"The Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee

Paris in the forties was a city awash in forged identities and remade lives.
But few transformed themselves as completely as Cornelius Castoriadis. When
the young Greek émigré arrived, in 1945, he settled down to write a doctoral
thesis on the inevitable culmination of all Western philosophies in "aporias
and impasses." But by the end of the decade, he had quit academia to lead a
curious double life. As Cornelius Castoriadis, he worked as a professional
economist, crunching numbers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development. Meanwhile, adopting a number of aliases, he developed one
of the most influential bodies of political thought to emerge from the
non-Communist left over the last half century. Mr. Castoriadis's covert
writings helped to rally France's beleaguered anti-Stalinist left in the
fifties and to inspire the spectacular Paris revolt of 1968.Yet even as other intellectual heroes of Paris '68 marched on to academic
renown in the English-speaking world, Mr. Castoriadis's work has remained
little known. That may change this year: As he turns seventy-five, academic
presses are generating the biggest wave of Anglophone publications by and
about Castoriadis yet.

The Castoriadis Reader (Blackwell), with representative extracts from almost
fifty years of political and philosophical writing, reflects his long march
from Marx back to Aristotle. World in Fragments (Stanford) presents a
selection of readings from Mr. Castoriadis's recent work, including papers
on ancient Greek democracy, the French Revolution, psychosis, racism, and
the history of science. (Both volumes are edited by David Ames Curtis, who
for the past decade has been the Greco-Parisian thinker's authorized
translator, and each bears cover graphics by Castoriadis admirer and
renowned jazz improvisationalist Ornette Coleman.)

Meanwhile, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Mr. Castoriadis's
theoretical magnum opus, first published in 1975, is finally available in
paper from Polity, after a decade of hardback near-oblivion. In these books,
the high abstraction of his philosophical excursions alternates with an acid
wit, trained by years of polemical writing. Typical is Mr. Castoriadis's
pithy remark on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: "Four words, four
lies."

Though Mr. Castoriadis's work started out within the Trotskyist tradition,
it soon transcended those origins. By the late forties, he saw in American
mass production or the Russian labor camp the embodiments of a demented
rationalism: an economic will to power that constantly engendered unforeseen
crises in the division of labor and responded with totalitarian measures in
a desperate effort to avoid its own collapse. In the fifties, Mr.
Castoriadis analyzed the "bureaucratic capitalism" of Stalinist Russia,
explored the philosophical implications of the 1956 Hungarian revolt against
Soviet rule, and scrutinized the wildcat strikes of Detroit autoworkers in
search of new forms of proletarian self-organization. Mr. Castoriadis took
seriously Leon Trotsky's dictum that the future of humanity was a choice
between socialism and barbarism -- with the USSR being, for him, a decisive
example of the latter. A circle of workers and intellectuals (including
Claude Lefort, now a leading political philosopher) collaborated in
hammering out a radically anti-hierarchical conception of direct democracy.

To readers of the group's now-legendary journal Socialisme ou barbarie
(1949-1965), Mr. Castoriadis was known as "Paul Cardan," among other
signatures; for, as a foreigner, he could be deported with twenty-four
hours' notice-making the occasional change of pseudonym an understandable
precaution, whatever the confusion to the public. Not that there was much of
an audience: Given the intimate relationship between intellectuals and the
Communist Party, he might as well have been writing in Greek. In 1967 the
members of the group voted to disband.

Then, in May 1968, everything changed. Students at the Sorbonne erected
barricades and called on the workers to launch a general strike, which they
happily did; and the vision of revolutionary spontaneity and worker
self-management elaborated by Mr. Castoriadis and a few comrades years
before suddenly went marching into the streets. In a manifesto, the student
radical leader (and later Green Party politician) Daniel Cohn-Bendit, best
known as "Dany the Red," acknowledged the influence of "the ideas of Pierre
Chaulieu," another Castoriadis pen name.

In the early seventies -- as the rest of the intelligentsia caught up with
the ideas he had helped launch years before -- Mr. Castoriadis obtained
French citizenship. He proceeded to reprint the old texts from the
Socialisme ou barbarie years under his own name. After quitting his job as
an economist to begin training as a psychoanalyst, he was not more gentle in
his critique of Lacan than he was with Stalin. Meanwhile, by the late
seventies, his warnings about the Soviet Union's arms buildup were regularly
cited by the New Philosophers, whose work was all the rage at the time.
Countless intellectuals began recalling fondly their days as militants in
Socialisme ou barbarie -- which was surprising, for its membership seldom rose
above the high two digits. "If all these people had been with us at the
time," Mr. Castoriadis noted wryly, "we would have taken power in France
sometime around 1957."

In
his own intellectual projects, Mr. Castoriadis certainly does his best to
resist what he calls "the glutting of the market by plastic 'pop'
philosophical collages." He focuses, throughout his work, on the question of
"autonomy" -- the process and condition in which a society recognizes that its
values are its own creation, not "given" (by God, or nature, or the mode of
production). Yet the potential to create new forms of social relation is
constantly hidden -- by precisely the institutions society has already
generated. "The guiding thread running throughout my writings," Mr.
Castoriadis explains, is "the obsession with the risk that a collective
movement might 'degenerate,' that it might give birth to a new bureaucracy
(whether totalitarian or not)." His examples of creative autonomy in action
are suggestive in their variety: the city-state of Greek antiquity; the
Paris commune; the shop-floor organizations that keep factories running (no
matter how stupid the bosses' orders may get); the formal innovations of
modernist art and jazz; the activism of Poland's Solidarity trade union in
the eighties.

As the final essay in The Reader makes clear, the threat of bureaucratic
ossification is by no means averted by the collapse of communism and the
near-collapse of the welfare state. Mr. Castoriadis takes little joy from
the sight of a population that "plunges into privatization, abandoning the
public domain to bureaucratic, managerial, and financial oligarchies,"
succumbing at last to the "generalized conformism ... pompously labeled
postmodernism." (The remark is that much more pointed when one recalls the
name of another ex-SouBer: Jean-François Lyotard.) And there is more than a
hint of Spenglerian gloom in Mr. Castoriadis's argument that "the process of
competitive decadence" between the old Soviet regime and its Western
counterparts yielded not a revolutionary upsurge but a pseudo-paradise of
consumerist passivity. Should academics choose to ignore his ideas about
autonomy -- preferring, instead, to celebrate laissez-faire or the delights
of "transgression" -- that would not surprise a grizzled polemicist like
Cornelius Castoriadis. After all, as he once wrote of intellectuals, "Paper
bears anything; so does a certain public."

[Scott McLemee was a contributing
editor of Lingua Franca magazine. (This article is reprinted from Lingua
Franca, The Review of Academic Life, vol. 7, no. 6, published in New York.]