As a work of social theory, I would argue that it belongs in a class with the writings of Habermas and Arendt". -- Jay Bernstein, University of Essex This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought.

This volume translates Castoriadis's dialogues on politics, ethics, culture, and aesthetics with important intellectual figures including Francisco Varela, Octavio Paz, and others.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

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 collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort (...) the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Paul Standish; Editorial, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 36, Issue 2, 28 June 2008, Pages iii–iv, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00255-i3.

In this posthumous collection of writings, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) pursues his incisive analysis of modern society, the philosophical basis of our ability to change it, and the points of intersection between his many approaches to this theme. His main philosophical postulate, that the human subject and society are not predetermined, asserts the primacy of creation and the possibility of creative, autonomous activity in every domain. This argument is combined with penetrating political and social criticism, opening numerous avenues of critical thought (...) and action. The book’s wide-ranging topics include the core worldview of ancient Athens, where the idea of self-creation and self-limitation made democracy possible; the wealth of poetic resources; a deconstruction of the so-called rationality of capitalism and of the current conception of democracy, along with a discussion of what a radical, revolutionary project means today; the role of what he calls the radical imagination in the creation of both societal institutions and history; the roots of hate; a psychoanalytic view of human development torn between heteronomy and autonomy; the role of education in forming autonomous individuals; and notions of chaos, space, and number. (shrink)

These remarkable essays include Cornelius Castoriadis's latest contributions to philosophy, political and social theory, classical studies, development theory, cultural criticism, science, and ecology. Examining the "co-birth" in ancient Greece of philosophy and politics, Castoriadis shows how the Greeks' radical questioning of established ideas and institutions gave rise to the "project of autonomy". The "end of philosophy" proclaimed by Postmodernism would mean the end of this project. That end is now hastened by the lethal expansion of technoscience, the waning of political (...) and social conflict, and the resignation of intellectuals who blindly defend Western culture as it is or who merely denounce or "deconstruct" it as it has been. Discussing and criticizing Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Weber, Heidegger, and Habermas, the author of The Imaginary Institution of Society and Crossroads in the Labyrinth poses a radical challenge to our inherited philosophy. (shrink)