Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis (French: [kastÉ"ʁjadis]; Greek: Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης [kastoriˈaðis]; March 11, 1922 â€" December 26, 1997) was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.

Life

Early life in Athens

Castoriadis was born in Constantinople, the son of Kaisaras and Sophia Kastoriadis. His family moved in 1922 to Athens. He developed an interest in politics after he came into contact with Marxist thought and philosophy at the age of 13. His first active involvement in politics occurred during the Metaxas Regime (1937), when he joined the Athenian Communist Youth (Κομμουνιστική Νεολαία Î'θήνας, Kommounistiki Neolaia Athinas), a section of the Young Communist League of Greece. In 1941 he joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), only to leave one year later in order to become an active Trotskyist. The latter action resulted in his persecution by both the Germans and the Communist Party. In 1944 he wrote his first essays on social science and Max Weber, which he published in a magazine named "Archive of Sociology and Ethics" (Î'ρχείον Κοινωνιολογίας και Ηθικής, Archeion Koinoniologias kai Ithikis). During the December 1944 violent clashes between the communist-led ELAS and the Papandreou government, aided by British troops, Castoriadis heavily criticized the actions of the KKE. After earning degrees in political science, economics and law from the University of Athens, he got aboard the RMS Mataroa, a New Zealand ocean liner, to go to Paris, where he remained permanently, to continue his studies under a scholarship offered by the French Institute. The same voyageâ€"organized by Octave Merlierâ€"also brought from Greece to France a number of other Greek writers and intellectuals, including Kostas Axelos, Adonis A. Kyrou, and Kostas Papaïoannou.

Paris and leftist activity

Once in Paris, Castoriadis joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste, but broke with it by 1948. He then joined Claude Lefort and others in founding the libertarian socialist group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949â€"1966), which included Jean-François Lyotard and Guy Debord as members for a while, and profoundly influenced the French intellectual left. Castoriadis had links with the group around C.L.R. James until 1958. Also strongly influenced by Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie were the British group and journal Solidarity and Maurice Brinton.

Career as economist and distancing from Marxism

At the same time, he worked as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development until 1970, which was also the year when he obtained French citizenship. Consequently, his writings prior to that date were published pseudonymously, as "Pierre Chaulieu," "Paul Cardan," "Jean-Marc Coudray" etc.

In his 1949 essay "The Relations of Production in Russia", Castoriadis developed a critique of the supposed socialist character of the government of the Soviet Union. The central claim of the Stalinist regime at the time was that the mode of production in Russia was socialist, but the mode of distribution was not yet a socialist one since the socialist edification in the country had not yet been completed. However, according to Castoriadis' analysis, since the mode of distribution of the social product is inseparable from the mode of production, the claim that one can have control over distribution while not having control over production is meaningless.

Castoriadis was particularly influential in the turn of the intellectual left during the 1950s against the Soviet Union, because he argued that the Soviet Union was not a communist but rather a bureaucratic capitalist state, which contrasted with Western powers mostly by virtue of its centralized power apparatus. His work in the OECD substantially helped his analyses.

In the latter years of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Castoriadis came to reject the Marxist theories of economics and of history, especially in an essay on Modern Capitalism and Revolution (first published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1960â€"61; first English translation in 1963 by Solidarity).

Psychoanalyst

When Jacques Lacan's disputes with the International Psychoanalytical Association led to a split and the formation of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964, Castoriadis became a member (as a non-practitioner).

In 1968 Castoriadis married Piera Aulagnier, a French psychoanalyst who had undergone psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan from 1955 until 1961.

In 1969 Castoriadis and Aulagnier split from the EFP to join the "Quatrième Groupe", a psychoanalytic group that claims to follow principles and methods that have opened up a third way between Lacanianism and the standards of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Castoriadis began to practice analysis in 1973 (he had undergone analysis in the 1960s first with Irène Roubleff and then later with Michel Renard).

In his 1975 work, L'institution imaginaire de la société (Imaginary Institution of Society), and in Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Crossroads in the Labyrinth), published in 1978, Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named in order to be recognized. Otherness emerges in part from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form to what Castoriadis terms the magma of social significations allows the psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mental indeterminacy and alterity.

For Castoriadis, self-examination, as in the ancient Greek tradition, could draw upon the resources of modern psychoanalysis. Autonomous individualsâ€"the essence of an autonomous societyâ€"must continuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflection. He writes:

...psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy. For, each person's self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannot have an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would not interrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes] tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn't exist outside the individuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society depends essentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society.

Castoriadis was not calling for every individual to undergo psychoanalysis, per se. Rather, by reforming education and political systems, individuals would be increasingly capable of critical self- and social reflexion. He offers: "if psychoanalytic practice has a political meaning, it is solely to the extent that it tries, as far as it possibly can, to render the individual autonomous, that is to say, lucid concerning her desire and concerning reality, and responsible for her acts: holding herself accountable for what she does."

Sovietologist

In his 1980 Facing the War text, he took the view that Russia had become the primary world military power. To sustain this, in the context of the visible economic inferiority of the Soviet Union in the civilian sector, he proposed that the society may no longer be dominated by the party-state bureaucracy but by a "stratocracy"â€"a separate and dominant military sector with expansionist designs on the world. He further argued that this meant there was no internal class dynamic which could lead to social revolution within Russian society and that change could only occur through foreign intervention.

Later life

In 1980, he joined the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

In 1984 Castoriadis and Aulagnier divorced.

He died on December 26, 1997 from complications following heart surgery. He was survived by Zoe (his wife), his daughter Sparta (by an earlier relationship with Jeanine "Rilka" Walter, Comrade Victorine in the Fourth International), and Kyveli, a younger daughter from his marriage with Zoe.

Thought

Edgar Morin proposed that Castoriadis' work will be remembered for its remarkable continuity and coherence as well as for its extraordinary breadth which was "encyclopaedic" in the original Greek sense, for it offered us a "paideia," or education, that brought full circle our cycle of otherwise compartmentalized knowledge in the arts and sciences. Castoriadis wrote essays on mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society, economics, politics, philosophy, and art.

One of Castoriadis' many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without determinations, but in order to be socially recognized must be instituted as revolution. Any knowledge of society and social change “can exist only by referring to, or by positing, singular entities…which figure and presentify social imaginary significations.”

Castoriadis used traditional terms as much as possible, though consistently redefining them. Further, some of his terminology changed throughout the later part of his career, with the terms gaining greater consistency but breaking from their traditional meaning (neologisms). When reading Castoriadis, it is helpful to understand what he means by the terms he uses, since he does not redefine the terms in every piece where he employs them. Here are a few.

Autonomy and heteronomy

The concept of "autonomy" appears to be a key theme in his early postwar writings and he continued to elaborate on its meaning, applications and limits until his death, gaining him the title of "Philosopher of Autonomy". The word itself is Greek, where auto- means 'for/by itself' and nomos means 'law,' defining the condition of creating one's own laws, whether as an individual or as a whole society. Castoriadis noticed that while all societies construct their own unique laws and institutions, members of autonomous societies are fully aware of this fact and explicitly self-institute (αυτονομούνται). In contrast, members of heteronomous societies (hetero- 'other') delegate this process to extra-social authorities and attribute their imaginaries to gods or ancestors or, in modern ideologies, to historical necessity.

Castoriadis emphasized the need of societies to legitimize their laws or explain, in other words, why their laws are good and just as they claim them to be. Most traditional societies did that through religion, believing that their laws were given by a super-natural ancestor or god and therefore must be true. Modern capitalist societies legitimize their system (capitalism) through 'reason', claiming it makes 'logical sense'. Castoriadis observes that nearly all such efforts are tautological in that they legitimize a system through rules defined by the system itself. So just like the Old Testament and the Koran claim that 'There is only one God, God', capitalism first defines logic as the maximization of utility and minimization of cost, and then bases its own legitimacy on its effectiveness to meet this criterion.

As he explains in one of his lectures in the Greek village of Leonidio in 1984, many newly founded societies start from an autonomous state which is usually in the form of direct democracy, like the town hall meetings during the American Revolution and the local assemblies of the Paris Commune. What they end up with however is a form of governance by which, the citizens, do not legislate directly but delegate this power to a group of experts who remain in power, largely unchecked by official means, for a number of years. The ancient Greeks on the other hand developed a system of continuous autonomy where the people (demos) voted constantly on matters of government and law and where the elected rulers, the archons, were mainly asked to enforce them. In such a system, courts of law were governed by common citizens who were appointed to the degree of judge briefly and army generals were voted in by the people and had to convince them of the correctness of their decisions. Taking some poetic licence to expand this point he says that in this system, the president of the national treasury could have been a Phoenician slave, since he would only be asked to implement the rulings of the demos.

Castoriadis' writings delve at length into the philosophy and politics of the ancient Greeks who, as a true autonomous society knew that laws are man-made and legitimization tautological. They challenged these laws on a constant basis and yet obeyed them to the same degree (even to the extent of enforcing capital punishment) proving that autonomous societies can indeed exist.

The Imaginary

This term originates in the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (see the Imaginary) and is strongly associated with Castoriadis' work. To understand it better we might think of its usual context, the "imaginary institution of societies". By that, Castoriadis means that societies, together with their laws and legalizations, are founded upon a basic conception of the world and man's place in it. Traditional societies had elaborate imaginaries, expressed through various creation myths, by which they explained how the world came to be and how it is sustained. Capitalism did away with this mythic imaginary by replacing it with what it claims to be pure reason (as examined above). That same imaginary is, interestingly enough, the foundation of its opposing ideology, Communism. By that measure he observes, first in his main criticism of Marxism, titled the Imaginary Institution of Society, as well as speaking in Brussels, that these two systems are more closely related than was previously thought, since they share the same industrial revolution type imaginary: that of a rational society where man's welfare is materially measurable and infinitely improvable through the expansion of industries and advancements in science. In this respect Marx failed to understand that technology is not, as he claimed, the main drive of social change, since we have historical examples where societies possessing near identical technologies formed very different relations to them. An example given in the book is France and England during the industrial revolution with the second being much more liberal than the first.

Similarly, in the issue of ecology he observes that the problems facing our environment are only present within the capitalist imaginary that values the continuous expansion of industries. Trying to solve it by changing or managing these industries better might fail, since it essentially acknowledges this imaginary as real, thus perpetuating the problem.

Thus, imaginaries are directly responsible for all aspects of culture. The Greeks had an imaginary by which the world stems from Chaos and the ancient Jews an imaginary by which the world stems from the will of a pre-existing entity, God. The former developed therefore a system of immediate democracy where the laws where ever changing according the people's will while the second a theocratic system according to which man is in an eternal quest to understand and enforce the will of God.

Castoriadis also believed that the complex historical processes through which new imaginaries are born are not directly quantifiable by science. This is because it is through the imaginaries themselves that the categories upon which science is applied are created. In the second part of his Imaginary Institution of Society he gives the example of set theory, which is at the basis of formal logic, which cannot function without having first defined the "elements" which are to be assigned to sets. This initial separation (schéma de séparation, σχήμα του χωρισμού) of the world into distinct elements and categories therefore, precedes the application of Logic and consequently science.

Chaos

This is a concept that one encounters frequently in Castoriadis' work (in all the references above for example). According to that, the Greeks developed an imaginary by which the world is a product of Chaos, as narrated by both Homer and Hesiod. The word has since been promoted to a scientific term, but Castoriadis is inclined to believe that although the Greeks had sometimes expressed Chaos in that way (as a system too complex to be understood), they mainly referred to it as nothingness. He then concludes what made the ancient Greek society different to other societies is exactly that core imaginary, which essentially says that if the world is created out of nothing then man can indeed, in his brief time on earth, model it as he sees fit, without trying to conform on some pre-existing order like a divine law. He contrasted that sharply to the Biblical imaginary, which sustains all Judaic societies to this day, according to which, in the beginning of the world there was a God, a willing entity and man's position therefore is to understand that Will and act accordingly.

The Ancient Greeks and the Modern West

Castoriadis views the political organization of the ancient Greek city states as a model of an autonomous society. He argues that their direct democracy was not based, as many assume, in the existence of slaves and/or the geography of Greece, which forced the creation of small city states, since many other societies had these preconditions but did not create democratic systems. Same goes for colonisation since the neighbouring Phoenicians, who had a similar expansion in the Mediterranean, were monarchical till their end. During this time of colonisation however, around the time of Homer's Epic poems, we observe for the first time that the Greeks instead of transferring their mother city's social system to the newly established colony, they, for the first time in known history, legislate anew from the ground up. What also made the Greeks special was the fact that, following above, they kept this system as a perpetual autonomy which led to direct democracy.

This phenomenon of autonomy is again present in the emergence of the states of northern Italy during the Renaissance, again as a product of small independent merchants.

He sees a tension in the modern West between, on the one hand, the potentials for autonomy and creativity and the proliferation of "open societies" and, on the other hand, the spirit-crushing force of capitalism. These are respectively characterized as the capitalist imaginary and the creative imaginary:

I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly laid out, at least in its general orientation. That's the road of the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism at the same time as it is that of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of "rational mastery," pseudorational pseudomastery, of an unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that is to say, for nothing, and of a technoscience that has become autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the domination of this capitalist imaginary. ¶ The other road should be opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the creative imaginary.

He argues that, in the last two centuries, ideas about autonomy again come to the fore: "This extraordinary profusion reaches a sort of pinnacle during the two centuries stretching between 1750 and 1950. This is a very specific period because of the very great density of cultural creation but also because of its very strong subversiveness."

Lasting influence

Castoriadis has influenced European (especially continental) thought in important ways. His interventions in sociological and political theory have resulted in some of the most well-known writing to emerge from the continent (especially in the figure of Jürgen Habermas, who often can be seen to be writing against Castoriadis). Hans Joas published a number of articles in American journals in order to highlight the importance of Castoriadis' work to a North American sociological audience, and Johann P. Arnason has been of enduring importance both for his critical engagement with Castoriadis' thought and for his sustained efforts to introduce it to the English speaking public (especially during his editorship of the journal Thesis Eleven). In the last few years, there has been growing interest in Castoriadis’s thought, including the publication of two monographs authored by Arnason's former students: Jeff Klooger's Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Brill), and Suzi Adams's Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation (Fordham University Press).

Major publications

Original French

• Mai 68 : la brèche [The Breach], Fayard, 1968 (under the pseudonym Jean-Marc Coudray; co-authored with Edgar Morin and Claude Lefort)
• La Société bureaucratique [Bureaucratic Society] in two volumes: Les Rapports de production en Russie and La Révolution contre la bureaucratie, 1973
• L'Expérience du mouvement ouvrier [The Experience of the Labor Movement] in two volumes: Comment lutter and Prolétariat et organisation, 1974
• L'Institution imaginaire de la société [The Imaginary Institution of Society], Seuil, 1975
• Les Carrefours du labyrinthe [Crossroads in the Labyrinth], Volume I, 1978
• Le Contenu du socialisme [On the Content of Socialism], 1979
• Capitalisme moderne et révolution [Modern Capitalism and Revolution] in two volumes, 1979
• Devant la guerre [Facing the War], Volume I, 1981 (a second volume was never published)
• Domaines de l'homme [Domains of Man] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe II), 1986
• La Brèche: vingt ans après (réédition du livre de 1968 complété par de nouveaux textes) [The Breach: Twenty Years After], 1988
• Le Monde morcelé [World in Fragments] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe III), 1990
• La Montée de l'insignifiance [The Rising Tide of Insignificance] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe IV), 1996
• Fait et à faire [Done and To Be Done] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe V), 1997

Posthumous publications

• Figures du pensable [Figures of the Thinkable] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe VI), 1998
• Sur Le Politique de Platon [Commentary on The Statesman of Plato], 1999
• Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique. La création humaine 1 [Subject and Truth in the Social-Historical World. Human Creation 1], 2002
• Ce qui fait la Grèce, 1. D'Homère à Héraclite. La création humaine 2 [What Makes Greece, 1. From Homer to Heraclitus. Human Creation 2], 2004
• Φιλοσοφία και επιστήμη. Ένας διάλογος με τον Î"εώργιο Λ. Ευαγγελόπουλο [Philosophy and Science. A Discussion with Yorgos L. Evangelopoulos], Athens: Eurasia books, 2004, ISBN 960-8187-09-5
• Une Société à la dérive, entretiens et débats 1974-1997 [A Society Adrift], 2005
• Post-scriptum sur l'insignifiance : entretiens avec Daniel Mermet ; suivi de dialogue [Postscript on Insignificance], 2007
• Fenêtre sur le chaos [Window to Chaos] (compiled by Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay), Seuil, 2007, ISBN 978-202-0908-26-9 (Castoriadis' writings on modern art and aesthetics)
• Ce qui fait la Grèce, 2. La cité et les lois. La création humaine 3 [What Makes Greece, 2. The City and Laws. Human Creation 3], 2008
• L'imaginaire comme tel [The Imaginary As Such], 2008
• Histoire et création : Textes philosophiques inédits, 1945-1967 [History and Creation], 2009
• Ce qui fait la Grèce, 3. Thucydide, la force et le droit. La création humaine 4 [What Makes Greece, 3. Thucydides, Force and Right. Human Creation 4], 2011
• La Culture de l’égoïsme [The Culture of Egoism] (transcription of an interview that Castoriadis and Lasch gave to Michael Ignatieff in 1986; translated into French by Myrto Gondicas), Climats, 2012, ISBN 978-208-1284-63-0 (interview about the topic of the retreat of individuals from politics toward a concern with wholly private matters)

Selected translations of works by Castoriadis

• The Imaginary Institution of Society [IIS] (trans. Kathleen Blamey), MIT Press, Cambridge 1997 [1987]. 432 pp. ISBN 0-262-53155-0. (pb.)
• The Castoriadis Reader (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis) Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1997. 470 pp. ISBN 1-55786-704-6. (pb.)
• World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. [WIF]. (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1997. 507 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2763-5.
• Political and Social Writings [PSW 1]. Volume 1: 1946â€"1955. From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism. (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 348 pp. ISBN 0-8166-1617-5.
• Political and Social Writings [PSW 2]. Volume 2: 1955â€"1960. From the Workers' Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism. (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 363 pp. ISBN 0-8166-1619-1.
• Political and Social Writings [PSW 3]. Volume 3: 1961â€"1979. Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society. (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1992. 405 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2168-3.
• Modern Capitalism and Revolution [MCR] (trans. Maurice Brinton), London: Solidarity, 1965 (including an introduction and additional English material by Brinton; the second English edition was published by Solidarity in 1974, with a new introduction by Castoriadis)
• Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Essays in Political Philosophy. (ed. David Ames Curtis) Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford 1991. 306 pp. ISBN 0-19-506963-3.
• Crossroads in the Labyrinth. (trans. M.H. Ryle/K. Soper) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1984. 345 pp.
• On Plato's Statesman. (trans. David Ames Curtis) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2002. 227 pp.
• The Crisis of Western Societies. TELOS 53 (Fall 1982). New York: Telos Press
• Figures of the Thinkable. (trans. Helen Arnold) Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2007. 304 pp.
• A Society Adrift. Interviews and Debates, 1974â€"1997 (trans. Helen Arnold) Fordham University Press, New York 2010. 259 pp.
• "Psychoanalysis and Politics", in: Sonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow (eds.), Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Culture, Routledge, 1994, pp. 1â€"12 (also in: World in Fragments, 1997, p. 125â€"136)
• Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis (ed./trans. Gabriel Rockhill and John V. Garner). Continuum, London 2011. 160 pp. ISBN 978-1-4411-3960-3. (hb.)

See also

• Autopoiesis
• Indeterminacy in philosophy
• Gödelian argument
• Ensemblist-identitarian logic
• Verstehen
• Post-phenomenology
• Post-Lacanian psychoanalysis
• Post-Marxism
• Philosophy of praxis
• Classical republicanism
• The French autonome movement
• Workers' council
• Decentralized planning

References

Further reading

• Suzi Adams. Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-082-3234-59-2.
• Suzi Adams (ed.). Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. ISBN 978-144-1172-90-7.
• Nelly Andrikopoulou. Το ταξίδι του Ματαρόα, 1945 [Mataroa's Voyage, 1945]. Athens: "Hestia" Printing House, 2007. ISBN 978-960-05-1348-6.
• Andrew Arato. From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory. Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies. M.E. Sharpe, 1993, pp. 122â€"45. ISBN 978-076-56185-35.
• Maurice Brinton. For Workers' Power. Selected Writings (ed. David Goodway). Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0.
• Dimitris Eleas. Ιδιωτικός Κορνήλιος [Private Cornelius]. Athens: Angelakis, July 2014. ISBN 978-618-5011-69-7.
• Jürgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: "Excursus on Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution." Polity Press, 1990, pp. 327â€"35. ISBN 0-7456-0830-2.
• Axel Honneth. "Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Cornelius Castoriadis' Theory of Society". In: The Fragmanted World of the Social. Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (ed. Charles Wright), SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 168â€"183. ISBN 978-143-8407-00-5.
• Hans Joas. Pragmatism and Social Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 154â€"171. ISBN 978-022-6400-42-6
• Alexandros Kioupkiolis. Freedom After the Critique of Foundations: Marx, Liberalism, Castoriadis and Agonistic Autonomy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 0230279120.
• Jeff Klooger. Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy. Brill, 2009. ISBN 978-90-04-17529-7
• Mathieu Noury. Cornelius Castoriadis, sociologue ? Critique sociologique de l'ontologie de la création imaginaire sociale. Revue Aspects Sociologiques, 18(1), March 2011.
• Yorgos Oikonomou (ed.), Η Î"ένεση της Î"ημοκρατίας και η Σημερινή Κρίση [The Birth of Democracy and Contemporary Crisis]. Athens: Eurasia books. 2011. ISBN 978-960-8187-77-1.
• Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, "Risked democracy: Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks", Radical Philosophy 166 (March/April 2011).
• Richard Rorty. "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future." Northwestern University Law Review, 82(2):335â€"51 (1988).
• Alexandros Schismenos. The Human Tempest. Psyche and autonomy in Cornelius Castoriadis' Philosophy [Η Î'νθρώπινη Τρικυμία. Ψυχή και Î'υτονομία στη Φιλοσοφία του Κορνήλιου Καστοριάδη]. Athens: Exarcheia, 2013. ISBN 978-618-80336-5-8.
• Alexandros Schismenos and Nikos Ioannou. After Castoriadis. Routes for Autonomy in the 21st Century [Μετά τον Καστοριάδη. Î"ρόμοι της Î'υτονομίας στον 21ο Î'ιώνα]. Athens: Exarcheia, 2014. ISBN 978-618-5128-03-6.
• Society of Friends of Cornelius Castoriadis. Ψυχή, Λόγος, Πόλις [Psyche, Logos, Polis]. Athens: Ypsilon, 2007. ISBN 978-960-17-0219-3.
• Yannis Stavrakakis. "Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with Social Constructionism and the Political in Castoriadis and Lacan." Constellations, 9(4):522â€"539 (2002).
• Yannis Stavrakakis. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 37â€"65. ISBN 0791473295.
• Theofanis Tasis. Καστοριάδης. Μια φιλοσοφία της αυτονομίας [Castoriadis. A philosophy of autonomy]. Athens: Eurasia books. December 2007. ISBN 978-960-8187-22-1.
• Theofanis Tassis. Cornelius Castoriadis. Disposition einer Philosophie. 2007. FU Dissertationen Online.
• Thesis Eleven, Special Issue 'Cornelius Castoriadis', Number 49, May 1997. London: Sage Publications. ISSN 0725-5136.
• John B. Thompson. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. University of California Press, 1984, Chapter 1: "Ideology and the Social Imaginary. An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort". ISBN 978-052-0054-11-0.
• Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend, Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism, London: Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 13â€"37. ISBN 978-184-7877-16-1.
• Marcela Tovar-Restrepo, Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy: New Approaches to Subjectivity, Society, and Social Change, Continuum International Publishing, 2012. ISBN 978-14-41-15226-8.
• Joel Whitebook. "Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche: Habermas and Castoriadis on the Unconscious". In: Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, MIT Press, 1997, pp. 172â€"193. ISBN 978-026-2540-80-3.

External links

Overviews

• Cornelius Castoriadis entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Interviews

• Videotaped interview with Chris Marker
• Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis for the show "Paraskinio," of the Greek television network ET1 (1984) on YouTube (with English subtitles)
• "Broadcast information on radio interviews with Cornelius Castoriadis" (in French). Institut National de l'Audiovisuel. Retrieved 2013-12-17.  (The files and documents kept at the Inathèque de France can be consulted at the consultation centre at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

Obituaries; biographies

• Cornelius Castoriadis 1922â€"1997 at the libertarian communist website libcom.org, 27 September 2003
• Symposium: Cornelius Castoriadis, 1922â€"1997, obituaries and profiles by Axel Honneth, Edgar Morin, and Joel Whitebook, Radical Philosophy magazine, July/August 1998 (access restricted to subscribers)
• "Obituary: Castoriadis and the democratic tradition" by Takis Fotopoulos, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1997)

Bibliographies; analyses; critiques

• The Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website contains bibliographies in many languages and the complete text of the Socialisme ou Barbarie magazine series (texts scanned in the original French)
• L'Association Castoriadis with bibliography, news, media events, original articles (in French)
• "Castoriadis": entry by John V. Garner, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Cornelius Castoriadis and the triumph of the will" by Alex Callinicos, Chapter 4.3 of Trotskyism, 1990
• Cornelius Castoriadis, critical analysis at the libertarian communist website libcom.org
• "An Introduction to Cornelius Castoriadis' Work" by Fabio Ciaramelli, Journal of European Psychoanalysis #6, Winter 1998 (access restricted to subscribers)
• "The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis" by Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 March 2004 (access restricted to subscribers)
• Full text of the Cornelius Castoriadis symposium held at the University of Akureyri, from the special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum, e-magazine of Nordic and Mediterranean studies, December 2008
• Houston, Christopher, "Islam, Castoriadis and autonomy". Thesis Eleven, February 2004, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 49â€"69
• Suzi Adams, "Castoriadis' long journey through Nomos: Institution, creation, interpretation". Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 70 (June), 269â€"295 (2008)
• Suzi Adams, "Towards a Post-Phenomenology of Life: Castoriadis' Naturphilosophie", Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 4, No 1â€"2 (2008)
• Linda M.G. Zerilli (2002), "Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New", doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.00302
• "The autonomy project and Inclusive Democracy: a critical review of Castoriadis' thought", by Takis Fotopoulos, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol 4, No 2 (April 2008)
• "Unities and Tensions in the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis With Some Considerations on the Question of Organization" by David Ames Curtis, talk delivered to "Autonomy or Barbarism"-sponsored event in Athens, 7 December 2007
• Exchange of letters between Cornelius Castoriadis and Anton Pannekoek, originally published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, translated and introduced by Viewpoint Magazine

WMF project links

• Media related to Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikiquote
• Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikibooks
• The dictionary definition of anerithmon gelasma at Wiktionary