كورنيليوس كاستورياديس

الأعمال

• 1975المؤسسة التخييلية للمجتمع (L’institution imaginaire de la société)

  يقطع مع الحتمية الماركسية: كل مجتمع يخلق نفسه عبر دلالات متخيلة ليست عقلانية ولا طبيعية، والاستقلال الذاتي يعني الاعتراف بمؤسسة المرء وتساؤله عنها.

• 1978مفترقات المتاهة (Les carrefours du labyrinthe)

  مقالات في التحليل النفسي واللغة والعلم والمجتمع، وهو الأول من ستة مجلدات تحمل هذا العنوان.

الموقف

Castoriadis is on the map for the idea that societies create themselves. In “Socialisme ou Barbarie” he analysed the Soviet Union as bureaucratic capitalism and saw the division between those who direct and those who carry out orders as the central conflict of modern societies in East and West; his ideas on workers’ self-management found an echo in May 1968. In the 1960s he concluded that Marxism, with its determinism and its claim to know the laws of history, had itself become an obstacle. “The Imaginary Institution of Society” sets against it the social imaginary: every society institutes itself through significations, gods, values, ideas of what is real, that cannot be deduced from nature or reason. Autonomy means that a society, and an individual, recognises itself as the author of its institutions and can question them; he found historical models in the Athenian polis and in modern democratic and workers’ movements. From Freud he took the radical imagination of the psyche, while rejecting Lacan’s structuralism. Jean-François Lyotard belonged to Socialisme ou Barbarie for ten years. Jürgen Habermas objected in 1985 that in Castoriadis’s model the creation of new worlds of meaning cannot be tied back to reasons the members of a society can share, and Axel Honneth discussed his ontology of creation critically in the same decade.

الحياة والسياق

Cornelius Castoriadis was born on 11 March 1922 in Constantinople; his family moved to Athens the same year. He studied law, economics and political science in Athens, joined the communist youth in 1937 under the Metaxas dictatorship and during the German occupation broke with the Communist Party to join a Trotskyist group, which exposed him to persecution from both sides. In December 1945 he left for Paris on a French scholarship aboard the ship “Mataroa”. In the French Trotskyist party he formed a tendency with Claude Lefort and left the party with it in 1948; the group and journal “Socialisme ou Barbarie” (journal 1949–65) emerged from it, and he wrote there under pseudonyms such as Pierre Chaulieu and Paul Cardan. From 1948 to 1970 he worked as an economist at the OEEC, later the OECD. Only after becoming a French citizen in 1970 did he publish under his own name. In 1969 he followed the break with Lacan’s school that led to the founding of the Quatrième Groupe, trained as a psychoanalyst and practised from 1973. From 1980 he was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He died in Paris on 26 December 1997.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Bureaucratic Society (La société bureaucratique, 2 vols., 1973)
• The Content of Socialism (Le contenu du socialisme, 1979)
• The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (La montée de l’insignifiance, 1996)