Cornelius Castoriadis
Agora International Website
A "Loi 1901" Association
Cornelius Castoriadis Dies at 75
Philosopher and Political Thinker
Inspired May '68 Rebellion in France
Philosopher of the social imagination,
co-founder of the legendary group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie,
seminal social and political thinker credited with inspiring the May 1968 events
in France, professional economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, practicing psychoanalyst, distinguished Sovietologist, and
critical conscience of the international Left, Cornelius Castoriadis died
December 26, 1997, in Paris at age 75 from complications following heart
surgery. He is survived by his wife Zoé, their daughter Cybèle, and an elder
daughter, Sparta.
Praise now flows in. Le Monde's obituary, written by long-time
friend Edgar Morin with whom he coauthored a book on May '68, bore the title
"Titan of the Spirit." C. L. R. James scholar Kent Worcester spoke for many left
libertarians when he called Castoriadis "our Isaiah," referring to another
recently deceased freethinker, Isaiah Berlin. Even the French Communist Party
newspaper, L'Humanité, acknowledged the significance of this radical
anti-Communist opponent, labeling him "an essential dissident."
And yet Castoriadis's ideas long remained better known than his name. To
avoid deportation from France, he had to write under pseudonyms. Beginning in
the 1960s Socialisme ou Barbarie's sister organization London Solidarity--and
later Philadelphia Solidarity--circulated "Chaulieu" and "Cardan" translations
with a certain success.(1) Only in the
1970s did Castoriadis gain French citizenship and begin to publish under his own
name so that student radicals moved by his ideas might discover who had inspired
them. A first English translation appeared in 1984. 1997 marked a watershed year
with the appearance of a new collection of writings, World in
Fragments, a retrospective Castoriadis Reader, the paperback
edition of his magnum opus The Imaginary Institution of Society, a
special Thesis Eleven issue, and a webpage
(http://aleph.lib.ohio-state.edu/~bcase/castoriadis).
Castoriadis avoided the intellectual fashions of his day. Such French trends
as fellow-traveling, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism,
deconstruction, and postmodernism (the latter championed by former S. ou B.
member Jean-François Lyotard) were among the targets of his fierce and
withering, yet often humorous, criticisms. Nor did he fit the mold of German
Critical Theorists, from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse to
Jürgen Habermas, all notoriously weak in their criticism of "Soviet" Marxism. He
thought for himself and with a small band of workers and intellectuals who
refused to give in to fads or to countenance oppression of any sort. His journal
was active in the fight against the French Algerian War, but Castoriadis never
indulged in "Third World" rhetoric or offered "critical support" to "left-wing"
dictators.
This steadfast, clear-eyed independence won him and his group admiration and
helped to build a radical non-Communist Left in postwar France. Though critical
of himself as well as others, Castoriadis never renounced his belief that
ordinary people can run their lives and institute self-governance without
bosses, managers, professional politicians, "leading parties," priests, experts,
therapists, or gurus. There was no "God that failed," for there was no God, no
"Reason of History," no "inevitable dialectical process" to guarantee success or
to save people from self-created folly, or from tragedy.
Castoriadis was born March 11, 1922, in Constantinople. His family emigrated
a few months later to avoid Greco-Turkish strife. He grew up in a prewar Athens
marked by dictatorship, world war, occupation, and liberation. A member of the
Greek Communist Youth at fifteen, he soon formed an opposition group. In the
extremely polarized atmosphere of wartime Greece, most members returned to
Communist ranks. Castoriadis joined the most left-wing Greek Trotskyist faction,
a decision that placed him under threat of death from both fascists and
communists.
The defining political moment of Castoriadis's adult life occurred in
December 1944, when the Greek CP attempted a coup d'état. Even fellow
Trotskyists, who were hoping that the event would drive the CP leftward, thought
it presaged revolutionary changes. Castoriadis disputed their optimism. With a
prescience that would become characteristic, he predicted that the putsch, if
successful, would have resulted not in the revolutionary creation of a classless
society but in the installation of a regime similar to Russia's. What ultimately
determined the course of events was the presence of British troops in Athens and
prior Big Power arrangements. But the subsequent establishment of totalitarian
regimes throughout Eastern Europe and the rest of the Balkans--including
Yugoslavia, which was not "liberated" by the Red Army--amply confirmed
this prognosis.
Castoriadis escaped what soon turned into the bloody Greek Civil War when he
received a French scholarship. He left Piraeus in December 1945 on the Mataroa,
a New Zealand troop ship since become famous for bringing a generation of Greek
intellectuals, including Kostas Axelos and Kostas Papaioannou, to France. In
Paris he joined the Trotskyists and began to develop the consequences of his
radical libertarian anti-Stalinism. Years before ousted Yugoslavian CP leader
Milovan Djilas became famous for characterizing Communist bosses as a "new
class," Castoriadis analyzed "bureaucratic capitalism" East and West. He
distinguished a "fragmented" form in the West--where, in the wake of the
Depression, the New Deal, world war, and the rise of a welfare State, a stratum
of state and private managers, accompanied by the bosses of business unionism,
began replacing private owners of capital as principal director of production
and the economy and main antagonist of workers--from a "total and totalitarian"
form reaching demented heights of terror under Stalin's regime of apparatchiks. The first to have translated Max Weber into Greek,
Castoriadis was aided in this original, if highly unorthodox, extension of
Marxian theory by this sociologist's writings on bureaucracy.
It was on the question of the Trotskyists' "unconditional defense of the
USSR" that Castoriadis first opposed the Fourth International. In 1948, French
Trotskyists proposed an alliance with Tito's police State, then on the outs with
Stalin's Cominform. Socialisme ou Barbarie, the group he had formed with
like-minded internal opposition forces, transformed itself into a separate
organization. Around that time, Detroit radicals centered around Raya
Dunayevskya (Leon Trotsky's secretary in Mexico), C. L. R. James (the
Trinidad-born Pan-Africanist, literary critic, cricket writer, and Trotsky's
interlocutor on the "Negro Question" in his adopted America), and Grace Lee
Boggs (a Chinese-American woman who had studied philosophy in prewar France)
broke with American Trotskyism and co-operated with S. ou B. during the 1950s.
What distinguished S. ou B. from many other revolutionary groups was its idea
that socialism meant not rule by a "leading party" versed in Marxist theory but workers' management of production and society.
In Socialisme ou Barbarie's 1949 inaugural issue, Castoriadis
predicted that the working-class response to Stalin's takeover of East Europe
would be a revolt against "its" new bureaucracy. Workers' councils set up during
the 1956 Hungarian Revolution strikingly confirmed his prediction even as this
workers' revolt against "Communism" threw much of the Left into disarray. Along
with S. ou B.'s cofounder Claude Lefort, Castoriadis and his review challenged
the fellow-traveling of such prominent French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre.
(Lefort had studied with French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who
eventually resigned as political editor of Sartre's journal, Les Temps
Modernes.) Sartre was later heard to say, "Castoriadis was right, but at
the wrong time." Castoriadis quipped that Sartre had the honor of being wrong at
the right time.
Developing his concept of "bureaucratic capitalism," Castoriadis asserted
that the main struggle had become that between "executants," or "order-takers,"
and "directors," or "order-givers." What distinguishes capitalism--especially in
its bureaucratic stage of giant factories, huge geographically-dispersed
corporations, and complex technical apparatuses--from earlier class societies
based on slavery or feudalism is that workers now keep the system operating not
by obeying orders (slave revolts or Jacqueries serving as counterexamples from
previous societies) but by resisting and contraveningthe
irrational and often absurd orders given by managerial strata cut off from the
everyday reality of production (the sure proof being the devastating effect of
"working to rule"). This resistance, expressed initially in cooperation among
"informal groups" at work, also encouraged a tendency toward autonomous action
that could serve as a basis for the transformation of society, he argued. With a
managerial bureaucracy in state-run enterprises, private businesses, and
top-down, integrated unions replacing capital ownership as the distinguishing
feature of capitalism, those who perform the tasks of production had to be
encouraged to participate and to show initiative. At the same time, however,
management found that it must combat independent decision-making on their part.
Out of the experience of the Hungarian Revolution Castoriadis composed his
classic statement of how a self-managed society might work. Still today, "On the
Content of Socialism" serves as a reference point for libertarian socialists.
But the uncontested ascension of De Gaulle in 1958 brought another phenomenon to
his attention. For S. ou B., Gaullism represented modernization for France, not
incipient fascism. With the collapse of the revolutionary movement and the
advent of "modern capitalism," bureaucracy both encouraged and fed upon mass
privatization and depoliticization. Apathy becomes the norm when people's drive
for participation is systematically thwarted.
Yet by the very early sixties Castoriadis also noticed countervailing trends.
Before many others, he recognized that the shop stewards' movement in England,
the nascent youth, women's, and antiwar movements, and the struggles of racial
and cultural minorities offered prospects for revolt against modern society that
might give rise to unpredictable and unprecedented expressions of autonomy,
alternative ways of living.
The logical conclusion of Russian Communism's bankruptcy and the rise of
modern capitalism--with its simultaneous encouragement and exclusion of people's
participation and the resulting new forms of contestation--was that Marxism
itself had become a deadening ideology of oppression, out of touch with new
movements and aspirations for change. In the final issues of S. ou B.,
Castoriadis posed the new alternative in stark terms: one had to decide between
remaining a Marxist and remaining a revolutionary. He chose the latter option.
"Marxism and Revolutionary Theory" (1964-5) challenged structuralist as well as
functionalist explanations of society and history while Paris was still in the
midst of a Lévi-Strauss-Althusser-Foucault structuralist craze.
In 1967 Socialisme ou Barbarie disbanded. But its key ideas continued to gain
ground. The older brother of May 1968 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had
attended the group's meetings, and "Dany" himself proudly proclaimed his
"plagiarism" of Castoriadis and S. ou B. Still a foreign national working for
OECD and so restricted from engaging in politics, Castoriadis maintained a low
profile during the student-worker rebellion. But he and other S. ou B.-ers
helped students turn May '68 into the largest strike France had ever known.
Calls for "autogestion" (self-management) in universities and factories echoed
his 1949 manifesto, "Socialism or Barbarism," and appeals to the "power of the
imagination" recalled his final S. ou B. text.
Castoriadis spent the last thirty years of his life overseeing publication of
his S. ou B. texts (Political and Social Writings in three
volumes) and ceaselessly developing, out of his last S. ou B. essay, a
highly original conception of history as imaginary creation--irreducible to any
predetermined plan, whether natural, rational, or divine. In Imaginary
Institution and an ongoing collection of writings (translated as Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy,
and World in Fragments), he elaborated his views without ever
disavowing his original conception of "workers' management" and expanded that
germ of an idea into a "project of autonomy" stretching from ancient Greece to
the present day.
Castoriadis retired in 1970 from his OECD position as Director of Statistics,
National Accounts, and Growth Studies, a job that had enabled him to study in
depth the major developed capitalist economies. He became a practicing
psychoanalyst in 1974 and was elected a Director of Studies at Paris's École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1979. As an analyst and in lectures and
books, he developed a distinctive renewal of Freudian theory based on an
original "psychical monad" that must be socialized by force and that never fully
accepts the social individual into which it is fashioned. Dreams (overtly sexual
or not), slips, "acting out," transgression, and even subversion testify to the
persistence of this ineliminable asocial core of the psyche--which, when
partially socialized, can serve as an inexhaustible source for imaginative
social change.
For Castoriadis, reports by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and others
concerning the "death of the subject" and the "death of man" were, like Mark
Twain's death, "slightly exaggerated." With his wife at the time, Piera
Aulagnier, Castoriadis challenged the reigning Lacanianism in French
psychoanalytic circles, instigating a break with Lacan's "Third Group" in 1968.
He opposed this rhetoric with the idea that psychoanalysis--like pedagogy and
politics, though in different ways--seeks human autonomy. The goal of
psychoanalysis is to establish "another relation" with one's unconscious, one
characterized by lucid self-reflection and deliberation, a clearer recognition
and acceptance of one's unconscious imaginary creations. The Freudian
restatement of the ancient Greek injunction, "Know Thyself," received a powerful
new articulation quite out of step with today's faddish therapeutic,
drug-dependent, and antipsychoanalytic trends.
Castoriadis's most original and enduring contribution, however, is as the
philosopher of the social imagination. The true opposition is not "the
individual versus society," mediated by "intersubjectivity," but psyche and
society as mutually irreducible poles, for the original psychical monad cannot
by itself produce social signification. In creating "social imaginary
significations" that cannot be deduced from rational or real elements or forces,
each society institutes itself--though usually without knowing that it
is doing so and in most cases preventing itself, by heteronomous means, from
recognizing its own self-institution. Castoriadis's concept of the "radical
social instituting imaginary"--with its enduring difference, and mutual
inherence, between "instituting society" and "instituted society"--breaks with
both functionalism and structuralism while providing the key to understanding an
original form of being, "the social-historical," a self-instituting and
self-altering unity that is irreducible to the physical, the biological, or the
psychical.
Two key themes are worked out in his later writings. The first involves
Castoriadis's rediscovery of the imagination. The imagination, Castoriadis
found, unsettles the entire edifice of our "inherited philosophy." In On the
Soul, Aristotle provided what became the standard view of the imagination,
one marked by irreality, mimicry, an impotent negativity. Although apparently
settling things there, Aristotle took up phantasia again at the end of
his treatise in a way that violated his canonical separation of sensation from
intellection. Conversely, as twentieth-century German philosopher Martin
Heidegger had noticed, Immanuel Kant granted the "Transcendental Imagination" a
central position in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but then
dislodged it a few years later in the second edition. Heidegger describes this
turnaround as Kant's "recoil" from the consequences of a powerful and unbridled
imagination. Curiously, Heidegger himself then dropped all mention of it.
Castoriadis also observed that, while Sigmund Freud spoke of "phantasies" all
the time, the founder of modern psychoanalysis refrained from naming, let alone
examining, this strange power to bring the imaginary, the non-existent,
into being.
A second major theme is the "co-birth," in ancient Greece, of philosophy and
politics. As the conscious questioning of society's instituted representations,
philosophy develops hand in hand with politics, which Castoriadis described as
society's lucid attempt to alter its own institutions. Both are associated with
the autonomy project, which Castoriadis saw as later expressed in early burgher challenges to Church and King, the American and French
Revolutions, and workers', women's, and youth movements of Western societies, as
well as in modern attempts to pursue philosophy beyond theological confines.
Castoriadis devoted particular attention to the advent of citizen democracy in
fifth-century B.C. Athens. He examined its direct-democratic institutions in
order to contrast them with "representative" ones that establish permanent
place-holders divorced from average citizens in today's "democracies."
Castoriadis preferred the term liberal oligarchy to describe current
Western political arrangements.
Castoriadis never stopped working. He was to lecture in the United States
against recent fads in psychoanalysis. "We have to keep trying," he wrote me in
a note, "to spread across the Atlantic" that "plague" of self-knowledge Freud
said he was bringing with himself when he visited America. And Castoriadis had
completed an article on "The 'Rationality' of Capitalism" shortly before the
recent global market collapse. He wondered how far capitalism could--according
to, but also against, its own "logic"--go toward turning the world into a
"planetary casino" of currency and finance speculation. Every few days, he
noted, sums greater than the entire US GNP are electronically gambled worldwide
via leveraged bets of no productive utility.
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 ground-breaking and
trail-blazing 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.
Death itself, it happens, was a recurring theme. We require an "ethic of
mortality" to counter heteronomous promises of eternity. This ethic was an
integral part of the Greek view that an afterlife, should such a thing exist, is
worse than life on Earth. As a democratic institution, tragedy--a public
performance of a play that ends in death--reminded the Athenians of the ultimate
meaninglessness of one's thoughts and actions as well as of the need for
self-limitation to keep hubris in check:
The sole genuine limitation that democracy can bear is self-limitation, which
in the last analysis can only be the task and the work of individuals (of
citizens) educated through and for democracy. Such an education is impossible
without acceptance of the fact that the institutions we give ourselves are
neither absolutely necessary in their content nor totally contingent. This
signifies that no meaning is given to us as a gift, any more than there is any
guarantor or guarantee of meaning; it signifies that there is no other meaning
than the one we create in and through history. And this amounts to saying that
democracy, like philosophy, necessarily sets aside the sacred. In still other
terms, democracy requires that human beings accept in their actual behavior what
until now they almost never have truly wanted to accept (and what, in our utmost
depths, we practically never accept), namely, that they are mortal. It is only
starting from this unsurpassable--and almost impossible--conviction of the
mortality of each one of us and of all that we do, that people can live as
autonomous beings, see in others autonomous beings, and render possible an
autonomous society.
In his work and in his life, Cornelius Castoriadis lived this democratic
ethic of mortality until the very end.
Bibliography of Cornelius Castoriadis Books in English
- Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Martin H. Ryle and Kate Soper
(Brighton, England: Harvester and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984).
- The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey
(Cambridge, England: Polity Press and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1987; paperback edition Polity Press, 1997).
- Political and Social Writings, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis,
3 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 1988, 1993).
- Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
- World in Fragments, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1997).
- The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford, England
and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
N.B.: A
more complete bibliography of writings by and about Castoriadis, as well as
additional news and information about the author, may be found elsewhere on the
Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website. 1. Berkeley Free Speech activist Mario Savio subscribed.
London Solidarity, which smuggled translations into pre-Solidarnosc Poland, also
produced some classics of libertarian socialism: Maurice Brinton's The
Irrational in Politics, on the authoritarian personality, and his Bolsheviks & Workers' Control, on Bolshevik hostility to workers'
management. |