Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, sociologist, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie collective.
His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.
Biography
Early life in Athens
Cornelius Castoriadis was born on 11 March 1922 in Constantinople, the son of fabric merchant Kaisar and Sophia Kastoriadis, Papachela. His family had to move in July 1922 to Athens, the home of Castoriadis' mother, due to the Greco-Turkish War. Castoriadis developed an interest in politics after he came into contact with Marxist thought at the age of 13. At the same time, he began studying traditional philosophy after purchasing a copy of the book History of Philosophy by the historian of ideas Nikolaos Louvaris.Sometime between 1932 and 1935, Maximiani Portas was Castoriadis' French tutor. During the same period, he attended the 8th Gymnasium of Athens in Kato Patisia, from which he graduated in 1937 at age 15.
His first active involvement in politics occurred during the Metaxas Regime in 1937, when he joined the Athens Communist Youth, a section of the Young Communist League of Greece. In 1938, Castoriadis and fellow student Andreas Papandreou were arrested for leftist affiliations. In 1941, Castoriadis joined the Communist Party of Greece, only to leave one year later in order to become an active Trotskyist—at the time, he was under the influence of the Archeio-Marxist/Trotskyist revolutionary militant Agis Stinas who was the founder of KDKE, a party that rejected the Communist-led National Liberation Front and promoted revolutionary defeatism. The latter action resulted in his persecution by both the Germans and the Communist Party.
In 1937, he also enrolled in the School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences of the University of Athens, from which he graduated in 1942.
In early 1944, he wrote his first essays on social science and Max Weber, which he published in the journal Archive of Sociology and Ethics. The journal was initially headed by the sociologist Avrotelis Eleftheropoulos, but later by Castoriadis and his fellow law students Dimitrios Tsakonas and Mimika Kranaki.
Castoriadis heavily criticized the actions of the KKE during the December 1944 clashes between the communist-led ELAS on one side, and the Georgios Papandreou government aided by British troops on the other.
In December 1945, he boarded the RMS Mataroa, a New Zealand ocean liner, to go to Paris to continue his studies under a scholarship offered by the French Institute of Athens. The same voyage—organized by Octave Merlier—also brought from Greece to France a number of other Greek writers, artists and intellectuals, including Constantine Andreou, Kostas Axelos, Georges Candilis, Costa Coulentianos, Mimika Kranaki, Emmanuel Kriaras, Adonis A. Kyrou, Kostas Papaïoannou, Miltiadès Papamiltiadès, Virgile Solomonidis, and Nikos Svoronos.
In France, he was known to intimates as "Corneille".
Paris and the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency
Once in Paris, Castoriadis joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste. He and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French PCI in 1946. In August 1946, Castoriadis published his article "On the Regime and Against the Defense of the USSR", which addressed the "Russian question"—that is, the nature of Stalinist Russia—rejecting the Trotskyist characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. Castoriadis acknowledged that the October Revolution had degenerated, but this alone does not explain the structure of the new type of regime.In 1948, Castoriadis and Lefort experienced their final disenchantment with Trotskyism, leading them to break away to found the libertarian socialist and councilist group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, which included Jean-François Lyotard and Guy Debord as members for a while, and profoundly influenced the French intellectual left. Castoriadis had links with the group known as the Johnson–Forest Tendency until 1958. Strongly influenced by Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie was the British group Solidarity, led by Maurice Brinton.
Early philosophical research
In 1946, Castoriadis started attending philosophical and sociological courses at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Paris, where among his teachers were Gaston Bachelard, the epistemologist René Poirier, the historian of philosophy Henri Bréhier, Henri Gouhier, Jean Wahl, Gustave Guillaume, Albert Bayet, and Georges Davy. He submitted a proposal for a doctoral dissertation on mathematical logic to Poirier, but by 1948 he had abandoned the project. The working title of his unfinished thesis was Introduction à la logique axiomatique, with a complementary unfinished thesis: Introduction à la théorie des sciences sociales.Career as an economist
At the same time, he worked as an economist at the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation / Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development until 1970, which was also the year when he obtained French citizenship. His last position at the OECD was Director of Statistics, National Accounts, and Growth Studies.Political theorist
In his 1949 essay "The Relations of Production in Russia", Castoriadis developed a critique of the supposed socialist character of the government of the Soviet Union. According to Castoriadis, the central claim of the Stalinist regime at the time was that the mode of production in Russia was socialist, but the mode of distribution was not yet a socialist one since the socialist edification in the country had not yet been completed. However, according to Castoriadis' analysis, since the mode of distribution of the social product is inseparable from the mode of production, the claim that one can have control over distribution while not having control over production is meaningless.Castoriadis was particularly influential in the turn of the intellectual left during the 1950s against the Soviet Union, because he argued that the Soviet Union was not a communist but rather a bureaucratic capitalist state, which contrasted with Western powers mostly by virtue of its centralized power apparatus. His work in the OECD substantially helped his analyses. Castoriadis regarded the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as the first genuine uprising against bureaucratic regimes.
His reflections on organization within a militant framework led him to confront the irreducible element of creation that cannot be described or anticipated in advance. The most explicit articulation of these ideas appears in his article "Proletarian Leadership", where he argues that Marxist revolutionary practice is marked by a profound contradiction: on the one hand, it depends on a scientific understanding of social structures; on the other, its very possibility hinges on the inventive and transformative actions of countless individuals.
To prevent visa complications, his pre-1970 political writings were published under a pseudonym, as "Pierre Chaulieu" "Paul Cardan" or "Jean-Marc Coudray".
Later, Castoriadis reissued most of his Socialisme ou Barbarie texts in ten volumes through the 10/18 publishing house between 1973 and 1979.
Distancing from Marxism
In the latter years of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Castoriadis came to reject the Marxist theories of economics and of history, especially in an essay on "Modern Capitalism and Revolution", first published in Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1960–61. Castoriadis' final Socialisme ou Barbarie essay was "Marxism and Revolutionary Theory", published in April 1964 – June 1965. There he concluded that a revolutionary Marxist must choose either to remain Marxist or to remain revolutionary.Psychoanalyst
When Jacques Lacan's disputes with the International Psychoanalytical Association led to a split and the formation of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964, Castoriadis became a member.In 1968, Castoriadis married his second spouse, Piera Aulagnier, a French psychoanalyst who had undergone psychoanalytic treatment under Lacan from 1955 until 1961.
In 1969, Castoriadis and Aulagnier split from the EFP to join the Organisation psychanalytique de langue française, the so-called "Quatrième Groupe", a psychoanalytic group that claims to follow principles and methods that have opened up a third way between Lacanianism and the standards of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Castoriadis began to practice analysis in 1973 after he had undergone analysis in the 1960s, first with Irène Roubleff and then later with Michel Renard. In the early 1970s, he worked for a time with chronically psychotic patients at the Maison Blanche Psychiatric Hospital.
His psychoanalytic thought was developed in a Lacanian milieu but adopted a critical stance from the outset.
Philosopher of history and ontologist
In 1967, Castoriadis submitted a proposal for a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of history to Paul Ricœur. An epistolary dialogue began between them, but Ricœur's obligations to the University of Chicago in the 1970s were such that their collaboration was not feasible at the time. His thesis would be provisionally titled Le fondement imaginaire du social-historique.After the events of May 68, Castoriadis dedicated most of his time until 1971 to the study of the philosophy of language, while from 1971 to 1975 he worked as editor of the philosophy journal Textures and, later, took over as editor of the political journal Libre until 1980.
In his 1975 work L'Institution imaginaire de la société and in Les carrefours du labyrinthe, published in 1978, Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named in order to be recognized. Otherness emerges in part from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form to what Castoriadis terms the "magma of social significations" allows the psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mental indeterminacy and alterity.
For Castoriadis, self-examination could draw upon the resources of modern psychoanalysis. Autonomous individuals—the essence of an autonomous society—must continuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflection. He writes:
Castoriadis was not calling for every individual to undergo psychoanalysis per se. Rather, by reforming education and political systems, individuals would be increasingly capable of critical self- and social reflection. He offers: "if psychoanalytic practice has a political meaning, it is solely to the extent that it tries, as far as it possibly can, to render the individual autonomous, that is to say, lucid concerning her desire and concerning reality, and responsible for her acts: holding herself accountable for what she does."