Summer Session in Sweden

The Summer Session of NSU is something that can only be experienced - hardly described. The coming session will take place at Wiik Castle, south of Uppsala/north of Stockholm, July 22.-29. 2007 (Swedish-language info with photos here ). More than a hundred participants from eight study circles will be together for a whole week of academic work and - play; with families and without. (A few families were even said to have started here ... )
Keynote speakers: Hartmut Rosa, University of Jena/ The New School of Social Research New York, and Alenka Zupancic, Institute of philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia. This combination of critical sociology and psychoanalytical philosophy should be fertile ground for the first, Nordic crossdisciplinary session of Castoriadis studies.

Winter Symposium at Södertörn University College March 23.-25. 2007

The first Winter Symposium in the Nordic Castoriadis study circle will take place at Södertörn Högskola in Stockhom, Sweden, March 23.-25. 2007. More information on thematics/call for papers will follow.

The study circle is open for new participants of all ages and academic levels. Please forward this information and link up to the blog, write comments etc.!

the autonomy and heteronomy problematic

the two central motifs in cc's thought are autonomy and (self) creation. although the one is not subsumed by the other, sometimes he seems to hesitate at their points of overlap. on the other hand, cc's distinction between autonomy and heteronomy is starkly drawn (although there are implicit points of that relativize their dichotomy within his own thought). there have been two historical, albeit partial, breakthroughs to autonomy: in ancient greece and with the onset of modernity. i for one do not think it's very helpful to consign the rest of world history to heteronomy, but neither would i want to collapse the distinction altogether. i think it could be important to look for - and recognize - more oblique and partial forms of autonomy within contexts that have conventionally been designated as 'heteronomous'. if 'partial breakthroughs' to autonomy can be recognized in the graeco-western trajectory, why not in other civilizational constellations as well? do we need to think autonomy more from an inter-cultural perspective?