| Cornelius Castoriadis |
Article Index for Cornelius |
Limousines in Cornelius |
Website Links For Cornelius |
Information AboutCornelius Castoriadis |
|
Cornelius Castoriadis {Link without Title} (Greek: Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης) ( March 11 1922 - December 26 1997 ) 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 to continue his studies in 1945. He had been an active Trotskyist in Athens but broke with the Trotskyists in Paris in 1948 and joined Claude Lefort and others in founding the Libertarian Socialist group and journal " Socialisme Ou Barbarie " (1949-1966), which included Jean-François Lyotard , Pierre Guillaume , as members for a while, and profoundly influenced the French intellectual left, notably Guy Debord . Strongly influenced by Castoriadis and "Socialisme ou Barbarie" was as well 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 extremely important and 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 . 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. 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. MAJOR WORKS
FURTHER READING
QUOTES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|