💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › nw-cornelius-castoriadis.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:56:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Cornelius Castoriadis Author: NW Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: biography,libertarian socialists,Obituary,critical Marxists Source: Scanned from Freedom (London) February 7, 1998, page 4 Notes: Pseudonyms used by Cornelius Castoriadis: Pierre Chaulieu, Paul Cardan
Cornelius Castoriadis, who has died at the age of 75, was one of the
most impressive and influentual intellectuals on the French left,
travelling over half a century from Stalinism through Trotskyism and
Leninism and finally past Marxism itself, away from prevailing forms of
socialism towards a more autonomous and libertarian approach to politics
altogether. He was best known to English-speaking anarchists as the
ideological inspiration of the Solidarity group during the 1960s and
1970s.
Kornelios Kastoriades was born on 11th March 1922 to a francophile Greek
family in Istanbul which soon moved to Greece, and he grew up in Athens
where he studied law, economics and philosophy. He was drawn to
left-wing politics as a boy and joined the Young Communists in 1937 and
the Communist Party in 1941, but he soon turned against the party line
and joined an extreme Trotskyist fraction in 1942. He was also involved
in the resistance movement against the German occupation of Greece. He
ran into personal danger from enemies on either side, and in 1945 he
made his way to France, where he spent the rest of his life.
By profession he was a statistical economist, and from 1948 he worked as
a senior official at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development) in Paris. But by vocation he was a revolutionary
propagandist, and during the same period he wrote prolifically for
left-wing publications and held regular meetings in Paris. In 1946 he
joined the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, the
Parti Communiste Internationaliste, but he formed a dissident fraction
which left it in 1948. He became a founding editor of the paper
Socialisme ou Barbarie, which from 1949 acted as the focus of one of the
most active groupuscules of the New Left, campaigning against all
actually existing forms of socialism, whether reformist or
revolutionary, and for a new form of socialism which would bring real
liberty, equality and fraternity. As 'Pierre Chaulieu' or 'Paul Cardan'
or lean-Marc Coudray', he produced a series of essays which appeared as
articles and then as pamphlets, were translated into several languages,
and reached small but active groups in other countries.
In this country his influence was exerted through the Solidarity group,
founded in 1960, which attempted to play a similar part in the British
left (and whose main leader coincidentally came from a Greek family and
used various pseudonyms). During a period of more than twenty years,
conscientious translations of the writings of 'Paul Cardan' (often
improved versions of the originals) appeared as articles in Solidarity
magazine or as Solidarity pamphlets or books, and introduced his ideas
to the English-speaking world—and beyond, since they were widely read
not only in Britain and America but in many parts of both Western and
Eastern Europe. Revolutionary and libertarian socialists of all kinds in
all places were impressed by such texts as Socialism Reaffirmed,
Socialism or Barbarism, The Meaning of Socialism, The Crisis of Modern
Society, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, History and Revolution,
Redefining Revolution, History as Creation, and were stimulated to
rethink their ideas.
His key doctrines were that class society is divided not according to
the ownership or control of property but according to the possession or
exertion of power (essentially between order-givers or directors and
executants or order-takers), that the various attempts at political and
social revolution (especially by Communist Parties) have succeeded only
in replacing the old bureaucracies by new ones, that Marxist analysis
itself shows that all the varieties of Marxism (including that of Marx
himself) cannot succeed, and that other ways must be found for
individuals to take power over their own lives, based on the principles
of autogestion—self-management—and autonomy.
His influence was most obvious in the 'events' of 1968 in France, many
of whose leaders especially Daniel Cohn-Bendit—were impressed by his
critical approach to all old politics, though as it happened the
Socialisme ou Barbarie paper and group had ceased a couple of years
earlier. In particular his concept of autogestion had a wide appeal for
the rebels outside the established political parties. Eventually he
abandoned not only Marxism but socialism, and by the end of the 1970s he
adopted the term 'autonomous society' instead. His line clearly
converged with that of anarchism, but although he made occasional
references to the anarchists, like many former Marxists he had little
respect for them, and in return anarchists took little notice of him.
This was probably a mistake, since many of his positive as well as
negative ideas are highly relevant to the work facing the anarchist
movement in the contemporary world.
In 1970 he retired from the OECD and became a French citizen. He turned
to psychology and became a psychoanalyst in 1974, associated with the
'Fourth Group' of dissident Lacanians. He began to achieve recognition
as a leading intellectual, was an editor of two leading
magazines—Textures (1971-1975) and Libre (1976-1980)—and in 1980 he
became a director of studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales at the University of Paris. He conducted an ambitious programme
of work and, at last able to write freely under his own name, he
produced a score of books. A series of cheap collections of his early
writings appeared from 1973 to 1979, accompanied by L'Institution
imaginaire de la societe in 1975, and followed by a series of
collections of later writings under the general title Carrefours dans la
labyrinthe from 1978 to 1997.
At the same time he became better known in the English-speaking world
with the appearance of American translations of some of his
writings—Crossroads in the Labyrinth (1984), The Imaginary Institution
of Society (1987), a three-volume collection of Political and Social
Writings (1988-1993), an anthology of Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy
(1991), World in Fragments (1997)—and another anthology, The Castoriadis
Reader (1997), just before his death. But he was still virtually ignored
by the political and intellectual establishments in the English-speaking
world.
Towards the end of his life he turned increasingly to linguistics and
mathematics, ancient history and pure philosophy. He developed an
idiosyncratic humanist position which emphasised the part played by
individual imagination and creative culture in human affairs and which
included a remarkable 'ethic of mortality', arguing that the absence of
any kind of divinity above humanity and of any kind of existence after
death made it all the more important to accept a tragic sense of both
private and public life and to concentrate on the development of
autonomous individuals in an autonomous society here and now. He always
opposed all kinds of intellectual obscurantism, though he never escaped
the obscurity of modern discourse in French, and his style became
increasingly esoteric and neologistic. At his worst he might be arrogant
and abstract, but at his best he could be inspiring and realistic. He
always had a wide circle of friends, to whom he was known as 'Corneille'
and with whom he enjoyed furious arguments, and he also earned
increasing respect from a larger public. He will probably be remembered
for his negative work, which helped to destroy some of the most harmful
myths of our time, rather than for his positive work, which tried to
construct a new world in their place; yet now that the former task is
completed, the latter task becomes increasingly urgent. "Whatever
happens", he said at the end of his life, "I shall remain first and
foremost a revolutionary". Other revolutionaries still have much to
learn from him.
Cornelius Castoriadis died in Paris following a heart operation on 26th
December 1997, and was the subject of long obituaries in the French
press. Obituaries appeared in this country in The Guardian and The Times
(the latter being an abridged and expurgated version of the present
article).