Cornelius Castoriadis

Key Concepts

Suzi Adams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781441102904
• eBook ISBN: 9781441169143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a Greek-French thinker best known for his work on 'autonomy' and 'human creation'. He was a political activist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker and economist. Recognised as a significant and original thinker of the twentieth century, his work is receiving increased scholarly attention. Notwithstanding the richness of his work, Castoriadis's terminology can prove challenging to understand. Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts is the first book of its kind, providing readers with a road map to the fundamentals of his thought. International specialists in Castoriadis's works introduce and clarify the complexity of his thought through the elucidation of nineteen key concepts that are fundamental to understanding - and grappling with - his ideas. Comprehensive and accessible, the entries have been carefully selected to cover the most central aspects - psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, politics - and periods of his thought.

CHAPTER ONE

Autonomy

Suzi Adams

The project of autonomy is central to Cornelius Castoriadis’s intellectual and political work, especially after the mid-1960s. It aims at the radical transformation of society – dominated in modernity by the rational mastery of bureaucratic capitalism – by revolutionary activity. Literally meaning ‘self-governing’ or ‘laws given by the self, for itself’ (auto-nomos), Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy builds on his articulation of socialism as workers’ self-management and council communism (see Socialism), which he developed during his time in Socialisme ou Barbarie as part of the broader, non-communist Left in France. Autonomy for Castoriadis consists in the interplay of collective and individual aspects; an autonomous society presupposes autonomous citizens (and vice versa) and the participation of all in power (Castoriadis, 1991, pp. 168–169; see also Howard, 1988). It is a sociopolitical project that aims to illuminate society’s ‘instituting power and at rendering it explicit in reflection’, on the one hand, and to reabsorb the explicit power of the political (le politique) into politics (la politique) in the strong sense, as the ‘lucid and deliberate activity whose object is the explicit institution of society’, on the other (Castoriadis, 1991, p. 174).

On Castoriadis’s account all societies institute themselves; that is, they create their own political form of society, be that, for example, monarchy or democracy (see Institution and Social-Historical). However, not all societies recognize that they are the source of their own form, customs, meanings and laws, and instead attribute them to an extra-social source, such as god or nature; such societies are heteronomous (see Heteronomy). An autonomous society in Castoriadis’s strong sense presupposes three things: first, the recognition that society is the source of its own form, meanings and laws; second, the recognition that socially created laws and norms are not given once and for all, and as such can be collectively – and publicly – problematized, interrogated and altered; third, the acknowledgement that there are no pre-given limits to the human realm – apart from very general, existential limits, such as mortality – and, as such, the social collective must set its own limits. This is the task of self-limitation (see Tragedy, Paideia and Democracy).

Intellectually, the project of autonomy emerged in Castoriadis’s thought during the second half of the 1950s as part of his ‘roads beyond Marx’; it is not however reducible to his shift beyond Marx. The crucial transition to a sustained critique of Marx is to be found in his text ‘Modern Capitalism and the Revolutionary Movement’ (in Castoriadis, 1987). The concept of autonomy did not emerge fully fledged in his thought but was rather a concept inprogress. In all, four intellectual sources and connections can be identified: first, the rethinking of the meaning of revolution via a critique of Marxist historical materialism and of Leninist vanguardism; second, the incorporation of psychoanalysis as a way of rethinking individual autonomy; third, the significance of the ancient Greek breakthrough to democracy; fourth, the attempt to rethink democracy as the anti-capitalist aspect of modernity. Each of these will be addressed in turn. The chapter concludes by mapping some open questions concerning possible limitations to Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy.

From the mid-1950s, Castoriadis began a critical engagement with Marx. More specifically, he set out to renew the revolutionary project via a critique of historical materialism in order to give self-determining human agency a central place.¹ He writes:

Starting from revolutionary Marxism, we have arrived at the point where we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries, between faithfulness to a doctrine that, for a long time now, has ceased to fuel either reflection or action, and faithfulness to the project of a radical change of society, which demands that we first understand what we want to change and that we identify what in society truly challenges this society and is struggling against its present form. (1987, p. 14)

Castoriadis identifies two aspects to Marx’s work: the emancipatory and praxis-oriented, which was found especially in Marx’s early writings, and the deterministic-reductionist, as found in Marx’s later writings, but also as taken up by orthodox Marxism. Castoriadis seeks to retrieve the former as a way of rethinking authentic revolutionary activity.

Castoriadis begins his critique of Marx by considering his economic theory. Here he hones in on the primary contradiction of capitalism in Marx’s eyes: the incompatibility of the development of the productive forces and the relations of production by shifting it to the level of bureaucratic organization (p. 15). His critique begins with an assessment of Marx’s theory of history via the ‘forces of production’ – something that is clearly central in Marx’s own thought – and later moved on to discuss the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ couplet – something that became more central in the later Marxian tradition than it had been in Marx’s own thought. Castoriadis builds a critique of the notion of technological determinism that underpins historical materialism (Castoriadis, 1987). But the forces of production are, in the last instance, the technological moment – in the strong sense of ‘technicist’ – of social relations conceived in economic (capitalist) terms, and thus fall prey to technological determinism (see Capitalism and Socialism). However, historical experience reveals a different perspective. ‘Technical progress’ is historically instituted and is thus far from being autonomous, linear and continuous in its long-term development – sustained technological innovation was not a feature of Greek antiquity or the Middle Ages, for example (Castoriadis, 1987).

From the critique of technological determinism, Castoriadis identifies the centrality of meaning as a basic aspect of society and history (see Arnason, 2012, p. 51) (see Social Imaginary Significations). He does so through a reconstruction of the latent idealism underlying Marx’s ‘objective rationalist’ philosophy of history (Castoriadis, 1987, pp. 41ff.). Castoriadis shows that Marx presumes a causal determinism in history, and, more importantly, in the ‘second degree’, that it is ‘the bearer of meanings that are linked together in totalities which themselves are meaningful’ (pp. 42–43), but in its abstraction to the regularities of behaviour as pure facts from which the concrete, lived content of actions and meanings has been jettisoned. On Castoriadis’s account, Marx’s did not supersede Hegelianism; rather, ‘the cunning of reason’ is also evident in Marx: ‘there is a reason at work in history, guaranteeing that past history is comprehensible, that history to come is desirable and that the apparently blind necessity of the facts is secretly arranged to give birth to the Good’ (p. 42). In contrast to deterministic conceptions, Castoriadis posits ‘non-causal’ elements to history (p. 44), of which the most important is human creativity. Human creativity in this strong sense is not merely a deviation from an already existing form or type but the positing of a new behaviour, the institution of a new social rule or the invention of a new social form. History is not dialectical but the domain of creation (p. 45). The importance of meaning to the human condition is central in this context; Castoriadis developed this further as social imaginary significations, for which his understanding of autonomy as a central social imaginary signification was a key complement to the dimension of autonomy as political doing/praxis (see Magma, Creation ex nihilo, Social Imaginary Significations and the Social-Historical).

Castoriadis’s rethinking of revolution and Marx’s theory of history included a (less systematic) critique of Leninist political vanguardism as a form of authoritarianism and self-alienation. On his account, Leninists are ‘technicians of this rationality’ and ‘specialists of this [historical] theory’ (p. 59). They are locked into the ‘materialist conception of history’ and disregard the autonomous activity of the revolutionary movement. Workers need to be directly involved in organizing and determining what is to be done, not informed of it, and required then to conform to it, by the vanguard party. Castoriadis argues that ‘they [the revolutionary masses] alone can invent, create a solution to a problem of which today no one can have even a suspicion’ (Castoriadis, 1988, p. 232). His opposition to political vanguardism formed part of his growing critique of bureaucracy, the rationality that underpinned it, its technical application and the apparent neutrality of such technique although it was employed for capitalist ends advocated by Lenin. In this vein, Castoriadis writes:

The formation and training of a bureaucracy as the managerial stratum in production (with the economic privileges that inevitably go along with this status) was, practically from the beginning, the conscious, straight forward and, sincere policy of the Bolshevik party, headed by Lenin and Trotsky. This was honestly and sincerely thought to be a socialist policy – or, more precisely, an ‘administrative technique’ that could be put in the service of socialism, since the class of administrators managing production were to remain under the control of the working class, ‘personified by its Communist party’. (1964, n.p.)

In the wake of these criticisms of Marx and orthodox Marxism, Castoriadis began to develop a positive account of autonomy by drawing on both Aristotelian and Marxian approaches to praxis as a creative and collective activity (Castoriadis, 1987). Instead of the means-end schemata, praxis, as a conscious and lucid activity, takes the autonomy of self and others as an end in themselves as primary: ‘In praxis, there is something to be done, but what is to be done is something specific: it is precisely the development of the autonomy of the other or of others’ (p. 75). But praxis – and concomitantly, autonomy – is not so much an end but a beginning (p. 75). In contrast to the phantasy of exhaustive and absolute knowledge of humanity as a technique – a technology – to achieve a given end, revolutionary praxis seeks to create a new society whereby ‘its object is the real as such and not a stable, limited, dead artifact’ (p. 77).

Castoriadis elucidated the individual aspect of autonomy through a psychoanalytic approach. His interest in psychoanalysis was already evident in the first half of the 1960s (see Castoriadis, 1987). He began training as a psychoanalyst in 1969 and started practicing in 1974. Castoriadis elaborated the creativity of the psyche through a rethinking of Freud. However, the importance of psychoanalysis for the project of autonomy has less to do with the specifics of Castoriadis’s theory of the psychic monad, the radical imagination of the psyche or his reading of Freud (see the Creative Imagination), and more to do with a certain idea – trans-Freudian and anti-Lacanian – of the overall goal of psychoanalytic therapy. (Castoriadis was not, however, advocating for universal psychoanalytic treatment!) Drawing on and radicalizing the ancient Greek tradition of self-examination, Castoriadis saw psychoanalysis as a way of incorporating critical self-reflection to formative psychical experiences and socializing institutions (see Paideia and Psyche). In this vein he writes:

Psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy. For each person’s self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannot have an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would not interrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes] tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn’t exist outside the individuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society depends essentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society. (2007, p. 151)

In this context we can posit a differentiation for Castoriadis between the ‘subject’ and ‘self’. For Castoriadis, the ‘autonomous individual’ signifies the shift from ‘socialized individual’ to the ‘autonomous subject’, and reflects a broader distinction between ‘self’ and ‘subject’, whereby the former engages with societal meaning, but the latter explicitly problematizes and reflects upon the institutions and meanings of society, on the one hand, but, on a more individual level, also posits a new relation to one’s psychical history and experiences, on the other (see Psyche and the The Living Being). This new relationship

makes it possible for the individual to escape the enslavement of repetition, to look back upon itself, to reflect on the reason for its thoughts and the motives of its acts, guided by the elucidation of its desire and aiming at the truth. (Castoriadis, 1991, p. 164; see also 1997a, pp. 137–171)

The capacity for reflection and deliberation – instead of passivity – characterizes the autonomous subject towards his/her psychical life and the problematization of received meanings.

Castoriadis deepened his elaboration of autonomy through renewed engagement with the ancient Greeks, with particular reference to the ancient Athenian instauration of direct democracy that blossomed in the sixth century BCE. In his view, the project of autonomy has only emerged twice in human history, and even then only partially: in ancient Greece and with the onset of European modernity. Castoriadis stresses that the ancient Greek breakthrough to autonomy is to be understood not as a ‘model’ to be replicated but as a ‘germ’ requiring further collective creation and problematization (see Democracy and Modernity).²

The significance of the ancient Greek breakthrough to autonomy lies in its creation of a new, political form of society: democracy. Ancient Greece was the only society to institute political power directly into the hands of its citizens, despite long histories – both in Greece and surrounding areas – of rule by sacred kingship and tyrants. In Castoriadis’s terms, the Greek invention of democracy was a self-creation out of nothing, as it could not be reduced to, or explained by, its antecedents (see Creation ex nihilo). The invention of democracy thus had weighty ontological consequences for Castoriadis. For him, autonomy and its elaboration as the concrete democratic polis signifies the creation of a new ontological form, and the very possibility of an autonomous society presupposes an ontology of human creativity and of society (the Social-Historical) as radically self-creating, on the one hand, and an image of being as not fully determined, as the interplay of chaos and kosmos, on the other.³

As Castoriadis understood it, the project of autonomy emerged as the dual instauration of politics in the strong and explicit sense (la politique) – as opposed to ‘the political’ (le politique) – and philosophy, also in a strong and interrogative sense (la philosophie) instead...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series
• Title
• Permissions
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Elucidating Castoriadis: Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1   Autonomy
• 2   Heteronomy
• 3   Social Imaginary Significations
• 4   Creative Imagination
• 5   Creation ex nihilo
• 6   Magma
• 7   Psyche
• 8   Social-Historical
• 9   Institution
• 10   Ensemblistic-Identitary Logic (Ensidic Logic)
• 11   Legein and Teukhein
• 12   Anlehnung (Leaning On)
• 13   The Living Being
• 14   Paideia
• 15   Capitalism
• 16   Socialism
• 17   Modernity
• 18   Democracy
• 19   Tragedy
• Index
• Copyright