Cornelius Castoriadis Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) was a French economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher. A member of the Trotskyist Inter nationalist Communist Party at the end of World War II (1939–1945), Castoriadis broke away from the Fourth International due to its defence of the Soviet Union in 1948. Castoriadis’s name is linked to the journal Socialism or Barbarism, which he cofounded with Claude Lefort. The journal was published between 1949 and 1965 and attracted activists and intellectuals such as Jean-François Lyotard. In those years, Castoriadis worked as an economist for the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, later to become the OECD) and often wrote under pseudonyms such as Paul Cardan and Pierre Chaulieu.

The main contribution of Socialism or Barbarism was its critique of the Soviet Union as a form of state bureaucratic capitalism and of traditional Marxism for its ideological stiffness in its reading of advanced capitalist and bureaucratic societies. The unorthodox antiauthoritarian Marxist critique (sustaining at times a view close to council communism) developed by the journal exercised a deep influence on the social movements of May 1968 in France. The common thread of Castoriadis’s political and intellectual life was indeed his unconditional defence of the project of autonomy.

The originality of Castoriadis’s thinking lies in the combination of a theory of autonomy with a radical view of the social imaginary. In 1970, Castoriadis left his position in the OECD. In 1974 he became a practicing psychoanalyst, and in 1979 he was elected Director of Studies at Paris’s École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

By autonomy, Castoriadis meant not only the possibility to give oneself one’s own law, but more radically, the possibility to be at the origin of what will be and to know oneself as such. The project of autonomy is very difficult to realize, both at the individual and at the social level, because every society tends to mythologize the fact of being self-produced by attributing its origins to extrasocial sources such as gods and heroes. When a society recognizes that it is responsible for its own origins, that society accepts the possibility of chaos. This is why almost all known societies are heteronymous societies—societies that attribute their origins to something other.

Drawing insights from psychoanalysis, Castoriadis argued that the psyche is monadic since it is pure representational, affective, or unintentional flux; indeterminate; and, in principle, unmasterable. It is only through a process of socialization beginning with the first encounters with language that a social individual is created. If it is true that no society could ever exist without the single concrete individuals that sustain it, it is equally true that no individual could exist outside of the imaginary significations of the society to which the individual has been socialized.

If the individual depends on the imaginary significations of society, then a full realization of the project of autonomy needs to be pursued at the social level. Although this is very difficult to accomplish, the possibility always remains for a society and for the individuals that compose it to radically question the imaginary significations in which they live. Imagination is radical because it is at the origin of reality itself, but also because it can always potentially question its own products. Among the known societies that have been able to attain such an ideal, Castoriadis looked to ancient Greece, to which he attributed both the discovery of philosophy and politics.

Bibliography:

Agora International. “Cornelius Castoriadis Agora International Website.” University of Michigan Library. www.agorainternational.org/.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.
The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987.
Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Political and Social Writings, vols. 1–3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988–1993.