In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an ‘inability to constitute oneself without excluding the other’ (Cornelius Castoriadis). Ironically Castoriadis himself, in a project we might term an (...) ethnography of the West (see his writings on ecology, capitalism, rationality, contemporary culture, racism, Greek philosophy/history, and the environment) is prone to the same vice, especially in his identification of the West as the sole autonomous society. This article argues that in the shariainstitution of a legal autonomy, Islam and Islamism alike demonstrate an affinity with modernity as defined by Castoriadis. In the light of this Islamist autonomy, it concludes that Castoriadis’ vision of modernity as a struggle between opposed imaginaries of autonomy and rational mastery needs reformulating. (shrink)

Do psychological perspectives constitute the only way through which the role of musical creativity in education can be addressed, researched and theorised? This essay attempts to offer an alternative view of musical creativity as a deeply social and political form of human praxis, by proposing a perspective rooted in the thought of the political philosopher and activist Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). This is done in two steps. First, an attempt is made to place the pursuit of the concept of musical creativity (...) within a larger educational and societal context of conflicting trajectories that run through (a) Modernity and (b) Education. Then, I revisit the issue of educational value of improvising and composing through creating conceptual links between the process of music-making through improvisation and composition and the project of political autonomy as conceived by Castoriadis. By foregrounding instituting imaginary over instituted imaginary, improvising and composing become active processes of positing new legitimacies, and of creating a music-making context that searches for its own foundations. It is in and through creative musical praxis that we can think about issues of hierarchies, musical values, social dimensions of different music-making processes, our relationship to past values and to historical dimensions of music. By arguing that improvisation and composition might be seen as ways of positing the issue of political autonomy in musical terms, this paper emphasises the role of improvisation and composition as a mode of potentially transformative educational practice that may foster the development of critical consciousness, linking music education to a larger project of re-discovering and at the same time re-defining democracy. (shrink)

A reading of Solon's elegy to eunomia through Castoriadis's seminal theory of autonomy as the explicit and reflective self-institution of society can elucidate the question of what constitutes sound governance. Solon proposes that the dignified realm of mortal life is the ethos of citizenship in a political state. Accordingly, this regime, which relies on intrinsic justification, needs to be understood in ethico-political terms. Its inherent ordinance is the rule of justice - the reciprocity of equitable proportion governing relations among citizens. (...) It is the responsibility of these citizens to safeguard the governing reciprocity, and when they neglect it, the entire state suffers the dire consequences of hubris. The political order that best observes and promulgates the rule of justice is good governance, which functions both as self-limitation and as a balancing measure by arranging the contest of civic forces into a fitting harmony. (shrink)

One of the most contentious of Castoriadis' ideas is his concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). This article elucidates and evaluates this concept of creation, contrasting Castoriadis' approach with its classical antithesis in the philosophy of Parmenides, who famously concluded that the universe muct be unchanging since nothing can come to be or cease to be.

Perhaps the most often criticized element of Hannah Arendt's political theory is her insistence on the necessity of constructing and maintaining rigid boundaries between various activities of the human condition. Less often, however, is the attempt undertaken to determine the philosophical motivation stimulating this project of distinction. This article will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Arendt's imperative is rooted in a certain misreading of the Marxian dialectic. The first part of the article will outline the contours of Arendt's (...) erroneous interpretation of Marx's understanding of labour, demonstrating the degree to which the latter breaks down the tripartite structure of the vita activa. The second part of the article will read Arendt's affirmation of distinction as being a response to what Arendt will take to be the problems of the dialectic, specifically the dialectic's allegedly necessary positing of conceptual contingency and logical necessity. Finally, the third part of the article will demonstrate, through an examination of two key passages in the work of Marx, the extent to which Marx himself was just as concerned with overcoming the type of homogeneous and abstract universalism rejected by Arendt. The ground will thus be provided for the overcoming of the necessity of Arendtian distinction, and perhaps also for a more fruitful engagement between the Marxian and Arendtian theoretical problematics. (shrink)

This paper asks and examines the question “who are you?” In doing so it embarks across the conceptual terrain of subjectivity, passing through five different regions. First is the subject and otherness, in which are considered Arendtian notions of the “who” of the individual in the appearing world. Next is the relation between the “I” and the “you” in systems of recognition, and how those systems are creations and expressions of social normativity. This is followed by the idea of the (...) sovereignty of the self as a reaction to its dislocation within systems of recognition. Sovereignty as such is viewed through the thought of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. With Foucault, the authors approach the question of social normativity as a frame rather than a constraint by which the self is stylized. The fourth section of the paper then explores self-questioning as a means of explicit or intentional self-stylization. Contrasting the “mere liberation” of thinking in Arendt’s thought with broader understandings of freedom, the fifth section relates Arendt’s conception of the miraculous with Derrida’s of the event. The paper’s trajectory returns in conclusion to the implications of its course for the initial question of who one is, particularly with respect to the teaching subject. (shrink)

The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on (...) the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of ‘generalized conformism’. Whilst making the argument that the notion of ‘generalized conformism’ is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on ‘new maladies of the soul’. Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism. The article concludes that the work of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts in the new individualism. (shrink)

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. (...) Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it. (shrink)

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. (...) Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it. (shrink)

This article critically considers Castoriadis’ central concept of creation ex nihilo. It does so in two ways. It first draws on recent research to suggest that the historical inauguration of the project of autonomy in ancient Greece - in both its political and philosophical aspects - was more complex and contextually anchored than Castoriadis acknowledges: it did not surge forth out of nothing. Second, it considers the idea of creation from a theoretical perspective. Here the idea of creation as contextual (...) rather than absolute is offered. Within this suggested qualification, two lines of discussion - drawn from the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions - are broached. (shrink)