Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis
Born(1922-03-11)11 March 1922
Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (present-day Istanbul, Turkey)
Died26 December 1997(1997-12-26) (aged 75)
Paris, France
NationalityGreek, French[78]
Other namesCorneille Castoriadis,[79] "Pierre Chaulieu," "Paul Cardan," "Jean-Marc Coudray"
Education8th Gymnasium of Athens[80]
University of Athens
(1937–1942: B.A., 1942)[81]
University of Paris
(Dr. cand., 1946–1948)[82]
University of Nanterre
(DrE, 1980)[83]
Notable work
List
    • The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975)
    • Crossroads in the Labyrinth (1978–1999, 6 vols.)
Spouse
List
    • Catherine May[84]
      (m. unkn.–unkn.; divorced)
    • Piera Aulagnier
      (m. 1968–1984; divorced)
    • Zoe Christofidi
      (m. unkn.–1997; his death)
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
InstitutionsÉcole des hautes études en sciences sociales
Main interests
Notable ideas
List

Cornelius Castoriadis[a] (Greek: Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης;[b] 11 March 1922 – 26 December 1997) was a Greek-French[78] philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.[85]

His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.[86]

  1. ^ Suzi Adams, "Towards a Post-Phenomenology of Life: Castoriadis' Naturphilosophie", Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 4, Nos. 1–2 (2008).
  2. ^ Andrew Arato. From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory. Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies. M.E. Sharpe, 1993, pp. 122–45. ISBN 978-0-7656-1853-5.
  3. ^ Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend. Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism. London: Sage Publications. 2006, pp. 13–37. ISBN 978-1-84787-716-1.
  4. ^ a b c Benoît Challand, "Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters Between Anarchism and Critical Marxism", in: Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Dave Berry, Saku Pinta (eds.), Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 210–231, esp. 210, "... Castoriadis's evident legacy to Left-libertarian thinking and his radical break with orthodox Marxist-Leninism ..."
  5. ^ a b Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, Duke University Press, 2000, Translator's Foreword by David Ames Curtis, p. xxiv, "Castoriadis, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, now Lefort ... are themselves quite articulate in their own right and historically associated with a libertarian socialist outlook..."
  6. ^ Ojeili, Chamsy (2001). "Post-Marxism with Substance: Castoriadis and the Autonomy Project". New Political Science. 23 (2): 225–239. doi:10.1080/07393140120054047. ISSN 0739-3148. Receiving his political inheritance from the broad libertarian socialist tradition, Castoriadis continues to challenge the domination of state and capital and to insist on the liberatory possibilities of direct democracy.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hirsch 126 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Suzi Adams (ed.). Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, "Democracy" entry by Ingerid S. Straume: "[Castoriadis'] thought certainly reflects ideas of radical, participatory and direct democracy, communitarianism and republicanism ...". ISBN 978-1-4411-7290-7.
  9. ^ Tassis 2007, pp. 1 and 26.
  10. ^ Fernando Urribarri, "Castoriadis: the Radical Imagination and the Post-Lacanian Unconscious", Thesis Eleven, November 2002, 71(1): 40–51.
  11. ^ FT B, p. 78.
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 146 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ IIS, p. 160: "We do not need, therefore, to 'explain' how and why the imaginary, the imaginary social significations and the institutions that incarnate them, become autonomous."
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 373 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 359 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ IIS, p. 287.
  18. ^ IIS, p. 298.
  19. ^ IIS, p. 274.
  20. ^ IIS, p. 336.
  21. ^ IIS, p. 282; confer Freud's term (Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz des Triebes "ideational representative of the drive" (Sigmund Freud, "Die Verdrängung" contained in the volume Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, Vol. III, Cahier 3, 1915, p. 130).
  22. ^ IIS, p. 177.
  23. ^ IIS, p. 312.
  24. ^ WIF, pp. 131 and 263; Elliott 2003, p. 91.
  25. ^ PPA, p. 151.
  26. ^ Yannis Stavrakakis. "Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with Social Constructionism and the Political in Castoriadis and Lacan." Constellations, 9(4):522–539 (2002).
  27. ^ Les carrefours du labyrinthe: Le monde morcelé (1990), p. 218.
  28. ^ WIF, p. 268. (Confer Fichte's original insight.)
  29. ^ An Eigenwelt that is organized through its own time (Eigenzeit); WIF, p. 385.
  30. ^ a b IIS, p. 281.
  31. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 46 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  32. ^ Cite error: The named reference IIS 343 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  33. ^ a b IIS, p. 175.
  34. ^ IIS, pp. 224–5.
  35. ^ From the Ancient Greek λέγειν "to say, speak" and τεύχειν "to make."
  36. ^ This is Castoriadis' version (IIS, p. 104) of Freud's motto Wo Es war, soll Ich werden ("Where Id was, Ego shall come to be"; see Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse: 31. Vorlesung).
  37. ^ IIS, p. 2.
  38. ^ Elucidation is a methodology pertaining to historical research (research on the social-historical conditions of possibility) which is "inseparable from a political aim and a political project" (IIS, pp. 2–3).
  39. ^ "The institution presupposes the institution: it can exist only if individuals fabricated by the institution make the institution exist" (WIF, p. 315). Klooger has compared Castoriadis' idea of the 'circle of creation' with Heidegger's idea of the 'hermeneutic circle' (Klooger 2009, p. 254). S. Gourgouris (2003) pointed out that the circle of creation is "a circle whose Being is nowhere, since in itself it accounts for the meaning of Being, a meaning that is always inevitably a human ... affair," and that, contrary to what Heidegger advocates, the circle of creation "is never broken by revelation (by 'unconcealment'—aletheia)" (Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 153).
  40. ^ The paradox arising from the assertion that historical consciousness universalizes historical knowledge; see IIS, pp. 34–5; Klooger 2009, p. 242; Konstantinos Kavoulakos, "Cornelius Castoriadis on Social Imaginary and Truth", Ariadne 12 (2006), pp. 201–213.
  41. ^ IIS, p. 208.
  42. ^ Castoriadis posits that new forms are radically novel; this, however, does not imply neither that ontological creation has no prior foundation—it is not in nihilo—nor that it has no constraints—it is not cum nihilo. Confer: FT B, pp. 241, 258.
  43. ^ "Being is creation, vis formandi: not the creation of 'matter-energy,' but the creation of forms" (Fait et à faire, p. 212).
  44. ^ "For what is given in and through history is not the determined sequence of the determined but the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty." (IIS, p. 184.)
  45. ^ "[T]ime is essentially linked to the emergence of alterity. Time is this emergence as such—whereas space is "only" its necessary concomitant. Time is creation and destruction—that means, time is being in its substantive determinations." (WIF, p. 399.)
  46. ^ WIF, p. 13.
  47. ^ PSW 2, p. 126: "Absolute Wage Equality".
  48. ^ a b Cornelius Castoriadis, "From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Us" (trans. Andrew Arato), Social Research 45(4):667–738, 1978, esp. p. 738: "It is a question of the destruction of economic motivations, by destroying the "socially objective" conditions of its [sic] possibility: the differentiation of revenues."
  49. ^ PSW 2, p. 152: "As for the administration of justice [in a socialist economy], it will be in the hands of rank-and-file bodies."
  50. ^ PSW 2, p. 121.
  51. ^ PSW 2, p. 147.
  52. ^ PSW 3, p. 252.
  53. ^ "Capitalism can function only by continually drawing upon the genuinely human activity of those subject to it, while at the same time trying to level and dehumanize them as much as possible." (IIS, p. 16.)
  54. ^ MCR, p. 46.
  55. ^ PI A, p. 66.
  56. ^ PPA, ch. 9.
  57. ^ CL, p. 325.
  58. ^ FT B, p. 124.
  59. ^ CR, p. xi.
  60. ^ EA, p. 19.
  61. ^ Suzi Adams, Jeremy Smith (eds.), Social Imaginaries, 1(1), Spring 2015, p. 38: "Ecological autonomy in [Castoriadis'] assessment is 'the question of the self-limitation of society'..."
  62. ^ CL, pp. 153–4.
  63. ^ Jeff Klooger, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy, BRILL, 2009, pp. 226–229.
  64. ^ PPA, ch. 5.
  65. ^ Jens Hoyrup, Ιn Measure, Number, and Weight: Studies in Mathematics and Culture, SUNY Press, 1994, p. 121.
  66. ^ Cornelius Castoriadis, "Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime", Constellations 4(1):1–18 (1997).
  67. ^ IIS, pp. 141, 170, 181.
  68. ^ IIS, pp. 54–6.
  69. ^ MCR, p. 29.
  70. ^ CL, p. 269.
  71. ^ FT A: "What Democracy? (including Passion and Knowledge)", p. 227.
  72. ^ Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, Routledge, 2009, pp. 148–9: "According to Cornelius Castoriadis ..., [e]quivalence in exchange ... came not from anything intrinsic to commodities, but from what the Greek called the nomos. It was rooted not in the material sphere of consumption and production, but in the broader social–legal–historical institutions of society. It was not an objective substance, but a human creation. ... In all pre-capitalist societies, prices – and distribution more generally – were determined through some mixture of social struggles and cooperation. Authoritarian regimes emphasized power and decree, while more egalitarian societies used negotiation, volition and even gifts..." and p. 306: "The power role of the market cannot be overemphasized... Cornelius Castoriadis ... proclaims that 'where there is capitalism, there is no market; and where there is a market, there cannot be capitalism'".
  73. ^ IIS, p. 66.
  74. ^ CL, pp. 46–115: "Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation"; Elliott 2003, p. 92.
  75. ^ Cornelius Castoriadis, "The State of the Subject Today", American Imago, Winter 1989, 46(4), pp. 371–412 (also in: WIF, pp. 137–171). Cf. V. Karalis (2005). "Castoriadis, Cornelius (1922–97)," in: John Protevi (ed.), The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 86–7.
  76. ^ PSW 3, pp. 272–80.
  77. ^ Christos Memos. "Castoriadis and Social Theory: From Marginalization to Canonization to Re-radicalization". In: Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck (eds.). Sociological Amnesia: Cross-currents in Disciplinary History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p. 190.
  78. ^ a b Memos 2014, p. 18: "he was ... granted full French citizenship in 1970."
  79. ^ He was known to intimates as "Corneille" (Dosse 2014, pp. 514–5).
  80. ^ Cite error: The named reference Bella was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  81. ^ "Castoriadis, Cornelius, 1922–1997" at E.KE.BI / Biblionet
  82. ^ Cornelius Castoriadis, Histoire et création : Textes philosophiques inédits, 1945–1967, Seuil, 2009, Section I, Chapter 4.
  83. ^ Cite error: The named reference Schrift 112 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  84. ^ Dosse 2014, p. 94.
  85. ^ "Cornelius Castoriadis Dies at 75" Archived 2004-06-14 at the Wayback Machine
  86. ^ Tassis 2007, p. 4; Tasis 2007, pp. 27–8.


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