Requiem for a Selbstdenker Cornelius Castoriadis

Requiem for a Selbstdenker: Cornelius Castoriadis(1922–1997)

Joel Whitebook

What concatenation of factors produces a resolutely independent thinker? This isa question which immediately suggests itself when considering the unparalleledlife and work of Cornelius Castoriadis, who died in Paris on December 24th at theage of seventy-five. Indeed, Castoriadis, along with Hannah Arendt – with whomhe invites comparison in many other ways as well – may represent the two preem-inent Selbstdenker of the postwar era. Before returning to our question, however,let us survey the accomplishments of his remarkable career.

Living in the most fashion-afflicted town of all, Castoriadis remained imperviousto the intellectual vogues that have regularly cycled through Paris over the pastfifty years. He was able to steer a course which remained focused on fundamen-tal theoretical and political issues and which – we can now see in retrospect –followed its own internal logic and achieved a remarkable degree of overallcoherence. When, after the war, the French intelligentsia were, almost withoutexception, in the thrall of the Communist Party and defenders of the SovietUnion, Castoriadis was not only a member of the Fourth International, but wenton to reject the Trotskyist position itself. He argued that the Soviet Union did notconstitute a degenerate worker’s state, as the Trotskyists maintained, but a newform of class oppression, and that this fact stripped it of all revolutionary status.In what was to become a well-known line, Castoriadis quipped, “‘USSR’: fourletters, four misnomers” – it was neither a union, soviet, socialist nor a republic.

It was during this period that Castoriadis met Claude Lefort, with whom heformed the ultra-leftist grouplet Socialisme ou Barbarie and published a journalunder the same name. To grasp the independence of the undertaking, it is neces-sary to transport oneself into the Manichean world of Cold War France, where onewas either for the Soviet Union or for the American-led capitalist powers. A groupdedicated to criticizing the official left position from the left and rethinking therevolutionary project necessarily condemned itself to be small in membership andmarginal in influence.1 The perseverance, however, paid off in the long run. Afteryears of isolation – indeed after the group had split up – Socialisme ou Barbarie’sideas exerted a major influence in the May–June events of 1968. Dany Cohn-Bendit himself acknowledged that many of the positions that he and his brotherGabriel popularized in Obsolete Communism: The Left-wing Alternative, a majortext of ’68, were taken from Socialisme ou Barbarie.

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In 1959 friction developed between Castoriadis and the other members ofSocialisme ou Barabarie over his article “Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous lecapitalisme modern.”2 The controversy it generated contributed substantially tothe eventual disbandment of the group in 1966. Despite internal attempts to blockits publication, the article appeared – under an editorial disclaimer – in 1960. Thethesis that sent feathers flying was that the difficulty with contemporary left-wingtheory and practice did not lie with vulgar Marxism – as true believers maintained– but with Marxism as such. The old idea that the proletariat would be led to revo-lution because of economic misery was no longer valid. In an analysis similar tothe Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of organized capitalism, Castoriadis argued thatcapitalism had entered a new modernized phase – de Gaulle was the agent of capi-talist modernization in France – through which it could manage economic crisesand provide the increasingly depoliticized and privatized population with asteadily increasing standard of living. Rather than the economistic issues of thepast, Castoriadis saw alienation – which, he argued, was engendered by capitalistmodernization and which could only be eliminated through the self-managementof society – as a potential source of radical politics. While he continued to anchorhis analysis in the dynamics of capitalist development, he came to view whatwere to be called the new social movements – youth, women, gays, ecologists andso on – as more politically significant than the traditional industrial proletariat.And, on a more fundamental theoretical level, he argued that the Marxianapproach was irreparably flawed insofar as its scientism and economism in prin-ciple precluded individual and collective creativity, action and self-management.3

That his comrades in Socialisme ou Barbarie were reduced to dismissingCastoriadis as an “existentialist” only attests to how entrapped even the bestMarxists of the day were in their calcified assumptions. The charge is, of course,ludicrous, but we can use it as an opportunity to take up questions raised by theerratic swings that have characterized French intellectual life in general. This willin fact lead us to a consideration of pressing theoretical problems that are stillwith us today. The history of French thought since the Second World War hasbeen radically antipodal – seesawing between Cartesian existentialism and anti-Cartesian structuralism, humanism and anti-humanism, surrealism and scientism,voluntarism and determinism, and, more recently, militant Third Worldism andself-congratulatory Europhilia, Maoism and neoliberalism4 – with little attempt atsynthesis or mediation, indeed, with little cognizance that the lack of synthesis ormediation was a problem.

There are two strong reasons why Castoriadis could never have been an exis-tentialist. First, like Hegel, Marx and Weber, and unlike the existentialists, heknew that the individual was not an ultimate datum, but “a product of history.”Indeed, he argued that, viewed from the long perspective, the individual was anexception which had made its appearance only twice in history and only incom-pletely, in ancient Greek and in modern European societies. Second, after hisappropriation of psychoanalysis, Castoriadis could never have accepted Sartre’s

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positing of the complete transparency of consciousness (which was a necessarycorrelate of the latter’s ethical voluntarism). In this regard, Castoriadis was fondof citing Freud’s image of “the navel of the dream,” where all transparency andmeaning dissolve into a tangle of opacity. That there exists an ultimate limit totransparency and meaning, however, in no way invalidates the pursuit of self-reflection, as certain post-structuralists argue. It only means that the interrogationof the self is an unendliche task.

While Castoriadis was certainly no existentialist, there is nevertheless a sensein which he preserved an essential moment of, if not existentialism, at leastCartesianism. As I have argued elsewhere,5 one of the major philosophical symp-toms of our times is the abstract negation of Cartesianism with the rush intointersubjectivity; the truth content of Cartesianism is not aufgehoben, it is simplyobliterated. Whether it emanates from Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, or fromWittgenstein and Habermas, the attempt has been to absorb the individual intothe transindividual – the subjective into the intersubjective – so thoroughly thatthe moment of privatisitic individuality drops out almost completely.6 In directopposition to this trend, Castoriadis draws on Piera Aulagnier’s research on earlydevelopment and infantile psychosis to posit a monadic core of the humanpsyche and a radical imagination.7 The latter consists in a private counter-world– a kosmos idios as opposed to the kosmos koinos of intersubjectively mediatedreality – of an internally wish-generated stream of representations and affects.Indeed, properly speaking, the two cannot even be distinguished at this level.Castoriadis maintains, moreover, that, owing to this monadic core, all socializa-tion comes from the outside and is necessarily violent; there does not appear tobe a shred of Hartmannian “preadaptation” of the psyche to the world.8 And,more recently, in a psychoanalytic examination of racism, he argued that, at themost archaic strata of the psyche, there exists a sheer unmediated hatred of other-ness which seeks its destruction. It is important to stress that, for Castoriadis, themonadic core of the psyche and the radical imagination are neither positive nornegative per se. Rather, they are thoroughly ambivalent. The psyche’s unelim-inable tendency to deny reality and to attempt omnipotently to remold it accord-ing to its wishes are the source of the best and the worst in human life. When thistendency is socialized and sublimated, it can lead to the most exalted accom-plishments in the realm of the Objective and Subjective Spirit. Unsocialized andunmediated, however, the omnipotent wish to transform the world can result inthe most catastrophic forms of pathology – from individual psychosis in thestrict sense to the collective psychosis of totalitarianism. We do not have to getinto the debates surrounding Freud’s doctrine of the death drive. At the end of“the century of two world wars, of the Gulag, Auschwitz, Cambodia, Bosnia,Biafra, Chechnia, Rwanda-Burundi, etc.,”9 the burden of proof is on those whowould deny the existence of an inherent destructive force in the human psyche.For Castoriadis, then, creativity and destruction are coequal potentialities of theradical imagination.


Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997): Joel Whitebook 143

A conception such as this was certain to be an anathema to a compulsivelyprogressivistic – and linguistifying – thinker like Habermas. He raised the objec-tion that for Castoriadis “the socialized individual is produced and, as inDurkheim, remains divided into monad and member of society. . . . Intrapsychicconflicts are not internally linked with social ones; instead, psyche and societystand in a kind of metaphysical opposition to one another.”10 There is, however,something odd about Habermas’s criticism, for its force rests on two problematicassumptions: first, that it is self-evident that we do not live divided between aprivate psychic world and a public social one; and second, that the existence ofan intrinsic opposition between psyche and society is necessarily false. Again, Iwould say the burden of proof lies with the critic. To begin with, there is nothingself-evident about the first assumption. Habermas’s objections notwithstanding, Ithink it is safe to say that we live as citizens of these two worlds and constantlyhave to negotiate their relationship – indeed, even that the conflict between thepsychic and the social is increasing as the public world grows more anomic. Andif our own experience is not compelling in this regard, we can, as Castoriadissuggests, “reread Remembrance of Things Past, and, given some leisure, thewhole of Western poetry, drama and the novel.”11 The rhetoric of Habermas’s crit-icism exploits the whole post-metaphysical climate in contemporary philosophy.In effect he attempts to dismiss the conflict between psyche and society simplyby labelling it “metaphysical.” There is, however, an intrinsic conflict betweenpsyche and society – and this is an admittedly “essentialist” claim – only it isanthropological rather than metaphysical. To be sure, the nature and extent of theconflict may vary from society to society, but it can never be eliminated.Habermas’s entire theoretical construction, however, is designed to show that thesocial reaches all the way down into the psyche, which would, for all intents andpurposes, mean the actual eradication of the psychic. Just because a progressiveliberal program demands it, the opposition between psyche and society cannot bewished away with the expedient formula Habermas takes over from Mead,namely, that socialization is simultaneously a process of individuation.12 But,again and more importantly, one should not want the opposition eliminated. Foralthough its existence imparts a tragic dimension to life and places definite limitson the possibilities of social amelioration, it is also one of the most profoundsources of the achievements – artistic, theoretical and political – that make ushuman.

If Castoriadis had no truck with Sartrean existentialism, he was no less criticalof structuralism when the theoretical pendulum swung in the opposite direction.His diagnosis of structuralism, which he considers a pseudo science, is succinctand accurate: namely, it represents “an abusive extrapolation” from phonology.13

It represents an attempt to extrapolate a comprehensive philosophical systemfrom a highly specialized positive science, to give an exhaustive account of soci-ety and history – or the mere appearance thereof – through the combinatory logicof a finite number of elements and the difference between those elements. The



fallacy in this program is that whereas a philosophical theory is obliged to give anaccount of the “origins” of its object domain – that is, of the material out of whichsociety is constituted – phonology, “as a positive and limited form of knowledge,”takes its object domain as simply given. Castoriadis is right: “Structuralism’snaivete in this respect is disarming.”14

If existentialism’s extreme voluntarism and insistence on the transparency ofconsciousness were objectionable to Castoriadis, structuralism’s denial of historyand reduction of meaning are no less unacceptable. In reaction to Marxism andthe illusion of historical inevitability – with its lethal historical consequences –Castoriadis, like Hannah Arendt, was determined to defend the possibility ofnovelty in history. Whereas she developed her concept of “natality” to this end,Castoriadis elaborated a theory of creativity and the radical imagination. As hesaw it, “the question of history is the question of the emergence of radical other-ness or of the absolutely new.”15 If this is the case, then structuralism’s reductionof the apparently new to the old, of the diachronic to the synchronic – which infact amounts to the elimination of history – must be inadmissible. In this context,I once posed a question to Castoriadis that had perplexed me for some time:“Given its radical ahistoricism, how could leftists find anything congenial instructuralism?” For, especially in the 1970s, certain groups of leftists under theinfluence of Althusser drew extensively on structuralism. He answered mepsychoanalyst to psychoanalyst: “How can a fetishist mistake a shoe for a penis?”

Again, this is not to say that Castoriadis, like the existentialists, believed in thetransparency of human thought, speech and action. With the structuralists, hemaintained that our individual and collective thought, speech and action areembedded in supra-individual configurations that determine us from behind ourbacks and limit our transparency and autonomy. He refers to this “anonymouscollective whole, [this] impersonal-human element that fills every given socialformation but which also engulfs it,” which “is neither the unending addition ofintersubjective networks (although it is this too), nor . . . their simple ‘product,’ ”as the “social-historical.” However, whereas the supra-individual structures ofstructuralism are formal, transhistorical and immutable, the social-historical is, toa significant degree, malleable. The social-historical is on the one hand, the“given structures, ‘materialized’ institutions and works, whether these be mater-ial or not,” into which every individual is thrown, to use a Heideggarian term. Itis, on the other hand, “that which structures, institutes, materializes.” Which is tosay, through the appropriation of its resources – for example, language, laws,customs, techniques, arts and so on – individuals and groups can in fact transformthe very world into which they have been thrown. Rather than systematicallyexcluding the emergence of the new, the old in fact provides the resources for itscreation. As opposed to the inert structures of structuralism, then, the social-historical is “the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted soci-ety, of history made and of history in the making.”16

The defense of history is, for him, necessarily connected with the defense of



meaning. For Castoriadis, the properly human realm, that is to say the realm ofhistory, occupies the vast intermediate domain lying between the “algorithmicand the ineffable”17 – both extremes that deny meaning. The algorithmic – in thiscase, structuralism – attempts to reduce putative meanings with all their fuzzyedges, to use Wittgenstein’s term, to nugget-like elements that can then bearranged and rearranged in a formalizable system. In other words, it tries toreduce meaning to formal structures. (We will consider the other extreme, theineffable, when we turn to post-structuralism.) We should be clear here. Unlikemany hermeneutical critics of positivism, Castoriadis is no opponent of science.On the contrary, he is an enthusiastic admirer of science, precisely as an extraor-dinary achievement of human creativity. But, like the best scientists and philoso-phers of science throughout history, he also recognizes that the foundations ofscience – and especially of mathematics, upon which the other sciences rested –were thoroughly aporetic. This denies the quantitative sciences the claims ofcomplete strictness or certainty which their more naive defenders often make.Moreover, in contrast to the mainstream of contemporary philosophy of science,Castoriadis’s position rests on an ontological claim: namely, that there exists abroad stratum of being to which, because of its nature, identitary-ensemblist logic– roughly his term for Kant’s Verstand or the Frankfurt School’s “instrumentalreason” – properly pertains and in which it has its validity. This stratum not onlyincludes physical nature, but a dimension of society – the economy, for example– insofar as it has been objectified in a nature-like fashion. The point is, however,that this is just one stratum of being, and it is not only illegitimate but perniciousto try to extend identitary-ensemblist logic into other strata where it cannot bevalidly applied – especially the strata that are mediated by meaning. Castoriadis’sobjection, then, is not to science as such, but to the scientistic totalization of iden-titary-ensemblist logic and, especially, to the attempted reduction of meaning tonon-meaning.

The analysis of meaning also plays an essential role in Castoriadis’s account ofsocial integration. In this regard, he addresses himself to a perennial philosophi-cal question which assumed new significance after the predicted social revolutionfailed to materialize in the West: Why do individuals conform, even in theabsence of extensive coercion, to the societies in which they live? Or, to put itdifferently, what is the binding principle of koinonia? Castoriadis answers thatindividuals conform to societies because, to a large degree, those societies “fabri-cate” individuals who fit into them. He draws on psychoanalysis – taken preciselyas a theory of “embodied meaning” – to explain how this works. Prior to theemergence of the Freudian drives and the repertoire of fantasies connected tothem, Castoriadis postulates the existence of a “primary phantasmatization”consisting in “at once the representation and the investment of a Self that is All.”18

(To bring the point home, Cornelius often got a mischievous kick from quoting aline from one of Freud’s late unpublished fragments, “Ich bin die Brust.”) Theoriginal monadic position consists in a “unitary subjective circuit” in which



everything is interconnected and referred back to the monadic subject. Castoriadismaintains this “mode of originary being of the psyche . . . is the first matrix ofmeaning”: this “proto-meaning realizes by itself [that is, in fantasy] just wheremeaning obviously cannot yet exist, total meaning, the universal and unbrokenbringing into relation which will tend to wish to encompass even that whichdenies it.”19 After drawing such a strong picture of the monadic core of the psyche,however, Castoriadis is confronted with the daunting theoretical task of explain-ing how that monad opens up to the world. He is in good company, for Freud hada similar problem. Castoriadis argues that, in the first instance, what the archaicpsyche – which always strives to maintain its monadic self-sufficiency andomnipotence – is offered in recompense for relinquishing its plenum-like exis-tence is connection with the nurturing person, most generally the mother. Alongwith this, the omnipotence of the initial stage is transferred to the mother; to useKohut’s vocabulary, the “grandiose self” is replaced by the “omnipotent object.”20

The significance of these facts should be stressed, for they mean, in the firstinstance, that eros and affect – and not some rationalistic learning program – arethe primary vehicles of socialization. In the next step of the process, the childmust turn from the closed world of the mother-infant dyad to the outside society.To compensate for the erotic attachment to the mother, society offers the childmeaning in the form of narratives which bring the chaos of the world into order.And affectually, the child is offered the father (the Phallus in Lacan’s sense), thefamily, the tribe, party, country and so on, as the new repository for her (partly)relinquished infantile omnipotence. Castoriadis’s psycho-anthropological thesis,then, is that all societies must provide alternative gratifications for the archaicpsyche’s relentless demand for “universal cognitive connection” or “universalsignification”21 in the form of meaning. In so doing, they not only socialize andsublimate the destructiveness of this original omnipotence, but also “fabricate”individuals who – to a remarkable degree – conform to their requirements. Whilethis is especially true in what Castoriadis call “heteronomous,” which is to saytraditional, societies, all societies must provide their members with meaning.

This thesis naturally led Castoriadis to oppose the current left-liberal treatment– or avoidance – of the problem of meaning, deriving, in large part, from Rawlsand Habermas. For example, as Habermas has steadily moved away from theproblematic of Weberian-Marxism – established by Lukacs, Horkheimer andAdorno – and toward the liberalism of Anglo-American philosophy, the questionof the “loss of meaning” in modernity was systematically swept into the shadowsand replaced by the question of justice. At one point in an uncharacteristic butenormously fertile article on Walter Benjamin in 1972, Habermas addressed theproblem at the heart of the Weberian-Marxian tradition: meaning is a “scarceresource” which is being depleted by the process of modernization, that is, by thefamous “disenchantment of the world.” In that article, Habermas recognized thatthe question of meaning and the question of justice followed two relatively inde-pendent axes and, therefore, that an increase in justice – also propelled by



modernization – was thoroughly compatible with an exhaustion of meaning.Indeed, in a passage that I have quoted before, he followed that logic to its conclu-sion and entertained the possibility that a just society might be a meaningless one:“Is it possible that one day an emancipated human race could encounter itselfwithin an expanded space of discursive formation of will” – that is, an expandedsphere of justice, in Habermas’s communicative conception – “and yet be robbedof the light in which it is capable of interpreting its life as something good?” Whatis most striking in the 1972 article is the tepidness of Habermas’s praise of theachievements of modernity. He speaks only of the “uncontemptible improve-ments in life” and the progress “in the products of legality if not in the formalstructures of morality,” which admittedly evoke “melancholy” when compared to“what has been missed” and to “moments of happiness that are in the process ofbeing extinguished.”22

As the decade passed, however, and as the Reagan–Thatcher revolutionincreasingly squelched any hopes of progressive political change on a significantscale in the West, Habermas’s defense of “the project of modernity” actuallybecame more enthusiastic – as well as more juridical.23 A curious thing, however,happened along the way. What had been a central pathology of modernity for theWeberian Marxists, that is, the loss of meaning, now became associated with oneof strongest virtues of liberalism. Liberalism’s structural separation of the goodand the right, ethics and morality, meaning and justice, came to be celebrated asa bulwark against totalitarianism in a pluralistic world. Totalitarianism is under-stood in this context as the violent imposition of a substantive notion of the goodon everyone and the suppression of all other points of view. In the process, mean-ing was relegated, if not to the private realm – to the drawingroom, as Max Weberput it – at least to the realm of ethics. It is important to be clear here. What is beingcontested is not the epochal advances of modern liberalism and the defense of apluralistic world; indeed, the insight that our world-view is just one among many– that it is a human creation – is at the heart of Castoriadis’s notion of anautonomous society. What is being objected to, rather, is the suppression of thediscussion of the loss of meaning by the advocates of deliberative democracy.24

When the problem of the loss of meaning is raised it is often dismissed out ofhand because it threatens to destabilize the Habermasian-Rawlsian theoreticaldivision of labor and to trump the problem of justice.25 To be sure, there are goodhistorical and political reasons to be cautious about the problem of meaning.Nevertheless, that all the tempting regressive fundamentalist and totalitarian solu-tions to the loss of meaning are painfully familiar does not mean that it ceases tobe a problem.26 Foucault is right about one thing: all serious questions are“dangerous.” There is a characteristically Habermasian fallacy at work in all ofthis, which Dews has spotted: namely, of equating “the critique of no longer plau-sible answers with a demonstration of the obsolescence of an entire domain ofproblems.”27

Given his psycho-anthropological thesis, Castoriadis a priori could never have



minimized the importance of the loss of meaning as a topic for social theory. And,on top of that, his empirical assessment of the contemporary Western cultureslocated the problem of meaning at the center of a profound cultural crisis.28 ForCastoriadis, the identity of a society and the meaning it provides its members aredetermined by “the specificity of the imaginary significations created by anddominating it.”29 He maintains that the “critical” modern epoch – roughly 1750 to1950 – was determined by two such imaginary significations: namely, the capi-talist project of “the unlimited expansion of (pseudo-)rational (pseudo-)mastery”and “the project of autonomy.” And he notes that the relation between these twoimaginary significations was “best defined by the conflict, but also the mutualcontamination and entanglement.”30 The project of pseudo-rational mastery –analyzed in the classical social theory of Marx, Weber, Polanyi and Horkheimerand Adorno – involves the historically unprecedented amalgamation of the capi-talist economy with “ensemblistic-identitary logic.” Where the emancipatedmarket provides the dynamic motor for potentially infinite expansion, Verstand orZweckrationalität provides the logical form that is imposed on all realms of exis-tence: “Nothing – physical or human ‘nature,’ tradition or other ‘values’ – oughtto stand in the way of the maximization process. Everything is called before theTribunal of (productive) Reason and must prove its right to exist on the basis ofthe criterion of the unlimited expansion of ‘rational mastery.’ ” At the same time,the project of autonomy – which had been incubating since the late Middle Ages– was instituted alongside the project of rational mastery. This project consistedin the critique of the dogmatic claims of tradition, which is to say, “of the statusquo’s claim that it should continue to exist just because it happens to be there,”and in the affirmation of “the possibility and the right of the individuals andcollectives to find in themselves (or to produce) the principle for ordering theirlives.”31 Castoriadis insists, and this point is crucial, that the agents of the projectof autonomy were the new social-historical movements, which, through theirstruggles, called into question the instituted forms of life in all its domains – forexample, “between monarchy and democracy, property and social movements,dogma and critique, the Academy and artistic innovation, and so on.”32 Kant thusaccurately captured only half the spirit of the classical modernist epoch when heobserved that “ours is an age of criticism.”

As has already been indicated, the relationship between the two projects wasambiguous and complex, strangely complementary as well as directly conflictual.Castoriadis argues that “this conflict has been, in itself, the central motor force ofthe dynamic development of Western society during this epoch and a conditionsine qua non for the expansion of capitalism and for the containment of the irra-tionalities of capitalist ‘rationalization.’”33 The cultural critique of “encrusted”tradition not only helped to clear the path for capitalist development, but thesocial, economic and political struggles against capitalist expansion compelledcapitalism, often against its will, to correct some of its most extreme and poten-tially destabilizing economic and political deficiencies. Castoriadis is emphatic



about one point, and its importance for his entire position cannot be overempha-sized: capitalism would never have granted any of the so-called normativeadvances of modernity – “the margins of freedom contained in the contemporaryregime” – if they had not been wrestled from it by often bloody struggles. And healso insists that in the absence of such movements, “the regime. . . would have,each time unrelentingly whittled them down (as is happening now).”34 We willreturn to this point shortly. For now, we should observe that, in the other direc-tion, the dynamic of the capitalist economy has also helped to propel the extraor-dinary creativity of modern culture and the perpetual critique of all merelyexisting institutions and values: “This restless society – intellectually and spiritu-ally restless – has been the milieu for the hectic cultural and artistic creation ofthe ‘modern’ epoch.”35 Even when it appeared to be the most detached from socio-political reality, modernist art often remained oppositional insofar as its mode ofaesthetic synthesis embodied an alternative logic to that of technical rationality.But now that the distinction between art and advertising has been deconstructedand artists no longer seek to be anti-bourgeois bohemians but more often self-promoting entrepreneurs, most of that has passed. In this context, Castoriadis isright when he observes that “‘postmodern’ art has rendered an enormous service.. . : it shows how really great modern art had been.”36

Castoriadis’s claim, then, is that the critical modern epoch came more or lessto an end by 1950. He argues that after “the two world wars, the emergence oftotalitarianism, the collapse of the workers’ movement (both result and conditionof the catastrophic slide into Leninism-Stalinism), and the decay of the mythol-ogy of progress,” and “after the movements of the 1960s” – which, as we shallsee, represented one last attempt to realize the project of autonomy – the projectof autonomy appears “totally eclipsed.”37 It should be stressed that Castoriadis isnot proposing a totalized logic of decline à la Horkheimer and Adorno. As anadvocate of the radical openness of history, he insists that the question of whetherthis eclipse is temporary or permanent remains to be seen. He also insists that,whatever the current situation, “Western societies find sedimented within them-selves the institutions and characteristics that . . . may one day serve as the start-ing point and the springboard for something else.”38 He argues, moreover, that afundamental reason for the eclipse was that the emancipatory movements them-selves bought into the project of “rational mastery,” with the result that “capital-ism, liberalism, and the classical revolutionary movements came to share theimaginary of Progress and the belief that technical-material power, as such, is(immediately or, after a delay, in a discounted future) the decisive cause or condi-tion of human happiness or emancipation.”39 As a result of this degeneration, by1950, almost all significant oppositional movemements – that is, movementswhich challenged the structure of the system rather than protesting particular poli-cies and actions – had ceased in the West.

As I have mentioned, the one important exception was the movements of thesixties, which Castoriadis defended despite their admitted naivete, inconsistency



and downright kookiness. Against their detractors, who sought to depict thosemovements as mere manifestations of narcissistic individualism – this criticism istoo easy anyway – Castoriadis interpreted them as the last gasp of the project ofautonomy. He saw them as intuitively struggling with one of the most criticalquestions of the day, namely, how to find new institutional and organizationalforms to embody and advance the project of autonomy after the decay of the oldleft. The activitists knew they did not want the technocratic organizational formsof the “project of rational mastery” – either in its left-wing or right-wing versions.But, as the denoument of the ’68 events too clearly demonstrated, they failedmiserably at creating alternative ones. And, even more consequentially, the move-ments of the sixties – which tended to eschew economic analysis – failed seri-ously to address, much less solve, the problem of the incessant expansion of thecapitalist economy. (The current discussions of democracy will likewise remainsuspended in thin air as long as supporters cannot productively confront thisissue.)

Castoriadis’s strong contention – and one which is mostly ignored by contem-porary social and political theory – is that at the same time as the project of auton-omy is at best dormant, “the capitalist imaginary signification of . . . unlimitedexpansion . . . is more alive than ever,” and is “engaged in a frantic course preg-nant with the severest dangers for humankind.” Witness the dizzying pace ofglobalization. What then separates the current period – call it “postmodern” orwhat you will – from the epoch of critical modernity is that capitalist expansionis developing without a significant oppositional culture or movement:“Capitalism developing while forced to face a continuous struggle against thestatus quo, on the floor of the factory as well as in the sphere of ideas or art, andcapitalism expanding without any effective internal opposition are two differenthistorical animals.”40 When Castoriadis speaks of today’s massive “atrophy of thepolitical imagination,” he is referring, first and foremost, to our collective inabil-ity to conceive of any means of containing capitalist development – of renorma-tizing the economy, to use Habermas’s vocabulary – or of any organizationalforms and modes of struggle that might serve to rekindle the project of autonomy.These, as he sees it, are the two most essential political problems of our day.

Against this severe diagnosis, it can rightly be objected that the women’smovement – which has in fact developed since the sixties – represents one of themost important chapters in the project of autonomy to date. And, in one respect,this is undoubtedly true. For, in a historically unprecedented fashion, it has putinto question some of the most deeply entrenched representations of who we are,which is to say, those having to do with gender roles, sexuality, power, intimacy,the family, child-rearing, and so on. At the same time, however, feminists – likethe rest of us and especially like other practitioners of identity politics – have hadlittle to say about the central question of containing the imaginary of unlimitedexpansion. Furthermore, there is a respect in which feminism – or at least acertain dimension of it – is perfectly compatible with and even contributes to that



expansion. For, among other things, feminism has entailed the opening of themarket to a group which was previously excluded from it on the basis of a purelynatural characteristic: their sex. This is certainly an instance of the logic of capi-talist development – the methodical eradication of merely natural determinationsand their replacement by abstract ones. This development not only provides newrealms for capitalist expansion, but also permits women to enter the market withrelatively less discrimination than in the past.

A familiar argument is often made in defense of the failure of the women’smovement – and of identity politics in general – to address the problem of capi-talist expansion. Once again, it construes a deficiency as an advantage. It is main-tained that to deal with the economy would require a “totalizing” analysis and a“totalizing” movement, and that history has taught us that analyses and move-ments which aim at the totality are always one step away from totalitarianism.Often drawing on Foucault for theoretical justification, the new social movementsare self-consciously “local” and disavow comprehensive programs precisely forthese reasons. But this is the statement of a problem, indeed, the central problemCastoriadis has delineated, not of a solution. It is also another example of thefallacy, pointed out by Dews, of equating the absence of a good solution to a prob-lem with the invalidity of that problem. For it does not follow from the fact thatwe have no feasible theoretical or organizational solutions to the problem ofcontaining capitalist development that it has ceased to be a problem. On thecontrary, it is expanding at a pace and on a scale that makes all previous devel-opment appear antediluvian. What we are in fact confronted with are old-fash-ioned problems exacerbated manifold, with the complete discredit of all previoussolutions to them, and, so far, with the inability to envisage new ones.

What followed from the failure of the movements of the sixties, as Castoriadissaw it, was a general retreat into privatization, depoliticization, consumerism andconformity, accompanied by “a deep distrust and cynicism regarding all the insti-tuted powers (politicians, business, trade unions, and churches).”41 This retreat,needless to say, only continues to grow. It is against this backdrop that heanalyzed what was to be the next swing of the pendulum of Parisian intellectuallife, namely, post-structuralism. Castoriadis examines Luc Ferry and AlainRenaut’s claim, in their controversial book La pensée 68,42 that the post-struc-turalists – who came into prominence in the 1970s – represented “the thought of’68.” Castoriadis argues that Ferry and Renaut got it exactly backwards: “Theirmisinterpretation is total. ‘Sixty-eight thought’ is anti-’68, the type of thinkingthat has built its mass success on the ruins of the ’68 movement and as a functionof its failure.”43 In the first place, he explains, although they had already been onthe scene for some time, the thinkers who came to be known as the poststruc-turalists had virtually no impact on the ’68 events. This was “both because theirideas were totally unknown to the participants and because these ideas werediametrically opposed to the participants’ implicit and explicit aspirations.”Castoriadis observes that “were one to have passed around an anthology of the



writings analyzed by Ferry and Renaut on the night that barricades were erectedin the Latin Quarter, at best one would have provoked an irrepressible laughter,and at worst one would have led the participants and the movement to disband[that is, if those writings were taken seriously].”44

In addition to its vigorous promotion by the intellectual and literary “impre-sarios” of the society of the spectacle, post-structuralism was in fact able toachieve its enormous success in the wake of ’68 by affecting a wily compromiseformation – or perhaps an act of splitting would be more accurate – whichreworked the meaning of those events. On the one hand, it both reflected andjustified the mood of failure, despair and withdrawal. Indeed, there was “a perfectharmony” between the philosophy of post-structuralism “and the state of mind,the humor, the mood, the Stimmung that followed the failure . . . and disintegra-tion of the movement.”45 Moreover, the content of the theories, for example, thedeath of the subject, the death of meaning, the death of history, the unsurpass-ability of power and so on – with its “inescapable corollary, the death of poli-tics”46 – provided a legitimization for depoliticization. On the other hand,however, poststructuralism, exploiting the anti-authoritarian mood of the sixties,offered a seductive aura of “subversiveness” – which continues to linger on in theUnited States – to mask the “inescapable corollary” of its doctrines. This is theway it could present itself as the heir to the movement. Perhaps we have to remindourselves again of the fetishist’s ability to see a penis in a shoe to understand howthis could have worked. But it nevertheless was a trick. For it provided “a legit-imization both for the failure of the movement” and for increasing privatization,while simultaneously offering “some sort of ‘radical sensibility.’ ” For those whowanted to withdraw from politics yet retain their subversive self-regard, “thenihilism of the ideologues, who had at the same time managed to jump on thebandwagon of a vague sort of ‘subversion,’ was admirably convenient.”47

This is the appropriate point to take up Castoriadis’s relationship to Lacan. Histheoretical critique of le maître follows more or less mutatis mutandis from hiscriticisms of classical structuralism. If we disregard the ad hominem considera-tions – namely, that Lacan was aristocratic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, misog-ynist and openly contemptuous of the idea of emancipation – his theories werealso intrinsically anti-political on their own. For, like the classical structuralismon which he drew, they systematically denied the possibility of anything newemerging in history and excluded the margin of freedom necessary for any sort ofautonomous political action. More specifically, his hypostatization of the deter-minative powers of the Symbolic – conceived as a machine-like “circuit” – wasevery bit as ahistorical as the most biologistic doctrines of Freud.48 What is thepoint of acting if, as Lacan puts it, the best we can do is pick up the die and throwthem in a game that has been rigged in advance – if, that is, “everything is foreverthe same”?49 Moreover, the deeply anti-democratic character of his doctrines wasreflected in his manipulative organizational practice. Lacan committed one of thecardinal offenses possible in psychoanalysis: he systematically exploited the most



powerful weapon at an analyst’s disposal, the transference, for purposes ofmanipulation and control, which is to say, for purposes of power. As Roustang –against whom Castoriadis had written a masterful polemic some years earliermaking the same points50 – has more recently shown, by blurring the distinctionbetween the consulting room and the classroom, between patient and disciple, andthereby allowing the transference to spill over from the clinical context, he couldexploit it for his own political ends. It allowed him to keep his followers in a stateof perpetual sibling rivalry, playing them off against each other, while preservingan idealizing transference towards himself as le maître. If this wasn’t psycho-analysis in the service of power, nothing was. And there’s nothing subversiveabout that.

Castoriadis’s central criticism of Lacan is that his “smoky mystifications of the‘Law’ and the ‘Symbolic’ ” ignore the question of the institution and makecritique impossible. By hypostatizing the “Law” and the “Symbolic” intoimmutable, transhistorical configurations and ignoring the question of theirhistorical institutionalization, all empirical institutions become valid as such. Inother words, Lacan’s construction involves a systematic suppression of thedistinction between “‘de facto validity’ and ‘de jure validity,’ ”51 which is thenecessary condition for all critique. There is, however, one crucial point on whichCastoriadis agrees with Lacan. At the same time as he rejects the hypostatizationof the Law, Castoriadis does not reject the transhistorical opposition betweenlawfulness and desire, that is, the uneliminable conflict between our nature asomnipotent wishing beings and the requirements of civilized social life. Ratherthan seeking elimination of the Law and the unmediated emancipation of desire– which he rightfully maintains would result in barbarism52 – he seeks to establisha new, autonomous relation both to the Law and to those desires. He insists thatall societies, past and present, must provide an institution for decentering infan-tile omnipotence and transforming the child into a socialized individual. Agreeingwith Freud and Lacan – and against the Freudian left, represented by Reich andMarcuse, as well as the désirants, represented by Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari– he argues that “it is here, beyond all socio-cultural relativity, that the profoundsignification of the Oedipus complex resides. For in the Oedipal situation thechild must confront a state of affairs which can no longer be imaginarily manip-ulated at will.”53 While it may be possible to devise less violent, post-patriarchalinstitutions to fulfill this function in the future, the function itself cannot be elim-inated: “We are justified in imagining everything with respect to the transforma-tion of social institutions; but not the incoherent fiction that the psyche’s entryinto society could occur gratuitously.”54

Regarding the anti-positivist movements in recent philosophy, Castoriadisargues that they in fact accept a central presupposition of the positivism they seekto oppose. Like the positivists who hold up mathematical physics as the onlyparadigm of valid knowledge, the anti-positivists equate thought with calculation,so that when they reject the supposed strictness of calculation, they believe the



only alternative is “the ineffable.” One finds this with the Mystische of the earlyWittgenstein, the oracular pronouncements of the late Heidegger, and the theoret-ical free-associations of Derrida. To undo this equation, Castoriadis insists that“what cannot be calculated can nonetheless be thought.”55 His argument is onceagain ontological. As we have seen, calculation – identitary-ensemblist thinking– only validly applies to a particular stratum of being, roughly what Descartescalled res extensia. And just as there are other strata of being – for example, thosecharacterized by the existence of metabolic functions or meaning – so there areother valid forms of thinking.56 Thus, rather than attempt the hyper- and pseudo-radical leap out of the “inherited modes of thought” into the ineffable, Castoriadisadvocates a program of the “self-transcendence of reason” through the methodi-cal “interrogation” of the limits of those inherited modes.57 And two foci for thatinterrogation – that is, two points where the limitations of the inherited modes ofthought become apparent so that new forms of thinking are called for – are theself-organization of living organisms and the unconscious.58

Finally, approximately three decades after Castoriadis’s original criticisms ofthe Soviet Union and the Communist Party, the left-wing Parisian intelligentsiafinally caught up with him – though in a characteristically one-sided way. After“Solzhenitsyn shock,” the genocide in Cambodia and, especially, the declarationof martial law in Poland, the French left came to recognize that communism wasa totalitarian system which was bankrupt through and through. In fact, it had beenan enormous historical calamity, the cost of which is only becoming fully appar-ent today. Why it took them so long to become “shocked” is another question.After all, Berlin, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had hardly made a dent, and theinformation about the Gulag had been available for some time. Be that as it may,in the most recent turn of the “weary wheel of Being,” French leftists moveddirectly from uncritical defense of communism to the equally uncritical defenseof liberalism. One was treated to the spectacle of former Maoists defending themerits of liberalism, individualism, capitalism and the West with the same ardor,style and verbiage with which they had formerly defended communism. This isnot to say that the Occidental tradition, which can count human rights andautonomous individuality among its finest achievements, is not to be criticallydefended – as Castoriadis has been doing for years. It is only to say once againthat that tradition consists in two conflicting imaginary significations – the projectof autonomy and the project of unlimited mastery – and that the existence of capi-talism must not be conveniently forgotten in the current atmosphere of post-’89self-satisfaction.

I will offer three hypotheses concerning Castoriadis’s unsurpassed ability tomaintain his independence over the past fifty years. The first concerns the processof identification. Like philosophy itself, Cornelius was born in Asia Minor. As didmany families of Greek origin at the time, the Castoriadises moved fromConstantinople to Athens, where Cornelius spent his youth, after the Greco-Turk



war of 1921. Already at the age of thirteen he was voraciously reading the pocketeditions of the great philosophers he carried with him. And when, as an adult, oneheard Cornelius speak or read his texts there was no denying his identificationwith the Greek philosophical tradition. His lectures and writings were punctuatedwith quotations from the ancient Greek. One sometimes had the impression thathe believed that by stating it in the Greek one guaranteed the truth of an assertion.To his detractors, this seemed like a pompous affectation. To those of us wholoved him, it seemed like a charming boyish identification with his heroes:Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The larger point is, however, that those identifica-tions, as well myriad others – in sum, his confidence about the abundance andgoodness of his internalized objects – contributed enormously to his ability tomaintain his independence vis-à-vis the vicissitudes and insults of externalfortune. But this was no slavish or scholastic subordination to the tradition; it wasnot traditionalism. Illustrating his own point that although we are “determined”by tradition we are not “enslaved” by it, Castoriadis took the resources that tradi-tion had given him to criticize it and go beyond it in a truly radical way. He thusbroke with it while elaborating it at the same time.

It is often said – in an attempt to pathologize analysts and discredit psycho-analysis – that analysts typically focus on the problems which cause them themost trouble personally. In the first place, this only counts as a criticism if oneassumes that psychoanalysts ought to be free from psychological difficulties. Butwe can go further and ask: are people not apt to be the most creative in workingon problems about which they have inside familiarity – for example, Freud onOedipal configurations and Winnicott on separation? The topic that was at thecenter of Cornelius’s psychoanalytic theories was, of course, omnipotence.Anyone who heard him play the piano – his dynamic range extended from fortis-simo to fortissimo – recognized that it was an active force in his personality. Myhypothesis, then, is the following: Cornelius’s sense of omnipotence no doubtcontributed, especially in his youth, to his difficulty in working in political groupsand his ideological combativeness. But it also served him well. For it undoubtedlyhelped him to stand alone, with the conviction that he was right and the otherswere wrong, in a number of situations in which weaker individuals would havecaved in to the pressures of the group.

My third hypothesis concerns Castoriadis’s sheer sense of animal vitality – joiede vivre is too weak a term. It was apparent to anyone who knew Cornelius howmuch gratification he extracted from the pleasures of life – food, wine, convivi-ality, humor and music. I am convinced that the compensations of those pleasuresmust have helped him substantially in getting through the many dark periods anddisappointments that his career necessarily entailed. And this vitality wasnowhere more manifest than in the three months of incredible struggle he wagedin the hospital prior to his death. An anecdote will help to illustrate this point. Onenight, Cornelius, his wife Zoe and I were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant inGreenwich Village. When Zoe and I failed to order pasta for our primo piatto,



Cornelius turned to us with a look of utter incredulity and contempt and said, “Togo to an Italian restaurant and not order pasta is like meeting Johann SebastianBach” – whom he considered the quintessential creative genius – “and not havinghim play a fugue.” In short, he esteemed the “lower” things every bit as much ashe did the “higher.” In fact, he knew the opposition was artificial.

In the spirit of Castoriadis, I will end these reflections on an interrogative note.As he was one of the few thinkers who continued to believe in revolution, it mustbe asked: What does his death mean for those of us who accept his insistence thatmodernity does not represent the completion of history, that epochal changes – forbetter or worse – are still possible, but who nevertheless can no longer accept theidea of revolution? Indeed, what does it mean for those of us who suspect that thebelief in revolution might represent a last vestige of magical thinking in histheory, a deus ex machina that would extricate us from our finitude? In thisrespect, Hans Joas has articulated the central question for thinkers of our genera-tion who are in agreement with the major thrust of Castoriadis’s position, but whocan no longer subscribe to the idea of revolution: “How can we continue tobelieve in, and strive to carry out, the project of autonomy when the myth of revo-lution is dead?”59 But this is a question for those of us to grapple with who willcontinue to elaborate the legacy of this “titan of the spirit”60 while we completewhat Freud called “the extraordinarily painful”61 work of mourning.

NOTES

1. As it did on Arendt, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had an enormous impact onCastoriadis. And, again like her, he was especially impressed with the role of the workers’ councils.

2. For the English translation see: Cornelius Castoriadis, “Modern Capitalism and Revolution,”Cornelius Castoriadis Political and Social Writings, Volume 2, 1955–1960, tr. and ed. David AmesCurtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 266–243.

3. In marked contrast to many other fallen Marxists, however, Castoriadis never turned on Marxwith the rage that congeals after idealizations collapse. Instead, Marx remained for him a majorfigure to be “interrogated,” on the same level as, say, Aristotle or Max Weber.

4. Giving some credence to the thesis that ontogeny recapitulates phyologeny, Foucault was ableto occupy all these positions in one career.

5. See Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Social Theory(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), ch. 4.

6. Recent critical theory has attempted to utilize Mead’s theory of the “I” to preserve the momentof individual privacy after the intersubjective turn, while avoiding the disturbing consequences andcomplexities of an emphatic notion of the unconscious. The price, however, is too high. For whatresults is a less disquieting, but also a drastically more superficial view of human spontaneity andcreativity. I intend to take up the question of critical theory’s misappropriation of Mead at a laterdate.

7. For a discussion of Aulagnier’s work, see Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Construction of theWorld in Psychosis,” World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and theImagination, tr. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Stanford University Press, 1997), 196–213.

8. While I am in basic sympathy with Castoriadis’s position, I believe that he states his positionso strongly that it actually becomes incoherent. See, Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, ch. 4. For



Castoriadis’s response to my criticisms see, Cornelius Castoriadis, “Fait et à faire,” Reveueeuropéenne des sciences sociales, ed. Giovanni Busino, 86 (1989): 471ff.

9. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Unpublished Notes,” begun January 24, 1997, 1.10. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. Frederick

Lawrence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987), 334.11. Castoriadis, “Unpublished Notes,” 1.12. See Jürgen Habermas, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s

Theory of Subjectivity,” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, tr. William MarkHohengarten (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), 149–205.

13. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, tr. Kathleen Blamey (CambridgeMA: MIT Press, 1987), 171.

14. Loc. cit.15. Ibid., 172.16. Ibid., 108. Or to put it in strictly linguistic terms: “So far from imposing an alienating

straight-jacket upon the speaking subject, language opens up an infinite area of untrammeled mobil-ity. But within this area, there must still be someone who moves, and we cannot think the being oflanguage without thinking the being of the speaking subject.” Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Sayableand the Unsayable: Homage to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Crossroads in the Labyrinth, tr. KateSoper and Martin H. Ryle (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 133.

17. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation,” Crossroads in theLabyrinth, 72.

18. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 287.19. Ibid., 299.20. A product of the French psychoanalytic tradition, Castoriadis never underestimated the

power of the archaic mother. Once in a discussion, he observed that patriarchy exists not becausewomen are so weak, but because they are so strong. To illustrate his point, he recounted the fact thatthe dying words of his father, a traditional Greek patriarch who had had two strong marriages, were“Mama, Mama.”

21. Loc. cit.22. Jürgen Habermas “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,”

Philosophical-Political profiles, tr. Frederick G. Lawerence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983),157–58.

23. It has often struck me that where Horkheimer and Adorno’s position became more utopianas the political situation worsened, Habermas’s has become more militantly Kantian – albeit in acommunicative form.

24. Peter Dews has shown that Habermas has not been able to sidestep the question of the loss of meaning indefinitely and that it has begun to reemerge at the outermost margins of his theory. See Peter Dews, “Facticity, Validity and the Public Sphere,” The Limits ofDisenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), 208ff.

25. A similar evasion occurs with the question of ecology. Because it cannot easily be accom-modated in the Habermasian framework and because it also threatens to trump the question ofjustice, it is rarely dealt with. However, it does not follow from the fact that because the problem ofecology is difficult to reconcile with modern anthropocentric conceptions of morality and justicethat it ceases to be a critical issue for the modern world.

26. The slippery slope argument is no more valid here than when conservatives make it in theabortion debate. It no more follows that raising the question of the loss of meaning will necessarilylead to totalitarian or fundamentalist solutions than it does that permitting abortions or physicianassisted suicide will inevitably lead to the indiscriminate taking of lives.

27. Peter Dews, “Modernity, Self-consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy,” The Limits ofDisenchantment, 188.

28. See especially Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” but also “TheMovements of the Sixties”, The World in Fragments, 32–45 and 47–58.



29. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” 36.30. Ibid., 37.31. Ibid., 38.32. Ibid., 35.33. Ibid., 39.34. Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” 56. As Axel Honneth has recognized, one of

the unfortunate consequences of Habermas’s turn to evolutionary learning theory is that concretestruggling individuals and groups have ceased to be the primary carriers of rationality and free-dom: “He no longer interprets the process of rationalization, in which he attempts to conceive theevolution of societies, as a process of the will-formation of the species; rather, he understandsthem as a supra-subjective learning processes carried by social systems . . . Habermas does notgive acting groups a conceptual role in his social theory. Instead, when it concerns the bearer ofsocial activities, he links the level of systematically constituted systems of action directly to thelevel of individual acting subjects without taking into consideration the intermediate stage of apraxis of socially integrated groups.” The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in theDevelopment of a Critical Social Theory, tr. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1991), 284–85.

35. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” 39.36. Ibid., 41.37. Ibid., 39. Castoriadis’s assessment of the anti-communist struggles in Eastern Europe was

that while they displayed enormous strategical imagination in overthrowing the communist regimes,they lacked creativity in creating alternative institutions, especially to the capitalist economy.

38. Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” 56.39. Castoriadis, “The Retreat from Autonomy,” 39.40. Ibid., 43.41. Ibid., 40.42. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris:

Gallimard, 1985), translated as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay in Antihumanism, tr.Mary H.S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).

43. Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” 54.44. Ibid., 50–51.45. Ibid., 53.46. Ibid., 51 (emphasis added).47. Ibid., 34.48. It might be objected that Freud too had his reactionary side, and that he can be read against

himself for more progressive purposes. But Freud’s theory is much more internally divided thanLacan’s. While it contains its deterministic-biologistic aspects, Freud’s theory has its more openself-formative ones as well. Lacan only has the former. Even more importantly, where Freud cham-pions the value of autonomy, Lacan explicitly ridicules it.

49. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation.” Crossroads in theLabyrinth, 49.

50. Ibid., 46–116.51. Castoriadis, “The Movements of the Sixties,” 52.52. The Freudian left has never successfully dealt with the fact that our desires include an appre-

ciable quantity of destructiveness.53. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 309.54. Ibid., 311.55. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul,” Crossroads in the Labyrinth,

33.56. This is another area where he invites comparison to Hannah Arendt. For she too tried to

develop a notion of thinking which was distinguished from philosophy, on the one hand, and thesciences, on the other. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Volume I, “Thinking” (New York:Harcourt Brace, 1978). Habermas has, of course, attempted to develop a more systematic




alternative to instrumental reason than either Castoriadis or Arendt with his theory of communica-tive rationality.

57. Castoriadis’s call for “the self-transcendence of reason” should be compared with Adorno’sinsistence that philosophy “must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.” TheodorW. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 15.

58. As I have pointed out previously, the philosophy of biology (including ecology) and the unconscious are two topics about which the Habermasian program has proven conspicuously unpro-ductive.

59. Hans Joas, “Cornelius Castoriadis’s Political Philosophy,” Pragmatism and Social Theory(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 174.

60. This was the title of Edgar Morin’s obituary for Castoriadis, “Castoriadis, un titan del’esprit,” Le Monde, 30 December 1997, 1.

61. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” S.E. 14.


Requiem for a Selbstdenker Cornelius Castoriadis

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