Between Athens and Paris: The life and intellectual contribution of Cornelius Castoriadis

In many ways, Castoriadis is an intellectual of the Enlightenment. He was, as many have said before, encyclopaedic. As a polymath, his interests were many and simultaneous, filling his life with several vocations and many projects. The arts, especially music, literature and the culinary, were to be taken as seriously as his politics and philosophy. As Edgar Morin reflects, ‘he showed in a dazzling way, against the established dogma, that one can form a culture for oneself in the twentieth century’ (1998: 5). However, the Enlightenment penetrates deeper. Humanism and critique dominate Castoriadis’s orientation. They underpin his dedication to, and mediate, the squabbles of his philosophical children: freedom and democracy. Political by choice, he is philosophical by necessity. Castoriadis’s biography reflects this as his life and vocations vacillate between the political and the philosophical. Of course, both are always present; his first love was philosophy and he never denied his politics.

Castoriadis and Marx would have made great intellectual interlocutors. This distinguishes Castoriadis from many of his revolutionary colleagues, especially those who struggled to avoid Marxist dogma. His pedagogical debt to Marx was repaid with the creation of his own formidable social philosophy and revolutionary theory. Through to middle age, Castoriadis was consumed by his Marxist militancy both in theory and in practice. The advent of his own distinctive strand of thought correlates with the exhaustion of Marxism. For Castoriadis, the students taking to the streets of Paris in May ’68 was a symbolically decisive moment for the 20th century. In this moment, radical politics were at once expanded and invigorated by new sites of contestation and, at the same time, subject to an impotence that would haunt them until today. It is difficult to separate Castoriadis’s intellectual trajectory from this history. The contours of his political thought were defined by his early political participation and critical engagement with the Greek left, and expanded and amplified among his comrades in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

By the time of the 1968 student uprising in Paris, Castoriadis had composed the outlines of his authentically original contribution. Leaving Marxism behind, Castoriadis’s project came to interrogate the structure of all aspects of modern human life; a philosophical elucidation of human activity, the individual and society. His interests expanded and his life was transformed. His late intellectual work was textured with a psychoanalytic flavour (he began to practise as a psychoanalyst in the early 1970s), and he immersed himself in the world of ancient Greece in order to further develop his theory of democracy. In Castoriadis’s later life he thrived intellectually, bringing philosophy to the world with catholic enthusiasm but, in doing so, he necessarily surrendered the active politics that he had been committed to during his years of participation with Socialisme ou Barbarie. ¹

Castoriadis was born in Constantinople in 1922, the same year his family moved to Athens, where he spent his youth. He had fond memories of Athens, of its beauty, street life and atmosphere. Castoriadis recalls: ‘it was a truly physical pleasure to stroll down the few avenues in central Athens in the sun, with the few trees there were there, and to chat with people’ (1990a: 2). Barely into his teenage years, he had already discovered his passion for philosophy. For this, he holds his father responsible, whom he characterizes as a staunch anti-monarchist, atheist and out-spoken Voltairian (Castoriadis, 1984, 1990a).

Castoriadis grew up steeped in intellectual and cultural activity. Both of his parents valued education and imparted to Castoriadis a strong sense of pedagogy. His mother bequeathed to her son a passion for music, while his father aroused his appetite for literature and philosophy – he would have the young Castoriadis recite French poetry or philosophic texts such as Plato’s Apology of Socrates (Castoriadis, 1990a). Castoriadis’s high school teachers were influential, many of whom he acknowledged for their role in his secondary education (Castoriadis, 1984). In particular, his French tutor Maximiani Portas (later Savitri Devi) – who was the first to answer his philosophical questions – had a significant and lasting impact on him (Dosse, 2014: 18). ²

As a precocious adolescent, he had completed his secondary education by the age of 15. It was this same precocity, combined with his concerns for social justice, that drew Castoriadis towards Marxism as a teenager. At this age, he devoured various Marxist publications that he would find in a small bookstore in Athens. His interest in radical politics at this time would lead him to the final chapter in his pedagogical development: his tutelage under the militant Spiros Stinas, who imparted a revolutionary spirit to him and was in turn revered by Castoriadis (Castoriadis, 2014).

As a teenager, and during the years preceding the Second World War, the political climate in Greece was rapidly changing. By 1936, then only 14, Castoriadis had already joined a Greek Communist youth cell. Greece was then under the control of the dictator Ioannis Metaxas. In one incident, the three other young men in Castoriadis’s cell were rounded up, beaten and incarcerated for six months (Castoriadis, 1990a). The ordeal must have been quite harrowing for the young Castoriadis. Nonetheless, Castoriadis continued his radical pursuits, and the stakes were raised with the Gestapo to contend with as Greece endured occupation under German forces. During the occupation, Castoriadis had first been a member of a group under Communist command before joining an ultra-left Trotskyist group under Stinas (Castoriadis, 1990a). It was in these years of witnessing the internal conflicts, purges and violence of the Greek Left that Castoriadis formed his lifelong distaste for Stalinism and its analogues.

In 1945, Castoriadis left for Paris with a scholarship in hand to commence a PhD in philosophy. He departed Greece with many other young intellectuals including, notably, his friend Kostas Papaionnou, as well as Kostas Axelos and George Kaidylis, on the New Zealand troop carrier Mataroa. Dosse remarks that ‘this crossing of the Mediterranean, which is a journey through time, a passage between antiquity and the contemporary, can be perceived as a metaphor for the philosophical work that will [later] occupy Castoriadis’ (2014: 37). Within months of his arrival in Paris he had associated himself with French Trotskyists (including Claude Lefort and Jeanie Walter, who became Castoriadis’s lover and later the mother of his first child, Sparta Castoriadis). Here, he continued to develop his critique of Stalinism that was initiated by his limited contact with a smattering of critical texts, including Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937) among others (Castoriadis, 1990a, 1990b: 35). Moreover, he was motivated by his disillusion with the organization of Greek communism (especially his distrust of the attempted Stalinist coup in 1944). To France, Castoriadis brought with him an intimate firsthand knowledge of Stalinism that was well received by the French Trotskyists. Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet state as a degenerated workers’ state did not hold up for long in Castoriadis’s mind and he began, alongside others, to construct a critique of Soviet bureaucracy as a new kind of exploitative class society (Castoriadis, 1990a). It was this break with Trotskyism that initiated the creation of the revolutionary group and journal of the same name, Socialisme ou Barbarie, in the late 1940s.

From 1949 to 1970, Castoriadis worked as a professional economist for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Primarily the job provided him security given his precarious situation as a foreign national in France, and a cover for his political activities. It also gave him insight into the economic mechanisms of 20th-century capitalism and the workings of high-level bureaucracy (Castoriadis, 1990a). It was over these years that Castoriadis was predominantly occupied with Socialisme ou Barbarie. The group believed themselves to have cut through perversions of organized Marxism and discovered the germ of Marxism that could bring it into fruition in their contemporary era. The first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie declared: ‘[W]e believe that we represent the living continuation of Marxism within contemporary society’ (Castoriadis, 1949: 1). ³ They took aim at the mainstream of Soviet-influenced and organized Marxism of the time that, in the opinion of Socialisme ou Barbarie, had betrayed the original task of Marxism with the result of a new kind of exploitative social organization. Their concern was with the situation of the proletariat and the authoring of revolution by and for the proletariat. They stood against capitalism and against bureaucratic state socialism. The question remained: how to inspire revolutionary activity? And furthermore, could the role of the revolutionary organization circumvent its propensity towards exploitative bureaucracy?

These problems played themselves out in both the theory and practice of Socialisme ou Barbarie until its final days in 1967. The internal debates provided Castoriadis with a forum in which to cultivate his own philosophical and political ideas. The arguments and divisions that plagued Socialisme ou Barbarie centred on organization. The group juggled theory and practice, agreeing on Castoriadis’s vision of a self-managed society but disagreeing on their role in getting there. The left of the group, headed by Lefort, dismissed the role of the revolutionary organization. ‘[W]e are an intellectual group, we publish a magazine, that’s all’, Castoriadis (1990b: 36) recalls of Lefort’s attitude; whilst others, including Castoriadis, argued for the continued relevance of political organization. Finally, although Castoriadis would shy away from conceding, Lefort’s position won out. In 1967, with an inactive readership and lack of participation, Socialisme ou Barbarie disbanded (Castoriadis, 1990a).

This background into Castoriadis’s political practice and development is useful for understanding both the historical transformation of radical politics and the crossroads of Castoriadis’s biography that unfolded in the late 1969s and early 1970s. No longer did he believe that the analysis of capitalism, restricted to the terms of economics and production, could be the sole pathway to liberation in the 20th century. Revolutionary politics had to step out of the factory so to speak. Castoriadis’s 1963 article published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, ‘Recommencing the Revolution’, argued that the revolutionary project concerned all aspects of human life. The responsibility fell to all those who composed society. The students of ’68 understood this: ‘change life’ was their rally cry. Intuitively, they had located their freedom; it was woven into the very fabric of the society they inhabited, it was all the time under their feet, ‘sous les pavés, la plage!’, ⁴ they proclaimed. The problem was how to realize this. In concrete terms, the student revolt of 1968 degenerated, failing to establish adequate organization and faced with the problem of expanding its broad project to the whole of society. Castoriadis (1990a) reflects on his conflicted feelings during 1968. He recalls his genuine elation when witnessing the spontaneous practical organization of the students and hearing the voices of common people:

people belonging to layers of the population who had never been able to express themselves in this screwed-up society, who came and said what was in their hearts and on their minds; I recall a nurse who had come to speak there, an old man. (Castoriadis, 1990a: 9)

At the same time, he remembers feeling and experiencing a deep sense of the contemporary political tragedy, of the inevitable collapse of these moments of spontaneity and creation back in on themselves (Castoriadis, 1990a: 9). The student uprising had confirmed Castoriadis’s own theoretical reorientation. The evolution of his thought had led him to take seriously the idea that the revolutionary programme would have to take account of the whole of human life. This realization brought his philosophical inclinations into closer alignment with his politics. However, the more diffused approach of this orientation left the revolutionary programme somewhat impotent. The dispersion of Socialisme ou Barbarie and the tragic failures of ’68 led Castoriadis to hang up his revolutionary boxing gloves and set about reconciling his philosophy with his politics.

Following the events of the late 1960s, the orientation of Castoriadis’s life changed dramatically. In 1970 he was naturalized as a French citizen and, no longer requiring his cover at the OECD, he resigned his post along with his multiple pseudonyms, the most famous of which were Pierre Chaulieu and later Paul Cardan. ⁵ Freed from the threat of deportation, his ever-burgeoning responsibilities at the OECD ⁶ and the demands of his political activity, Castoriadis set about expanding his philosophical program that had ripened in the background of the events of the previous years. He returned to the philosophical problems that he had grappled with when he first arrived in Paris. Then, the main working title for his doctoral work was ‘Introduction to an Axiomatic Logic’, ⁷ with a complementary thesis: ‘Introduction to the Theory of the Social Sciences’ ⁸ (Dosse, 2014: 44). His philosophical concerns at this time were not dissimilar to those of his mature thought. Along similar lines to Husserl, Castoriadis was troubled by the crisis of science and philosophy (Dosse, 2014: 45). Even at this early stage in the development of his thought, he was problematizing the notion of a closed philosophical system (Castoriadis, 1990a: 3). In the final years of the 1960s and the early 1970s Castoriadis developed his theory of the social imaginary and social historical. He had approached Paul Ricoeur in 1967 with the intention of completing a doctoral dissertation under Ricoeur’s supervision, titled ‘The Imaginary Foundations of the Social-Historical’, which failed to transpire for practical reasons (Dosse, 2014: 264). Nevertheless, the ideas Castoriadis had formulated to this end were published in his original and important work L’Institution imaginaire de la société (The Imaginary Institution of Society) in 1975. The elaboration of this work would consume much of his intellectual endeavours from this point on.

In 1973, Castoriadis began practising as a psychoanalyst. His first analysis began in 1960 ⁹ and his interest in the field later coincided with his second marriage to the notable psychoanalyst, Piera Aulagnier, in 1968, whom he met through a Lacanian seminar series. Their confluence of thought was reciprocally productive and had a significant influence on French psychoanalytic theory at the time. Stepanatos (2007) goes as far as to say that the convergence of their two perspectives signalled the end of the hegemony of the structuralist signifier in French psychoanalytic theory. In addition, Castoriadis played a behind-the-scenes role as Aulagnier’s husband and as a non-practising member in the democratic experiments of the ‘Fourth Group’ ¹⁰ in which Aulagnier was a major contributor. Here, Castoriadis’s critique of power and bureaucracy converged with psychoanalysis in a move that sought to democratize the psychoanalytic organization and address modern social alienation (Dosse, 2014: 169). His daughter Sparta recalled her surprise when her stepmother told her that her father would take up the profession as a psychoanalyst: ‘It was a shock to me. I didn’t think he would succeed in shutting up to listen to his patients’ ¹¹ (Dosse, 2014: 175). Despite Sparta’s concerns, several of Castoriadis’s analysands recount his positive style of psychoanalysis which focused on creation and possibility in contrast to the more common analytical approach that fixates on negative analytic categories such as loss and trauma (Dosse, 2014: 184).

Castoriadis continued to practise psychoanalysis for many years both privately and in several hospitals. He was still working on the philosophical implications of his psychoanalytic theory up until his death in 1997. Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic pursuits shaped his thought in two directions. On the one hand, he fleshed out his elucidation of society with an innovative theory of psyche and language; on the other, he had his ‘ear to the ground’, so to speak, insofar as he had the intimate experience of hearing the minds of a diverse section of society.

From the 1970s onward Castoriadis evoked a paradigm that encompassed the individual and social configuration of our world. It took seriously the individual psyche and its social role in the world and in history in a way that he had not previously considered. His project retained a revolutionary attitude. Society, Castoriadis argued, is the product of the creative potentials of human history. It is our society, a society authored by us. By rejecting Marxism, Castoriadis sacrificed the focus of the Marxist revolutionary project that took aim at the relations of production. Marxism had provided Castoriadis’s politics with a site of contestation. Once out of the factory, Castoriadis’s politics took seriously all aspects of human life. The forays of his later years, into psychoanalysis and the politics of ancient Greece, only confirmed this. Castoriadis’s revolutionary project had broadened. His mature project was decentred, taking into account all aspects of human life, from the psyche to the social imaginary and the ebb and flow of the social-historical, without prioritizing any one aspect of the human condition.

That ancient Greek democracy informed much of Castoriadis’s project is not incidental. His Greek origins were never forgotten, even though he was troubled by his relationship to his homeland. For Castoriadis, Greece had failed to negotiate history in the way that Western Europe had succeeded. Greece remained trapped somewhere between the Athenian polis and Byzantine Christianity and had failed to establish its own modern tradition (Castoriadis, 1984). This, alongside the cosmopolitanism and intellectual hub that was 20th-century Paris, made France Castoriadis’s home. As a young man, Castoriadis was drawn to philosophy. Even at a young age, he intuitively understood its potential, but it took the politics of the Western European Enlightenment for Castoriadis to realize its possibilities. Castoriadis, helped along by his father’s Voltairian spirit, unravelled the puzzle that his Greek origins had endowed him with. In France, Castoriadis discovered the Enlightenment. Here, with the scaffolding of humanist Marxism, he was able to make a convincing interpretation of modernity. Whilst Castoriadis never returned to live in Greece, he did discover the potency of the Greek tradition. In this he was able to, albeit for himself, forge a distinctively modern Greek tradition.

The final chapter of Castoriadis’s life was more at ease than were his more turbulent years living a dual existence between his professional day job at the OECD and his covert revolutionary activities and all the volatility they entailed. His French naturalization in 1970 certainly played a role, permitting him to publish under his own name and to participate openly in French society without the threat of deportation. In 1978, he married his third wife, Zoe Christofidi. Their life together until his death in 1997 was perhaps the most settled and intellectually productive periods of Castoriadis’s life (Dosse, 2014: 245). Their apartment in the XVI arrondissement was a vibrant cultural and social environment, playing host to regular social gatherings whereby Castoriadis could hold court with music, games and lively conversation (Dosse, 2014: 247). It was in this period that Castoriadis finally secured a teaching position at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His seminars attracted a wide audience that many of his students recall with fond memories. Pierre Vidal-Naquet suggests that these were some of the best days of Castoriadis’s life, a time when he could bring all of his faculties together in teaching and research (Dosse, 2014: 311).

From an early age Castoriadis was driven towards philosophy and politics, firstly by the influence of his parents and then by his own precocious spirit. This spirit was one that Castoriadis was enthusiastic to impart: friend and colleague Eugéne Enriquez (1989: 31) recalls how his adult children reflected on how Castoriadis would explain to them in their youth the wonders of the stars and planets while holidaying together with Castoriadis on the Greek island of Skopelos. Castoriadis was a vibrant and charismatic character and enjoyed a central position amongst others in creative philosophical and political discourse. Participants in Socialisme ou Barbarie recall his physicality and enthusiasm to make his point and convince others, but emphasize his desire to win over those with dissenting viewpoints with his charisma and clarity before resorting to heated confrontations – of which he was also very capable (Dosse, 2014: 102–8).

Castoriadis’s intellectual energy is apparent in his writings. His polemical engagement with the subject of his inquiry and his ironic wit do not detract from the seriousness and gravity he places on his intellectual endeavours. In tracing the contours of Castoriadis’s intellectual biography, it is striking how much his political and philosophical positions change and evolve. His willingness to accept the limitations of his own thinking demonstrate the degree to which he practises his own philosophy. In this way, the project of autonomy – the project of critique and conscious creation – motivates his intellect.

Castoriadis began his intellectual journey with a love of philosophy and a passion for the emancipatory potentials of politics. As a young adult, Marx’s contribution had been quintessential in helping him begin this project. This was the Marx who had sought to bring philosophy to the world and the world to philosophy. Castoriadis was attentive to people’s everyday lived experiences – his engagement with workers during his Socialisme ou Barbarie years, the voices of the people that had inspired him in 1968 and his intimate contact with his analysands – informed this project. The results were such that he would abandon Marxism and, to a lesser degree, the autonomous workers’ movement in favour of a grander project of social transformation that understood a more distributed approach that rests within our collective mode of thinking and doing in the world. With this, Castoriadis had unified his philosophy and politics.