In his fragment on `capitalism as a religion', Walter Benjamin characterizes capitalism not only as a phenomenon that is `influenced' by religion, as conventional sociological interpretations assume, but as one of `essentially religious' character. This article takes up and elaborates Benjamin's idea, drawing mainly on Simmel, Marx and the constructivist concept of economic `myths'. Referring to Simmel's idea of money as `absolute means' and Marx's concept of capital, it is argued that money is a non-observable and basically paradox phenomenon, comparable (...) to religion. But capitalism differs from traditional religion in that it is no longer based on a fixed distinction between the mundane and the transcendent world. Rather, the promises of capital have to be redeemed in a continuous process of constructing and deconstructing economic `myths'. The article argues that such an interpretation of capitalism `as' a religion could be capable of synthesizing the results of contemporary research on innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth. (shrink)

The ontological turn in Castoriadis' thought is exemplified in The Imaginary Institution of Society (IIS). Castoriadis did not stop there, however, but was drawn to enquire into more general ontological questions. In turn, this line of questioning made its presence felt significantly in Castoriadis' intellectual trajectory, such that, as I argue in this article, we can speak of a shift from a regional ontology of the social-historical (as developed in the IIS) to a later transregional ontology of physis as creative (...) emergence. Castoriadis' ontology of physis occurs at the convergence of three intertwined threads in his thought: the rethinking of the idea - and regions - of nature, his growing onto-epistemic critique of `objective' knowledge and his theorization of the creativity of being via time. This leads him to develop an (unfinished) philosophical cosmology that, although placing more emphasis on continuity between anthropic and non-anthropic modes of being, can still highlight the autonomy and uniqueness of the social-historical. (shrink)

: My contribution intends to show that the traditional philosophical concept of work (Marx, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marcuse, Arendt, Habermas, and the rest) leaves out a crucial dimension. Work is reduced, for example, to the interaction with nature, the problem of recognition, or economic self-preservation. But work also establishes an ethical relation having to do with the needs of others and to the common good—a view of work that should be of particular interest for feminist and gender philosophy. This dimension makes (...) visible, as socially necessary work, the so-called reproductive sphere pertaining to giving birth and raising children, but it also generalizes the aspect of care, which plays a significant role in traditional woman's work. The ethical relation to the other is a characteristic feature of human work and in this sense, the possibility of working is a part of a good life. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of the natural world, on the one hand, and the changing configuration of his philosophical anthropology, on the other—especially in regard to his reconsideration of the creativity of nature in the 1980s and the reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic. It contextualizes these movements in his thought within a broader hermeneutic of modernity that, (...) following Johann Arnason, emphasizes the cultural currents of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity as a field of tensions. In an extension of Arnason’s elaboration, however, the present article argues that a latent opening towards an ecological worldhood is implicit to Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity that, conversely, also finds Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy. (shrink)

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative (...) ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the unfinished dialogue between Arnason and Castoriadis, with a particular emphasis on the problematic of world articulation. Arnason’s thought is situated as reconfiguring classical sociological constellations, especially as they pertain to the revitalization of the civilizational problematic and the emphasis on the philosophical dimension of sociological investigation. His interpretative framework is located within the nascent field of post-transcendental phenomenology, which he elaborates via the overlapping problematics of cultural articulations of the world as an inter-cultural horizon, and the (...) human condition as various modes of being-in-the-world. Arnason’s encounter with Castoriadis is considered. Despite the many points of fruitful contact, Castoriadis’ neglect of the phenomenological question of the world as a ‘shared horizon’ is, in Arnason’s view, too great to overcome; Arnason looks instead to Weber, Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, Patočka for interpretative resources. Although Castoriadis’ elucidation of the world proceeds ‘in fragments’, the article contends that hermeneutical reconstruction of his thought reveals openings onto the problematic of elemental world orders that can further the dialogue with Arnason. (shrink)

My contribution intends to show that the traditional philosophical concept of work leaves out a crucial dimension. Work is reduced, for example, to the interaction with nature, the problem of recognition, or economic self-preservation. But work also establishes an ethical relation having to do with the needs of others and to the common good—a view of work that should be of particular interest for feminist and gender philosophy. This dimension makes visible, as socially necessary work, the so-called reproductive sphere pertaining (...) to giving birth and raising children, but it also generalizes the aspect of care, which plays a significant role in traditional woman's work. The ethical relation to the other is a characteristic feature of human work and in this sense, the possibility of working is a part of a good life. (shrink)

Cornelius Castoriadis understood history as a self-creating order. In turn, he elaborated history in two directions: as the political project of autonomy, and as the ontological modality of the social-historical. On his account, history as self-creation was only possible through the interplay of social (or political) imaginaries and social doing. Although social imaginaries are readily situated within the non-subjective field, non-subjective modes of doing have been less explored. Yet non-subjective contexts are integral to both the “doing” and “imaginary” dimensions of (...) the human condition, and form the preconditions for concrete varieties of social and political action and politics (as la politique), more generally. The present paper begins to clear a path to reflect on social doing in its non-subjective aspects; as such, it is preparatory rather than programmatic. After briefly reviewing the field of “social imaginaries”, it reflects on Castoriadis’s elaboration of “praxis” and “teukhein”. It then considers Johann Arnason’s culturological reconfiguration of Castoriadis’s approach, and Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology of the movement of human existence as different ways of engaging with the problematic of doing, instituting society and political imaginaries. Despite a gradual subordination of “doing” to “signification” in Castoriadis’s philosophical elaborations, “social doing” as a non-subjective modality does not disappear altogether from his thought – especially and explicitly in respect to the phenomenon of instituting society as a political project – and remains a point of recurring intrusion into his more explicit theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This essay unpacks Johann Arnason’s theory of culture. It argues that the culture problematic remains the needle’s eye through which Arnason’s intellectual project must be understood, his recent shift to foreground the interplay of culture and power (as the religio-political nexus) notwithstanding. Arnason’s approach to culture is foundational to his articulation of the human condition, which is articulated here as the interaction of a historical cultural hermeneutics and a macro-phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon. The essay discusses Arnason’s (...) elucidation of his theory of culture as a contribution to debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’. It traces its beginnings from his critique of Habermas’s theory of modernity to its development via a trialogue with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. It argues that Arnason's theory of culture moves beyond socio-centric perspectives, and, in so doing, offers a critique of what we might call sociological solipsism. In decentring society/anthropos, a more nuanced understanding of the human condition as a unity in diversity is achieved. The essay concludes with a discussion of some tensions in Arnason’s understanding of culture, and argues for the importance for incorporating a qualitative notion of ‘movement’ in order to make sense of historical novelty and social change. (shrink)