Castoriadis at work

Unpublished texts

History and creation is a collection of unpublished texts covering a large period of the intellectual itinerary of Cornelius Castoriadis (from 1946 to the 1960s), during which the central concepts of his thought took shape, as they will find their expression successful in his big work The imaginary institution of society (1975). These unpublished interest has a first interest underlined by Nicolas Poirier in the presentation of the collection: covering a period which corresponds to its revolutionary militantism activities carried out within the framework of the journal Socialism or barbarism (1949-1967), they show the close involvement between these activities “ practices »With concrete or historically contextualized issues (the revolutionary movement at the time of Stalinism and the ever -increasing bureaucratization of capitalism) and reflections (contained in the collection) a priori Much more theoretical and abstract.

History and creation So the first deserves to undermine a widespread idea on the trajectory of Castoriadis according to which the 1970s, marked by the publication of The imaginary institution of societywould have noted the withdrawal of Castoriadis in an ever more theoretical and university activity. Castoriadis would have “ strategically »Given his militant activities to then aim, in a context of defeat of protest movements, university recognition (acquired by his appointment, in 1980, at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences).

This thesis which seeks to underline a symptomatic divorce, in the itinerary of Castoriadis, between practice and theory, is undermined by these texts which, on the contrary, show the early and permanent interest of the latter for problems concerning the antinomies of logic (Kantian and Hegelian in particular) at the heart of the thesis project submitted in 1946 and that it will not lead typed and reproduced in the collection). They especially show the ever tighter joint between these reflections “ fundamental “And the theme of social-historical creation on which is precisely based on the possibility of an effective project (“ practical ») Political autonomy.

The antinomies of speculative thought

The course of Castoriadis is thus the illustration of one of the central theses of his thought, which he never stopped developing from the 1940s: only praxis, social-historical creation, indissolubly practical and theoretical, is able to resolve the antinomies of thought “ contemplative “, Condemned to oscillate between, on the one hand, a quest for closing and completed totalization of knowledge and, on the other hand, the recognition of the essentially open and unfinished nature of knowledge.

The relationship between Kantian and Hegelian thoughts remarkably symbolizes the tension crossing this frame of thought dominated basically by an erroneous understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. Indeed, Kantian thinking gives off a new fundamental type of subjectivity giving universally forming to sensitive experience, from which the categories come from a priori Constitutes of all absolutely certain, scientific knowledge (if there are content of absolutely certain knowledge, it is that any knowledge cannot come from empirical experience: it is therefore necessary to apply a subjectivity, non -psychological, constituting experience).

Kantian philosophy is therefore unsurpassable in that it lays down the basics of all non -dogmatic philosophy of knowledge as well as the only ideal character (regulator) of an exhaustive closure of knowledge: knowledge that will never be confused with being in itself (noumène) in that it comes from a given, human organization of experience can only be an endless task. But, at the same time, it is unable to resolve the split between an immutable transcendental subjectivity which, located outside of all historical effectiveness, organizes a priori Experience and, on the other hand, a historically located empirical subjectivity, contingent, taken in phenomenal flow.

It is also in the paradoxical incapacity to completely deduce experience from the categories. They are indeed constantly referred to the factual existence of the sciences which they must nevertheless found: because there are, in fact, content of absolutely certain knowledge, it is necessary to go beyond empiricism which draws any content from knowing sensitive experience and simultaneously postulate transcendental subjectivity and its categories. There cannot be, as Kant claims, of real deduction from the categories and pure forms, since the conditions of experience are in turn conditioned by the existence of what they must nevertheless found. The transcendental deduction is not a real foundation, it turns into an empirico-transcendental circle.

These two limits highlight, according to Castoriadis, an inadequate conception of the relationship between theory and practice, a forgetful of praxis: it is because the categories and the transcendental are removed from any instituting historicity that subjectivity is problematic. It is also the same oblivion of praxis which explains that the Kantian deduction of the experience alike on a circularity which can only be renewed to a social-historical creation: only creation can abolish any priority between “ condition ” And “ conditioned And make any deductive approach in vain.

Hegelian thinking on its side proceeds to a real procedural and historical foundation of the categories which brings them out of the circle of the deduction and the duplication of subjectivity in two irreconcilable forms. Far from being transcendental data frozen from all eternity, Hegelian logic makes it possible to see how they generate and self-use conversely in forms of always richer knowledge to achieve absolute knowledge, the ultimate position of knowledge where to definitively identify being and thought. Being in itself is not, as Kant thought, inaccessible: the difference between transcendental subjectivity and being in itself is still insufficient, it lacks dialectical identity or opposites find their unity in a richer identity which reveals the abstract character of their separation. But, suddenly, it is the historicity of knowledge as an infinite progression (the second pole of the tension indicated above) which vanishes. The philosophy of Hegel, which nevertheless reveals the procedural character of knowledge, hypostasies the fictitious idea of ​​totality (knowledge as an infinite task) knowing absolute so that the logic that it deploys ends up absorbing any creation in a totalizing form of identity. Hegelian becoming turns out to be that of an overhanging logic which annihilates any true historicity, testifying to the same blindness towards praxis: creation is reduced to the difference itself reintegrated in the expression of the same (as an identity of identity and non-identity). It thus returns below what constituted one of the main contributions of Kantian criticism: the non-identification between being and knowledge.

Thus, transcendental thought recognizes the total axiomatization of knowledge in system as an infinite task but freezes its forms and categories in a subjectivity devoid of historicity while Hegelian philosophy founds in a reversible and systematic order the categories but blocks the constitution process in a so -called unsurpassable state of knowledge. Praxis, therefore, will gradually appear, in the reflection of Castoriadis, as the decisive concept allowing to avoid the pitfalls to which the two emblems of contemplative thought succumb.

Praxis as a solution to the antinomies of contemplative thought

In addition, if praxis resolves the dead ends of contemplative thought by imposing itself as constituting the future of forms of knowledge, it affects in return the understanding of the story that it identifies. It will therefore make it possible to substantially deepen the political thought of Castoriadis. History, in fact, can no longer be reduced to any predetermination whatsoever since the formed forms (cognitive but also economic, legal, ideological etc.) now appear as the crystallization of an instituting process. Structuralism, the last avatar of contemplative thought, thus falls into the trap of erecting transhistoric (transcendental) invariants a limited number of elements whose combinations would make it possible to produce all possible human societies.

If structuralism forgets that history is the creation of its own conditions of possibility, praxis does not however take away its claim to scientificity. The axiomatization of history is certainly made unfinished by human praxis, but it is not deprived of scientificity. Indeed, its axiomatization is only possible insofar as it is essentially partial, fragmentary, certain historical transformations requiring to lay new irreducible axioms to the previous ones. These new axioms are then the effect of no cause, of any dialectical process, of no combination of invariants, but of a sui generis alteration. Thus, the passage of a market economy “ craft (Without accumulation regime) to a capitalist economy (finalized by an indefinite valuation of capital and by a project of rational mastery of nature) can no longer occur within the same axioms or even from a new combinatorial.

Such an evolution is notably irreducible to the new combination that capitalism establishes between the worker and the means of production (relation of dispossession which is added to the expropriation of the product). Capitalism, compared to a simple market economy (“ craft ), Is therefore social creation – historical of a new imaginary meaning from which can be understood, among other things, the new combinations of this “ production mode ». The imaginary, collective and immotivated creation of new meanings, therefore comes to elucidate (and not to explain), the impossible closing of history and to complete the Castoriadian reflections clearing the centrality of human praxis. We also find, in the right of this intellectual maturation, the bases of virulent criticism that Castoriadis will send to Marxism at the start of The imaginary institution of societyaccused of having smothered all praxis in favor of a deterministic reading of history, that is to say a aim of integral and definitive axiomatization of it.

This collection of unpublished, as well as the presentation and annotations of Nicolas Poirier, precious and enlightening, thus revive a thought at work, being made, building its own tools in contact with major classical thoughts. The most famous aspects of Castoriadian thought (the criticism of Marxism, the imaginary instituting) are thus firmly attached to a reflection as powerful as it is critical of the greatest thinkers, doubling and overlapping more targeted and “ practices ” of Socialism or barbarism. Autonomy as a collective questioning project of the inherited meanings thus takes on its full meaning and all its scale.