28 Facts About Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis 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.

Cornelius Castoriadis was born on 11 March 1922 in Constantinople, the son of Kaisar and Sophia Kastoriadis.

Cornelius Castoriadis developed an interest in politics after he came into contact with Marxist thought and philosophy at the age of 13.

Cornelius Castoriadis heavily criticized the actions of the KKE during the December 1944 clashes between the communist-led ELAS on one side, and the Papandreou government aided by British troops on the other.

Once in Paris, Cornelius Castoriadis joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste.

Cornelius Castoriadis submitted a proposal for a doctoral dissertation on mathematical logic to Poirier, but he eventually abandoned the project.

Cornelius 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.

When Jacques Lacan's disputes with the International Psychoanalytical Association led to a split and the formation of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris in 1964, Cornelius Castoriadis became a member.

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

Cornelius Castoriadis began to practice analysis in 1973.

Cornelius Castoriadis was not calling for every individual to undergo psychoanalysis, per se.

Cornelius Castoriadis 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.

Cornelius Castoriadis had been elected Directeur de recherche in EHESS at the end of 1979 after submitting his previously published material in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project of connecting the disciplines of history, sociology and economy through the concept of the social imaginary.

Cornelius Castoriadis's teaching career at the EHESS lasted sixteen years.

Cornelius Castoriadis died on 26 December 1997 from complications following heart surgery.

Cornelius Castoriadis was survived by Zoe Christofidi, his daughter Sparta, and Kyveli, a younger daughter from his marriage with Zoe.

Cornelius Castoriadis wrote essays on mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society, economics, politics, philosophy, and art.

Cornelius Castoriadis used traditional terms as much as possible, though consistently redefining them.

When reading Cornelius 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.

Cornelius Castoriadis considered Greece, a topic that increasingly drew his attention, not as a blueprint to be copied but an experiment that could inspire a truly autonomous community, one that could legitimize its laws without assigning their source to a higher authority.

Capitalism legitimizes itself through "reason," claiming that it makes "rational sense", but Cornelius Castoriadis observed that all such efforts are ultimately tautological, in that they can only legitimize a system through the rules defined by the system itself.

Cornelius Castoriadis believed that for a given society, as we penetrate the layers of its culture deeper and deeper, we arrive at meanings that do not mean something other than themselves.

Cornelius Castoriadis then is offering an "ontogenetic", or "emergentist" model of history, one that is apparently unpopular amongst modern historians, but can serve as a valuable critique of historical materialism.

For example, Cornelius Castoriadis believed that Ancient Greeks had an imaginary by which the world stems from Chaos, while in contrast, the Hebrews had an imaginary by which the world stems from the will of a rational entity, God or Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible.

Cornelius Castoriadis believed that the complex historical processes through which new imaginaries are born are not directly quantifiable by science.

Cornelius Castoriadis was a social constructionist and a moral relativist insofar as he held that the radical imaginary of each society was opaque to rational analysis.

Cornelius Castoriadis 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.

Cornelius Castoriadis has influenced European thought in important ways.