without knowing that it is doing so and in most cases preventing itself, by heteronomous means, from recognizing its own self-institution. Castoriadis's concept of the "radical social instituting imaginary"- with its enduring difference, and mutual inherence, between "instituting society" and "instituted society" -breaks with both functionalism and structuralism while providing the key to understanding an original form of being, "the social-historical," a self-instituting and self-altering unity that is irreducible to the physical, the biological, or the psychical.
