Unities and Tensions by magma review

David Ames Curtis

Unities and Tensions in the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis With Some Considerations on the Question of Organization1 It is an honor to be invited to Athens, birthplace of democracy.

I myself have had the

opportunity to study and investigate the Athenian democracy as translator of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Pierre Lévêque’s Cleisthenes the Athenian. But as Vassilis Lambropoulos has remarked, many in the West who admired Ancient Greece did so from afar, never setting foot in modern Greece, indeed pathologically avoiding it. 2 I am glad to be among you, modern Greeks, to learn from you and to share with you so that we might today create common endeavors. Allow me therefore to express my gratitude to the organizers of this event, which commemorates the tenth anniversary of the death, but also the life and work, of the great political and social thinker Cornelius Castoriadis. This commemoration is intended, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an occasion for all of us present to engage in mutual dialogue about the project that stood at the center of that life and work, the project of autonomy, and to reflect upon its meaning, its relevance, and its chances for fulfillment, as well as the obstacles it encounters today. I had the wonderful opportunity, as translator and as a collaborator, to work closely with Castoriadis over the last thirteen years of his life. But I speak to you tonight not at all from a privileged position or with special inside information. My introductory remarks are designed not to establish a gulf or a barrier between myself and you, but rather to foster this evening that shared dialogue and reflection I just mentioned. I also wish to voice my appreciation for your, the audience’s, willingness to listen to me speak in a foreign language, for I only know some Ancient Greek and, embarrassingly, no Modern Greek. This situation is especially frustrating because my role in what I call The 1

International Republic of Letters is that of a translator, 3 a “go-between,” as we say in English, a cultural worker who attempts to bridge differences and bring people together across linguistic and cultural divides. Yet I also know from the very experience of translation that such efforts are not innocent and may even be viewed with suspicion on both sides: the linguistic community that anxiously sees its authors’ words transformed beyond recognition into a foreign language and that other linguistic community which suddenly and disturbingly finds alien ideas introduced into its culture in such a way that those ideas become strangely familiar even while remaining strangely foreign, unheimlich. 4 My effort today will therefore be quite unambitious. I shall simply offer a few suggestions, with organizational as well as intellectual implications, for how Castoriadis’s work may be received. In this respect, I shall be guided by another aspect of my modest cultural work-as member of the Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website bibliographers’ collective. 5 This Website compiles constantly updated lists of writings by and about Castoriadis in seventeen languages for public use. Our bibliography shows that most of Castoriadis’s originally French writings are available in Greek. Thus, Greek-speaking activists and intellectuals are on a par with their French-, English-, Portuguese-, and Spanish-speaking counterparts. We have common ground to explore. While unambitious, this effort will offer an examination of the most misunderstood period of Castoriadis’s work. For, I propose to start, as the great blind Greek poet would have said--had he known Latin--in media res, in the very middle, instead of at the start or at the end. I refer to the phase between the last issue of Castoriadis’s revolutionary journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1965 and the 1975 publication of his major work, L’Institution imaginaire de la société.

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“Le monde morcelé” (World in fragments) is the title Castoriadis gave to two of his texts. “In October 1970,” Castoriadis informs us, he drafted a text and sent it to “a preparatory committee for an interdisciplinary colloquium.” 6

This talk on contemporary science “was

distributed to the forty or so people who took part” in this “symposium [that] took place at Royaumont, in February 1971.” 7

The following year, Castoriadis published it, “with,” he

specified, “a number of minor modifications as ‘Le monde morcelé,’ in Textures,” the review in which he collaborated with Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, and Marc Richir. 8 In an added Note, he expressed, without any illusions, his disappointment: “as was easy to foresee, and as was almost predicted in the text itself, it served no purpose,” 9 for this text did not incite the kind of discussions he had hoped to elicit concerning the crisis in the human, social, and natural sciences--a crisis intimately connected with the general crisis of contemporary society. To this first printed version was added, by way of a conclusion, a new paragraph: How . . . can the question of the social institution of contemporary science be detached from the question of the manner in which society is itself instituted? . . . How . . . can one hope to abolish this institution in its present form [“of mystification or pseudotechnical manipulation”] without profoundly disrupting the internal organization of knowledge and of the scientific work which is congruent with it? And what could this disruption be, if not an entire reconsideration of the question of knowledge, of those engaged in its pursuit, of the object of their pursuit, and thus, once again, and more than ever, philosophy, that philosophy whose death some simpletons believe they can cause simply by pronouncing it. The social transformation required by our times is inseparably bound up with the self-transcending of reason. . . . [W]hat is at stake is not merely the content of what needs to be changed--the tenor and organization of knowledge, the substance and function of the institution--but also, and even more so, our relationship to knowledge and to the institution. It is impossible henceforth to conceive of any essential change which does not involve a change in this relationship [emphasis added]. Come what may, it will remain the greatness of our epoch, and the promise of its crisis, to have sighted the possibility of this change. 10 What are we to make of this bold and far-ranging statement? For those inspired by the cofounder of Socialisme ou Barbarie, his trenchant critique of “bureaucratic capitalism,” and his advocacy of “workers’ management,” a switch to philosophy and science beyond the confines of a revolutionary group might seem an abrupt, even an unwelcome, change. For those who think

Castoriadis’s more recent philosophical work is of interest but find his earlier political and social writings ancient history after the demise of Communism, his rhetoric in this lecture might, on the contrary, appear at best a holdover from an older activist self. Both these reactions would seem to share in the idea that there is an “early” and a “later” Castoriadis. If taken absolutely, this “early”/“later” distinction is one I would challenge. 11 In fact, to the extent that we take seriously this concluding statement, we glimpse some concrete reasons why Castoriadis came to emphasize the need to bring both philosophical reflection and political action to bear on the problem of social change.

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Where does this “early”/“late” theme come from? In print, first from Brian Singer’s two excellent introductory articles published three decades ago: “The Early Castoriadis: Socialism, Barbarism and the Bureaucratic Thread” and “The Later Castoriadis: Institutions Under Interrogation.” 12 The model for this turn, or Kehre, is evidently that of the “early” and “late” Heidegger.

Indeed, “Le monde morcelé” became “Modern Science and Philosophical

Interrogation” when Castoriadis published a “considerably enlarged” 13 version of this text in the November 1973 Encyclopædia Universalis with a title quite reminiscent of the title of a Heidegger text 14 --though in the latter’s case the supposed division is certainly not between an early political stance and later philosophical concerns, and Heidegger’s brief and disastrous forays into politics are certainly not comparable in content or character to Castoriadis’s longstanding commitments.

But obviously this theme has a life beyond the page and is not

absolutely foreign to Castoriadis’s own intellectual-political biography. It thus merits further examination, raising pertinent questions applicable to any temporal development: Where, one may ask, is the dividing line, if any, between “early” and “late”? What are the distinctive criteria for each alleged period? What is the point of making such a distinction in the first place and how

is that distinction used, how is it to be used? In his articles, Singer notes what might appear to some as a “certain bewilder[ing]” shift from a concentration on politics and economics to a more philosophical orientation, as well as a “certain coherence” to Castoriadis’s ongoing work. Singer bases his idea of an “early” vs. “later” Castoriadis, however, on the assertion that there was “a more or less uninterrupted public silence of almost ten years” between the demise of Socialisme ou Barbarie (June 1965 for the review, July 1967 for the group) and the French publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society (in 1975). 15 This is quite an ample and vague time band for a break or a change of emphasis, a Kehre. In fact, when we examine the various ways in which commentators and critics have broken up his life’s work, we find a surprisingly broad range of differing interpretations. There are those who in 1958 rejected his ideas for the functioning of a collective revolutionary organization, 16 those who never accepted his rejection of the Marxian conception of economic crises (1959), 17 those who broke with Castoriadis’s 1963 extension and radicalization of those theses, 18 those who see the key change as having taken place around the 1965-1967 breakup of the group and the waning of an explicit collective political commitment, 19 those who see a new period dawning with the turn to psychoanalysis, the 1968 break with Lacan, and the 1969 creation of the “Fourth Group,” or with the turn to a “social theory” apparently divorced (for good or ill) from activist considerations. 20 Often, the split is simply (though vaguely) between an earlier “political” period and a later “philosophical,” “psychoanalytical,” or plainly “academic” one. 21 Conversely, and more bizarrely, we have a group like Demokratia kai phusis (Democracy and Nature), now renamed Inclusive Democracy, which wishes to take the conclusions of his later “Athenian democracy” period as one basis for a renewed political commitment--also inspired by Murray Bookchin’s municipal libertarianism--but which surprisingly leaves no room for S. ou B.-era analyses. 22 (I’m citing here just a few options exercised by some of the more coherent and creative people who employ and respond to Castoriadis’s ideas.) In light of all these sometimes overlapping but certainly nonidentical appreciations, we might conclude that this work is, to use his own terms, “magmatic” in character and that it lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Like the world, according to Castoriadis, it is evidently divisible in many ways--though that doesn’t mean divisible “just

anyhow.” Given that magmas are not fully susceptible to, but rather resist, ensemblistic-identitary (separable whole-and-parts) definition, and given their characteristic of indefinite referral (in the case of significations), how can one distinguish one magma from another? This is a question I once posed to Castoriadis in private and one he later tried to address in one of his seminars. Saying that his oeuvre is magmatic doesn’t say much, for any body of work over time is likely to have a magmatic character. Nor does this general statement tell us much about its specific content or its articulations. One can nevertheless try to distinguish it somehow or other from others’ work, and this may be a first step. For example, the work of another well-known radical thinker, Noam Chomsky, perhaps lacks “the union and the tension” found in Castoriadis’s five decades of writings. 23 It is difficult to discern, at first glance at least, the relationship between Chomsky’s linguistic theory (“invariant structures”) and his avowedly anarchistic/antiimperialistic political stands. Or rather, one would have to examine both this theory and these stands in another way than Chomsky himself does, since the latter explicitly states that there is no relationship between his scientific work and his social advocacy.

We find another

relationship than this one in Castoriadis, explicitly avowed as well as implicitly present. Noting its magmatic character, then, doesn’t dispense us from having to examine and evaluate that work, from making judgments, and from doing so in a consequential way. One might conceivably adopt a “pluralist” or “ecumenical” position--a general and uncritical acceptance of all these artificial divisions, which can be frankly contradictory--or maintain an eclectic “pick and choose” attitude, adopting one, another, or several of them without feeling the need to account for one’s arbitrary choice or choices, thereby ignoring the imperative of logon didonai (giving a reason and an account). But when it comes to making use of Castoriadis’s work, that would be an unconsciously ironic and ultimately ridiculous outlook or practice. I am not saying that one has to either accept every “period” or every point or else just reject them wholesale in an “all or nothing” alternative, for that is as far from a critical evaluative standpoint as indiscriminate pluralism or erratic “picking and choosing” would be. Rather, I believe that the integral, and not incidental, magmatic character of the tensions and unity in Castoriadis’s life work, which permits such varied interpretations and which we may also wish to emulate as well

as evaluate, is such that whatever “phase” or “aspect” one examines or employs is already engaged in constant referrals--implicit ones certainly, and also often explicit (for example, in Castoriadis’s frequently self-referential cross-referencing)--to multiple other “phases” and “aspects” of his work--and, beyond the work, to what that work intends as object and as project: autonomy. Separation and isolation--which are of course necessary, but never adequate for all occasions--not only are artificial (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, heuristically speaking . . .) but can also lead to mistaken appreciations, once the question of truth is raised in relation to this magmatic domain. Thus, it is not only that, in dividing up the magma of Castoriadis’s oeuvre arbitrarily and uncritically or in dealing with it only partially, we run the risk, personally and intellectually, of overlooking or misunderstanding dynamic features extending across the entire spectrum of his work, but we may also, socially and organizationally, miss the chance for exchanges with others that can (1) challenge our own thinking, (2) bring up related but previously unconsidered or underconsidered issues, and (3) build a community or scholars and activists that, working together and in tandem, might keep his legacy alive and growing and changing so as to preserve and expand its pertinence. Criticism, as much as an overall integrative approach, is crucial to achieving these goals. These observations thus hold for more politically-oriented readers who like the “early work” of Castoriadis but eschew his later “academic” writings just as much as it does for scholars who dismiss the “prephilosophical” or “prepsychoanalytic” work as being without much interest now. It is in exploring just this decade-long transitional period Singer pointed to--which, in fact, was not as “silent” as Singer thought--that one can attempt to establish connections between the “early” and “later” periods. Someone who accepts the old S. ou B. analyses but doesn’t like the newfangled philosophical stuff will be hard pressed to come to terms with a text like “The Question of the History of the Workers’ Movement,” written in 1973 for the Éditions 10/18 republication of his S. ou B. articles, in which Castoriadis challenges all his previous accounts of working-class activity by relevantly employing the tools he was forging at the time for Part Two of The Imaginary Institution of Society. 24 Similarly, we may ask: How can one read the posthumously published 1986 seminar commentary on Plato’s Politikos (Statesman) 25

without recalling that Castoriadis had already commented this text in a 1979 essay for another Éditions 10/18 volume where he decided that he had to abandon the word socialism in favor of autonomous society while retaining the best of his formulations and insights regarding real historical efforts and tendencies toward a libertarian socialism? 26 And how can one miss the connection between Castoriadis’s criticism of Plato’s presentation of the “royal man” (basilikos) as being, at best, one man in a thousand 27 (if he exists at all) to have the requisite political skills, and his criticism of capitalism in a 1957 S. ou B. text, “On the Content of Socialism, II,” which states near the beginning: If a thousand individuals have among them a given capacity for self-organization, capitalism consists in more or less arbitrarily choosing fifty of these individuals, vesting them with managerial authority and deciding that the others should just be cogs. 28 Where would the “early”/“late” distinction be made on this score? How does one clearly divide the “political” from the "philosophical" here, or at another point? Clearly, the early “political” critiques of bureaucratic capitalism were informed by these philosophical concerns, just as he adds, in a footnote to his 1986 “academic” seminar, 29 that “in these observations from the Statesman are found then the kernel of the criticism of every totalitarian regime and even of all bureaucratic power, including management of labor in factories, regulations, foremen, and so forth.” 30 Castoriadis insisted that there is no royal road from philosophical thinking to a specific political stance, or vice versa, but that doesn’t mean that one can oppose and separate out one from the other along a simple temporal continuum or contain them within unconnected vessels. An amusing recent example of the latter, quite untenable position: The “Association Cornelius Castoriadis,” an undemocratic and secretive organization set up by Castoriadis family members after his death, has avoided republication of Castoriadis’s S. ou B.-era writings. 31 It published some of his later political and social writings only after the appearance of “pirated” work presented by an “Anonymous Translator” (thought by some to be none other than yours truly). 32 Running for election to a seat on a Council whose meetings are not open even to the membership, an enterprising young academic, Nicolas Poirier, told the Association’s 2005 General Assembly of his work investigating Castoriadis’s early, unpublished philosophical writings in the family archives. Poirier stated that there was a “watertight (étanche)” separation

between these writings and contemporaneous S. ou B. texts: while early philosophical writings by Castoriadis did exist, they supposedly were wholly unrelated to his political concerns. Stated so baldly and so badly, even family insiders had to object. Yet Poirier’s blunder had no bearing on his election: while denying rank-and-file members access to their own group’s membership list, family insiders had already obtained enough proxy votes to elect him anyway. Once elected, Poirier changed his tune, recently claiming in public that there is no such “watertight” separation. One wonders what his ultimate opportunistic position will be when, next year, he publishes a scholarly edition of these writings.

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I have argued that splitting the “early” Castoriadis off from the “later” can lead one to commit errors of appreciation and substance. I observed, moreover, that such an artificial split fails to invite the necessary dialogue between scholars and activists that would keep his work alive and relevant and that would allow ourselves, in our assertions, to be challenged and enlightened by others.

A third point concerns what used to go under the heading of

“interdisciplinary” studies or, in the 1960s, the “multiversity.” Here we return to “Le Monde morcelé,” which was not only the name of the 1970 lecture for an interdisciplinary colloquium, but--an indication that this theme remained dear to him--the title of the third volume of his Carrefours du labyrinthe series.

Might an alleged turn toward science and philosophy,

apparently taking him away from explicit revolutionary political engagement, be dated from this point, and specifically from his presentation of this theme, two years after May ’68? Now, the idea of a “world in fragments” excludes on its own any idea of an eternal or timeless “unity” to the fifty-plus years of Castoriadis’s work. Nevertheless, one could affirm the existence of a unity, and of a tension--of a “history made” that is equally a “history in the making,” to borrow another phrase from his “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory”--in the unfolding of his work.

To do so, and in order to contest more substantively the binary

“early”/“later” division, we need to go a bit further back in time but also examine the import of his reflections on philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis during the last thirty years of his life.

Castoriadis reported that he had become “smitten” by philosophy at the age of thirteen after he purchased a “History of Philosophy” at an Athens used-book sale. And he was already organizing seminars on Kant and Hegel while a student in World War II-era Greece. When, as a young Trotskyist whose life had been threatened by both Stalinists and Fascists, Castoriadis left Athens for France, he came to postwar Paris with the intention of writing a “doctoral thesis whose theme was that every rational philosophical order culminates, from its own point of view, in aporias and impasses.” 33 Nevertheless, his other love, politics, proved more attractive at first and practical needs led him to a day job at OECD: he created a tendency within the Fourth International along with Lefort and other intellectual and working-class revolutionaries who could not accept the Trotskyists’ “unconditional defense of the Soviet Union.” From the outset, the journal and group maintained that the main class division in society is between “directors,” or order-givers, and “executants,” or order-takers; 34 that a Marxist analysis of the relations of production in “Soviet” Russia of itself reveals the existence of a separate exploiting bureaucratic stratum; 35 and that a revolution advocating “workers’ management” could, should, and would take place against this bureaucracy--a prognostication strikingly confirmed by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. 36 But who does not see in his critique of “bureaucratic capitalism” not only a nonorthodox extension of Marxism informed by a reading of Weber (he was the first Greek translator of the German sociologist as early as 1944) but also a practical and radical demonstration of the “aporias and impasses” of an unbridled rationalization of economy and society? A creative generalization of the problems of revolutionary theory on the basis of the generalization he observed in the crisis of society--which is characteristic of Castoriadis from the beginning to the end--may be seen in the first part of “On the Content of Socialism” (1955), where it is stated that the “cultural” and “sexual functions” must be taken into account along with the “economic function” and that the division between intellectual and manual labor must be destroyed while bringing an end to patriarchal authority relations, all of these being sine qua non conditions for any revolutionary transformation of society. 37 In the second part (1957), he stated that--first in production but eventually, by a process of generalization inherent to bureaucratic capitalism, in all spheres--contemporary society demands the complete exclusion of people from

the determination of their own activities while simultaneously soliciting their active participation in these same activities. Moreover, this schizophrenia-inducing capitalist system necessarily gives rise to the “project of autonomy” and thwarts it at the same time. In the early Sixties, Castoriadis was among the first to glimpse the significance of a generalized contestation of the irrational “rationality” of the “bureaucratic-capitalist project” and to predict that people in highly developed Western societies--especially those suffering a “double oppression”: women, youth, and minorities--would come to invent new forms of living and being together that challenge not just capitalistic economic relations but age-old sexual, familial, and other oppressive social relationships. 38 In “Recommencing the Revolution” (1964), he brought this conclusion one step further by revising his idea that the crisis comes from a confrontation between “directors” and “executants”: those who perform exclusively directorial or executant functions, now existing only in small numbers at the very top and very bottom of the bureaucratic-hierarchical pyramid, were no longer the key actors in the crisis of contemporary society; the relevant division had become the one between those who accept the system and those who reject it. Above all, we find the permanent effort of people to live their lives, to give their lives a meaning in an era where nothing is certain any longer and where, in any case, nothing from without is accepted at face value. In the course of this effort there tends to be realized for the first time in the history of humanity people’s aspiration for autonomy. For that very reason, this effort is just as important for the preparation of the socialist revolution as are the analogous manifestations in the domain of production. 39 It is not surprising that students in May 1968 found in Castoriadis’s and Socialisme ou Barbarie’s writings central inspiration for their own activities. To this generalization of the crisis of contemporary society “where nothing is certain any longer,” Castoriadis responded by trying to broaden the outlook and interests of his revolutionary group. In the key internal text from 1962, “For A New Orientation,” he advocated integrating into the group’s work and action the issues and insights of contemporary science and knowledge-cultural anthropology, history, urbanism, “technical and scientific change [in relation to] the masses (growing separation between the scientifico-technical world and the common man; opposing pole found in the massive dissemination of information and in the people’s

demonstrated thirst for scientifico-technical information) . . . the implications of contemporary scientific development for the future of society . . . the revolutionary signification of psychoanalysis,” as well as “cybernetics and its revolutionary implications.” 40

He was

highlighting at the same time the growing student and youth revolt and the attendant questioning of authority relations in the realms of work, family relationships, education, and overall values, noting in particular the increasingly open conflict within the University between its “social function” of the reproduction of knowledge and of society and its “cultural function” of free inquiry. 41

“Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” (1964-65) challenged every form of

functionalist and Structuralist explanation but also Louis Althusser’s exemption of “scientific knowledge,” as well as of University structures and practices, from the Sixties’ growing contestation of inherited values and ideas and from the political question of how present-day society can and should transform itself. 42 Neither should it be surprising, then, that “The Anticipated Revolution”--Castoriadis’s text on May ’68--ends by noting the connections between this student and youth revolt, the overall crisis of contemporary society, and the specific crisis in knowledge transmission, on the one hand, and scientific inquiry, on the other. To indulge in endless discussions on the revolution in science and technology is a complete waste of time if one does not comprehend what it entails: first of all, that the education and culture industries are now and henceforth of greater importance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than the steel industry and all other metalworking industries combined. . . . Next, and even more significant, are the problems posed on all levels by the profound crisis of contemporary knowledge and science. (The broad mass of scientists ha[s] not yet even realized that this crisis exists; they merely undergo this crisis in ways now obscure to them.) So as not to beat around the bush, we may speak of this crisis as the death of science in its classically accepted sense and in all hitherto known senses of the term. It is the death of a certain way in which knowledge is fabricated and transmitted. It concerns the perpetual uncertainty as to what knowledge has been ascertained, what is probable, doubtful, obscure. It involves the indefinitely extended collectivization of the human support network of knowledge and, at the same

time, the fragmentation ad infinitum of this knowledge just at the moment when the imperious and enigmatic interdependence, or more precisely, the articulated unity, of all fields of knowledge is becoming more apparent than ever. Also in question is the relation of this knowledge to the society that produces it, nourishes it, is nourished by it, and risks dying of it, as well as the issues concerning for whom and for what this knowledge exists. Already at present these problems demand a radical transformation of society, and of the human being, at the same time that they contain its premises. If this monstrous tree of knowledge that modern humanity is cultivating more and more feverishly every day is not to collapse under its own weight and crush its gardener as it falls, the necessary transformation of man and society must go infinitely further than the wildest utopias have ever dared to imagine. 43 We see here a continuation, and a creative generalization, of the major lines of his revolutionary thinking, as well as an early formulation of the “world in fragments” theme. Some, however, will perhaps be tempted to identify the break between an “early” and a “later” Castoriadis around this point. Indeed, these concluding thoughts were drafted for the published version of La Brèche that appeared in June 1968 as a book--his first--not for the shorter, May 1968 roneotyped version of his text, “Reflect, Act, Organize,” which marked his unsuccessful attempt to rally together and reestablish a revolutionary group in the midst of events. Similarly, the “Monde morcelé” statement about the crisis of science and the crisis of society, quoted earlier, appeared only with the later Textures version, not in the original text distributed to an interdisciplinary group of scholars who remained relatively indifferent to a set of proposals that formed the original conclusion to his talk. One could add Castoriadis’s 1966 decision to convince the Socialisme ou Barbarie group to “commit suicide” when it failed to gain the active (nonconsumerist) response it had hoped for on the part of its readership and as he came to see that the issues he had begun to deal with in “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” could not be addressed within the context and confines of a revolutionary journal. Again, I certainly do not want to deny the existence of ruptures--and, more generally, changes--within Castoriadis’s overall work. But, holding to the idea that that work is a coherent and fecund unity in the making relevant for today, I believe that we can discern an ongoing effort

to generalize and expand the revolutionary possibilities of, and prospects for, social change during this particular, indeed crucial, phase in the development of his thought. This “radical . . . transformation of man and society,” Castoriadis continues prospectively, will require the individual to develop from the outset in a quite different manner. Through such development, the individual will have to become capable on its own of entertaining another relationship with knowledge, a relationship for which there is no analogy in previous history. It is not simply a question of developing the individual’s faculties and capacities.

Much more profoundly, it is a matter of the individual’s

relationship to authority, since knowledge is the first sublimation of the desire for power and therefore of one’s relationship to the institution and everything that the institution represents as fixed and final point of reference. All this is obviously inconceivable without an upheaval not only in existing institutions but even in what we intend by institution. 44 The events of May 1968, which Castoriadis played such a significant part in catalyzing, had in turn catalyzed his thinking about the breadth and the depth of what was required for a continuation of the process of individual and social self-transformation. The goal of autonomy-originally conceived negatively in terms of the baleful consequences of a possible postwar takeover of Greece by Stalinists and positively in terms of workers’ management, and continually expanded since then--was now being expressed in this idea of the individual entertaining “another relationship” (than authoritarian/submissive) to knowledge, as well as to institutions and to the overall process of institutionalization (“the institution,” in Castoriadis’s parlance). Rather than say that Castoriadis abandoned revolution in 1970 in order to devote himself to science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis--or in 1968, or in 1965-67, or even in 1962 or in 1959-1960, it must be affirmed that, with each new challenge, each defeat, he creatively generalized the stakes while noting new obstacles and more acute problems and challenges-precisely what he had done every time, at least from the editorial “Socialisme ou Barbarie” in the first issue of the review.

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The “crisis of modern science,” which Castoriadis takes up in “Le Monde morcelé,” is not, he allows, totally unfamiliar to people living today in an age of uncertainty. For, despite an unreasonable confidence in the alleged certainty of their society’s scientific knowledge, people know, too, “that the nontotalized, and possibly nontotalizable, fragments of this knowledge exist only as the property of certain trades whose languages have nothing in common with [their] own and increasingly little in common with each other.” 45

In addition, they know “about the

disconcerting confirmation of the [equation] E=mc2 by the corpses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently, about the possible irreparable damage that has been inflicted upon the equilibrium of a biosphere dating back thousands of millions of years." 46 But this sense of uncertainty being experienced by present-day society in relation to its values, its goals, its ways of living, communicating, interacting, and even dying is now beginning to extend to science itself: It is no longer a question of doubts about the validity of this or that specific theory, nor of the tolerable obscurity of basic concepts--which could continue to be thrown as a sop to the philosopher without that interfering in the real business of science.

For the

uncertainty which has arisen in the course of this scientific activity itself, and which has both hindered and stimulated its growth at every important stage in its progress, has come to call in question and represent a crisis for the entire categorial framework of science; it thus explicitly refers the scientist to a philosophical interrogation. 47 In “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” the extended version of “Le Monde morcelé,” Castoriadis appends at this point a clarification that reads as an apt description of his research program in this expanded text and in his subsequent criticisms of the traditional approaches to science and philosophy: This interrogation is all-encompassing.

For what is at stake here is not only the

metaphysics that have underpinned three centuries of Western science and that have provided it with its implicit and unconscious conception of the ontological status of mathematical, physical, biological, psychical, and social-historical objects. It is also and equally the logical framework within which these objects have been considered; it is the

accepted model of the kind of knowledge to be pursued, the criteria of the presumed demarcation between science and philosophy, and the social-historical situation and function of science and of the organizations and people who sustain it. At the same time, it should be obvious that such an investigation must involve a no less radical calling into question of philosophy itself. 48 What follows is one of his first attacks against Heidegger--against “ontological difference” as “absolute”--and then his investigations into the crises in the natural, social, and human sciences: mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, economics, law, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and set theory and logic, to cite these disciplines in the order they were examined. It was, however, in his consideration of another discipline that Castoriadis best articulated his initial conception of a “world in fragments”: the history of science. In examining both the real ruptures that occur between successive theories in the sciences and this succession of ruptures itself, one discovers that “[s]cientific truth is no more synchronically additive than it is diachronically cumulative." 49 It is not enough to note that sets of scientific theories--a (Kuhnian) “paradigm” or a (Foucauldian) “episteme” 50--succeed each other, since one would then remain simply on the subjective side of scientific research and thinking and fail to inquire how it is possible for an objective science to have a history that is something more and something other than a series of errors (or “approximations”) that will somehow one day lead, “asymptotically,” to the one final truth about everything. The strikingly significant import of this hybrid discipline is especially evident in the history of the “exact” sciences: Newtonian theory, for example, adequately correlates with certain phenomena--including some not known at the time of the theory’s formation--and yet fails to correlate with other phenomena that can nonetheless be correlated with a succeeding theory (Einstein’s), whose premises and categories can in no way be characterized as a mere “generalization” of those of the previous theory or as an “addition” of new premises and categories, fully congruent and consistent with the old ones: What is shown by the history of physics (which, for obvious reasons, is our main interest here) is that at each stage there is a “description-explanation” of a given class of facts, which is simultaneously both adequate [according to] the accepted criteria of rationality and yet incomplete [lacunaire] relative to the set of known facts, and logically incoherent

from the standpoint of the “rationality” of the subsequent stage. [Who does not see here a resumption of the argument formulated in the first paragraphs of Castoriadis’s programmatic text on organization, “Proletarian Leadership,” from 1952, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty, speaking of “one of my Marxist friends,” described in terms of “the masses’ unpredictable ingenuity”? --DAC 51] Everything takes place as if there existed levels or strata of the physical object which were “describable-explicable” in correlation with a given “categorial system,” and yet at the same time as if both of these had to be, on any given occasion, essentially incomplete or deficient in some way. 52 When one attentively examines the implications of the fact that our knowledge has a history in the strong sense, one is forced to pursue an investigation of the organization and content of “scientific knowledge” at each stage and epoch of its existence; but this clearly implies also an investigation into what is known at each of these periods, an investigation, in other words, into the organization and content of what, quite simply, is. 53 In thinking not only, epistemologically speaking, about what is known but, ontologically speaking, about what is, we must think the latter “in terms of a hitherto unsuspected type of stratification” 54 of being that is not simply organized differently according to our theories but organizable differently in itself. 55 The logic of what is is susceptible to a plurality of different, and incompatible, theoretical interpretations according to which logical stratum is considered, or rather, more deeply and ontologically speaking, what is itself has a multiplicity of not fully congruous logical facets; it contains different logics. We are thus summoned to think about what is, and about what at each stage we think about what is, in a way that has no analogue or precedent in inherited thought. There is no one logic that can be imputed to the real, but equally we cannot deny that it has any logic at all; in the same way, there is no one logic that can be imputed to our theories of the real and to their succession, but nor can we deny any logic whatsoever. 56 Castoriadis’s conclusion? The “time has perhaps come to begin to think about the astonishing enterprise of human theoretical activity [faire] for what it is in its own right, and not by analogy with mirrors [reflections of nature], masonry [constructivism], dice-throwing [probability

theory], or story-telling [‘narrative’].” 57 The imaginary, in a primal positing sense (instead of as a secondary and derivative feature), becomes paramount. Castoriadis’s revival of this theme within the history of philosophy upsets the whole of inherited philosophy but also restores philosophy’s task as that of “unending interrogation”--as befits, indeed, the age of uncertainty in which it reemerges.

***

Let us summarize the foregoing. Beginning with an enquiry that grows out of the specific context of a society that is experiencing uncertainty as to its ways of living and being, its goals, its values, and its knowledge and that has been capable, so far, neither of adequately understanding the crisis it is undergoing nor of revolutionizing the conditions for the emergence and persistence of that crisis, Castoriadis sets as his task the clarification, for people and for their autonomous activity, both of this crisis and of the conditions for that crisis. He proceeds to an examination of the crisis in the various interconnected--but for the most part noncommunicating-disciplines of knowledge, continuing the work he had already begun in the Sixties integrating the revolutionary implications of these disciplines into people’s ongoing effort to transform their society. This crisis could be read in, but not adequately resolved by, a variety of responses that have been designated by such terms as “interdisciplinary studies” and the “multiversity” (or, in another connection, “archaeology”). Along the way, the hybrid discipline of the history of science helped to reveal that the fecund approach was not simply to combine two or more disciplines, or to find their intersection, but to reflect on this crisis itself in all disciplines and to clarify its meaning in a way that goes beyond general epistemological issues in order to raise ontological questions pertinent to the transformation of both society in general and the scientific institution in particular. This approach is still driven by the aim of autonomy in that it is conducted under the sign of establishing “another relation” between individuals and their knowledge than the one hitherto promulgated by the inherited philosophy. The problematic contained in the history of the exact sciences showed that we must accept the fact that being itself, not just our knowledge of it, is

itself stratified in what it is, in the logics of what it is, and in our knowledge of it (since extant constellations of knowledge, and their historical ruptures, themselves partake of being). Being thus cannot be described as the timeless and unchanging pure unity by which it has been characterized since Parmenides, and the more recent positivistic search for its one true and eternal logical organization, contradicted now by the recognition of a true history of science, must also be abandoned. It would have been meaningless and self-contradictory, however, to extend the notion of “autonomy” mechanically, from the political and social meaning it had gained in Castoriadis’s previous work, to all of being. The path that will be followed, and that had already been marked out by the assertion that history is self-creation, is that the various strata of being create themselves (qua forms). “Autonomy” will retain the more restricted meaning already laid out in “Theory and Revolutionary Project” (the second part of “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory”) and developed further in subsequent texts--viz., that human autonomy involves explicit knowledge that one makes one’s own laws and that one can therefore try to change these laws in a lucid way without reference to extrasocial instances of authority. But the idea of self-creation will extend the challenge to rationalistic determinism, already contained in the idea and project of autonomy, to all forms and strata of being. In “Le Monde morcelé”/“Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” this assertion is perhaps most explicit in his discussion of the biological sciences: in thinking of the living being in terms of a cybernetic automaton, as has become the fashion, we must realize that this living “automaton can never be thought except in its own terms, that it constitutes its own framework of existence and meaning, that it is its own a priori, that to be alive is to be for oneself, as some philosophers have for a long time asserted.” 58 Now, both at the end of his discussion of the history of science in “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation” and near the end of this same text, Castoriadis speaks not only of the “stratification” of being but of its various regions, as they are explored in different domains of study. It is the absolute separation between regions that is at issue here. This is not because they ultimately form a single region, but because the articulation between them is something quite other than a partitioning, a mere juxtaposition, an

increasing specificity or a linear, real or logical, hierarchy. To reassert and render explicit this articulation--as did Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz or Hegel, but otherwise than they were capable of doing--is, in our opinion, the task confronting philosophical thought today. 59 We easily recognize in this statement the antecedent to the Notice with which Castoriadis introduces his 1990 book Le monde morcelé: “The world--not only ours--is fragmented. Yet it does not fall to pieces. To reflect upon this situation seems to me to be one of the primary tasks of philosophy today.” 60 The regions will be described and elucidated in much greater detail in “The State of the Subject Today” and other texts, but the intention animating this elucidation was already evident in the 1970 lecture paper and its expanded versions: negatively speaking, there is an explicit challenge to all forms of determinism and reductionism in the human, social, and natural sciences; more positively speaking, it is argued that each scientific discipline, now informed by a new conception of science, of philosophy, and of their mutual relationship, must learn to articulate itself in relation to all the others and to articulate the region of being to which it refers in terms of the self-creation of that region. In more recent texts, it is not just the stratification of regions and the articulations between the disciplines studying these regions that is at issue. The articulations among regions of being themselves, mentioned in “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” now become paramount for their continuing study. “The State of the Subject Today,” for example, examines both the principal regions psychoanalysis must deal with when thinking about the psychoanalytic subject and a sort of interregionality to the subject that cannot be reduced to a combination of like elements or to a simple unity of disparate ones: In a first sense, the “subject” presents itself as this strange totality, a totality that is not one and is one at the same time, a paradoxical compound of a biological body, a social being (a socially-defined individual), a more or less conscious “person” and, finally, an unconscious psyche (a psychical reality and a psychical apparatus), the whole being supremely heterogeneous in makeup and yet definitely indissociable in character. Such is how the human phenomenon presents itself to us, and it is in the face of this cluster [nebuleuse] that we have to think the question of the subject. 61

It is in such rich, even when summary, descriptions, often informed by his psychoanalytic work, that we begin to glimpse what Castoriadis intends by a “world in fragments that does not simply fall apart” (or become a candidate for Deconstruction). This “world in fragments” is not simply made up of a variety of regions and strata (that would otherwise be explicable in terms of a panlogistic application of subjective or objective categories). In its self-creative positing of new forms (natural world, living nature, human psyche, society) and of new and irreducible laws governing these multiple heterogeneous forms, as well as in its ongoing self-alteration of these forms and laws, being itself is irregularly stratified, it stratifies itself irregularly; it thereby resists the full application of any one logic because it makes be, in its self-alteration, other logics irreducible to previous ones.

***

Castoriadis once defined the “revolutionary project” as an “open engendering of significations oriented toward a radical transformation of the social world, . . . and unified by the idea of the autonomy of man and of society.” This quotation comes from one of the key “transitional-period” texts I spoke about earlier. 62 It may not be entirely to the liking of someone interested only in the earlier “political” writings, and it may not entirely fit into the perspective of someone who takes as his or her point of departure the “later” writings on philosophy, psychoanalysis, “social theory,” etc. and who today perhaps finds the problematic of revolutionary thought and organization passé.

But it is expressive of a certain stage in

Castoriadis's thinking that is not to be isolated artificially from the rest. It articulates his ongoing effort to generalize the growing crisis of psyche and society--or better, his ongoing effort to elucidate, and engage, the generalization of this crisis which runaway rationalization and resistance thereto have engendered--by entering into the specifics in a host of extant domains while never losing sight of the overall stakes.

Let us take this last brief statement as a

provisional characterization of the magma of Castoriadis's work--that is, a work open to further elucidation, disputation, revision, and creative transformation. Such an “open engendering” of revolutionary, autonomy-oriented significations requires

us to rethink what a revolutionary organization does, what it aims at, what it can and should accomplish, and how it goes about its work.

Informed by all “periods” and “parts” of

Castoriadis’s work, yet always adopting a critical attitude not only about each “period” and “part” but also about what constitutes them and how they relate to one another, we may begin to recreate such an organization in a new way--as a self-articulating and tension-filled unity in the making aimed at precisely this sort of “open engendering.” To conclude this talk, I wish to offer a few quick--and certainly insufficient--observations about this question of organization. This issue has become increasingly important, as efforts are now underway in a number of linguistic communities to create organizations and discussion groups inspired by Castoriadis’s ideas. In the Scandinavian world, an English-language blog 63 as well as an ongoing academic seminar 64 have been established. The Francophone community has witnessed the foundation and dissolution of a political organization, “Lefairepensant,” and then the formation of an online Yahoo discussion group, “apartirdecc,” which continues amidst constant debate about what it can and should be. 65

The Verein für das Studium und die

Förderung der Autonomie makes the “autonomy or barbarism” theme central to its activities. 66 Various, more or less formal and more or less specialized efforts have existed for a while in the Spanish-speaking world. The smallest--yet perhaps also most ambitious--effort is the “Autonomy or Barbarism” group in Greece, 67 which pays special attention to its own internal development and transformation, boldly distributes its political tracts in the public marketplace, and is planning publication of a journal with a more philosophical orientation.

As for Agora

International, 68 now more than a decade and a half old, it continues disseminating information about, and facilitating contacts among, these disparate groups with their varying conceptions of how Castoriadis’s ideas may be relevant today. I leave aside here various university-sponsored conferences whose methods of organization, criteria of selection, and general tenor are of much less interest, bound up as they are with hierarchical rituals of exclusion and prestige endemic to academia. Another “transitional-period” text, written back in 1973 when Castoriadis addressed “The Question of the History of the Workers’ Movement,” provides a first insight: We cannot discuss it without developing a series of considerations that might seem

abstract, “philosophical,” useless, even ridiculous to those who claim to be interested only in action and struggle. These people perhaps should stop their agitation a moment and try to gauge the incalculable weight of the naive metaphysics that the tiniest phrase in their tracts, the apparently most simple and most solid idea they have in their heads, conveys. . . . [T]he least intelligent of scientists sneer when reminded of the philosophical questions situated at the foundations of their activity--for the sole reason that they are immersed in a metaphysical ocean so think (and filled with the fantastic constructs that are “things,” “causes,” “effects,” “space,” “time,” “identity,” “difference,” etc.) that they clearly cannot see in it. Graver still, however, is the case of the militant who talks all the time about classes, laws of history, revolution, socialism, productive forces, the State, and power, curiously believing that in these vocables, and in his handling of them, ideas play no part, that he is dealing here with strange things that are both solid and transparent at the same time--and who, for this very reason, is completely enslaved to past theoretical and philosophical conceptions whose significations have already been fixed, all the more so as he can know neither what these conceptions are, nor where they come from, nor, therefore, finally, where they are leading him. 69 As with his discussion of the history of science and not unrelated to it as we see here, this discussion of the history of the workers’ movement dating from the same period evinces a will to integrate philosophical and political concerns so that we do not find ourselves unconsciously mouthing the same old cliches over and over again. Castoriadis, the philosopher of creation and autonomy, always emphasized that, if just one percent of someone’s actions were original, that individual would be the most creative person in the world. The same applies to groups and organizations. One naive temptation extant today is simply to “apply” Castoriadis’s ideas readymade to existing political movements, issues, and struggles without also undertaking the critical self-work and the critical rethinking of inherited thought necessary to avoid repetition and imitation. A very undynamic desire to settle on “positions” occults the movement of self-activity a Castoriadis-oriented group could exemplify.

In some recent discussions, the legacy of

criticism of what S. ou B.’s sister organization, London Solidarity, labeled “Trad Rev” (traditional revolutionary) positions and practices seems to have been forgotten or remains

unknown. The unexamined impulse has been to provide instructions, analyses, and criticisms for others--even when a group has itself not yet articulated its own goals and views in a general “statement of purpose.” A paramount question to be addressed from the start, should in my opinion be not only the self-creation of each group within each linguistic community but also self-creation across linguistic communities (internationalist cooperation among mutually foreign groups).

This

constitutes a double challenge. At issue--beyond a general reference to Castoriadis and to what his intellectual and political trajectory represents in the world, which remains rather empty 70--is the collective and conflictual self-articulation of people, practices, and significations that may be “supremely heterogeneous in makeup” yet might become “definitely indissociable in character.” This can be accomplished only via an unprecedented group creation spanning political, philosophical, artistic, etc. concerns, widely varying backgrounds, traditions, and experiences, and differing impulses requiring shared examination and debate, not peremptory mutual exclusion. Monos phronein (being wise alone) is no strength. Clashing opinions and varying efforts are not necessarily weaknesses. A number of principles developed within Socialisme ou Barbarie still hold--though they must now be reexamined in light of Castoriadis’s later work as well as, of course, with a view to changes within contemporary reality and social imaginary significations. The will to break down the separation between intellectual and manual work within a revolutionary organization--a key internal antibureaucratic task for such an organization which constitutes, moreover, an exemplary approach for the future society one wishes to help bring into being--remains valid, but it also requires rearticulation in today’s world, where pure “directors” and pure “executants” are uncommon and the crisis facing us is not only multidimensional but transdisciplinary, and indeed, if we take Castoriadis seriously, total.

In relation to the lethal anthropological

transformations currently underway, the response must be commensurate with bureaucraticcapitalist society’s programmed destruction of significations and thus be aimed at an equally far-reaching anthropological self-transmutation of which explicitly political endeavors and goals are but one feature. 71 (A preposterous solution one “Lefairepensant” member proposed for constituting a “political organization” was to isolate all artists interested in Castoriadis’s

work in a separate room and keep them there until they could prove in writing that their concerns might be of interest to the group’s politically-minded members. . . .) Castoriadis was articulate and firm in his stand against mindless activism. And S. ou B. did not break with the Fourth International, he said, merely to pursue a “correct Trotskyism.” Also retaining value are certain S. ou B.-era principles to which a revolutionary organization aiming at fostering autonomy--that is, at contributing to the conditions under which people’s own reflective, deliberative, self-transformative activity might arise, be exercised, and broaden into new areas--should adhere. For example, anti-“substitutionism” (rejection of any idea of a “leading party” and of the Leninist view of workers as capable of only “trade-union consciousness” but also of any privileged class or group in whose name one would speak), a concomitant refusal to engage in “parachuting” into others’ struggles in order to tell them what the proper demands and methods of organization would be, and an abandonment of any fantasy of “outflanking” or “outbidding” tactics governed by the illusion that it suffices to appear “more radical” or “purer” than other groups in order to win those in engaged in existing struggles over to one’s side and one’s ideas. But let us, provisionally here, leave the last word to Castoriadis in another of his “transitional-period” texts: Everything we have to say would be inaudible if it is not understood from the outset as a call for a critique that is not a form of skepticism, for an opening that does not dissolve into eclecticism, for a lucidity that does not halt activity, for an activity that does not become inverted into a mere activism, for a recognition of others that remains capable of vigilance. 72

David Ames Curtis < curtis@msh-paris.fr > Sarasota, Florida - Winchester, Massachusetts USA - Paris, France, March-April/November 2007 N.B.: People interested in the Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website may contact our Greek cobibliographers, Yorgos Oikonomou <yorgosoikonomou@yahoo.com> in order to subscribe to the CC/AI Website’s update announcements. Currently, 950+ individuals and organizations receive these free monthly electronic announcements.

NOTES 1. The present paper combines elements from the Translator’s Foreword to my translation of Castoriadis’s writings World in Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) and a talk I delivered in English in September 2000 to a conference on Castoriadis held on the island of Crete: “Apropos of The ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ Work of Cornelius Castoriadis: For A Critical-Integrative Approach.” An earlier version of the present paper was read in Vienna at the Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst. 2. Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 57. 3. I have published translations of more than a millions words of Castoriadis’s writings in seven volumes. 4. See my 2004 lecture, now online at http://1libertaire.free.fr/Castoriadis45.html : “Effectivité et réflexivité dans l’expérience d’un traducteur de Cornelius Castoriadis.” 5. Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website: http://www.agorainternational.org . See the last page of the present paper for contact and subscriber information. 6. This colloquium was organized by, among others, Claude Lefort and Edgar Morin, the coauthors of Castoriadis’s book on May ’68, La Brèche. 7. I cite here the English translation, “Note on the Texts Collected in this Volume,” Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Martin H. Ryle and Kate Soper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1984), p. xxxi. 8. “Le monde morcelé,” Textures, 4-5 (1972): 3-40. 9. See Castoriadis's publication note, ibid., p. 3. 10. “Le Monde morcelé” was expanded into “Science moderne et interrogation philosophique,” which appeared in volume 17 (Organum) of the Encyclopaedia Universalis (November 1973) before appearing in the first volume (1978) of the Carrefours du labyrinthe series. For this concluding paragraph, I cite “Modern Science and Philosophical Investigation,” pp. 223-24 of the English Crossroads translation. 11. I have challenged this distinction from the very first time I wrote a text about Castoriadis; see in particular my translator's Foreword to the third volume of Castoriadis's Political and Social Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); see p. xvi. 12. See Brian Singer, “The Early Castoriadis: Socialism, Barbarism and the Bureaucratic Thread,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 3 (Fall 1979), pp. 35-56, and “The Later Castoriadis: Institutions Under Interrogation,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 4 (Winter 1980), pp. 75-101. 13. Crossroads, p. xxxi. 14. The text to which I am referring in relation to Castoriadis’s “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation” is Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics.” Similarly, Castoriadis’s “Technique” in Crossroads may be seen, in part, as a critical response to “The Question Concerning Technology” and his “The ‘End of Philosophy’?” as an explicit answer to Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” A serious engagement with these parallel texts as well as with the substance of Castoriadis’s repeated critiques of such Heideggerian concepts as “Gelassenheit” and “ontological difference” would be worth someone’s effort as a way of bringing out Castoriadis’s ongoing challenge to Heidegger’s thinking. In conversation, Castoriadis told me how much he regretted that the (entirely justified) critique of “left Heideggerianism” had been undertaken in such a botched way by Allan Bloom in the latter’s surprise 1987 neoconservative bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. 15. “The Later Castoriadis,” p. 75. 16. See, from Castoriadis's side, “Proletariat and Organization, I” (1959), now in Political and Social Writings, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The second part, “Prolétariat et organisation (suite et fin),” appeared in S. ou B., 28 (July-August 1959): 41-72, and was reprinted as “Prolétariat et organisation, II,” in L’Expérience du mouvement ouvrier, vol. 2: Prolétariat et organisation (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1974), 189-248; an English translation exists only in typescript form. With Henri Simon and other members, Lefort left S. ou B. definitively in 1958 to form Informations et Liaisons Ouvrières (ILO), which later became Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO) after Lefort’s departure. For background information on both S. ou B. and ILO/ICO, see Lefort's "An Interview with Claude Lefort" (originally conducted April 19, 1975 in French as a

pamphlet for Anti-Mythes 14 [November 1975]), trans. Dorothy Gehrke and Brian Singer, Telos, 30 (Winter 197677): 173-92, and now available in Lefort's huge new volume Le Temps présent. Écrits 1945-2005 (Paris: Éditions Belin 2007), as well as Castoriadis’s January 26, 1974 interview conducted by the precursor to Anti-Mythes (now available in English as “‘The Only Way to Find Out If You Can Swim Is to Get into the Water’: An Introductory Interview,” The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis [Malden, MA and Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1997], pp.1-34), as well as Simon's September 7, 1974 interview, “De la scission avec Socialisme ou Barbarie à la rupture avec ICO (entretien avec H. Simon),” Anti-Mythes, 6 (December 1974), and his I. C. O., un point de vue (available c/o Échanges, B. P. 241, 75866 Paris Cedex 18 France). Carrying on the Henri-Simonian tradition in the United States now is Collective Action Notes (website: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/index.html). A former S. ou B member, the late Alain Guillerm, said the joke circulating within the S. ou B. group with regard to the ILO/ICO split-offs, so sensitive to protecting working-class expression from bureaucratic control, was that Simon and the others spent their time worrying whether stapling together the pages of their working-class contributors’ reports might itself constitute a bureaucratic act. 17. See “Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne” (drafted in 1959-1960 and published in three parts in S. ou B. in 1960-1961), now available as “Modern Capitalism and Revolution” in the second volume of his Political and Social Writings. 18. Castoriadis’s “Recommencer la révolution,” drafted in 1963 and published in S. ou B. in 1964, is available in English as “Recommencing the Revolution” in the third volume of his Political and Social Writings, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) as well as in The Castoriadis Reader. 19. The last issue of the review S. ou B. was published in 1965; the group dissolved in 1966, publishing “La suspension de la publication de Socialisme ou Barbarie” in July 1967 (this circular, distributed to subscribers, is now available online at, e.g., http://www.plusloin.org/textes/sob-dissolution.html and in English in the third volume of his Political and Social Writings as “The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie”). The time period for the dating of the end of active organizational political involvement can be extended at least to 1968, if one counts the effort to reconstitute the group in the midst of the May “events.” 20. At the beginning of “Institution première de la société et institutions secondes” (1986), Figures du pensable (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp 115-26--in English: “The First Institution of Society and Second-Order Institutions,” trans. David Ames Curtis, Free Associations, 12 (1988): 39-51, and now available in English in the electronic volume Figures of the Thinkable (including “Passion and Knowledge”) http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf --Castoriadis in effect denies that it is possible to do “social theory”--i.e., he denies that one can have a theory of (a theoria of, a looking objectively upon) the institution of society--because of our social-institutional situatedness. An impossible “social theory” therefore is to be contrasted with the real possibility of engaging in what may be called “social thought”--i.e., an attempt to elucidate society from, e.g., the standpoint of the project of autonomy, by putting society and its significations in question. 21. On the latter charge, see, e.g., Alex Richards’ “The Academisation of Castoriadis,” Edinburgh Review, 78/79 (1988): 226-31. 22. See http://www.democracynature.org and http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org . On my polemic with D&N/ID see “Inclusive Democracy Throws in the Towel on its Empty Threat” http://www.agorainternational.org/dnweb5.html (January 2007), which provides a full bibliographical record of both sides of this debate. 23. I borrow this phrase from “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” (now in The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 108); it was used there by Castoriadis, much more broadly, to characterize the relationship between instituting society and instituted society. 24. “Introduction. La Question de l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier,” L’Expérience du mouvement ouvrier, vol. 1: Comment lutter (Paris: 10/18, 1974), pp. 11-120; in English: “The Question of the History of the Workers’ Movement,” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, pp. 157-206. 25. Sur Le Politique de Platon (Paris: Seuil, 1999); now available in English as On Plato’s Statesman, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 26. “Introduction. Socialisme et société autonome,” Le Contenu du socialisme (Paris: 10/18, 1979): 11-45; available

in English as “Socialism and Autonomous Society,” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, pp. 314-31. This introduction to the penultimate volume in the Éditions 10/18 series ends: To abolish heteronomy does not signify abolishing the difference between instituting society and instituted society--which, in any case, would be impossible--but to abolish the enslavement of the former to the latter. The collectivity will give itself its rules, knowing that it itself is giving them to itself, that these rules are or will always become at some point inadequate, that it can change them--and that they bind it so long as it has not changed them in a regular way. This conclusion, which borrows from what Castoriadis considers the Statesman’s just critique of the law--but which also takes Marx to task for adopting (with his ideas of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and of the “higher phase of communism”) positions that make it impossible, Castoriadis says, to distinguish between Marx’s “total man” and Plato's “royal man” (basilikos)--should be read in light of Castoriadis's much earlier warning, in “On the Content of Socialism, II” (1957), about the ultimate inadequacy of all constitutional-legal arrangements, even the most “socialist” ones: There is no question for us here of trying to draw up “statutes,” “rules,” or an “ideal constitution” for socialist society. Statutes as such mean nothing. The best of statutes can only have meaning to the extent that people are permanently prepared to defend what is best in them, to make up what they lack, and to change whatever they may contain that has become inadequate or outdated. From this point of view, we obviously should condemn any fetishism for the “soviet” or “council” type or organization. . . . The council will remain such an expression for as long as people are prepared to do whatever may be necessary for it to remain so. . . . The council is not a miraculous institution. It cannot be a means for the workers to express themselves if the workers have not decided that they will express themselves through this medium. But the council is an adequate form of organization: Its whole structure is set up to enable this will to selfexpression to come to the fore, when it exists (Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, pp. 95-96). John Barker emphasizes this antifestishistic view of councilism in his obituary: “Cornelius Castoriadis: 11 March 1922 - 26 December 1997," Capital and Class, 65 (Summer 1998): 159-66 (now available online at, e.g., http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199804/msg00030.html). Barker’s emphasis here is salutary because many people have a tendency to treat Castoriadis’s classic 1957 statement on libertarian council socialism as a “blueprint” or a “utopia” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet has committed the latter error in statements made on several occasions: e.g., “Homage to Cornelius Castoriadis,” trans. David Ames Curtis, Common Knowledge, 7:2 [Fall 1998]: 2.) Castoriadis had already addressed this issue himself by laying out the antiutopian character of his view of councils near the beginning of “On the Content of Socialism, II” (Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, p. 97). And in On Plato’s Statesman (p. 41), Castoriadis reiterates his radical antiutopian standpoint: [B]eyond Plato's critique--which, after all, is relatively secondary to our interests--you end up, of course, with a radical and entirely justified condemnation of every utopia, that is to say, of every attempt to define and fix in place the perfect society. There can be no such definitions. And we should have known it already since the Statesman. Vidal-Naquet's repeated characterizations of “On the Content of Socialism, II” as a “utopia” are rather surprising and confusing, for my own positive appreciation of a radical critique of the tendency of (Platonic and other) utopias to try (in vain) to freeze society and stop time comes especially from a joint reading of “On the Content of Socialism, II,” On Plato’s Statesman, and the last chapter (on Plato) of Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Cleisthenes, the Athenian. An Essay on the Representation of Space and of Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato, with a new discussion On the Invention of Democracy by Pierre Lévêque, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Cornelius Castoriadis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 27. In the posthumously published Sur le Politique de Platon (e.g., p. 156), where the French Editors rely on the Auguste Diès French translation, “ten thousand men” is given instead of the correct “one thousand men” (kiliandrÇi at Statesman 292e). Castoriadis had himself hand-corrected this error in his copy of the Diès translation, but the French Editors neglected to note this key correction. 28. “On the Content of Socialism, II,” Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, p. 93. Note that not only the number "one thousand" but also the number "fifty" appears in both this 1957 text and in Statesman 292e! 29. In fact, while inadvertently misquoting M. I. Finley from memory Castoriadis goes out of his way to state, by way of contrast, “I’m not a ‘scholar’” (see On Plato’s Statesman, pp. 18 and 250n.2). He did not conceive of

himself as an academic--even when lecturing at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 30. Ibid., p. 259n2. 31. With the exception, that is, of “Marxisme et théorie révolutionnaire” (first published in S. ou B. in 1964-65), as it forms the inseparable first part of his major “later” work, L’Institution imaginaire de la société (now available in a 2006 Éditions du Seuil reprint). With the recent republication of “Transformation sociale et création culturelle” (a post-S. ou B. text included in the 1979 Le Contenu du socialisme) within an art-oriented new collection Fenêtre sur le chaos (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2007), the Castoriadis heirs are now even cannibalizing the old Éditions 10/18 series volumes, publishing a “later” text while leaving original S. ou B.-era texts out of print. The URL of the family’s “Association Cornelius Castoriadis” website is http://castoriadis.org . 32. Prior to the 2005 publication of the internet translations cited above, Figures of the Thinkable (including “Passion and Knowledge”) http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf, another internet volume appeared in 2003: The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep), translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf . On this unauthorized publication, see Scott McLemee, “The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis: The Story of a Revered European Thinker, a Literary Legacy, Family Squabbles, and Internet Bootlegging,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 50:29 (March 26, 2004): A14-16 http://www.notbored.org/strange-afterlife.html or http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i29/29a01401.htm. 33. “Fait et à faire,” originally published in Autonomie et autotransformation de la société. La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis, ed. Giovanni Busino (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1989): 467; now available in English as “Done and To Be Done,” The Castoriadis Reader, p. 371. Also, in an interview for Radical Philosophy, 56 (Autumn 1990), p. 38, he explains, “I came to France to do a Ph.D. thesis in philosophy. (The theme of the thesis was that any attempt at a rationally constructed philosophical system leads to blind alleys, to aporias and antinomies. Mostly, what I had in mind was Hegel, but not only.) This remains an unfinished manuscript.” In a 1991 interview with Agora International, now available at http://www.agorainternational.org/CCAIINT.pdf but not yet translated into English, Castoriadis had elaborated a bit more fully on his early postwar plans for a thesis: [J]e voulais aller en France faire une thèse de philosophie; l’idée de mon sujet c’était qu’il ne peut pas y avoir de système philosophique rationnel clos, que cela entraine à des absurdités ou des impossibilités ou des contradictions. J’avais moi-même fait, pendant l'occupation, des séminaires sur les Prolégomènes de Kant, sur la Logique hégelienne, etc. avec des jeunes, des plus jeunes qui venaient. This early interest in philosophy, and in the teaching of philosophy, also belies, on the biographical plane, any simple and clear-cut articulation of the “early”/“later” distinction as being one between politics and philosophy, or activism vs. academicism. 34. See the editorial in the first issue, “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” now available in English as "Socialism or Barbarism," in Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, pp. 76-106. 35. See "The Relations of Production in Russia," in ibid., pp. 107-58. 36. In addition to "Socialism or Barbarism," already cited, see “The Proletarian Revolution Against the Bureaucracy” (1957), Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, pp. 57-89 and “The Hungarian Source” (1976), in Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, pp. 250-71. 37. See “On the Content of Socialism, I” (1955), Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, in particular the section on “Alienation in Capitalist Society,” pp. 305-8. 38. “Modern Capitalism and Revolution” (1959-1960), Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, pp. 226-315. 39. “Recommencing the Revolution” (1964), Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 41 (emphasis added). This “just as much” phrase should now be read in light of his 1971 statement, cited above, that “It is impossible henceforth to conceive of any essential change which does not involve a change in this relationship [to knowledge].” 40. “For a New Orientation,” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 16. 41. “Student Youth” (1963) and “The Crisis of Modern Society” (1965) in Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, pp. 64-75 and 106-17. 42. See, now, “The Movements of the Sixties” (1986) in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 47-57. 43. “The Anticipated Revolution" (1968), Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, pp. 124-56.

44. Ibid., p. 154. 45. “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” pp. 148-49. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 151 (translation slightly altered, here and elsewhere, from “categorical” to “categorial” [catégoriale]; Castoriadis is speaking about historically extant (scientific) categories in the broad sense, not about the timeless categorical divisions of Aristotelian or Kantian philosophy). 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 167. 50. Ibid., p. 168. 51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 232 (the penultimate page of this famous tome). In “Proletarian Leadership” (1952; now available in English in the first volume of the Political and Social Writings), Castoriadis explains that “the revolutionary and cosmogonic character of [‘the creative activity of tens of millions of people as it will blossom during and after the revolution’] consists precisely in the fact that its content will be original and unforeseeable.” He continues: It is vain to try to resolve this antinomy [of “revolutionary activity”] by suppressing one of its terms. To renounce rational, organized, and planned collective activity because the masses will resolve all problems in the process of their struggle is in fact to repudiate the “scientific” aspect, and more precisely the rational and conscious aspect of revolutionary activity; it is to sink voluntarily into a messianic mysticism. Not to recognize the original and creative character of the masses’ activity or to pay it only lip service, on the other hand, amounts to laying the theoretical foundations for bureaucracy, whose ideological basis is the recognition of a “conscious” minority as the repository of historical reason (p. 198). 52. “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” p. 171. 53. Ibid., p. 168. 54. Ibid., p. 172. 55. Castoriadis contrasts the “in itself” with the “for itself” (he employs the latter term extensively in, for example, World in Fragments, stating that the “for itself” is characteristic of all living forms of being). The resulting contrast with the "for itself," however, is neither Hegelian nor Sartrean in inspiration. Nor is the “in itself” conceived by him as belonging to an unknowable noumenal realm, à la Kant, but instead is thought in terms of the Aristotelian kath’ auto. He translates this latter term as the vers soi (the “towards itself”). 56. “Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,” pp. 173-74. 57. Ibid., p. 173. 58. Ibid., p. 183. 59. Ibid., p. 178. I have restored the word “region,” which did not appear in the Ryle/Soper translation. 60. I quote the “Notice” included in the English translation, World in Fragments, p. vii. 61. “The State of the Subject Today,” in ibid.,p. 141. 62. “The Question of the History of the Workers' Movement,” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 198. 63. “Castoriadis blog: Discussions on the philosophy and political thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, hosted by Study group 8 in the Nordic Summer University (NSU)”: http://www.castoriadis.blogspot.com 64. Regarding the Nordic Summer University’s Network Group 8 devoted to the work of Castoriadis, see, e.g., http://www.nsuweb.net/wb/doc/fpdf/krets.php?id=167 65. Consult: http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/apartirdecc 66. http://www.autonomieentwurf.de 67. The Greek “Autonomie ou Barbarie” group can be contacted via e-mail: a_ou_b@yahoo.com ; their website is found at http://www.autonomyorbarbarism.blogspot.com . 68. http://www.agorainternational.org 69. Ibid., p. 162-63. 70. I have believed, from the inception of Agora International (a name I suggested so as to avoid the adoption of another early member’s hagiographic suggestion: “Cercle Cornelius Castoriadis”) that, no matter how much members of a prospective group might be inspired by Castoriadis and his thought, it is a mistake to use his name in the title of the organization. (This is also why I suggested the name “Lefairepensant”: to avoid the “groupe Castoriadis” locution adopted by some participants.) Beyond the collective failure of imagination and the inability

to articulate clear and coherent goals to which the adoption of such eponymous group names testifies, there is a practical consideration: inevitably, huge amounts of discussion time are wasted, both internally and in the group’s external relations, justifying the choice to focus on Castoriadis. It should also be recognized, as is alluded to in the text, that a reference to Castoriadis of itself provides a group with no concrete guidance as to the adoption of any particular position. 71. See The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep) http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf, cited above, including the Anonymous Translator’s Foreword, which ties Castoriadis’s more recent “rising tide of insignificancy” theme to the older “socialism or barbarism” theme. And on the later theme, see David Ames Curtis, “Socialism or Barbarism: The Alternative Presented in the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis,” in Autonomie et autotransformation de la société. La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis, pp. 293-322. A Greek translation of this last text is to appear in the first issue of the Greek Autonomy or Barbarism group’s journal. 72. General Introduction, Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, p. 35.