Studiekretsar / Krets 8 2007-2009 Sommarsession: Abstracts 

Creation, Rationality and Autonomy/

Sommarsession: Abstracts

Inlagd i maj 2008

Abstracts for summer session July 20-27 2008

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Kathleen Wilson:
Suspending Subjectivity: New Grounds for a Revolutionary Praxis of Autonomy?

What are the limits of the possible? How can we surpass limits that are socially and historically constructed contingencies? By what means can we create what is not, based on what is?
Two main lines of thought will be explored in this paper. Firstly, that to feed the political imaginary with the infinite resources of the radical imaginary, it is critical to think of what lies behind, and beneath human subjectivity. By what means, however, can we access this pre-rational state, the primordial magma, from which we edify social imaginary significations? Secondly, and consequentially, a praxis of transgression will be proposed as possible loci for the creation of new meaning. Praxis, which is necessarily intertwined with a politics of autonomy, for Castoriadis, must challenge the imaginative closure of systemic and inherited thought.
By way of a concrete object of research, namely, Japanese Butoh dance/theater, we aim to demonstrate that the suspension of subjectivity is essential to uncover the infinite resources of magma, this flux of being, from which political imaginaries and human subjectivities appear as determinate. Its poetical techne reaches deep inside the flesh, in order to release the archeology of historical sediments composing the body. In this critical moment when sense (meaning) and matter (flesh) ‘touch’, transfiguration is performed. Butoh is a praxis of transgression that blurs boundaries between art and life; accessing an ‘immanent beyond’ our daily reality. This exposé is thus an attempt to cross-boarders, shift registers, transgress limits, to delve into the indeterminate, in order to release new possibles, and actualize new virtuals.

Anders Michelsen:
THE PERIPHERAL INSIDER: DE-PRESENTATION? On antimigration sentiments and the crisis of postcolonial critique
In this paper antimigration sentiments – debated primarily as a problem of the West but for sure emerging in other parts of the globe, is taken to point to a denial of heightened global interdependence in Edward Said’s sense of ”one global environment.” The paper argues that this leaves the regime of postcolonial critique in an impasse between Western triumphalism, e.g. Francis Fukuyama’s post-hegelianism, and what we may term ’fundamentalism’ of a new order negotiating this heightened global interdependence. What is increasingly left out seems to be not only postcolonial critique but the entire prospect of cultural critique and criticism. The option of deconstruction, of ’sign on sign’ – of signified alterity, etc. to the advancement of something else, contesting in a wider sense the heritage of critique and critical thought in the postwar era, in particular, perhaps, when based on ’French poststructuralism’. Current antimigration sentiments (and of course, from different perspectives and in other contexts, in other parts of the world, left out of the debate here) seems to have a simpler solution: to deny the migrant, to re-create the world as if migration was non-existent, to conceive the world from a position beyond the ”beyond” of postcolonial critique, that is, to dispute the very idea of a global environment. That is, denial of large scale movement, of diaspora, of native informant, by way of a reconstituted system along the lines of Samuel P. Huntington’s and others notions of cultural homeostasis by way of separation of civilizations: to put it short, by de-presentation of the resident alien at root. Insofar antimigration sentiments are more than a passing whim of postmodern constituencies, they may well be seen as an attempt at ontological ’tearing with Said’s ‘global fabric’, displaying a different moment of signification, in the sense of what Cornelius Castoriadis terms the ”imaginary institution of society,” instituted as an ontologically creative form of the human ex nihilo, appearing antepredicatelively to representational signification: what Castoriadis bluntly terms ” (...) self-creation deployed as history.” Thus the intersection between antimigration sentiments and self-creation may point not only to possible imports of current cultural processes, but, equally important, to new ways of understanding globalization as meaning.


Adam Netzén:

THE RESTRUCTURING OF OBJECTIVITY AND SOME
OF ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE ONTOLOGY OF THE
SUBJECT

This paper should be seen as a tentative
attempt at problematising the understanding of the ontology of subjectivity, via the concept of scientific objectivity. One of the most prominent features of modern Western ontology has been the idea of a distinct separation between subject
and object. Thus, the concepts of subject-ivity and object-ivity have in many ways mirrored each other and been strongly interdependent. In this paper I will attempt to sketch some of the changes in the concept(s) of scientific objectivity over the last decades, and draw some preliminary conclusions as to how this may change our view of what a subject is. Some of the resources used for this will include post-empiricist philosophy of science, Science & Technology Studies, and hermeneutics.


Jacob Dahl Rendtorff:
PHILOSOPHY OF IMAGINATION: FROM SARTRE TO
CASTORIADIS AND RICOEUR

This paper will track the concept of imagination from Jean-Paul Sartre where it was a category of creative consciousness that later was applied to history and society to the uses of the concept in the political philosophy of Castoriadis and Ricoeur.

Claude Fourcade:

MAI 68 40 ANS APRÈS: "LA BRÈCHE "MORIN,LEFORT,
CASTORIADIS, ET AUJOURDH`HUI

Il s`agit seulement de proposer une causerie
autour de la lecture de: "la brèche, vingt ans
après" et autour d`un verre de vin, pour introduire
à la lecture croisée par E.Morin, C.Lefort
et C.Castoriadis de mai 68,dans le rapport
gouvernants/gouvernés comme contradiction
principale en lieu et place de la lutte des
classes.Ceci par un acteur et dirigeant provincial - Bordeaux - de mai 68.

Andrea Gabler: Castoriadis and 1968

Christopolous Nikos:
The critique of Cornelius Castoriadi’s on Marxism

The paper has three units, an introductory that gives us a spherical view of the Marxist theory in the 20th century, the main unit that deals with the “theory of value” and finally, the total conclusions. The basic question of the paper is the one that is expressed from Castoriadis: Do we have to overcome Marxism?

The introductory unit mainly works on the critique that Cornelius Castoriadis is enforcing on Marxism in the first part of his work ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’, ‘ Marxism and the Revolutionary Theory’. The axis in which we will move on are the following four: first there is the viewing of ‘ The Historic State of Marxism’, ‘The Marxist Theory of History’ and ‘The Marxist Philosophy of History’. Finally, certain brief conclusions will be imprinted.

The basis of the second unit is the article of Cornelius Castoriadi’s “Value, Equality, Justice, Politics: from Marx to Aristotle and from Aristotle to us” in which Castoriadis considers the senses that keep their etymology in time, but despite all these approaches, as far as their substance is concerned, it differs. All these senses, meet, combine, clash and lastly they compose a net around the crossroads of the labyrinth of the total thinking that concerns the social – historic.
Checking certain evident items of Marx’s approach in the sense of Value, we see the need to present itself for its consideration – via criticism of the first – Aristotle. .
At present everything shows that the matter is getting embrangled, from the fact of the consideration of two incongruous philosophers, up to the point where the tip of the clew can be seen, the precious contribution of the historical horizon.
The proof will be set forward first time and the senses with the order they are given in the article. The choice, the structure will remain the same with the one of K. Kastoriadis article, it contributes in the better attribution of the stylistic framework of the original text.
In second time there will be a presentation of a brief assessment of impressions from this article, aiming at the clarification of the stylistic mainly part of the making of a new antechamber, which will lead us to the total conclusions.


Fotis Theodoridis:
THE HUMAN SUBJECT IN CASTORIADIS THOUGHT

The psychoanalytic strand in Castoriadis thought unfolds a non-reductionist logic and ontology of the human psyche or, something that is the same for him, of the human subject. This logic-ontology distinguishes the human psyche from the animal psyche and from the biological lineage of human
existence but also from the social-historical world, within which it is always deeply immersed. Against both the biological and the social reductions of the human subject, and against any kind of dualism,
Castoriadis posits the idea of a human subject as a mode of being by its own, constituted upon its own forms and principles of organization.
These forms and principles that organize the
mode of being of the human subject find a
support in both the biological and the social
lineage of its existence, but cannot be reduced to either of them, neither logically nor ontologically. They have to be approached and understood,
as modes, forms and principles of organization and as to their constitutive effect, by their own.
Central in the human psyche’s mode of existence are two capacities that are unique to it. First, the capacity of radical imagination, that is, the capacity to create images or forms that lack any real or rational referents. Secondly, the capacity
to find pleasure in the very representation of those images in imagination and thereby to
invest the very process of representation with the intention to achieve the pleasure associated to those images. The human psyche organizes its endless and ceaseless flux of representations by a flux of intentions aiming to achieve a flux of affections associated to these representations.
From a biological point of view therefore, the human psyche is a mad animal, since it
creates representations without referents; and it is an incurably sick animal, since it seeks and effectively always finds meaning and pleasure inm those representations. But this madness and this sickness is exactly what make the human psyche human. On the level of the individual psyche, this
madness and sickness accounts for such different things as the psychotic subject, the conscious and responsible social individual and different forms of
artistic creation. On the social-historical level, the very emergence of language and of a social world of meaning find their lineage in this madness and sickness of the individual psyche, although they are not reducible to it. They are rather creations of a collectivity of individual psyches, or of what Castoriadis calls the social imaginary or the imaginary of the anonymous collectivity. Language and the social significations that it embodies and conveys constitute the collective counterpart, so to say, of the individual psyche’s flux of representations. It is exactly because humans are mad and sick, that they can sublimatem and devote their lives to such social imaginary significations, as the love for God, the annihilation of the other in Ausvitz or the fight for democracy.

In my paper, I will try to pursue two sets of aims. First, to explicate Castoriadis conception of the human subject. This involves a delineation of
his non-reductionist logic-ontology of the human psyche and of the modes, forms and principles of its organizations that radically distinguish it from its biological and social lineages. Secondly, I will try to explicate the implications of this conception of the human subject for a series of seemingly different but in many ways highly related areas of thought and practice: (1) the controversy regarding the biological vis-à-vis the social determinations of the subject; (2) the status of the subject in the social-historical research, in relation to the holistic-individualistic or structure-agent controversy and the post-structuralist claim for the death of the subject; (3) the theoretical and practical aims of the psychoanalytic activity; and (4) the subjective lineages of the political project of individual and collective autonomy.


Ingerid Straume:
The imaginary as a mode of politicization
Political philosophy, at least since John Rawls, has little room for notions like the imaginary (fr. l'imaginaire). Rather, the discipline is concerned with principles and preconditions for managing a multicultural society marked by value pluralism. The main concern is not the values themselves, nor their problematization or change (i.e., politics). Today, I argue, political philosophy either resembles a sophisticated art of administration, or a total negation of the same (e.g. existentialist "politics"). In my paper, I will investigate a different path, guided by the notion of the imaginary as a political "faculty" as suggested by Castoriadis, and also drawing on impulses from May 1968.


Anders Ramsay
Council communism and autonomous society - on Castoriadis and Pannekoek

Castoriadis and Socialism ou Barbarie has often been labeled as generally belonging to the tradition of council communism or council socialism. The paper intends to discuss the relationship between these ideas, particularly with an eye to the works of Anton Pannekoek.

Anders Michelsen:
THE PERIPHERAL INSIDER: DE-PRESENTATION? On antimigration sentiments and the crisis of postcolonial critique

In this paper antimigration sentiments - debated primarily as a problem of the West but for sure emerging in other parts of the globe, is taken to point to a denial of heightened global interdependence in Edward Said's sense of "one global environment." The paper argues that this leaves the regime of postcolonial critique in an impasse between Western triumphalism, e.g. Francis Fukuyama's post-hegelianism, and what we may term 'fundamentalism' of a new order negotiating this heightened global interdependence. What is increasingly left out seems to be not only postcolonial critique but the entire prospect of cultural critique and criticism. The option of deconstruction, of 'sign on sign' - of signified alterity, etc. to the advancement of something else, contesting in a wider sense the heritage of critique and critical thought in the postwar era, in particular, perhaps, when based on 'French poststructuralism'. Current antimigration sentiments (and of course, from different perspectives and in other contexts, in other parts of the world, left out of the debate here) seems to have a simpler solution: to deny the migrant, to re-create the world as if migration was non-existent, to conceive the world from a position beyond the "beyond" of postcolonial critique, that is, to dispute the very idea of a global environment. That is, denial of large scale movement, of diaspora, of native informant, by way of a reconstituted system along the lines of Samuel P. Huntington's and others notions of cultural homeostasis by way of separation of civilizations: to put it short, by de-presentation of the resident alien at root. Insofar antimigration sentiments are more than a passing whim of postmodern constituencies, they may well be seen as an attempt at ontological 'tearing with Said's 'global fabric', displaying a different moment of signification, in the sense of what Cornelius Castoriadis terms the "imaginary institution of society," instituted as an ontologically creative form of the human ex nihilo, appearing antepredicatelively to representational signification: what Castoriadis bluntly terms " (...) self-creation deployed as history." Thus the intersection between antimigration sentiments and self-creation may point not only to possible imports of current cultural processes, but, equally important, to new ways of understanding globalization as meaning.