Studiekretsar / Krets 8 2007-2009 Vintersymposium: Abstracts 

Creation, Rationality and Autonomy/

Vintersymposium: Abstracts

Inlagd i november 2008

Preliminary overview

Abstracts for Winter Symposium in Athens, Greece, March 27 - 29 2009

Angelos Mouzakitis:
Chaos and Creation in Castoriadis’ interpretation of Greek Thought

Focusing on Casotriadis’ reading of the Antigone and on his interpretation of Greek mythology and religion, this paper aims to explore the importance chaos holds in Castoriadis’ conception of creation and ultimately of the human being. Castoriadis champions the idea of radical finitude without succumbing to the temptation of nihilism, while his idea of creation is arguably inextricably linked with a challenging conception of infinity. Importantly, infinity is here conceived in terms of the unlimited and indeterminate capacity of human beings to not merely produce but to properly create their multifaceted worlds and institutions. At the same time chaos is thought as the groundless ground of creation in line with Greek mythology, while bearing some elective affinities with relevant insights in Romanticism and late German Idealism.

Charles Snyder:
"On chaos and the Muses’ Song in Hesiod's Theogony: With and Beyond Castoriadis"

One of Castoriadis’ principal concerns in Séminaire VIII of his 1982-83 Ce quit fait la Grèce, 1. D’Homère à Héraclite was to demonstrate the ‘immediate and living connection’ of mythological and philosophical significations in Hesiod’s concept of chaos. This paper situates Castoriadis’ analysis of chaos within recent philological and philosophical interpretations of the Theogony. I shall argue that Castoriadis’ two significations of chaos, and more precisely how these two meanings relate within the larger thematic development of the poem, offers a much more sophisticated account of the relation between philosophy and mythology without ignoring other key features of Hesiod’s divinely inspired song. Beyond Castoriadis, I shall link his two significations of chaos with an interpretation of the limits of the Muses’ own divine song in order to show the speculative/philosophic moment in Hesiod.


Gabriel Rockhill:
Pseudo-Democracy in the History of Political Imaginaries

The primary goal of this paper is to explore and extrapolate on Cornelius Castoriadis’ resolute critique of pseudo-democracy in the modern world by comparing and contrasting it with ancient democracy. In order to do so, I will begin by outlining the unique history of the term and concept of democracy in the Western world, highlighting the following fact, which was pointedly noted by Moses Finley in Democracy Ancient and Modern:
"In antiquity, intellectuals in the overwhelming majority disapproved of popular government, and they produced a variety of explanations for their attitude and a variety of alternative proposals. Today their counterparts, especially but not only in the west, are agreed, in probably the same overwhelming majority, that democracy is the best form of government, the best known and the best imaginable."
After illustrating the relevancy of this claim, I will outline the various differences between democracy in ancient Greece and modern forms of representative democracy by relying on Castoriadis’s masterful analysis. Finally, I will attempt to extend and develop Castoriadis’s critical reflection on contemporary pseudo-democracy in works such as La montée de l’insignifiance and Post-scriptum sur l’insignifiance by relating it to the work of Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey and Jacques Rancière. The overall objective of my intervention will be to use the work of Castoriadis on the history of political imaginaries to shed light on the current state of what is widely referred to today as democracy tout court.



Ingerid S. Straume
Learning of What, Learning as Whom? Meaning and Imaginary Significations in the Philosophy of Education

The concept of learning organizes many policy reforms and discourses in contemporary Western school systems. Discussions about learning are often concerned with learning in abstracto, with little reference to the significations and meaning of that which is learned, such as contents, normativity and subjectivity. Even though Lev Vygotskij had an eye for the cultural dimension of learning (meaning), this dimension has not been properly developed. Many learning theories of today seem unable to elucidate that learning always means learning of something, and furthermore, that the subject who learns something, does so as something and someone. This arguably leads to a reductionist view of education, subjectivity and human praxis.

In the past, Nordic perspectives on education emphasized «danning» (political Bildung) and «folkbildning» (general enlightenment), both in policy and practice. From that standpoint it was possible to identify, and often resist, instrumentalism. Today, however, this position may be in need of renewed defence. The critique of learning in abstracto is part of such a project.

Ingmar Meland:
Between Imagination and Judgement
Heidegger, Cassirer, and the debate at Davos 80 years after

From the 17th of March to the 6th of April 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer resided at the winter resort Davos in Switzerland. They were invited, as two of the leading philosophers of the day, to give lectures the topic “What is Man?” For three weeks the two philosophers – the one on the height of his career and the other a shooting star – gave lectures, each on their respective topics. Cassirer lectured on philosophical anthropology and Heidegger’s recently published Being and Time. Heidegger concentrated upon the book he was writing at the time, which came out the same year, namely Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The disputation, we can see in retrospect, was not only about how to interpret Kant and the role of transcendental imagination in the first critique, but also about the future of philosophy.

This paper tries to take stock of the recent “debate about the debate”, mainly by framing it as an anecdote writ large about the ethico-political import of philosophy. Within this frame, the paper ties in with the main objective of the conference by mobilizing Cornelius Castoriadis’ critique of Heidegger in “The discovery of the Imagination” to get a grip on the ethico-political dimension of the Davos disputation, the recent debate about it, and the theme of “social-historical imaginary”. This, in turn, makes it possible to connect Cassirer’s posthumous The Myth of the State with recent theories of the importance of social imaginary in culture and politics (C. Castoriadis, P. Ricoeur, and C. Taylor). In conclusion the question is raised as to whether “the project of autonomy”, in the form we have inherited it from the Enlightenment, can be consistently thought without a theory of political judgement (H. Arendt) that would satisfy the criteria applied to aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgement.


J.F. Humphrey:
The self-creation of Anthropos and the Imaginary Institution of Society

In the essay, “Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation of Anthrōpos,” which is found in Figures of the Thinkable, Cornelius Castoriadis raises the question: “What is anthrōpos?” (p. 1). This important question, he writes, “is fundamental to the whole of Greek civilization.” Instead of turning to the philosophers to answer this question, he explores the answers contained two tragedies: Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’ Antigone to show that Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ answers to this provocative question “stand perfectly opposed” to one another. The difference between the two tragedians’ answer, however, cannot simply be ascribed to the subjective conditions of each poet; rather, Castoriadis insists, “the difference expresses and is consubstantial with the extraordinary rhythm of intellectual creation in democratic Athens, the increasingly radical marginalization of traditional representations, and the expanding and deepening of human self-awareness.”
In this paper, I examine Castoriaidis’ analysis of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ answers to the question: “What is anthrōpos?” I explain the importance that he attributes to both Aeschylus’ answer and to Sophocles’ answer to this fundamental question; I outline the differences that he finds between these two poets; and I consider how Castoriadis uses and expands on the conception of the “self-creation of anthrōpos” to develop his notion of “the imaginary institution of society.”


Olivier Fressard:
Imaginary institution of society and brute force: political views

When he compares the political imaginary of Ancient Greeks with that of the Moderns, Castoriadis draws attention to the fact that the first overtly recognized the important role of force in political matters without trying, as the second does, to mask or justify it. The heraclitean idea that “war is the father of all” is said to epitomize the greek state of mind. Thus, force is a fundamental category of the Greek political imaginary and possess, in the opinion of Castoriadis, an irreducible character that the Moderns have attempted to eliminate.
Nevertheless, Castoriadis upholds that there is a power more potent than the power of the weapons, and that the latter one is subordinated to the first one. This is the power of the social imaginary that he calls “infra-power”, this is to say underlying power. His ontology of the social-historical also lays down, against materialist ideas of the philosophy of history, that meaning is the constitutive element of societies and history. These are embodied in magmas of significations. But isn’t this in contradiction with the way Castoriadis characterizes the political imaginary of the Greeks? Moreover, doesn’t this conception lead away from what has always seemed to be part of all social and political life, that is to say: imposing by the means of force a constraining order and the often violent struggle between the social groups and between the countries?
Castoriadis seems once again to confuse the issue when he claims that any society comes into existence by the means of a radical creation of his own world whose identity is irreducible to every other. This thesis makes us think that the face-to-face between the different societies will regularly lead to a violent confrontation.
We will try here to reconstruct Castoriadis’ thought in a way that allows us to establish if it is coherent or contradictory. This search for intelligibility will be then the occasion to clear up the more general issue, that is more important in this age than ever, of the role of force, violence and war in relationships between societies (or between different groups in a same society) while each one of them is supposed to live in a specific and incommensurable world.

Zoé Castoriadis:
Castoriadis and the Greeek language

Castoriadis is presented as a French writer of Greek origin or as a Greek-French author. While he wrote almost exclusively in French (and only marginally in Greek at the beginning of his career, and to some extent in English), he always maintained a close relation with his mother language, modern Greek. Ancient Greek and German are present at the origin of his philosophical thought (during his youth he translated philosophical texts from German to Greek).

His distancing from Greek started from his installation in France and allowed him to acquire a more objective view on this language and its evolution.

We will try to identify, from his writings, the archived documents and the discussions he had had about this subject, his point of view on the expressive possibilities of the Greek language in the fields of: philosophical thinking, poetry and fiction.


Harald Wolf:
Radical Rupture or Continuity?
Greek Polis and Modern Project of Autonomy
(working title)


Catharina Gabrielsson:
On the mythologies of architectural origins

This paper is will explore how Castoriadis’ reasoning can be used for a critical re-assessment of the Western conception of architectural origins. According to a persuasive Western mythology, recounted by a wide range of thinkers (from the antique architect Vitruvius to Sigmund Freud), society as such emerges with the invention of language around the primordial fireplace. As linked to this Ur-scene, architecture emerges shortly after with the invention of the primitive shed, constructed through the binding together of branches in a fashion that is seen to prototype the Greek temple. This conception of architectural origins has been repeated at decisive moments in architectural history, signifying important shifts as regards to the continuous struggle between tradition and modernity. As pointed out by architectural historian Joseph Rykwert in his seminal "On Adam’s House in Paradise" (1981), conceptions of architectural origins have always primarily served as a means for defining and legitimizing a certain architectural response to the present. The “inverted teleology” and determination of models such as abbé Laugier’s idealistic hut and Viollet-Le-Duc’s pragmatic shed thus participate in defining architecture as essentially form and representation, rather than as (for instance) a socially practiced space. Taking this theme as its outset, the paper will investigate how Castoriadis’ conception of autonomy, creation and self-limitation provide the means for a different interpretation of architectural origins in general and of the Greek temple in particular, thereby possibly setting the grounds for an alternative concept of architecture.


Mats Rosengren:
True and false chaos - an attempt to understand Castoriadis’s treatment of productive chaos in early Greek thought

In a seminar, held January 26 1983, Castoriadis said: "When it comes to this original matrix, this subtratum, we are confronted with two ideas, two significations. The first is that of verse 116 (in Hesiodos): Chaos as Empty space, as Abyss. The world springs forth ex nihilo. Even being itself is first an emptiness. If I were to translate this into my own terms, I should say that what we have here is the idea of a radical creation, of a creation out of nothing, and of a creation of nothing itself out of a hyper-nothing, The second signification […] is the idea of a kykeon, a shapeless mixture, terrifying, containing everything and nourishing everything. And it is this second idea […] that has been called upon to play the most important role in the development of Greek philosophy.” (Ce qui fait la Grèce, p 174, my own transl.)
In my contribution I would like to explore these two ideas, in order to see how Castoriadis puts them into play in his own philosophical thought, and in particular in relation to his notion of radical creation.


Kristina Egumenovska:

Democracy and Self-Management: The Double Reality of Our Time

It seems pertinent, today more than ever, to consider the question of politics with reference to the economic sphere, even though democracy can not be defined, at least not in its radical meaning, without reference to Athenian democracy (even if only implicitly) and social movements (such as for instance feminist or worker’s movement). If we do not want to end with an ‘empty talk’ with regard to politics and with a simulacrum of the ‘after-work’ type of democracy, it is crucial therefore to address several issues that arise from the contemporary unlimited multiplication of state and the incestuous mélange between economy and politics (as if the Athenian polis is standing on its head). In this regard it would be helpful with some of Castoriadis’s earlier writings to reflect upon the relation between democracy and self-management.


Anders Ramsay:
Freud, Castoriadis and critical Theory of Society

Fotis Theodoridis - title pending

Participants without paper:

Yorgos Oikonomou
Jacob Dahl-Rendtorff
Adam Netzén
Håvard Nilsen og Henninge
Ulf Martin
Nikos Christopolous
TT