"The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

The story of a revered European thinker, a literary legacy, family squabbles, and Internet bootlegging

As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during the early 1980s, Bill Brown began publishing Not Bored!, a photocopied journal of small circulation inspired by what Mr. Brown calls "the ultra-left milieu": revolutionary thinkers and organizations considered too extreme by orthodox Socialist and Communist parties. You can still subscribe to the hard-copy edition, but today most readers discover it through www.notbored.org. Many of them seek it out for the site's impressive archive of classic ultra-leftist texts.

Mr. Brown's Web site is prominent enough within a certain political subculture. But it is hardly the place one would expect to be the first English-language publisher of a book that would normally be issued by a major academic press. Then again, the circumstances behind The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep), by Cornelius Castoriadis, are anything but normal.A Greek philosopher, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary theorist, Mr. Castoriadis moved to Paris after World War II. By the 1960s, his analysis of the Soviet economy as a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" was a subterranean influence on radical activists around the world. His later work on questions of social theory, philosophy of science, and ecological politics has appeared in English translation from Blackwell Publishing, the MIT Press, and Stanford University Press. Mr. Brown calls The Rising Tide an "electro-samizdat" publication -- but Mr. Castoriadis's estate regards it as a pirate edition of the thinker's work.

Last fall, according to Mr. Brown, he was offered The Rising Tide of Insignificancy by an individual who called himself Paul Cardan -- a name he immediately recognized as one of the pseudonyms used by Mr. Castoriadis when publishing his early work. The volume included essays on psychoanalysis, ancient Greece, the third world, and the Persian Gulf war, among other topics, most of which appeared during the 1980s and 1990s. It was not just a translation but a scholarly edition -- with footnotes explaining obscure references and nuances of translations, as well as cross-references to previous works by Mr. Castoriadis.

"A lot of people in the [radical] milieu who contact me don't want to use their real names," says Mr. Brown. "So hearing from someone using the pseudonym Cardan really wasn't that unusual." And yet it was a surprise, even so, because Mr. Castoriadis had died in 1997. The cover page of the new book (which has been available as a PDF file at the Not Bored! Web site since December) states that The Rising Tide was "translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service." The author is listed as Cornelius Castoriadis -- which, as a footnote jokes, "is here a pseudonym for Paul Cardan."

As convoluted as that may sound, it is only part of a knotty tale involving an interdisciplinary thinker, his widow, a controversial translator, and charges of bootlegging usually associated with the world of pop music, rather than philosophy. A long preface to the collection describes conflicts within the Cornelius Castoriadis Association, the French nonprofit organization overseeing the editing and publication of the philosopher's posthumous works -- and in particular between his widow and David Ames Curtis, an American translator living in Paris. Of the nine previous volumes by Mr. Castoriadis available in English, Mr. Curtis has translated and edited seven of them. When asked about the online publication of the new book, Mr. Curtis says he will "neither confirm nor deny any involvement" with it. "But I am delighted," he says, "that the work of Castoriadis is appearing under the pseudonym of Paul Cardan once again, and that it is now available to the whole wide world."

Full story continues at Chronicle.