The Castoriadis Reader

by David Curtis (Editor), Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis is presently Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is a philosopher, social critic, professional economist, practicing psychoanalyst and one of Europe's foremost thinkers. The Castoriadis Reader provides for the first time an overview of the author's work and encompasses every aspect of his thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

500 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 1997

Reviews

[David M]

Learn from my mistake. Just because you come across an intriguing allusion to an author in the pages of the New Left Review, that doesn't mean you have to drop everything to go and read said author.

Castoriadis is quite tedious and not particularly insightful. I'm aware that I deserve no sympathy at all for my ordeal of reading this book. Beforehand, I even asked a close friend, would you recommend reading Castoriadis? His response was a pretty unequivocal, Not really.

Foolishly, I disregarded his advice and went ahead anyway. Don't be like me. Now more than ever, trust your friends.

*
Alright, so this is really boring and kinda petty in places (defending himself against Habermas's willful misinterpretations, etc, it's about as edifying as seeing two professors squabble over who gets the extra donut at the faculty lounge), but there are moments that make me not regret checking it out from the library. Castoriadis was a theorist of democracy, and as such I think he speaks with urgency to our moment

The dominant idea that experts can be judged only by other experts is one of the conditions for the expansion and the growing irresponsiblity of the modern hierarchical-bureaucratic apparatus. The prevalent idea that there exists 'experts' in politics, that is, specialists of the universal and technicians of the totality, makes a mockery of the idea of democracy... It also - given the emptiness of the notion of a specialization in the universal-contains the seeds of the growing divorce between the capacity to attain power and the capacity to govern - which plagues Western societies more and more. - pp277

*
"...the specific turn that philosophy has taken since Parmenides, and especially since Plato, as onotology of determinacy..." - pp 307

I think it's important to be extremely, extremely skeptical of statements like this. First of all, the philosophizing that happened prior to Parmenides isn't really extant. It's possible to make all kinds of wild claims on its behalf simply because it exists only as a series of fragments. The contemporary philosopher/hermeneut is thus given extreme latitude to discover whatever he or she desires in Heraclitus.

Plus, statements like the above turn the whole history of philosophy into a monolithic conspiracy stretching back 2,500+ years. This paranoid style of thinking confers a certain heroic status on the contemporary philosopher, who's resisting the vast empire of thought that came before, but it all seems a bit meretricious and unearned. The end point seems to be a kind of intellectual primitivism or fetishizing of the occult as end in itself.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, Castoriadis's whole concept of the 'magma' doesn't actually have much to recommend it. Melreau-Ponty was already there to delineate a positive value to indeterminancy in the opening chapters of Phenomenology of Perception. Phenomenology already gave us (my personal favorite) the 'prethematized lifeworld.' I don't see in what way this so-called 'magma' is supposed to be an advance. It just seems like he's reiterating old points in a more obscure language, while claiming to make a radical break with all that came before... but maybe I should try and be more open-minded.