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DOI: 10.1177/1368431012440864
2012 15: 289 European Journal of Social Theory
Suzi Adams and Ingerid S. Straume
Castoriadis in dialogue

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Editorial
Castoriadis in dialogue
Suzi Adams
Flinders University, Australia
Ingerid S. Straume
University of Oslo, Norway
This special issue is devoted to critical engagement with the thought of Greek-French
thinker Cornelius Castoriadis (19221997). Co-founder (with Claude Lefort) of the
Socialisme ou Barbarie collective and journal, Castoriadis was a political activist, psy-
choanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker, and economist. Despite the richness
and originality of his thought, his work remained on the margins of scholarly debate for a
long period (at least in the Anglophone arena). This is now slowly changing and is evi-
dent, for example, in the continuing posthumous publication of his French seminars (e.g.
Castoriadis, 2004, 2008, 2011b), the recent translations of his work into English (Castor-
iadis, 2010, 2011a) and the emergentand burgeoningreception of his work through
monographs and comparative studies (Adams, 2011; Klooger, 2009; Mouzakitis, 2008;
Poirier, 2011; Smith, 2010; Tovar, in press). Central to Castoriadiss trajectory was the
project of autonomy as the mutual interplay of philosophy and politics. Through the pro-
blematization and questioning of received thoughta key aspect of autonomythe
space for debate and conflict were kept open. In the spirit of Castoriadis, the contribu-
tions to this special issue seek to open up his work by pushing against the almost inev-
itable tendency to closure. They do so in two ways: first, in interrogating and extending
key aspects of his theoretical project that have hitherto received less attention in the sec-
ondary literature; and, second, by bringing his thought into dialogue with other thinkers,
with whom he systematically engaged during his lifetime.
Born to a Greek family in Constantinople, Castoriadis spent his adult life in Paris
where he emigrated with a French scholarship in 1945. During the post-war period he
Corresponding author:
Suzi Adams, School of Social and Political Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Aus-
tralia, 5001, Australia
Email: Suzi.adams@flinders.edu.au
European Journal of Social Theory
15(3) 289294
The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431012440864
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worked as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-
ment (OECD), while devoting his intellectual energy to Socialisme ou Barbarie. The
political context in post-war France was exceptionally polarized; the Left was almost
exclusively communist up until the 1960s, when, in the wake of the Hungarian uprisings
in 1956, Socialisme ou Barbarie and other groups broke up the political landscape. It is
telling that, when Castoriadis announced his break with Marxism in the early 1960s, this
was seen as controversial, causing great tensions in Socialisme ou Barbarie (see Castor-
iadis, 1997). As an immigrant engaged in political work under Gaullism, Castoriadis
could not publish under his own name until the 1970s, when he acquired French citizen-
ship and started a new career as psychoanalyst. The use of pseudonyms together with his
late inclusion in academia and the belated translation of his work into English (it took 12
years before his main work, The Imaginary Institution of Society, appeared in English in
1987) may explain why his work is not as widely known as could be expected for a thin-
ker of his calibre.
The originality of his thought notwithstanding, Castoriadis tended to downplay the
extent of his intellectual sources. This may be, in part, a result of his stance as a rev-
olutionaryas one who is outside mainstream traditionsas well as of his rejection
of the importance of the hermeneutic dimension of activity. Like Nietzsche and
Heidegger before him, Castoriadis claimed to have practiced a new way of doing phi-
losophy, while inherited thought (i.e. the entire philosophical tradition since Plato),
had been caught in a reductive mode that downplayed the radical imagination and
focus only on being in terms of determinacy. As such, for Castoriadis, traditional phi-
losophy could not account for (auto-)creation as the emergence of ontological
novelty. The ancient Greek institution of democracy emerged as a new political form
amidst a sea of monarchies and, for Castoriadis, exemplified social-historical cre-
ation; that is, it could not be reduced to, or produced from, its antecedents. Even
though it is evident that Castoriadis was engaged with themes that engaged many
other thinkers of his time, it is also true that no other thinker treated these themes
in the way Castoriadis did. This is especially the case for what he calls the creative
imagination (as opposed to the productive imagination) which, in many ways, formed
the lynchpin of his work.
In moving beyond Marx in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Castoriadis turned to
ancient Greek philosophy, which he understood in a broad sense to include historians and
writers of tragedy. Emerging from praxis philosophy and French currents of phenomen-
ological Marxism, Castoriadiss later thought took an ontological turn in order to eluci-
date the philosophical preconditions of an autonomous society. This involved a
rethinking of Freud and the psyche as the flux of representations of the radical imagina-
tion, and an ongoing dialogue with Aristotle, Kant and the early Romantics. French intel-
lectual currents and debates were central to his trajectory: Merleau-Ponty was an
enduring intellectual source, as was Bachelard for his approach to knowledge; Emile
Durkheim and his later thought on collective representations; Ricoeur was indirectly
influential, whilst Levi-Strauss and Lacan provided Castoriadis with lines of critique.
Castoriadiss thought is characterized by an ongoing dialogue between the ancients and
the moderns; this is a feature of modern thought in general, but Castoriadiss take on it is
particularly innovative. His emphasis both on autonomy and the creative imagination
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reveals Enlightenment and Romantic themes at play centrally in his work; this informs
the originality of his engagement with the ancient Greeks and the human condition.
The present special issue aims to extend the debate on Castoriadiss oeuvre by ques-
tioning the limits and lacunae of Castoriadiss own thought in key ways, on the one hand,
and by bringing him into dialogue with other thinkers, in order to open up his thought
even further, on the other. The first two articles in this collection focus on central aspects
internal to Castoriadiss thought: his interpretation of ancient Greece and the project of
autonomy, respectively.
In an allusion to Merleau-Ponty, Johann P. Arnasons groundbreaking article, entitled
Castoriadis as civilizational analyst: Sense and non-sense in Ancient Greece, recon-
structs the civilizational dimension of Castoriadiss thought through an analysis of
Castoriadiss posthumously published seminars on ancient Greece. Although the ancient
Greeks had been an enduring source for Castoriadiss rethinking of history and his roads
beyond Marx since the mid-1960s, the seminars (from the earlymid 1980s) present a
more detailed picture of his approach. Distinctive to Castoriadiss perspective was his
identification of a social imaginary core that provided a primary grasp of the world
emerging as the interplay of chaos, incomplete order and ultimate dissonance between
humanity and the worldwhich, in turn, further shaped Greek civilizational patterns
and innovations. Here, Arnason argues that Castoriadis was close to Eisenstadts
understanding of the civilizational dimension of human societies as the connection
between interpretations of the world and institutional forms of social life. Unlike some
of Castoriadiss other writings on ancient Greece which seemed to emphasize the flow-
ering of autonomy embodied in the democratic polis, his seminars focused on the
period of Homeric Greece as a formative phase and the Homeric texts as a master key
to the classical Greek imaginary and for the entire Greek civilizational trajectory.
In her essay Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy: Ecological worldhood and the her-
meneutic of modernity, Suzi Adams critically engages with Castoriadiss elucidation of
autonomy. She focuses on the significance of Castoriadiss writings on political ecology
for his project of autonomy, especially in its more philosophical aspects. An emphasis on
the environmental problematic has implications for understandings of nature, as well as
for the human place within the natural world. Adams pursues these implications through
a reconsideration of the import of the ancient Greek problematic of nomos and physis for
Castoriadiss broader philosophical anthropology, on the one hand, and for his later phi-
losophy of nature, on the other. She contextualizes these aspects of Castoriadiss thought
within a hermeneutic of modernity that takes the Enlightenment and Romanticism
(understood to be broad cultural currents) as constitutive for modernitys field of ten-
sions and conflict of interpretations. Although the phenomenological problematic of the
world was marginalized in Castoriadiss thought, its later reappearance in his rethinking
of the living being and the creativity of nature broadens the phenomenal field and
extends the lines of continuity between the human and the natural world. Adams argues
that greater appreciation of the Romantic aspects of the environmental movement (and
our understanding of nature) as they relate to autonomy and the cultural formation of the
world not only put Castoriadiss articulation of nuclear social imaginary significations
into question, it also raises questions of ecological worldhood that simultaneously finds
autonomy at its limits.
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If the first two essays focused on latent openings and possibilities in Castoriadiss
thought to argue withand againsthim, the remainder of the essays bring Castoria-
diss into dialogue with a range of other thinkers. In continuing the engagement with
Castoriadis and the problematic of autonomy, Natalie Doyle focuses on Marcel
Gauchets reworking of key tenets of Castoriadiss thought. An important French philo-
sopher, psychoanalyst and historian (although, because of the dearth of available English
language translations, his oeuvre is not as well known in the Anglophone world as it
merits), Gauchet was a former student of Claude Lefort, and, for a time, worked with
Castoriadis, Lefort, Marc Richir and Pierre Clastres on the journal Textures. In their var-
ious ways, each of these thinkers continued to inform Gauchets intellectual trajectory.
In her contribution Autonomy and modern liberal democracy: From Castoriadis to
Gauchet, Doyle demonstrates the ways in which Castoriadiss notion of autonomy
influenced Gauchets understanding of modernity, but argues that, in rethinking his-
toricity, Gauchet rejects Castoriadiss approach to creation as absolute. Gauchets
notion of modern power (a theme that is under-developed in Castoriadiss thought)
reconfigures autonomy in a way that also encompasses capitalism and a paradoxical
understanding of modern democracy. Doyle shows how Gauchets thought encapsulates
the tension in modernity between the power of social transformation and the aspiration
to self-government that was its original inspiration, and concludes, along with Gauchet and
Castoriadis, that the current state of global environmental degradation provides an oppor-
tunity to reactivate the political aspects of democracy.
A focus on modern forms of subjectivity and their historical variations has been
central to the psychoanalytic project, be that Freud or Lacan, Gauchet or Castoriadis.
However, Castoriadiss break with Lacan precluded a constructive engagement with any
critical reconfigurations of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his contribution, New individu-
alist configurations and the social imaginary: Castoriadis and Kristeva, Anthony Elliott
begins to readdress this by bringing Castoriadis into dialogue with Julia Kristeva. He
does so in order to excavate the theoretical preconditions of what he terms the new indi-
vidualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary Western culture.
After mapping the various approaches to individualism and new individualism, which
includes thinkers such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, which,
to use an Arnasonian term, partially structures the field of tensions in which the ensuing
debates play out, Elliott focuses on Castoriadiss elucidation of general conformism in
its relation to contemporary subjectivities and social imaginaries. To enrich Castoriadiss
analysis, Elliott turns to Kristevas understanding of the new maladies of the soul to
extend his analysis of the contemporary weakening of the imagination through a deeper
engagement with psychoanalytic currents, especially in their relevance for understanding
the wider social world.
Some intellectual dialogues are more self-evident than others. One of the more obvi-
ous interlocutors for Castoriadis is Hannah Arendt, who shared many of his interests and
passions, such as ancient Greek thought and the history of political self-organization,
where the Athenian polis was seen as the paradigmatic exemplar. In A common world?
Arendt and Castoriadis on political creation, Ingerid Straume explores some of the con-
nections between the two original thinkers. She traces theoretical parallels in their
thought and illustrates how the weaker points in each thinkers oeuvre can be elucidated
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and enriched through engagement with the other. Focusing on the notion of political
creation, Straume argues that there is an unacknowledged connection between two
dimensions of the political in Arendts thought, which, when taken seriously, would
bring her closer to Castoriadiss contention that political doing means to create institu-
tions (an assertion Arendt opposesinconsistently, according to Straume). However, the
notion of plurality, which plays a key role in Arendts political thought, can fill out a less
developed region of Castoriadiss social theory that is particularly important for analyses
of practical politics. Taken together, Straume argues, their thought could be used to form
a perspective well suited to analyze moments of political creation and novelty.
While Castoriadis acknowledged the relevance of Arendts work, this did not extend
to the work of Michel Foucault. When Castoriadis was still writing under a pseudonym,
Foucault was enjoying considerable success with (post-)structuralist constellations that
were one of Castoriadiss antagonists in his main work, Linstitution imaginaire de la
societe (1975). This notwithstanding, a rich philosophical perspective is developed as
Alexandros Kioupkiolis engages Castoriadis and Foucault in critical dialogue in The
agonistic turn of critical reason: Critique and freedom in Foucault and Castoriadis.
Kioupkiolis situates the agonistic critique of Foucault and Castoriadis as an alternative
to universalist and contexutalist/relativist strands of thought. Agonistic reason forgoes
the need for foundations without sacrificing ideals such as freedom, reason and validity.
Taken as a social theory, it lends itself to ethical and political thought, as well as work on
the imaginary dimension of societies. Kioupkiolis also exposes some of the aporias that
need to be addressed in such a project, for example when Foucault, while providing a
methodology that is lacking in Castoriadis, is ultimately unable to reflect upon and found
his own project. Kioupkiolis concludes that Castoriadiss engagement with ontology and
the novelty of creation provides it with an emancipatory dynamic that is lacking in the
works of Foucault.
In the final essay, What is to be thought? What is to be done? The polyscopic thought
of Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis, Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner
introduce Castoriadiss compatriot, Kostas Axelos, who immigrated to France as part
of the same group of Greek students in 1945. Castoriadis and Axelos were known as the
two most important Greek philosophers in Post-War France, but their respective recep-
tion and intellectual development were rather different and their paths barely crossed. In
contrast to Castoriadis, Axelos spent his working life within French academia and wrote
his dissertation on Marx (translated as Marx, the Man Who Thinks Out Technique) within
a Heideggerian and Nietzschean perspective. Karagiannis and Wagner demonstrate that
despite their many differences, an attentive co-reading of Castoriadis and Axelos opens
up many original and remarkably fresh insights. Both thinkers display an acute sense of
the importance of engagement withand involvement intheir contemporary world.
Through their joint commitment to polyscopic thoughta cross-disciplinary, radical
comprehensiveness they traverse and challenge established divisions within, and
between, the humanities and the social sciences. At the same time, it is clear that for
Axelos and Castoriadis the human world is a fragmented one, but not a reality beyond
understanding. Thus, in returning to the question of the world, and the questioning of the
world, resonances with the opening essays are heard, the hermeneutical circle is tra-
versed, whilst questions for further investigation are opened.
Adams and Straume 293
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References
Adams S (2011) Castoriadiss Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Castoriadis C (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society (Blamey K, transl.). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Castoriadis C (1997) An introductory interview. In Castoriadis C (ed) The Castoriadis Reader
(Curtis DA, ed., transl.). London: Blackwell.
Castoriadis C (2004) Ce qui fait la Gre`ce I, DHome`re a` Heraclite: Seminaires 19821983. Paris:
Seuil.
Castoriadis C (2008) Ce qui fait la Gre`ce II, La cite et les lois: Seminaires 19831984. Paris: Seuil.
Castoriadis C (2010) A Society Adrift. Interviews and debates 19741997 (transl. Arnold H). New
York: Fordham University Press.
Castoriadis C (2011a) Postscript on Insignificance. Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis (ed.,
transl. Rockhill G; transl. Garner J V). London: Continuum.
Castoriadis C (2011b) Ce qui fait la Gre`ce III, Thucidide, la force et le droit: Seminaires 19841985.
Paris: Seuil.
Mouzakitis A (2008) Meaning, Historicity, and the Social. Osnabruck: VDM Verlag.
Klooger J (2009) Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy. Leiden: Brill.
Smith K (2010) Meaning, Subjectivity and Society: Making Sense of Modernity. Leiden: Brill.
Poirier N (2011) Lontologie politique de Castoriadis: Creation et institution. Lausanne: Payot.
Tovar M (in press) Castoriadis, Foucault and autonomy: New Approaches to Subjectivity, Society
and Social Change. London: Continuum.
About the authors
Suzi Adams received her PhD in 2007 and teaches social theory at Flinders University (Adelaide).
She has recently published a monograph on Castoriadiss thought entitled, Castoriadiss Ontology:
Being and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press). Address: Dr Suzi Adams, Sociology,
School of Social and Political Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Aus-
tralia, 5001, Australia [email: Suzi.adams@flinders.edu.au]
Ingerid S. Straume is a philosopher of education basedat the University of Oslo. Her PhDthesis from
2010 is on Cornelius Castoriadis, education in a democracy and political paideia. She has published
articles on politics, philosophy and education, and edited the anthology Depoliticization: The Political
Imaginary of Global Capitalism(withJ.F. Humphrey, Aarhus UniversityPress, 2011). Address: Ingerid
S. Straume, University of Oslo, University of Oslo Library, POBox 1009 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
[email: Ingerid.straume@ub.uio.no]
294 European Journal of Social Theory 15(3)
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