Castoriadis blog

2009-09-20T02:59:00.003+02:00

NSU network group - the end and some new beginnings

2009-08-06T10:05:00.003+02:00

This blog started out as a forum for the network group Creation, Rationality and Autonomy in the academic network Nordic Summer University. This group has now come to an end, with a very successful summer session at Tyrifjord, Norway. The group was the biggest of all, counting 20 + persons from ca. 10 nationalities, presenting 13 papers - quite a feat, since the group has concentrated on just one philosopher over the past three years: Cornelius Castoriadis.

Now, in the aftermath of the past three years, many participants in the symposia and sessions wish to maintain the network in some - preferably more than one - form. In the short perspective, there will be one or anthologies published with some of the papers. The Norwegian think-tank Res Publica has expressed an interest in making one such publication, the NSU will hopefully provide the means for one more.

On the new Castoriadis Book

2009-05-21T14:33:00.003+02:00

If people find it hard to find the money to buy my new book on Castoriadis(which I can fully understand - it certainly is steep), but would be willing to buy a paperback edition of it, can I suggest that you send an email to Brill telling them that you would love to buy it if it were in paperback. That way they will know there is a demand for it. I am just afraid that if no one buys the hardback because of the price they won't do a paperback edition.

New Book On Castoriadis Published

2009-05-20T06:51:00.001+02:00

Dear Friends,

I wanted to let you all know that my book has now been published. I received my copies of the book today and it looks great. 'Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy' (with a foreword by Dick Howard) can now be ordered from the Brill website , from Amazon , or any of a number of other sites, or through your friendly local bookseller. Please get yourself a copy (and ask your library to buy one too). I will be glad to receive any feedback from you once you have read it.

Jeff Klooger

Castoriadis, Foucault, Deleuze and Others?

2009-04-06T00:14:00.003+02:00

I have been invited to be a respondent to a paper that is to be presented at Congress in Ottawa, Canada. The session titled Foucault and the Sciences of the Soul. One of the papers is a comparison of Foucault and Castoriadis [2]. Although I'm hardly an expert on either Castoriadis or Foucault I have a much better grasp on the former and no clear idea how the two might relate.

However, I have been thinking about Castoriadis as a figure of 'contemporary French philosophy.' Generally, that term is meant to include Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard.... As more people become aware of Castoriadis's work his name seems to be appearing in the lists of such figures, often improperly identified as a postmodernist or a poststructuralist. Do the readers of this blog believe that there is much, if any, common ground between Castoriadis and these theorists or others of the era? If so, who, which concepts or ideas, and why? Further, why were Castoriadis's few mentions of his contemporaries largely dismissive?[1]

My limited familiarity with Deleuze makes me believe that there are many conceptual crossovers with Castoriadis. Given that both Deleuze and Castoriadis moved at the fringes of the Lacanian movement and ultimately rejected Lacan would seem to be one important commonality. I recently asked David Curtis why Castoriadis never made reference to Deleuze, when it seemed he must be familiar with him. Curtis directed me to a footnote in the book On Plato's 'Statesman'. The footnote accompanies a remark in the translator's afterword (written by Curtis) about what was to become of Castoriadis's unpublished writings. Castoriadis said they were not to be published as he didn't want his unfinished works to become someone else's fashionable book. The footnote reads:

The name he cited, seemingly out of the blue, was Gilles Deleuze's. Only later did I form the hypothesis that Castoriadis may have felt that Deleuze/Guattari's book on capitalism and schizophrenia may have taken over, without attribution or the same depth of revolutionary purpose, his own ideas on the contradictory nature of capitalism, which simultaneously excludes worker's participation and solicits it.

I asked Curtis if he is familiar with Deleuze's work and if he thought this to be a fair belief on Castoriadis's part, if indeed it was his belief, given that this is a supposition by Curtis, and he notes he never followed up on Castoriadis's remark. Curtis provided another couple anecdotes that seemed to demonstrate that Castoriadis had little regard for Deleuze or Guattari.

Reading 'Movement of the Sixties,' I cannot help but notice the absence of Deleuze and Guattari from Castoriadis's assessment of how off-base more post-68 theorising about the month long uprising is. If there were any two thinkers who may have carried the mantle Pensée '68, it would seem to be them with their best-selling Anti-Oedipus, although they certainly weren't claiming that '68 somehow represented an individualist turn, which is the position that Castoriadis challenges in the article. I cannot help but think that one of the few thinkers acknowledged as having influenced the actions of '68 - although not under his own name, as he wasn't a citizen at the time - wouldn't be bitter that others would, after the fact, see their theories rise the charts, in part on an attempt to understand the event. I wouldn't blame Castoriadis if he were, but at the same time, I'm not prepared to psychoanalyse him.

If a suspicious attitude toward his contemporaries was one of Castoriadis's 'oedipuses,' then it's up to us to surpass them and determine if there are those among this group that may usefully inform Castoriadis and the project of autonomy, or who would be especially dismantled by having his concepts and analysis brought to bear on their theories. I'd like to hear the thoughts of others on this issue. I'm including the abstract for the paper I'm to respond to below (see [2]).

Thanks,
Troy

[1] Many of my friends make great use of Foucault, so I took much notice of the few times Castoriadis makes mention of him. He clearly did not think highly of the man. In 'State of the Subject Today' he lots him in with the structuralists, whom he takes apart (WIF, p. 144). In 'Movement of the Sixties,' he takes an unsubstantiated swipe at him: "Foucault did not hide his reactionary positions until 1968, although he spoke less, it is true, of the way in which he put them into practice during a students' strike in 1965 at Clermont-Ferrand" (WIP, p. 51). In 'The Retreat from Autonomy' Foucault feels the full weight of Castoriadis's derision for his claim that from Kant onward, philosophers makes no longitudinal value judgment, but merely thinks in "sagittal relation to their own actuality" (quoted in WIP, p. 34). As it is this exact notion of philosophy that Castoriadis is refuting in this essay, he clearly regards Foucault as an intellectual 'enemy.'

[2] This is the abstract for the paper. If you have any comments or things you think I should consider in my response, please email me at dtc[at]yorku.ca:
“Foucault with Castoriadis: transformative processes from ‘psyche’ to‘subjectivity’”

The paper will focus on Foucault’s analyses of processes of subjectivization and self-subjectivization, and will link these to Castoriadis’s analyses of the “social imaginary” and its relation to “psyche” (as the representative, affective, and intentional fluxes), “individuality,” and “subjectivity.”

Relying particularly on L’Herméneutique du Sujet and Le Courage de la Vérité: le Gouvernment de Soi et des Autres II, the paper will study Michel Foucault’s late focus on bios as a process of living constitutive of an indeterminate and constantly changing “self” subjectivized through discursive and non-discursive social practices—where the transcription of power relations reflects various forms of governmentality and different relations and effects—as well as through processes of self-subjectivization, such as those associated with parrhesia.

The possibility of an indeterminate “self” has been elaborated in similar ways by Cornelius Castoriadis, particularly in L’Institution Imaginaire de La Société and Sujet et Vérité Dans le Monde Social-Hisotrique. Castoriadis relies not on the “social imaginary,” but on (the ensidic representations of) legein (social saying or representing) and teukhein (social doing or practicing) to socialize, acculturate, and subjectivize “psyche”—from “radical imaginary” to “individual” then “subject.”

Both philosophers highlight a social and political ontology relying on multiplicity, becoming, and indeterminacy, and while they have different analyses, they both highlight something inherently irreducible in their ontology of (self-)transformation—where fluxes or processes constantly interact with contingencies becoming necessity. Their contribution to the “Sciences of the Soul” is first and foremost methodological: the methods, as well as the objects of study, of these sciences need to be able to account for processes in their singularity and multifarious forces and to study indeterminate sites of transformation.

Call for papers: The Modern Problematique - Transformations and Tensions, Openings and Closures

2009-04-02T15:01:00.013+02:00

THE NORDIC SUMMER UNIVERSITY'S SUMMER SESSION 2009
Tyrifjord, Norway July 19 - 26
Key note speakers: Peter Wagner and Steven Shaviro

Modernity: one or many?
Modernity has traditionally been thought as one phenomenon – a break with traditional society, or a development there from (cf. Durkheim, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Weber). Over the past decades, however, scholars have voiced concerns about this agreed unity. Modernity conceived as a unity is, in many ways, a Western idea, carrying the sigils of the hegemon. An alternative would be to regard modernity as a multiple, or as a successive phenomena (Eisenstadt, Arnason, Wagner). Modernities take diverse forms in both space and time.

What is modern society?
In order to discuss modernity, we need a conception of society. Cornelius Castoriadis has an original take on what a society his. To him, society is first and foremost described in terms of imaginary significations.

To understand a society, then, means to understand its social imaginary significations, and the meaning they embody. The central social imaginary significations in modernity are, to him, "rational mastery" and "autonomy". These significations contradict each other, but at the same time, provide support for each other. Socialization in Western societies, then, means to invest emotional energy – belief, meaning, secondary values – in these significations.

In response to the emergence of a modern society, a social philosophy and a social science arose, which aimed at understanding the ongoing transition from “traditional” to “modern” societ[b]y[/b] and the many social problems (anomie, alienation, disenchantment, inequality, exclusion, etc.) based in this groundbreaking social transformation. The distinction between “tradition” and “modernity” became fundamental. Many contemporary scholars, however, are convinced that such a distinction is not sufficient to capture the basic social conditions of the present. The distinction implicates that the last, major transformation of Western societies occurred more than a hundred years ago, and that social change since then is only about gradual transitions. This assumption - which has been very influential not only in academic thought, but also in politics and everyday life during the 20th century - sits under the heading of “modernization theory”. The idea is that that more and more institutions, individuals and communities are turning more and more modern; i.e. social change is unilaterally interpreted as the realization of modernity.

Contemporary sociologists now suggest that recent transformations of social institutions, and of cognitive and normative convictions, are so fundamental that the history of modern societies itself must be divided into different epochs.

One, two, many modernities
Distinctions between “early” and “late” (or “high”) modernity, modern and “postmodern” society, “first” and “second modernity”, “solid” and “liquid” modernity have become widespread (cf. Lyotard, Giddens, Sennett, Beck and Bauman).

Recent theories of “successive modernities” claim that there has been two epochs in the history modern societies, and that a third one is in the process of being established (Peter Wagner, Luc Boltanski/Eve Chiapello and Johann Arnason). Peter Wagner describes – in an ideal typical sense - three epochs of modernity: The first one is liberal-bourgeois in character and restricts modernity only to certain segments of the population. This epoch is replaced by a bureaucratic-administrative model, which is more inclusive. The third epoch, which Wagner mentions, is called an “extended liberal modernity”, but it remains undeveloped in his work. Others, like Beck, Bauman and Sennett, divides modernity in only two epochs, but describe certain aspects of the present epoch more in detail than Wagner. Chiapello and Boltanski speak about three “spirits of capitalism”. They do not focus on the institution of capitalism, but – relating back to Max Weber – on the spirit of capitalism. This means that justifications, critiques (social and artistic) and discourses of capitalism are central in their analysis of the transformation. Secondly, they conduct an analysis of discourses in order to capture this transformation. Management literature is their empirical object of research. A political theory of successive modernities can also be developed. Historically, T.H Marshall’s well-known theory of citizenship and its transformation can here be of some relevance. The transformation from civil rights to social rights captures an important part of the transition from a first to a second epoch of modern democracy. The concept “service democracy” has been used by others to capture this later epoch. The citizen turns into a client, while the state and administration - guided by experts - guarantee the constant supply of resources. Today, however, there are clear indications that service democracy is loosing legitimacy.

Society without meaning?
Since modernity's beginning, there has been a struggle for and tensions between the strive for autonomy and rational mastery. The situation today, however, seem more ambiguous than ever. In many spheres of social life we can notice a certain significational void, a state of limbo, where meaning no longer makes sense. In Castoriadis' view, two tendencies can be identified: A lack of investment in past significations (the tradition), and a lack of investment in new ones. Perhaps what we see today is a second crisis of modernity, where a third kind of modernity is developing, or we are finally leaving modernity and its significations alltogether.

Yet, there seems to be a certain contradiction between this diagnosis – generalized conformism and insignificance – and his former sociological thesis, which said that a society exists insofar and through collective investment in certain significations. And correspondingly, that a society ceases to exist as society the minute its members no longer believe in the core significations which hold that society together.

Does this mean that Westerners do not live in a society? Or is "insignificance" in itself a signification? A very strong, dominant one, which trumps all tendencies or attempts to muster political and social action? A cynicism that makes all effort and qualitative investments laughable?

Peter Wagner’s ground breaking work, A Sociology of Modernity, identified two main themes of modernity: liberty and discipline. His latest book, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation, explores the modern problematique throughout Western history. One implication of his perspective is that modernity is - are - phenomenons to be interpreted and problematized, in multiple ways.

The Nordic Summer University invites papers that explore these and related questions from various perspectives, like political philosophy, history, sociology, art and more.

Please send abstract to
ingerids2(a)yahoo.no

Literature:
Arnason, J. P. (1989) “The imaginary constitution of modernity”, in G Busino et al., Autonomie et transformation de la société Geneva: Dorz
Arnason, J. P. 2005. "Alternating Modernities: The Case of Czechoslovakia." European Journal of Social Theory 8:435-51
Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, É. (2005): The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso.
Carleheden, M. 2006. "The transformation of our conduct of life: One aspect of the three epochs of Western modernity." Distinktion 55-75
Castoriadis, Cornelius (2007): Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford, Stanford University Press
Castoriadis, Cornelius (2005): Une société à la derive. Entretiens et débats. Paris, Seuil
Castoriadis (2004): Post-scriptum sur l’insignifiance. Entretiens avec Daniel Mermet. Paris, Éditions de l’aube
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1999): Dialogue. Paris, Èditions de l’aube
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1998): The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MIT Press
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997): World in Fragments. Writings on Politics, Society,
Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. Stanford, Stanford University Press
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1996): La monté de l’insignifiance, Les Carrefours du labyrinthe IV. Paris, Seuil
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1995): Filosofi, politik, autonomi. Stockholm/Stehag, Brutus Östling
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1991): Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Essays in Political
Philosophy. New York, Oxford University Press
Eisenstadt, S. 2002. Multiple modernities. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Habermas, J. (1990): Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am main. Suhrkamp
Habermas, J. (1992): Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Sennett, R. (2006): The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven: Yale UP.
Wagner, P. (1994): A sociology of modernity: liberty and discipline. London: Routledge.
Wagner, P. (2008): Modernity as experience and interpretation: A new sociology of modernity. Cambridge Polity Press

Thesis Eleven, free sample

2009-02-24T21:30:00.001+01:00

Dear All,
Perhaps you will be interested to know, that Thesis Eleven now for some time generously has made Peter Murphy's and my special issue on self-organization (2007; 88:1) and creativity - including Castoriadis - a free sample.
Please go to: http://the.sagepub.com/content/vol88/issue1/
All the best, Anders Michelsen

How creativity is killed

2009-02-05T21:54:00.004+01:00

Here is a wonderful talk on creativity, art, children and the imagination. And how our educational system kills creativity.
IS

2009-01-24T20:16:00.000+01:00

Castoriadis and economic theory

2008-12-17T11:22:00.003+01:00

Hello,

I just joined academia.edu and added Castoriadis as a sub-topic under philosophy. I'm pretty lonely there right now.

I wanted to turn people's attention to the political economic work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (bnarchives.yorku.ca). They have made some use of Castoriadis in their new theory of capital.

There is now a discussion group based on their theory (http://www.yorku.ca/cmass/forum/index.php). I have posted two papers I wrote on Castoriadis. One is linking Castoriadis and Veblen in more deeply explicating how the pair relate to N&B's 'power theory of capital.' The other is using Castoriadis to critique a little discussed, but vital (and ridiculous) component of neoclassical economics, the representative agent.

I hope others who work with Castoriadis will consider the work of N&B as an alternative to Marx's labour theory of value and capital.

Thanks,
Troy Cochrane

Castoriadis and Derrida

2008-12-14T10:34:00.003+01:00

I have been invited to write a chapter on Castoriadis and the imaginary for an anthology on postmodern thinking in pedagogy. This is of course a challenge, but an interesting one. First of all, I do not want to miss an opportunity to present Castoriadis' thought in my own part of the world (Norway), but more substantially, it is interesting to investigate in what sense he worked on the same issues as his postmodern contemporaries, though his approach and "answers" were quite different.

Right now I would like some advice on the following: Castoriadis taught at École des Hauted Études en Sciences Sociales from 1981 (starting there in 1980). Was Derrida already teaching there at that time? Did they acknowledge each other at all? In my view, they were concerned with many of the same questions, such as the relationship between language and meaning, ontology and more. If anyone wants to share some reflections on the (non-)relationship between the two, it would be most interesting.

Thanks!

Ingerid S.

Athens Symposium

2008-12-02T16:37:00.003+01:00

The Nordic Summer University's Winter Symposium in Athens, March 27-29, has received several interesting abstracts that can be viewed here.

Videos on democracy and integration

2008-12-02T16:30:00.004+01:00

Dominique Bouchet just released 5½ hours of video material about integration and democracy, inspired by Castoriadis, Morin, Lefort, and more. This material is available on the net and on 2 DVDs. See this webpage (language: Danish). Please feel free to pass this information to people who might be interested. Dominique Bouchet is also planning Spanish, French and English versions… Let’s see ..

Nordic Summer University: Winter Symposium in Athens, March 27-29, 2009

2008-11-08T16:46:00.010+01:00

The Ancient Greek and the Modern Western Imaginary

From the late 70’s Cornelius Castoriadis turned towards a deeper study of ancient Greek philosophy and culture. His seminars at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, held from 1980 to 1995, were in the first years devoted to the Greek imaginary and its creations. Recently, these seminars have been published in French, and partly translated into Greek. His theme was the emergence, in ancient Greece, of social imaginary significations that enabled societies to question their own institutions, and the co-emergence, out of that questioning, of philosophy and politics. Furthermore, connected to the political "project of autonomy" were the institutions of polis and democracy. Some points in Castoriadis's account are worth highlighting, as they open up a series of interesting questions.

First, he traces the origins of the signification of autonomy in Greek mythology and religion, as conveyed by poetry and the first cosmological and anthropological conceptions of the world. This calls for studies of the central role of mythology, religion and culture, and also of education or paideia in the formation of the imaginary world of society. Secondly, he argues that the signification of autonomy emerged within a mythological and, in Castoriadis’s judgment, deeply true conception of the world as a fundamentally undetermined Chaos. Any emergence of order (cosmos), according to that conception, is arbitrary, limited in time and deemed to destruction; something that is equally valid for gods and human beings, their societies and their institutions. This in turn opens up the question about the impact of the ontological conception of the world, as a source of social meaning, upon the thought and the institutional practices of society.

Thirdly, he locates the failure of democracy in ancient Greece in its de facto incapability of self-limitation, defining in that way self-limitation as one of the major principles of democracy. This opens up questions about the sources of self-limitation of democracy, as a kind of guarantee against its own self-destruction. Finally, he makes the interpretation that Plato’s hostility and in fact hate against democracy, which impregnate the whole of his work, was mainly built upon a conviction that the failure of democracy is immanent to its nature, and was due to the inherent inability of the uneducated mob to self-limit itself. Hence his effort to find an extra-social and extra-historical source of limitation of society. This endeavour also runs through the philosophical and political thought of modernity, raising a series of questions about the ambivalent and often hostile relation between democracy and (academic) philosophy.

The imaginary signification of autonomy, according to Castoriadis, re-emerged once again in Western Europe, but its historical trajectory has been shaped by some other significations that distinguish the modern Western imaginary from the ancient one. First, it re-emerged within a reductionist conception of the world as a determined differentiation of a unity. This conception runs through the most dominant strands of Western philosophy and also underlies its two major ideologies, liberalism and socialism, which effectively define freedom as recognition of necessity. This opens up a series of questions regarding the relations between a reductionist conception of the world and the project of autonomy, and regarding also the historical impact of the two Western ideologies and the social movements that they have inspired upon the historical trajectory of the project of autonomy. Second, the signification of autonomy re-emerged in West together with another central imaginary signification, namely the signification of the unlimited expansion of “rational mastery”, which underlies the political and economic institutions of capitalism. This raises a series of questions about the relations between the project of autonomy and the economic institutions of society. Finally, Castoriadis makes the diagnoses that during the last four or five decades we experience in Western societies a retreat from autonomy and a concomitant increasing domination and globalization of the signification of “rational master”. This raises questions about the contemporary state of the project of autonomy, the conditions of possibility of its restoration in the social and political scene and of its globalization.

We call for papers that aim to contribute to the elucidation of the following areas, related to the above questions, or of other related areas, such as:

• The emergence and the historical trajectory of the imaginary signification of autonomy in the thought, the institutional practices and in the cultural creations of the ancient Greece and the modern Western world.
• The state of the project of autonomy and the conditions of its possibility and its globalization in the contemporary world.
• Comparisons and cross-fertilizations with the work of other researchers related to the above areas.

Please send a short abstract to ingerid.straume(a)hihm.no by December 1st

Academic Tree

2008-10-29T12:56:00.003+01:00

Have you heard about academia.edu ? It is a great big network of academics all over the world (where else?) where everyone get their own homepage, can upload papers, search for colleagues etc. Looks great to mee. Perhaps a good place for a network in Castoriadis studies?
IS

Forthcoming Book on Castoriadis

2008-10-16T10:51:00.001+02:00

I thought people might be interested to know that a book I have written about Castoriadis’ work is scheduled to be published in 2009 by Brill as part of their Social and Critical Theory series. The title will be Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy.

This will be the first monograph in English dedicated entirely to a consideration of Castoriadis’ ideas. The book is both an introduction to Castoriadis’ key concepts and arguments and an exploration of some of the philosophical underpinnings and implications of his work.

I will make another announcement once the book has been published.

Jeff Klooger

Conference in Gothenburg - session on Castoriadis

2008-10-01T17:30:00.005+02:00

See an upcoming event in Gothenburg with a special session on Castoriadis. This call for papers was forwarded from one of the coordinators, Mats Rosengren.
Antonio Negri is one of the key note speakers.

La Brèche

2008-07-10T12:56:00.009+02:00

Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Edgar Morin's book from June 1968, La Brèche, has been republished this year on Fayard, with an additional section called Vingt ans après (twenty years after). Here, the three authors comment upon the students' revolt and the question of organization for a would-be revolutionary movement. I have recently read Castoriadis's texts in the new volume (in the original volume, he used the pseudonym Jean-Marc Coudray). His ideas on the question of organization are not less interesting today, especially as a critique of the alterglobalization movement, the "movement of movements" (Negri & Hardt).

When giving advice to the – possibly – revolutionary movement, Castoriadis in particular warns against existing dichotomies, posed like mutually exclusive options. For instance, when there is either the imagination or the organization; creativity or reality, etc. As we know, politics is often, in ordinary discourse, perceived as something dull, hardened, set, signifying doxa, bureaucracy and non-creativity (well illustrated by Jacques Rancière’s concept la police). But also: hard reality, that which in the end must have a final say, the non-eligible. Political institutions and their keepers seem “real” in a commanding way: “You can play all you like, but in the end we all have to grow up and face reality, i.e. that which the grown-ups have decided”.

If we, correspondingly, limit our political repertoire to the other side of the dichotomy, e.g. happenings, the event and the carnivalesque (Bakhtin) – or worse, if we regard our commitment to politics as leisure time activities, something offered to us, something to fill our lives, providing “identity” and meaning – we are actually feeding the existing system, Castoriadis argues.[i] To accept the dichotomy – and hence, restrict our political activities to just one side of it out of fear of being captive to the other – means to submit our power to the existing hierarchy: bureaucratic capitalism. It also means saying that only one part of the dichotomy can be real, whereas the other becomes purely imaginary in the sense of fictional, non-real.

Accepter cette antinomie comme valable, c’est accepter l’essence de même de l’idéologie capitaliste bureaucratique, c’est accepter la philosophie et la réalité qui existent, c’est refuser la transformation réelle du monde, c’est intégrer la révolution dans l’ordre historique établi (Castoriadis 2008:136).

The point to remember is that it will always be in the interest of the powers in place to facilitate change in order to swallow it – or use it to renew and refine its own, existing power structures. Hence, if we accept the dichotomies offered by the existing social order, and choose one side against the other, we are already playing the game of the powers in place. It is therefore imperative, says Castoriadis, that the would-be revolutionary movement gives itself form. It must organize itself, give itself a “face” and articulate something to which it is willing to commit itself, albeit temporarily. By giving itself a new form, the revolutionary movement leaves behind the old ground with its definitions, dichotomies and dilemmas. This will also make the movement immune to cooptation. Furthermore, such self-positing is the only way to transgress hierarchy and divisions in society. Otherwise, the hierarchy will only reproduce itself in ever new versions.

Ingerid S.

[i] In my view, Hannah Arendt comes very close to accepting this dichotomy, in refusing to include the making of institutions in her notion of the term politics (Arendt 1990 [1963]). Similar claims can be made against Jacques Rancière.

Magma

2008-07-10T12:50:00.002+02:00

I have been told that there is a discussion group on Castoriadis on Facebook called Magma. Apparently, it is very active. I have not checked it out, since I do not (want to) use Facebook.

Ingerid S.

Call for papers: POLITICAL IMAGINARY AND HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

2008-04-08T10:16:00.013+02:00

The Nordic Summer University invites participants for this year’s summer session at Brandbjerg Højskole, Vejle, Denmark, July 20 - 27, 2008. Abstract submission and registration by May 1st

Call for papers: POLITICAL IMAGINARY AND HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

Political thought is interwoven with notions of political subjectivity. In deciding how to conceptualize the human subject - as a self-constructing or constructed identity, a bearer of interests, communicative negotiator, or cathected social meaning - certain notions of politics are brought to life. And vice versa.

40 years after May 68 – could the imaginary again become a political category?

Cornelius Castoriadis, influential thinker in the group "Socialisme ou Barbarie", was a great inspiration for May 68 rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit. One of the central ideas of the time was that politics is an activity of the imaginary, i.e. to visualize, create and believe in (cathect) new forms of social organization. The notion of "the imaginary" (l'imaginaire) is central in Castoriadis's thought. Via the processes of sublimation and socialization, the imaginary constitutes human subjectivity. Even more original is the idea that the imaginary – and connected to this, creativity – defines the social-historical. Creation, to Castoriadis, is "... the mode of being of the social-historical field, by means of which this field is. Society is self-creation deployed as history". Politics, then, becomes conscious, social-historical creation of imaginary significations.

Today, it could be argued, our collective consciousness is burdened with too much reflexivity. Critique has turned into hyper-reflexivity and irony. Radical political thought seems to be divided between, on the one hand, neo-leninist proposals for unspecified "action"; on the other hand, identity politics and positioning in an endless web of relations. Castoriadis suggests a third alternative, combining elucidation with the always a-rational aspects of human creativity. Psychoanalysis, politics and human subjectivity to him become aspects of one and the same movement: “the project of autonomy”.

Contributors are welcome to explore these and related topics. Comparisons with other thinkers within political thought, psychoanalysis, pedagogy and social theory are especially welcome!
2-5 ECTS credits for PhD-students.

Please send a short abstract (ca. 300 words) by May 1st to ingerids2(a)yahoo.no
Participants without paper are also welcome.
NB: All participants must register!

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS in plenary sessions: Professors Andrew Bowie and Tong Shijun

Brandbjerg Højskole
Board and lodging are kept at good standard and a minimum prize. The summer session offers many possibilities for recreation, including a cultural programme, excursions and special arrangements for children (from the age of 3 years). Please note that the NSU, as a Nordic organization, can only fund travel expenses for praticipants from Nordic institutions, within the Nordic countries.

Nordic Summer University is an organisation and network for Nordic researchers working across the Nordic countries and the academic disciplines. NSU is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Our summer sessions have hosted such distinguished guest lecturers as Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Žižek, Simon Critchley, Sandra Harding, Paul Gilroy and Johann P. Arnason.

More information about the Nordic Summer University (NSU)

Akureyri Winter Symposium

2008-04-06T11:23:00.003+02:00

Some photos from one of the most peaceful places on Earth, Akureyri, Iceland. Philosophers, sociologists and pedagogues discussing, talking, and bathing in natural hot pools.

MAY 1968 - 2008: Arrangements in the UK

2008-04-01T10:21:00.003+02:00

A few things which might be helpful - from Stuart:

This is the May 68 conference at Birkbeck University, London:
Call for papers
Programme

There is a season about to commence on BBC Radio four about May 68. A stack of programmes and resources are located here:
One daily programme will chart events day by day, starting March 17th. Programmes are usually archived on the site within a day or two of broadcasting, so you should be able to access them all, although be quick as they're taken off after a while.

Meantime, this is a BBC Radio 4 programme on 'Imagination'
HINT: Look in the second column, second box down for the link that plays the programme back to you
...This is the archive it comes from:
There are links to philosphy and other resources too...

Castoriadis symposium in Melbourne

2008-03-19T01:51:00.003+01:00

hello cc-ers,

i'm organizing a cc symposium in melbourne for later this year. at this stage it's for one day only, but should there be any interested northerners, i would try and get more funding to extend it over 2 or 3 days (but would need early expressions of interest from you to do that). i've pasted in the CFP below. hope the Akureyri gathering went well!

suzi

Call for papers:

SYMPOSIUM: CASTORIADIS IN DIALOGUE

Date: Friday, 28th November 2008
Venue: Monash University (Caulfield)

Ten years after the death of Cornelius Castoriadis, the interdisciplinary significance of his thought remains largely unmined. His philosophical-political elucidations sought not only to interrogate the human sciences (from art to epistemology) but extended to the natural sciences as well (from auto-poiesis to mathematics). Melbourne has long been central for Castoriadis studies, and, in continuing that tradition, interested scholars are invited to submit abstracts in any area of Castoriadis’ thought for in-depth presentation and discussion. Proposals that bring Castoriadis into dialogue with other thinkers and traditions are especially welcome.

Please email abstracts to Suzi Adams by 10th June, 2008
(Earlier expressions of interest are of course very welcome).

Email: suzi.adams@arts.monash.edu.au

Book wanted - Crossroads in the Labyrinth

2008-01-09T10:43:00.000+01:00

How on Earth do I get hold of Crossroads in the Labyrinth? (Castoriadis 1984, MIT Press). I live in Norway, and my university library does not provide it, nor will Amazon.com ship it here. Apparently, I live in the bush. Perhaps I could persuade my library, but as I need it rather quickly (to complete a thesis) it would be good if anyone out there had some good advice, e.g. second hand online bookstores. Thanks!

Ingerid S.

Link exchange

2007-11-15T09:03:00.000+01:00

For link exchange, please make contact again, your email was erased. Thanks.