Cornelius Castoriadis

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name:	Cornelius Castoriadis
Birth:	March 11, 1922 (Istanbul, Turkey)
Death:	December 26, 1997 (Paris, France)
School/tradition:
Main interests:	Marxism, Political philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Economics
Notable ideas:	"Autonomy"
Influenced:	Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Maurice Brinton, Takis Fotopoulos

Cornelius Castoriadis[1] (Greek: Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης) (March 11, 1922-December 26, 1997) was a Greek economist and philosopher. He was born in Constantinople (Istanbul) and his family moved soon after to Athens. After earning degrees in Political Science, Economics and Law from the University of Athens, he moved to Paris in 1945 to continue his studies under a scholarship offered by the French Institute. Castoriadis developed an interest in politics after he came into contact with Marxist thought and philosophy at the age of 13.

Contents 1 Early life in Athens 2 Activities in Paris 3 Works 4 Major publications 5 Further reading 6 Quotes 7 External links

[edit] Early life in Athens

His first active involvement in politics occurred during the Metaxas regime (1937), when he joined the Athenian Communist Youth (Kommounistike Neolaia). In 1941 he joined the real Communist Party (KKE) and quit one year later in order to become an active Trotskyist. The latter action resulted in his persecution by both theGermans and the Communist Party. In 1944 he wrote his first essays on social science and Max Weber, which he published in a magazine named "File of Sociology and Ethics" (Archeion Koinoniologias kai Ethikes). During the violent episodes between ELAS and the Athenian people against the British troops and the Papandreou government in 1944, Castoriadis heavily criticized the actions of the KKE and boarded a Portuguese boat (Mataroa) from Piraeus to Paris, where he remained permanently.

[edit] Activities in Paris

Once in Paris, Castoriadis joined the local Trotskyist and Communist groups, but broke with the former by 1948. He then joined Claude Lefort and others in founding the libertarian socialist group and the journal "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (1949-1966), which included Jean-François Lyotard and Pierre Guillaume who were members for a while, and profoundly influenced the French intellectual left, notably Guy Debord. Castoriadis had links with the group around C.L.R. James until 1958. Also strongly influenced by Castoriadis and "Socialisme ou Barbarie" were the British group and journal Solidarity (UK) and Maurice Brinton.

At the same time, he worked as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development until 1970, which was also the year when he obtained French citizenship. Consequently, his writings prior to that date were published pseudonymously, as Pierre Chaulieu, Paul Cardan, etc. Castoriadis was particularly influential in the turn of the intellectual left during the 1950s against the Soviet Union, because he argued that the Soviet Union was not a communist, but rather a bureaucratic state, which contrasted to Western powers mostly by virtue of its centralized power apparatus. His work in the OECD substantially helped his analyses. In the latter years of Socialisme ou Barbarie Castoriadis came to reject the Marxist theories of economics and of history, especially in an essay on Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne. Although he was active in the political movements of the 1960s, his interests shifted from direct political action and revolution towards seeking to understand the relationship of the human individual to social formations.

This led him towards more philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of human social and political life and he trained as a psychoanalyst and began to practice in 1974. In his 1975 work L'institution imaginaire de la société (Imaginary Institution of Society) and in Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Crossroads in the Labyrinth) published in 1978, Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named to be recognized. Otherness emerges in part from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form to what Castoriadis terms the magma of social significations allows the psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mental indeterminacy and alterity. In 1980 he joined the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

[edit] Works

In his 1980 Facing The War text he viewed that Russia had become the primary world military power. To sustain this, in the context of the visible economic inferiority of the Soviet Union in the civilian sector, he proposed that the society may no longer be dominated by the party-state bureaucracy but by a "stratocracy" - a separate and dominant military sector with expansionist designs on the world. He further argued that this meant there was no internal class dynamic which could lead to social revolution within Russian society and that change could only occur through foreign intervention. This led some people to suggest he had become a cold war apologist.

One of Castoriadis's many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without determinations, but in order to be socially recognized must be instituted as revolution. Any knowledge of society and social change “can exist only by referring to, or by positing singular entities ... which figure and presentify social imaginary significations.”

Concerning his political views, he has been called the "Philosopher of Autonomy". He defined an Autonomous society in contrast to a Heteronomous one. While all societies make their own imaginaries (institutions, laws, traditions, beliefs and behaviors), autonomous societies are those that their members do know this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (i.e. God, ancestors, historical necessity).

Castoriadis's work will be remembered for its remarkable continuity and coherence as well as for its extraordinary breadth. It was "encyclopaedic" in the original Greek sense, Morin noted, for it offered us a "paideia," or education, that brought full circle our cycle of otherwise compartmentalized knowledge in the arts and sciences. Castoriadis wrote essays on physics, biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society, economics, politics, philosophy, and art, never claiming a spurious "expertise" conferred by specialization or losing sight of the overall picture. Autonomy appears as a key theme in his early postwar writings. Not until his death did he stop elaborating on its meaning, applications, ramifications, and limits.

[edit] Major publications

• The Castoriadis Reader (ed./trans.: David Ames Curtis) Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1997. 470 pp. ISBN 1-55786-704-6. (pb.)
• World In Fragments. Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. (ed./trans.: David Ames Curtis) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1997. 507 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2763-5.
• Political and Social Writings. Volume 1: 1946-1955. From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism. (ed./trans.: D.A.Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 348 pp.ISBN 0-8166-1617-5. (PSW, vol. 1)
• Political and Social Writings. Volume 2: 1955-1960. From the Workers' Struggel Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism. (ed./trans.: D.A.Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 363 pp. ISBN 0-8166-1619-1.
• Political and Social Writings. Volume 3: 1961-1979. Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society. (ed./trans.: D.A.Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993. 405 pp.ISBN 0-8166-2168-3.
• Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Essays in Political Philosophy. (ed. David A. Curtis) Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford 1991. 306 pp. ISBN 0-19-506963-3.
• The Imaginary Institution of Society. (trans.:Kathleen Blamey) MIT Press, Cambridge 1998. 432 pp. ISBN 0-262-53155-0. (pb.)
• Crossroads in the Labyrith. (trans.: M.H.Ryle/K.Soper) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1984. 345 pp.
• On Plato's Statesman. (trans.: D.A.Curtis) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2002. 227 pp.
• Le Contenu du Socialisme. Paris 1979. (fr.) (in: PSW, vol.1)
• La Brèche: vingt ans après. (Réédition du livre de 1968 complété par de nouveaux textes). Paris 1988. (fr.)
• Figures of the Thinkable. (trans.: H. Arnold) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2007. 304 pp.

[edit] Further reading

• Thesis Eleven (Journal), Special Issue 'Cornelius Castoriadis', Number 49, May 1997. Sage Publications, London. ISSN 0725-5136
• Maurice Brinton: For Workers' Power. Selected Wrintings. (ed. David Goodway) AK Press Edinburgh/Oakland 2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0.

[edit] Quotes

• "His line clearly converged with that of anarchism, but although he made occasional references to the anarchists, like many former Marxists he had little respect for them, and in return they took little notice for him. This was probably a mistake, since many ... of his ideas are highly relevant to the work facing the anarchist movement in the contemporary world." Nicolas Walter, in: "Freedom newspaper Anarchist fortnightly", 07.02.1998.

[edit] External links

• Agora International - Cornelius Castoriadis Website. (Bibliographies in many languagues and the complete Bibliography of 'Socialisme ou Barbarie'.)
• L'Association Castoriadis, (Paris).
• Cornelius Castoriadis Archive at libcom.org
• About Cornelius Castoriadis, Agora International.
• An Introduction to Cornelius Castoriadis' Work by Fabio Ciaramelli, Journal of European Psychoanalysis #6, Winter 1998.
• Cornelius Castoriadis, 1922-1997, obituaries and profiles by Axel Honneth, Edgar Morin, and Joel Whitebook, Radical Philosophy, July/August 1998.
• Cornelius Castoriadis 1922-1997 by the Anarchist Federation, libcom.org
• Obituary: Castoriadis and the democratic tradition by Takis Fotopoulos, Democracy & Nature", Vol. 4 No. 1.
• Cornelius Castoriadis, biography by John Barker, International Anarchist web pages.
• "Cornelius Castoriadis and the triumph of the will" by Alex Callinicos, Chapter 4.3 of Trotskyism, 1990.
• The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis by Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2004.