Castoriadis Research Articles

Beyond a socio-centric concept of culture: Johann Arnason's macro-phenomenology and critique of sociological solipsism

This essay unpacks Johann Arnason’s theory of culture. It argues that the culture problematic remains the needle’s eye through which Arnason’s intellectual project must be understood, his recent shift to foreground the interplay of culture and power (as the religio-political nexus) notwithstanding. Arnason’s approach to culture is foundational to his articulation of the human condition, which is articulated here as the interaction of a historical cultural hermeneutics and a macro-phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon. The essay discusses Arnason’s elucidation of his theory of culture as a contribution to debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’. It traces its beginnings from his critique of Habermas’s theory of modernity to its development via a trialogue with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. It argues that Arnason's theory of culture moves beyond socio-centric perspectives, and, in so doing, offers a critique of what we might call sociological solipsism. In decentring society/anthropos, a more nuanced understanding of the human condition as a unity in diversity is achieved. The essay concludes with a discussion of some tensions in Arnason’s understanding of culture, and argues for the importance for incorporating a qualitative notion of ‘movement’ in order to make sense of historical novelty and social change.

Mapping the theme of Creativity in Cornelius Castoriadis’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginaries

This paper elucidates the notion that action is creative through the social imaginaries perspective. Hans Joas’s critique of sociological theories on action developed in The Creativity of Action (1996 [1992]) argued that creativity is an essential concept to better understand social action. Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur employ an understanding of action as being inextricably connected to the social imaginary and capable of bringing forth historically novel forms of being and doing. An elucidation of Castoriadis’s dichotomy between the instituted and instituting imaginaries and Ricoeur’s distinction of the ideological and utopian poles of the cultural imagination bring to the surface points of convergence and divergence in their respective understandings of the social imaginary and historical novelty. Inspired by Joas’s critique of sociological theories of action through pragmatism, which is underlined by a critique of the philosophical anthropological assumptions held by structuralism, this essay argues that Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s distinct insights on the creative dimension of social action and the way in which social reality emerges can elucidate further an anti-structuralist philosophical anthropology that can help inform sociological theories of action.

Freud: An Intellectual Biography by Joel Whitebook

Reviewed by: Freud: An Intellectual Biography by Joel Whitebook Richard Wheeler (bio) Freud: An Intellectual Biography. Joel Whitebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 497 pages. Philosophically trained psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook weaves an ambitious group of themes into his extended biography of Freud's intellectual development. The overarching purpose is aptly named in the first section of the introductory chapter, which Whitebook calls "Reappropriating Freud." A significant dimension of this reappropriation is deeply personal, reflecting Whitebook's return to a serious, comprehensive study of Freud's life and texts, decades after completing his psychoanalytic training. What Whitebook calls "Accounting for the 'Missing Mother'" is his primary theme. With it, he joins a search conducted over the past several decades by many analysts, feminists, and other scholars—some hostile, some friendly—in the developing field of Freud Studies, to come up with an understanding of the mother's part in a conceptual field originally centered on inevitable conflict with the father. He calls his "second theme" the "break with tradition," which involves both Freud's break with a tradition-based notion of truth that embraced the scientific world view of Enlightenment thought, as well as the break with positivist rationality that became a key exponent of the "dark enlightenment." Woven into the exploration of these themes are Whitebook's effort to locate Freud within the larger development of intellectual culture, to explore Freud's relation to the problems that have long occupied major philosophical strains of (mostly) western thought, and to account for the shift in the "hermeneutical horizon" that led him to the vantage points pursued in this book. I will focus here on the central "missing mother" strand. A key question the book explores could be put something like this: how should we understand Freud (the man and his work) in relation to what is often called the pre-oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the self's emergence as an individual from the merged state of the infant/mother and the importance of that experience for ongoing life? In his exploration of this theme, Whitebook is generous in acknowledging the intellectual debts he ran up in the wide [End Page 131] reading behind this book. Whitebook's point of view is shaped by analysts who pioneered and nurtured this pre-oedipal turn (e.g., Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Otto Kernberg, Hans Kohut, to name a few), feminists and queer theorists from outside analytic practice (Madelon Sprengnether in particular), analysts who brought feminism into their thinking and practice (e.g., Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow), philosophers from Heraclitus to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Ricouer, and other analysts deeply grounded in philosophy, particularly Cornelius Castoriadis. Especially important in shaping the central idea of this book, however, is the distinction that Hans Loewald made between the "official" and the "unofficial" Freud: In what the philosophically trained [he studied with Heidigger] psychoanalyst Hans Loewald calls his "official" doctrine, Freud focused almost exclusively on the figure of the father and maintained that the Oedipus complex was the "nuclear complex" not only of neurosis but also of civilization. (Whitebook, 2017, p. 2) The mother, Whitebook writes, may seem "largely absent" in the official Freud, but "her absence is itself a presence […] The early mother is in fact at the center of what [Loewald] refers to as Freud's 'unofficial' position, and it will be our task to draw her out" (p. 2). That is possible, Whitebook writes, because although Freud "split off" from his own psychic life, and from the main emphasis of his thinking, the traces of the mother's contributions to his own development, those "disavowed and dissociated regions of the mind appear in his 'unofficial' position, and, following Loewald, it will be our job to ferret them out, analyze them, and assess the ramifications for psychoanalytic theory" (p. 10). In order to draw the mother out in this project, White-book must explore what the biographical record tells us about Freud's earliest relation to his mother and must identify in Freud's later life what is best explained by the heritage of pre-oedipal experience. He must also clarify a dynamic in which Freud's development of psychoanalytic...

As redes sociotecnológicas e a operação do imaginário instituinte

Resumo O estudo discute as maneiras pelas quais as redes sociotecnológicas expressam a conjugação de legein e de teukhein, conforme esses termos são concebidos por Castoriadis para designar dimensões do imaginário instituinte. Trata-se de uma reflexão teórica desenvolvida com o objetivo de qualificar as referidas redes como processos do imaginário social. A relevância da discussão reside no tratamento epistemológico inusual das redes sociotecnológicas,abordadas como elementos constituintes dos processos de criação e instituição do social. O procedimento metodológico consistiu na interpretação dos conceitos de legein e de teukhein, aplicados a configurações da comunicação tecnológica mediática, engendrada pelo imaginário de época. O resultado traduziu-se na caracterização das redes sociotecnológicas como expressões do imaginário atinente ao terceiro espírito do capitalismo, segundo perspectiva de Boltanski e Chiapello.

Window into chaos

This is the first English translation of a remarkable two-part lecture given by Cornelius Castoriadis at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in January 1992. The lecture features within a series on social transformation and the task of creative forms of labour. In this installment Castoriadis explores the significance of art through a creative reading of Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy in the Poetics. He rejects Aristotle's dependence on the mimetic tradition in search for a vision of art as the unveiling of the creative resources that lie within the human being. Yet he retains Aristotle's vivid depiction of art as a form of production that is at once cognitive, emotive and social. Art, for Castoriadis, affects a transformation on the level of imagination that opens us anew to the fundamental questions of human being and doing. Through his extensive knowledge of western forms of artistic production Castoriadis draws lucid connections between Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, Hegel, Greek sculpture, renaissance painting, modern literature and folk music to explore the work of art as a ‘window into chaos’, a creative production that gives form to what cannot be formed: the ground of creativity at the heart of the imagination.

Cornelius Castoriadis on the Scope and Content of Neoclassical and Marxian Economics

:The paper presents the thought of the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on economic methodology and the neoclassical and Marxian traditions. Castoriadis suggested that the scope of economic theory includes the identification of “local” regularities and not the search for invariant “laws.” He criticized the use of equilibrium and the utilitarian framework in the neoclassical tradition and proposed to approach human agency based on the Aristotelian concept of the “social individual.” In addition, he criticized the deterministic nature of the Marxian “laws.” According to Castoriadis, the use of concepts such as the “production function” and “capital” presents a number of caveats.

Castoriadis versus Michels

Throughout his life, Cornelius Castoriadis displayed an unwavering commitment to democracy. He militated for it and developed concepts to elucidate its significance for human freedom. Yet are the concepts Castoriadis developed enough to explain the depth of his aforementioned commitment? In this essay, I try to imagine how Castoriadis would have addressed Roberto Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ thesis. I find that Castoriadis’s concepts can help us question the normative value Michels assigned to oligarchy, but they fail to explain how he could have remained so committed to democracy when oligarchy seems ineluctable. Such a commitment, I argue, ultimately rests on an existential decision, the roots of which cannot be rationally explained.

ANOTAÇÕES SOBRE O PROBLEMA DA IMAGINAÇÃO NA FILOSOFIA DE IMMANUEL KANT

In this article we deal with the problem of imagination from Immanuel Kant’s selected texts. This is a comparative analysis between two pre-critical essays and the two first editions of the Critique of Pure Reason which were published by the philosopher. We discussed the different approaches and comprehensions about the concept of imagination and its activities in the texts above, by making a debate with two philosophers (Cornelius Castoriadis and Roger Verneaux). We also discussed about the philosophical stance and attitude that they are observed in Kant's works, which are in according to the history of Philosophy in the West. Through this discussion, we elaborated a comprehensive diagram about the problem of the imagination that it denies some dichotomy in order to admit the constitutive duplicity of the imagination and it also recognizes the imaginative activity in the scopes of knowledge, aesthetic and politics.

Cornelius Castoriadis on institutions: a proposal for a schema of institutional change

The paper presents the thought of the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on institutions and argues that his insights contribute significantly to the development of a theory of institutions and institutional change which moves beyond the neoclassical framework. Stylised facts of historical experience such as strong path-dependence and lock-in effects and the diversity of observed institutional forms are explained naturally in his proposed framework. In addition, a schema for institutional change is suggested, which accommodates a number of other strands in the literature as special cases. This schema could be elaborated in various directions and facilitates structuring the further development of an alternative institutional theory.

S. Adams, Ricoeur and Castoriadis in discussion

S. Adams, Ricoeur and Castoriadis in discussion

From collective representations to social imaginaries: How society represents itself to itself

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to reconsider the relevance of Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the social imaginary as a way of re-invigorating the study of ‘collective representations’ within the social sciences. The paper begins with a review of how social thought has been understood, from Durkheim's writing on collective representations onwards. A case is made for the utility of Castoriadis’ concept of social imaginary significations in restoring their centrality within the social sciences. In contrast to viewing social thought as ‘super-structural’ ideology, or as a constellation of social attitudes and opinions commonly shared, Castoriadis’ view of social imaginary significations articulates a view of social representations as under-determined by, though never articulated without reference to, social morphology. However the imaginative capacity of individuals and society to generate this surplus of signifiers is understood, Castoriadis’ thinking allies the study of social imaginary significations with the study of social morphology without reducing either to mere representations of the other. What is needed now is a methodology suited to the empirical exploration of the network of significations that constitute the ‘imaginary institution of society’.

Una interpretación del proyecto revolucionario de Cornelius Castoriadis frente a la crisis económica: Autonomía, Política y Democracia

La crisis económica de la última década ha dejado al descubierto una crisis social profunda que refleja el progresivo desarraigo del individuo respecto de la sociedad, posibilitando el surgimiento de alternativas sociales que sacrifican la libertad a cambio de seguridad. Este artículo presenta una interpretación del proyecto revolucionario de Cornelius Castoriadis como una alternativa a la democracia liberal actual, capaz de hacer frente a la crisis social al situar a la propia sociedad como elemento central en su propia construcción. El surgimiento de un individuo lúcido y reflexivo capaz de desarrollar una acción política consciente, permite avanzar hacia la autonomía individual y social, construyendo un régimen democrático que implica la combinación de libertad e igualdad

Neo-liberalism and other political imaginaries

This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations are already constituted by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The article proceeds as follows: the first two sections discuss varieties of political culture and how, despite seeming natural, they are actually products of underlying political imaginaries. Then I explain the concept of political imaginary and how the current reigning imaginary of neo-liberalism curiously undercuts the practice of politics itself. Under neo-liberalism, market solutions are seen as superior to political ones. Yet now even at the time of this writing, there is a backlash against neo-liberalism: from the right in a search for an older order (which is still anti-political) and from the left for more public power on the streets. While the latter is, in my view, far better than the former, it still does not go far enough in imagining politics and power otherwise. In the final section I draw on Castoriadis to flesh out the idea of a radical political imaginary.

5. El Imaginario Social: reflexión con Cornelius Castoriadis

Este artículo es un ensayo que tiene porobjetivo presentar una reflexión acerca de laelucidación del filósofo Cornelius Castoriadissobre el individuo y la sociedad desde laperspectiva del imaginario social.Metodológicamente, la reflexión fue posibledesdela hermeneúsis como procedimiento mental y laexegesis dio sentido a la elucidación desarrollada.La sistematizacióndeesas ideas permitióinterpretary comprender la estrecha relación entre loimaginario y la praxis social que elaboran losindividuos mediante sus acciones. El imaginariode un conjunto humano, entonces, alude a unaficción vivida por él y no a un espacio ideal, demera ficción o a un ámbito mental creado por undiscurso oficial. Para llegar a esta conclusión, separte de la empiria como forma de construccióndel mundo por parte de los seres sociales y sepone en entredicho las posturas occidentalestradicionales en torno al estudio de las sociedades.

Ontological Anti-naturalism and the Emergence of Life and Mind: Castoriadis and Deacon

ABSTRACTThis essay compares the ideas of Cornelius Castoriadis and Terrence W. Deacon. Castoriadis’s anti-Naturalistic ontology, with its conception of radical ontological creation and fundamental indeterminacy, along with his analysis of the category of the “for-itself”, comprising all subjective beings from the living organism to the social-historical, is compared to Deacon’s exploration of the emergence of life and mind, which sees the emergence of teleological beings as resulting from the creation of form-generating constraints that involve new types of dynamic process. Significant parallels and convergences between Castoriadis and Deacon are uncovered and explored.

Espaciologia: Uma Objeção

The present work aims at analyzing one particular outcome of the traditional logics/onthology with its problems and de formations, the social space autonomization, and, in special, the tendency named spatiology. Starting from the radical premise that according to the fundamental theoretical contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis, the marxist theory - general philosophical/methodological basis of "spatiology" and of its interlocutors - is, in a radical analysis, a tributary of those logics and anthology, the present essay seeks to contribute for the construction of a revolutionary - non fragmentary, authentically dialetical - approach to the Social reality. Under this view, or on introductory level, the question of spatial autonomization is contextualized, and the formalistic problematic in the social studies sphere is present ed and discussed.

Ontological Issues and the Possible Development of Cultural Psychology

Ontological issues have a bad reputation within mainstream psychology. This paper, however, is an attempt to argue that ontological reflection may play an important role in the development of cultural psychology. A cross-reading of two recent papers on the subject (Mammen & Mironenko, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 49(4), 681-713, 2015; Simão Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50, 568-585, 2016), aimed at characterizing their respective approaches to ontological issues, sets the stage for a presentation of Cornelius Castoriadis' ontological reflections. On this basis, a dialogue is initiated with E.E. Boesch's Symbolic Activity Theory that could contribute to a more refined understanding of human psychological functioning in its full complexity.

Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State, edited by Hans Steinmüller and Susanne Brandtstädter. London: Routledge, 2016. xvii+193 pp. £90.00 (cloth).

<i>Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State</i>, edited by Hans Steinmüller and Susanne Brandtstädter. London: Routledge, 2016. xvii+193 pp. £90.00 (cloth).

Aesthetic Imaginary: Rethinking the "Comparative"

My coinage of the term 'aesthetic imaginary' follows the line of a few thinkers in a field that I would like to call 'imaginary studies': Cornelius Castoriadis’s social imaginary, Michele Le Dœuff’s philosophical imaginary, and Marguerite La Caze’s analytical imaginary. The space and the opportunity here do not grant me much room to explain what the different kinds of imaginary mean and potentially imply, and also descant on the points of engagement that aesthetic imaginary might have with them; this is something that I shall undertake to accomplish elsewhere. However, within the spatial restrictions of this paper, I will try to bring out the nature and philosophy of my proposition and expand on the intricacies that aesthetic imaginary produces in our understanding of the notion of the 'comparative.'

Time in the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis

We can locate the problematic of time within three philosophical questions, which respectively designate three central areas of philosophical reflection and contemplation. These are: 1) The ontological question, i.e. 'what is being?' 2) The epistemological question, i.e. 'what can we know with certainty?' 3) The existential question, i.e. 'what is the meaning of existence?' These three questions, which are philosophical, but also scientific and political, as they underline the political and moral question of truth and justice, arising from the phenomenon of time, the irreversible constant flow of phenomena that undermines every claim to absolute knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the importance of time for philosophical thought and, more generally, for human social and psychical life, in the context of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis, who asserted that “being is time – and not in the horizon of time”, correlated history to society and being to temporality within the social-historical stratum, the ontological plane created by human existence, where “existence is signification”. Time is interpreted as the creation and destruction of forms in a magmatic, layered with a non-regular stratification, reality, where the social-historical manifests as the creation of collective human activity, in the manner of social imaginary significations. This notion of temporality is accompanied by a profound criticism of traditional rationalistic philosophy, to which Castoriadis assigns the name ‘ensemblistic/identitary’, that highlights the necessity of a new, magmatic ontology, based on the primacy of time. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00023.1