Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and because it involves the psyche's practical and poetic engagement with the creation of new (...) imaginary forms. Philosophy's task, in this sense, is to consider thought from the standpoint of the unthought, a daring task that cannot ultimately take place without one's fully-fledged acceptance of one's own finitude. (shrink)

This article examines the possible contributions the existentialist tradition might make to environmentalism. I note, first, that Martin Heidegger is a questionable ally, both because his relationship to technology is ambiguous, while his affiliations with the Nazis were not. But the larger existentialist tradition is valuable for the environmental movement because it opens up a field of possibilities for human creativity. Sartre serves as exemplary for the way he struggled with the dialectic between individual autonomy in his early philosophy of (...) freedom, and the needs of the collective as he confronted them in his later turn toward Marxism. But the demands of the collective are more reasonably confronted in the larger legacy of Hegel than in the more limited form they took in Sartre's Marxism. The article concludes that Sartre's struggles can be enlightening to those of us who now seek the joyful wisdom of existential freedom for the individual even as we confront the demands that environmental degradation will place on the collective. (shrink)

From the beginning of his career Alain Touraine tried to develop a heterodox sociological terminology which promised to open up new ways of thinking about the dynamics of modern societies. This article tries to bring to light some of the Sartrean roots of Touraine's early theoretical tools and to reconstruct his intellectual development through the 1970s and 1980s when he formulated his ideas on the emergence of social movements within post-industrial society. It will be argued that Touraine's major works of (...) the 1990s - though not without some theoretical problems - offer fresh insights into the conditions of modernity and are able to correct and modify interpretations of modernity of major theorists such as Habermas and Taylor. (shrink)

I attempt to show that Marx was driven by a systematic philosophical goal expressed already in his doctoral dissertation and present throughout his mature political economic theory as well as in his practical political writings. I reconstruct this systematic – and critical – philosophical adventure in order to suggest that it is as philosophy that Marx's work retains its political bite today. In the process, I propose a reinterpretation of Marx's political theory that, once again, is traced through the entirety (...) of Marx's corpus. The young Marx criticized Hegel's separation of the political from society; he then attempted to reduce the political sphere to civil society; the theory of alienated labor was elaborated as a theory of political economy that replaced the political; but in the end, when all three volumes of Capital and the unpublished Grundrisse are considered systematically, Marx sees capitalism as threatened ultimately by its inability to reflect politically on its own presuppositions, and hence its limits. (shrink)

The social thought of Castoriadis and Lefort address Old World constellations. Yet both are positioned in a critical relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and pose questions about power, the political and citizenship relevant to different civilizational settings. Two political philosophies that emerged in the era of revolutionary critique are examined in this paper alongside Castoriadis and Lefort. Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of republic and empire and Simon Bolivar’s creed of independence were American visions that connected with the political imaginary. Each (...) set down traditions open to interpretation and mythologisation. Both invoked an older rivalry of two images of the New World, as American or as Colombian, which was really a rivalry of Spanish and British Empires and their civilizational influences. Where earlier republican visions developed at the cusp of virtue and interest cultures had posed a particular range of questions about democracy, civic constitution and independence, American states now contained democratic and authoritarian potential. Even though Castoriadis and Lefort did not make these American contexts the centre of their work, each conceive the political and politics in ways that are relevant to American modernities. A key argument put in this paper with respect to Castoriadis and Lefort is that Castoriadis’s conception of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary finds a strong case in the North American revolution. (shrink)

WESTERN MARXISM by J. G. Merquior London: Paladin Books, 1986. 247pp., £3.95.

This essay starts by reviewing Claude Lefort’s writings on totalitarianism, a theme that runs like a red thread through his oeuvre and plays a key role in the different stages of his intellectual development. The analysis of the USSR is a central interest of Lefort and his colleagues at Socialisme ou Barbarie (and inspires them to adopt an explicitly “political” approach against the “economism” of their fellow Marxists); the problem of totalitarianism features prominently in Lefort’s theory of democracy and human (...) rights (where it functions as the “flipside” of democracy); and the theme holds Lefort’s attention well after the events of 1989. The emphasis of this essay, however, is not on the chronology of Lefort’s trajectory, but on the methodological role of totalitarianism in his theoretical framework. Lefort’s account of totalitarianism serves him as a tool to dissect the symbolic fabric of modern society. In Arendt’s view, totalitarian rule reveals something of the essence of modernity, as a movement towards ever increasing technical mastery. For Lefort, by contrast, totalitarian tendencies arise as an attempt to close off the experience of indeterminacy that has been opened up by political modernity. He shows that the totalitarian “imaginary” (which he dissects in psychoanalytic terms) presupposes yet deliberately inverts the very ideas that sparked the democratic revolution and that are central to the self-representation of democratic societies. In consequence, democracy is continuously at risk of degenerating into totalitarianism. Importantly, the totalitarian threat, which Lefort believes to be the main threat to modern society, only becomes visible by adopting a specifically “political” perspective. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we continue to understand and to interpret our society in “political” terms, that is, in reference to the symbolic constellation of collective power. (shrink)

I met Castoriadis only twice, once in Paris in 1979, and then repeatedly in Melbourne in 1991 over the time of the Thesis Eleven Conference on Reason and Imagination. Both these encounters, in different ways, were transformative for me. As it happens, I remember them very well. As the distance risks clouding memory, I take time in this paper to reconstruct and share these stories. They take us back to the world through which we first encountered Castoriadis, as Paul Cardan, (...) via the efforts of London Solidarity and its emblematic hedgehog – small and prickly, doesn’t like being interfered with; known to pop up in ways that might just be revolutionary. This was Castoriadis as I first encountered him, and this was the culture I likely never got past: Socialisme ou Barbarie, en anglais. (shrink)

This memorandum offers some incomplete thoughts on the process through which Paul Cardan became Cornelius Castoriadis. This involves some examination of the connection, alignments and dissonances between the Johnson-Forest Tendency in Detroit, and Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris. Special emphasis is placed on the pioneering work of Stephen Hastings-King and the notion that these intellectual movements centred their energies around the search for the proletariat. Cardan spent more time with Marx; Castoriadis, professionally, spent more time with Freud, and after. The (...) spectre of Freud is as central to these inquiries as is the ghost of Marx. If the spectre of the Worker needs to be dispelled, after Socialisme ou Barbarie, then the dynamics of suffering and creativity also need yet to be maintained in tension. (shrink)