Cornelius Castoriadis’s entire work has been all along devoted to pursuing a vehement critique of all kinds of ontological foundation of political institution. His fostering of the radically socialhistorical characters of collectivity has been constantly played against the aspiration to base contingency upon absolute precepts. Nevertheless, as I attempt to show in this paper, his institutional theory, while freeing itself from ontological absolutes, risks being haunted by another kind of absolutism, one of democratic outline. Such an absolutistic seduction, in my view, takes the form of a strong, all too strong defense of direct democracy and radical autonomy as well as rejection of political representation. As a consequence, Castoriadis’s discourse can be viewed as inhabited by a structural contradiction: while the search for an originary purity is discarded at the ontological level, it shows its phantasmatic perpetuation in the realm of politics.
