ABSTRACT
The ‘flaw’ of the modern man, whose power is recognised by the yardstick of working in his interest, by stocking and accumulating, can be identified, as G. Bataille says, by his ‘incapacity to lose’ his own autonomy, to begin with, as well as his productions. The imaginary categories of thought that all too often enunciate the cooperative ideals and principles, keep them in a situation of marginality with regard to mainstream economics. Though highly efficacious in the case of the industrial – and later on the neo-liberal – economy, the categories of imaginary completeness are inefficacious in the case of an alternative economy, as cooperatives. The strength of modernity rests on the agreement between its values – the aspirations of the individual as an economic actor-agent to the own, to accumulation and the always more, deriving from imaginary completeness – and the categories used to enunciate such values and pertaining also to the imaginary register.
