1 Castoriadis in Dialogue

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DOI: 10.1177/1368431012440864 2012 15: 289European Journal of Social Theory

Suzi Adams and Ingerid S. StraumeCastoriadis in dialogue

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Editorial

Castoriadis in dialogue

Suzi AdamsFlinders University, Australia

Ingerid S. StraumeUniversity of Oslo, Norway

This special issue is devoted to critical engagement with the thought of Greek-French

thinker Cornelius Castoriadis (19221997). Co-founder (with Claude Lefort) of the

Socialisme ou Barbarie collective and journal, Castoriadis was a political activist, psy-

choanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker, and economist. Despite the richness

and originality of his thought, his work remained on the margins of scholarly debate for a

long period (at least in the Anglophone arena). This is now slowly changing and is evi-

dent, for example, in the continuing posthumous publication of his French seminars (e.g.

Castoriadis, 2004, 2008, 2011b), the recent translations of his work into English (Castor-

iadis, 2010, 2011a) and the emergentand burgeoningreception of his work through

monographs and comparative studies (Adams, 2011; Klooger, 2009; Mouzakitis, 2008;

Poirier, 2011; Smith, 2010; Tovar, in press). Central to Castoriadiss trajectory was the

project of autonomy as the mutual interplay of philosophy and politics. Through the pro-

blematization and questioning of received thoughta key aspect of autonomythe

space for debate and conflict were kept open. In the spirit of Castoriadis, the contribu-

tions to this special issue seek to open up his work by pushing against the almost inev-

itable tendency to closure. They do so in two ways: first, in interrogating and extending

key aspects of his theoretical project that have hitherto received less attention in the sec-

ondary literature; and, second, by bringing his thought into dialogue with other thinkers,

with whom he systematically engaged during his lifetime.

Born to a Greek family in Constantinople, Castoriadis spent his adult life in Paris

where he emigrated with a French scholarship in 1945. During the post-war period he

Corresponding author:

Suzi Adams, School of Social and Political Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Aus-

tralia, 5001, Australia

Email: [email protected]

European Journal of Social Theory15(3) 289294

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worked as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-

ment (OECD), while devoting his intellectual energy to Socialisme ou Barbarie. The

political context in post-war France was exceptionally polarized; the Left was almost

exclusively communist up until the 1960s, when, in the wake of the Hungarian uprisings

in 1956, Socialisme ou Barbarie and other groups broke up the political landscape. It is

telling that, when Castoriadis announced his break with Marxism in the early 1960s, this

was seen as controversial, causing great tensions in Socialisme ou Barbarie (see Castor-

iadis, 1997). As an immigrant engaged in political work under Gaullism, Castoriadis

could not publish under his own name until the 1970s, when he acquired French citizen-

ship and started a new career as psychoanalyst. The use of pseudonyms together with his

late inclusion in academia and the belated translation of his work into English (it took 12

years before his main work, The Imaginary Institution of Society, appeared in English in

1987) may explain why his work is not as widely known as could be expected for a thin-

ker of his calibre.

The originality of his thought notwithstanding, Castoriadis tended to downplay the

extent of his intellectual sources. This may be, in part, a result of his stance as a rev-

olutionaryas one who is outside mainstream traditionsas well as of his rejection

of the importance of the hermeneutic dimension of activity. Like Nietzsche and

Heidegger before him, Castoriadis claimed to have practiced a new way of doing phi-

losophy, while inherited thought (i.e. the entire philosophical tradition since Plato),

had been caught in a reductive mode that downplayed the radical imagination and

focus only on being in terms of determinacy. As such, for Castoriadis, traditional phi-

losophy could not account for (auto-)creation as the emergence of ontological

novelty. The ancient Greek institution of democracy emerged as a new political form

amidst a sea of monarchies and, for Castoriadis, exemplified social-historical cre-

ation; that is, it could not be reduced to, or produced from, its antecedents. Even

though it is evident that Castoriadis was engaged with themes that engaged many

other thinkers of his time, it is also true that no other thinker treated these themes

in the way Castoriadis did. This is especially the case for what he calls the creative

imagination (as opposed to the productive imagination) which, in many ways, formed

the lynchpin of his work.

In moving beyond Marx in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Castoriadis turned to

ancient Greek philosophy, which he understood in a broad sense to include historians and

writers of tragedy. Emerging from praxis philosophy and French currents of phenomen-

ological Marxism, Castoriadiss later thought took an ontological turn in order to eluci-

date the philosophical preconditions of an autonomous society. This involved a

rethinking of Freud and the psyche as the flux of representations of the radical imagina-

tion, and an ongoing dialogue with Aristotle, Kant and the early Romantics. French intel-

lectual currents and debates were central to his trajectory: Merleau-Ponty was an

enduring intellectual source, as was Bachelard for his approach to knowledge; Emile

Durkheim and his later thought on collective representations; Ricoeur was indirectly

influential, whilst Levi-Strauss and Lacan provided Castoriadis with lines of critique.

Castoriadiss thought is characterized by an ongoing dialogue between the ancients and

the moderns; this is a feature of modern thought in general, but Castoriadiss take on it is

particularly innovative. His emphasis both on autonomy and the creative imagination

290 European Journal of Social Theory 15(3)


reveals Enlightenment and Romantic themes at play centrally in his work; this informs

the originality of his engagement with the ancient Greeks and the human condition.

The present special issue aims to extend the debate on Castoriadiss oeuvre by ques-

tioning the limits and lacunae of Castoriadiss own thought in key ways, on the one hand,

and by bringing him into dialogue with other thinkers, in order to open up his thought

even further, on the other. The first two articles in this collection focus on central aspects

internal to Castoriadiss thought: his interpretation of ancient Greece and the project of

autonomy, respectively.

In an allusion to Merleau-Ponty, Johann P. Arnasons groundbreaking article, entitled

Castoriadis as civilizational analyst: Sense and non-sense in Ancient Greece, recon-

structs the civilizational dimension of Castoriadiss thought through an analysis of

Castoriadiss posthumously published seminars on ancient Greece. Although the ancient

Greeks had been an enduring source for Castoriadiss rethinking of history and his roads

beyond Marx since the mid-1960s, the seminars (from the earlymid 1980s) present a

more detailed picture of his approach. Distinctive to Castoriadiss perspective was his

identification of a social imaginary core that provided a primary grasp of the world

emerging as the interplay of chaos, incomplete order and ultimate dissonance between

humanity and the worldwhich, in turn, further shaped Greek civilizational patterns

and innovations. Here, Arnason argues that Castoriadis was close to Eisenstadts

understanding of the civilizational dimension of human societies as the connection

between interpretations of the world and institutional forms of social life. Unlike some

of Castoriadiss other writings on ancient Greece which seemed to emphasize the flow-

ering of autonomy embodied in the democratic polis, his seminars focused on the

period of Homeric Greece as a formative phase and the Homeric texts as a master key

to the classical Greek imaginary and for the entire Greek civilizational trajectory.

In her essay Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy: Ecological worldhood and the her-

meneutic of modernity, Suzi Adams critically engages with Castoriadiss elucidation of

autonomy. She focuses on the significance of Castoriadiss writings on political ecology

for his project of autonomy, especially in its more philosophical aspects. An emphasis on

the environmental problematic has implications for understandings of nature, as well as

for the human place within the natural world. Adams pursues these implications through

a reconsideration of the import of the ancient Greek problematic of nomos and physis for

Castoriadiss broader philosophical anthropology, on the one hand, and for his later phi-

losophy of nature, on the other. She contextualizes these aspects of Castoriadiss thought

within a hermeneutic of modernity that takes the Enlightenment and Romanticism

(understood to be broad cultural currents) as constitutive for modernitys field of ten-

sions and conflict of interpretations. Although the phenomenological problematic of the

world was marginalized in Castoriadiss thought, its later reappearance in his rethinking

of the living being and the creativity of nature broadens the phenomenal field and

extends the lines of continuity between the human and the natural world. Adams argues

that greater appreciation of the Romantic aspects of the environmental movement (and

our understanding of nature) as they relate to autonomy and the cultural formation of the

world not only put Castoriadiss articulation of nuclear social imaginary significations

into question, it also raises questions of ecological worldhood that simultaneously finds

autonomy at its limits.

Adams and Straume 291


If the first two essays focused on latent openings and possibilities in Castoriadiss

thought to argue withand againsthim, the remainder of the essays bring Castoria-

diss into dialogue with a range of other thinkers. In continuing the engagement with

Castoriadis and the problematic of autonomy, Natalie Doyle focuses on Marcel

Gauchets reworking of key tenets of Castoriadiss thought. An important French philo-

sopher, psychoanalyst and historian (although, because of the dearth of available English

language translations, his oeuvre is not as well known in the Anglophone world as it

merits), Gauchet was a former student of Claude Lefort, and, for a time, worked with

Castoriadis, Lefort, Marc Richir and Pierre Clastres on the journal Textures. In their var-

ious ways, each of these thinkers continued to inform Gauchets intellectual trajectory.

In her contribution Autonomy and modern liberal democracy: From Castoriadis to

Gauchet, Doyle demonstrates the ways in which Castoriadiss notion of autonomy

influenced Gauchets understanding of modernity, but argues that, in rethinking his-

toricity, Gauchet rejects Castoriadiss approach to creation as absolute. Gauchets

notion of modern power (a theme that is under-developed in Castoriadiss thought)

reconfigures autonomy in a way that also encompasses capitalism and a paradoxical

understanding of modern democracy. Doyle shows how Gauchets thought encapsulates

the tension in modernity between the power of social transformation and the aspiration

to self-government that was its original inspiration, and concludes, along with Gauchet and

Castoriadis, that the current state of global environmental degradation provides an oppor-

tunity to reactivate the political aspects of democracy.

A focus on modern forms of subjectivity and their historical variations has been

central to the psychoanalytic project, be that Freud or Lacan, Gauchet or Castoriadis.

However, Castoriadiss break with Lacan precluded a constructive engagement with any

critical reconfigurations of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his contribution, New individu-

alist configurations and the social imaginary: Castoriadis and Kristeva, Anthony Elliott

begins to readdress this by bringing Castoriadis into dialogue with Julia Kristeva. He

does so in order to excavate the theoretical preconditions of what he terms the new indi-

vidualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary Western culture.

After mapping the various approaches to individualism and new individualism, which

includes thinkers such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, which,

to use an Arnasonian term, partially structures the field of tensions in which the ensuing

debates play out, Elliott focuses on Castoriadiss elucidation of general conformism in

its relation to contemporary subjectivities and social imaginaries. To enrich Castoriadiss

analysis, Elliott turns to Kristevas understanding of the new maladies of the soul to

extend his analysis of the contemporary weakening of the imagination through a deeper

engagement with psychoanalytic currents, especially in their relevance for understanding

the wider social world.

Some intellectual dialogues are more self-evident than others. One of the more obvi-

ous interlocutors for Castoriadis is Hannah Arendt, who shared many of his interests and

passions, such as ancient Greek thought and the history of political self-organization,

where the Athenian polis was seen as the paradigmatic exemplar. In A common world?

Arendt and Castoriadis on political creation, Ingerid Straume explores some of the con-

nections between the two original thinkers. She traces theoretical parallels in their

thought and illustrates how the weaker points in each thinkers oeuvre can be elucidated



and enriched through engagement with the other. Focusing on the notion of political

creation, Straume argues that there is an unacknowledged connection between two

dimensions of the political in Arendts thought, which, when taken seriously, would

bring her closer to Castoriadiss contention that political doing means to create institu-

tions (an assertion Arendt opposesinconsistently, according to Straume). However, the

notion of plurality, which plays a key role in Arendts political thought, can fill out a less

developed region of Castoriadiss social theory that is particularly important for analyses

of practical politics. Taken together, Straume argues, their thought could be used to form

a perspective well suited to analyze moments of political creation and novelty.

While Castoriadis acknowledged the relevance of Arendts work, this did not extend

to the work of Michel Foucault. When Castoriadis was still writing under a pseudonym,

Foucault was enjoying considerable success with (post-)structuralist constellations that

were one of Castoriadiss antagonists in his main work, Linstitution imaginaire de la

societe (1975). This notwithstanding, a rich philosophical perspective is developed as

Alexandros Kioupkiolis engages Castoriadis and Foucault in critical dialogue in The

agonistic turn of critical reason: Critique and freedom in Foucault and Castoriadis.

Kioupkiolis situates the agonistic critique of Foucault and Castoriadis as an alternative

to universalist and contexutalist/relativist strands of thought. Agonistic reason forgoes

the need for foundations without sacrificing ideals such as freedom, reason and validity.

Taken as a social theory, it lends itself to ethical and political thought, as well as work on

the imaginary dimension of societies. Kioupkiolis also exposes some of the aporias that

need to be addressed in such a project, for example when Foucault, while providing a

methodology that is lacking in Castoriadis, is ultimately unable to reflect upon and found

his own project. Kioupkiolis concludes that Castoriadiss engagement with ontology and

the novelty of creation provides it with an emancipatory dynamic that is lacking in the

works of Foucault.

In the final essay, What is to be thought? What is to be done? The polyscopic thought

of Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis, Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner

introduce Castoriadiss compatriot, Kostas Axelos, who immigrated to France as part

of the same group of Greek students in 1945. Castoriadis and Axelos were known as the

two most important Greek philosophers in Post-War France, but their respective recep-

tion and intellectual development were rather different and their paths barely crossed. In

contrast to Castoriadis, Axelos spent his working life within French academia and wrote

his dissertation on Marx (translated asMarx, the Man Who Thinks Out Technique) within

a Heideggerian and Nietzschean perspective. Karagiannis and Wagner demonstrate that

despite their many differences, an attentive co-reading of Castoriadis and Axelos opens

up many original and remarkably fresh insights. Both thinkers display an acute sense of

the importance of engagement withand involvement intheir contemporary world.

Through their joint commitment to polyscopic thoughta cross-disciplinary, radical

comprehensiveness they traverse and challenge established divisions within, and

between, the humanities and the social sciences. At the same time, it is clear that for

Axelos and Castoriadis the human world is a fragmented one, but not a reality beyond

understanding. Thus, in returning to the question of the world, and the questioning of the

world, resonances with the opening essays are heard, the hermeneutical circle is tra-

versed, whilst questions for further investigation are opened.

Adams and Straume 293


References

Adams S (2011) Castoriadiss Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University

Press.

Castoriadis C (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society (Blamey K, transl.). Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

Castoriadis C (1997) An introductory interview. In Castoriadis C (ed) The Castoriadis Reader

(Curtis DA, ed., transl.). London: Blackwell.

Castoriadis C (2004) Ce qui fait la Gre`ce I, DHome`re a` Heraclite: Seminaires 19821983. Paris:

Seuil.

Castoriadis C (2008) Ce qui fait la Gre`ce II, La cite et les lois: Seminaires 19831984. Paris: Seuil.

Castoriadis C (2010) A Society Adrift. Interviews and debates 19741997 (transl. Arnold H). New

York: Fordham University Press.

Castoriadis C (2011a) Postscript on Insignificance. Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis (ed.,

transl. Rockhill G; transl. Garner J V). London: Continuum.

Castoriadis C (2011b)Ce qui fait la Gre`ce III, Thucidide, la force et le droit: Seminaires 19841985.

Paris: Seuil.

Mouzakitis A (2008) Meaning, Historicity, and the Social. Osnabruck: VDM Verlag.

Klooger J (2009) Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy. Leiden: Brill.

Smith K (2010) Meaning, Subjectivity and Society: Making Sense of Modernity. Leiden: Brill.

Poirier N (2011) Lontologie politique de Castoriadis: Creation et institution. Lausanne: Payot.

Tovar M (in press) Castoriadis, Foucault and autonomy: New Approaches to Subjectivity, Society

and Social Change. London: Continuum.

About the authors

Suzi Adams received her PhD in 2007 and teaches social theory at Flinders University (Adelaide).

She has recently published a monograph on Castoriadiss thought entitled, Castoriadiss Ontology:

Being and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press). Address: Dr Suzi Adams, Sociology,

School of Social and Political Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Aus-

tralia, 5001, Australia [email: [email protected]]

Ingerid S. Straume is a philosopher of education based at theUniversity ofOslo.Her PhD thesis from

2010 is on Cornelius Castoriadis, education in a democracy and political paideia. She has published

articles on politics, philosophy and education, and edited the anthologyDepoliticization: The Political

Imaginary ofGlobalCapitalism (with J.F.Humphrey,AarhusUniversityPress, 2011).Address: Ingerid

S. Straume,University ofOslo,University ofOsloLibrary, POBox 1009Blindern, 0315Oslo, Norway

[email: [email protected]]



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1 Castoriadis in Dialogue