Abstract
The publication in the same year of two significant works on Castoriadis should be regarded without doubt as a great opportunity to think once more along – and possibly even beyond – the trajectories of his thought. Despite their pronounced differences in scope, aim and content, both publications are works of unfailing scholarship and I believe that while they won’t fail to generate a lively debate in the circles of Castoriadis scholars they could also disseminate Castoriadis’s main insights to the wider reading public in the English-speaking world.
Revolving around an interpretation of the ‘key-concepts’ crisis and critique, Memos’s book Castoriadis and Critical Theory is an attempt to re-instate Castoriadis as a radical and political thinker, and consequently to free his works from the ‘idolatry of words’ that, according to the author, characterizes the ‘abstract, philosophical and apolitical readings of his works’ (p. 2; emphasis added). In Memos’s understanding of things, Castoriadis’s thought has suffered in the hands of ‘fashionable scholars’ (p. 2) who have allegedly abandoned the revolutionary aspect of his works in favour of an ‘apolitical and conservative appropriation of his works via the promotion of “abstract” concepts, like “imagination, chaos, creation, monad, body, psyche, magma, tragedy, ensemblistic-identitary logic, legein and teukhein”’ (p. 3), etc.
Memos’s book is comprised of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the English-speaking reader to Castoriadis’s early works while throwing light on his formative years as a young intellectual and revolutionary. The second chapter explores the Trotskyist influences in Castoriadis’s critique of Marx and orthodox Marxism and the third revolves around the ‘crisis of Marxism’ debate, offering inter alia an insightful comparison between Castoriadis and Althusser on this matter. The fifth chapter focuses on Castoriadis’s role in the events of May 1968 and on the development of the project of autonomy.
I now come to the fourth chapter of the book, bearing the telling title ‘Marx in Question’, which is in my view the most prominent from a theoretical point of view and the one that is most likely to generate a fruitful – and perhaps even heated – debate. Here, Memos explores the convergences between Castoriadis’s, Axelos’s and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx. Although the reader is warned that the three thinkers don’t form a ‘school’ of thought or of Marxism, Memos still believes that their common experiences in Greece in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the midst of the civil war and especially their confrontation with the practices of the Greek Communist Party played a pivotal role in their perception and interpretation of Marx’s oeuvre (p. 88). Following predominantly John Holloway (and to a lesser extent Simon Clarke), Memos argues that Castoriadis ultimately failed to account for the crucial differentiation between Marx and Marxism and that, in spite of his relentless critique of orthodox Marxism, Castoriadis’s reading of Marx is premised on the (dogmatic) interpretation of Marx’s works offered by orthodox Marxism (p. 89).
Indeed, Memos is at times quite convincing in arguing that Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was often one-sided and polemic, or that Castoriadis’s analysis of Marx’s Capital ‘seems lacking in depth’ (p. 91). However, the question remains whether Marx’s (or some Marxist) account of society and history should be regarded as the only possible (or desirable) emancipatory discourse in the present state-of-affairs. In my understanding of his work, Memos seems to believe that this is the case and perhaps this explains his persistence in treating Castoriadis as a valuable commentator of Marx and as a ‘critical’ theorist. Enlightening as this treatment might be, it obliterates a series of developments in Castoriadis’s own thinking, under the – erroneous in my view – assumption that the various non- Marxian elements that shaped Castoriadis’s later meditations on society, psyche and the cosmos are obstacles for the concrete realization of revolutionary objectives. However, this position operates under a highly problematic clear-cut distinction between ‘abstract’ theory and ‘concrete’ praxis, which is rather untenable not only from the perspective of Castoriadis’s works but also in light of the various developments in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language during the 20th century. To name everything that deviates from such a clear-cut distinction or from variations of Marxism ‘post-modern’ as Memos does at times is entirely inaccurate and beside the point.
The second problem stems from the first and it concerns a certain attempt to construct the true interpretation of Castoriadis’s works, always in a polemic against the alleged misconceptions of conservative interpreters. Even if one accepts the – in my view precarious – distinction between progressive and conservative thinking, which ultimately rests on a specific historical metaphysics, the problem remains that Memos never really challenges a single interpretation of this kind. At the end of the day, any reader who does not share in all of Memos’s convictions may fail to understand what remains of Castoriadis’s unique approach to the social-historical. In other words, once robbed of all the unique concepts he introduced in the fields of social theory and philosophy, the uniqueness of Castoriadis’s approach is lost.
Memos seems to believe that the uniqueness of Castoriadis’s approach consists in the centrality the concepts of crisis and critique hold in his works and that, through the interpretation he offers his readers, Castoriadis’s thought purged from its conservative and problematic elements can impregnate ‘the tradition of critical and radical theory’ (p. 140). Although I believe that the majority of his readers will agree on this last point, I still doubt whether they will consent with the relegation of the majority of Castoriadis’s key-concepts to the status of, at bottom, harmful abstractions. The great merit of Memos’s work is, however, that it exposes some of the tensions that can be found in Castoriadis’s works and shows that, open as they remain to interpretation, they are invaluable in any attempt to think and act in the present historical context.
Being the product of the efforts of distinguished scholars, Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, offers a variety of interpretations of Castoriadis’s works that ‘explore different but related aspects of his works’ (p. xvi), as the editor Vrasidas Karalis explains in the prologue. The volume is divided into two parts, while it contains also a short prologue and an elaborate introduction to the ‘first part’, in other words to the translation of Castoriadis’s ‘early essays from their original in Greek’ (p. xv), both authored by Vrasidas Karalis. Both Karalis’s introduction and Castoriadis’s early attempts to formulate a distinctive approach to the study of the social-historical will no doubt be of great help both to Castoriadis scholars who are not proficient in modern Greek and to the wider reading public, while they can be seen as complementary to Memos’s detailed account of Castoriadis’s intellectual trajectory.
Like Memos, Karalis traces contradictory elements or a ‘rather antinomic origin’ (p. 9) in Castoriadis’s formative years as a thinker and links this antinomy with contrasting influences exerted upon Castoriadis by two radically different but perhaps equally important individuals, the ‘staunch and relentless communist fighter’ Agis Stinas (p. 3) and the ‘liberal-idealist’ philosopher Konstantinos Despotopoulos (p. 4). Importantly, Karalis argues that this antinomy left an inextinguishable trace in the ‘early essays’, a certain disemia, emanating from Castoriadis’s attempt to ‘synthesize coexisting and yet contradictory patterns of conceptualization’ (p. 16), viz. neo-Kantian and Marxist ones.
Before turning to the essays on Castoriadis’s works, a note on translation is due. Vrasidas Karalis and Anthony Stevens have undertaken the difficult task of rendering into English Castoriadis’s ‘early’ essays, ‘Directions of the Journal Sociological and Ethical Archive’, ‘On the Work of Max Weber’ and ‘Obituary for A[gis] Stinas’, which appeared originally in the mid-1940s in the ‘short-lived journal entitled Sociological and Ethical Archive’, before being reprinted in Athens in 1988 by Ypsilon Books (see pp. 1–2). As far as I can judge they have done brilliant work and their translations are invaluable to the English-speaking reader who had previously no access to these little gems.
The second part of the volume begins with Anthony Stevens’s essay, which compares Heidegger’s and Castoriadis’s readings of the Antigone, aiming to elucidate their differences and to offer ‘an adjudication of the points at issue’ (p. 69). Stevens’s essay is well-argued and thought-provoking and, being also a rigorous ‘study in translation’ (p. 71), it benefits greatly from the author’s own translation of Heidegger’s texts. Stevens’s approach adds to the existing bibliography on the issue by introducing in the discussion Heidegger’s text of 1942, Der Ister, an interpretation of Hölderlin’s homonymous hymn of 1802. Stevens argues that Heidegger’s (mis)interpretation of Sophocles is not primarily a byproduct of his Nazism, as Castoriadis suggests, but of his ‘theological’ approach, which effaces the historicity and the political aspects of the original Greek tragedy (pp. 84–5), while making allowances for ‘personal trauma’ (p. 84), i.e. his gradual disillusionment with the idea of becoming the philosopher-king of the Nazi regime, as the basis of what he understands as Heidegger’s wider rejection of the political (p. 84). The essay is followed by an appendix where Stevens offers a ‘literal translation of Heidegger’s version’ of the stasimon in question from p. 112 of the Einführung in die Metaphysik and where the reader is offered an additional tip, as the ‘translations Castoriadis specifically objects to are underlined’ and ‘neologisms of Heidegger’s own coining are [printed] in italics’ (p. 85).
The essays of Andrew Cooper (‘Aesthetics and Autonomy’) and George Pefanis (‘Philosophy and Theatre: Cornelius Castoriadis on the Imaginary Structure of Meanings in Theatre and Performance’) also take account of Castoriadis’s readings of Greek tragedy. Drawing from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Cooper explores the relationship between aesthetics and autonomy in Castoriadis’s thought with specific emphasis on his late text Fenêtre sur le Chaos (window to chaos), where Castoriadis explicitly thematizes art, creation and (mainly aesthetic) tradition. Cooper brings to the fore the convergence of aesthetic experience and autonomy in the paradoxical state of being in which humanity always already finds itself, as he argues that in Castoriadis’s account tragedies are means to gain insight into ‘the limitations of humanity, while holding anhtropos as a radical question oscillating between inherited and self-created poles’ (p. 115; emphasis added). Art therefore can be seen as ‘at once a window into chaos and the creation of the cosmos, orienting us toward both our fundamental creativity and the structures we have inherited that give form to our experience’ (p. 116). Pefanis creates an ‘intelligible dialogue between Castoriadis, Lehmann and Deleuze-Guattari, concerning the structure and the constructive character of meanings in the theatre…as well as the role of social imaginary with regard to the post-modern or to the so-called postdramatic theatre’ (p. 117). One of the most important aspects of his paper is the attempt to bring together the concept of the rhizome introduced by Deleuze and Guatteri and Castoriadis’s concepts of radical imagination and creation ex nihilo (see especially pp. 132–4), without obscuring their differences and without abandoning the critical-practical perspective of Castoriadis’s oeuvre. This is why, in the last part of his paper, Pefanis is adamant that in the absence of the critical-elucidating project ‘theory is reduced … to absurdities of fruitless eruditeness’ and that Castoriadis’s thought is a constant call ‘to return to that project, and, through the theatrical relation, try to create new projects’ (p. 136).
Peter Murphy’s essay, ‘Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis’, is a critical assessment of Castoriadis’s works with emphasis on his critique of bureaucratic capitalism, which understands Castoriadis’s ‘weaknesses’ as stemming from his ‘economic theory’ and traces conservative, even ‘right-wing’ elements (like his skeptical and cautious stance towards feminism, Third World Politics, the ‘eros of making’, etc.), in his otherwise ‘left-wing’ thinking (pp. 137–8).
Jeremy Smith’s contribution, ‘Contexts of Capitalism: From the “Unlimited Extension of Rational Mastery” to Civilizational Varieties of Accumulation and Economic Imagination,’ offers a comparison between Castoriadis’s notion of the ‘capitalist imaginary’ of ‘endless expansion’ of rational mastery and Johann Arnason’s ‘reconstruction of Weber’s metaphor of the “spirit” of capitalism’. Focusing on Anrnason’s work on Japan, it attempts to show that Castoriadis’s ‘theorisation of capitalism requires consideration of regional contexts and reformative programs enacted by states’, since these programs ‘refashion the imaginary signification of endless expansion of rationality’ (pp. 149–50). Indeed, the study of Japan offers, according to the author, a good example of the need to give direction and content to Castoriadis’s concept of autonomy, which is ‘too categorical to capture the nuances of living politics’ (p. 175).
In his essay ‘Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Castoriadis and the Politics of Heterodox Marxism’, and grounding his interpretation of (post) modernity on Agnes Heller, Simon Tormey focuses on Castoriadis’s possible impact on radical politics in a post-modern condition (p. 179). Although Tomey finds fault with Castoriadis’s attempt to account for heteronomy by ontologically re-tracing the alleged origin of social significations, he insists that even in this guise Castoriadis’s approach is preferable to ‘flat, static and ahistorical’ interpretations of symbolic systems, like those associated with Wittgenstein and Winch (p. 194). He also traces ‘postmodern moments’ in Castoriadis’s thinking and he is adamant that Castoriadis develops the very concept of a ‘project’ in a non-totalizing way and is therefore able to defy the accusation that he advances ‘a teleological conception of autonomization’ (p. 195). Tomey concludes that The Imaginary Institution of Society, revolving around the indispensable for ‘any left radicalism’ notion of autonomy, offers invaluable insights into ‘what a post-modern reading of autonomy might look like’ as it brings to the fore the ‘radical otherness of symbolic and cultural formation’ (p. 195).
Craig Brown links in his essay Castoriadis’s views concerning ‘democracy and social creativity’ with those of Claude Lefort and pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and G. H. Mead. In fact Brown sees two major traditions that have explicitly addressed the interlinking of democracy and social creativity, viz. ‘the radical democratic variant of North American Pragmatist philosophy and the French theories of democratic creativity’ (p. 196) represented by Lefort, Gauchet and Castoriadis himself. Brown believes that the elucidation of the relations between the two concepts is not merely of academic interest, but it is rather necessitated by ‘the current ideological uncertainty of modern social and political movements’ (p. 197).
Jeff Kloger contrasts Castoriadis’s interpretation of democracy in terms of autonomy and John Keane’s insights as presented in his The Life and Death of Democracy. Kloger points out from the outset that, like any other project, democracy is a two-fold social-historical phenomenon, as it exemplifies at once a significative/imaginary and an institutional/concrete aspect. Despite finding in Keane a nuanced intellectual whose approach bears elective affinities with Castoriadis’s, he still argues that Castoriadis’s account has the privilege of remaining open to unprecedented and so-far-unimagined potentialities of social being. Key to the supremacy of Castoriadis’s approach is arguably the centrality he attributes to the concept of ‘imaginary signification’, ‘around which the various aspects and dimensions of the democratic constellation can be organised coherently’ (p. 220).
John Rundell compares Max Weber’s and Castoriadis’s accounts of political modernity, focusing primarily on Weber’s The City and Castoriadis’s On Plato’s Statesman and exploring the ways in which they articulate the ‘continual confrontation and conflict between three different models of power that have been bequeathed to modernity – the royal or stately-sovereign, the oligarchic and the democratic’ (p. 235). Irrespective of the differences he traces between the two thinkers in his copious and detailed analysis of their works, Rundell concludes ‘Autonomy, Oligarchy, Statesman’ by pointing out that their common understanding lies in the acknowledgment that ‘politics is not a tragic regime, nor one subject to historical fixity, but a fragile one’ (p. 261).
The final contribution to the volume, Toula Nikolakopoulos and George Vassilakopoulos’s ‘Radical Democratic Subjectivity: Possibilities and Limits’, is a study of Castoriadis’s concept of ‘radical democratic subjectivity’ and juxtaposes Castoriadis’s conception of history as oscillation between autonomy and heteronomy and Hegel’s ‘diagnosis of modernity’ and especially with ‘his ascription of a decisive formative role to modern Western property-owning subjectivity’ (p. 263). Through complex and elaborate arguments that include a critique of Castoriadis’s conception of chaos, the authors attempt to show that Castoriadis’s ‘radical subjectivity’ cannot escape the confines of modern formalism and that his rejection of Hegel’s understanding of subjectivity is rather ‘too hasty’ (p. 275), while they point out the importance of ‘abstract subjectivity’ for the ‘alienability of property’, without which ‘our formal freedom would be compromised’ (p. 279). They also argue that Castoriadis ultimately fails to ‘incorporate into his theory the idea of the perpetual (re)creation of the same institutions as the defining act of a genuinely autonomous society (p. 289; emphasis added). More importantly, they conclude that ‘Castoriadis’s radical democratic subject is the apotheosis of the “empty” self that Hegel identifies with the dominant mode of being in the modern world, namely the abstract being of property-owning subjectivity’ (p. 290). It is perhaps the boldness of this statement that urged Karalis to write that the essay closes the volume ‘in a provocative and challenging note which would have immensely pleased Castoriadis himself’ (p. xviii). In effect, all the papers of this volume, as well as Memos’s rigorous work, are no less provocative and/or thought-provoking and are bound to offer their readers pleasure and surprises in equal measures. Being a long-time reader of Castoriadis’s works and of the relevant literature, I found myself mesmerized by the texts, occasionally nodding in agreement, shaking my head in disagreement or disbelief, but also utterly surprised at times by the brilliance of an argument and by the elaborate and detailed expositions of all the authors. Both publications share the conviction that there is currently an urgent need to bridge once more theory and praxis, and I hope that both books will be warmly received by the reading public and that they won’t fail to enrich our understanding of the present and to inspire our individual and collective praxis.