In the first phase of the postwar [post-World War II] era,

the real problems had a name: Stalinism in general and in

France; the nature of the Soviet regime and of the

“socialisms” popping up like mushrooms in Eastern

Europe and in China; the Cold War.

Cornelius Castoriadis. Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and

Social Writings. Volume 3. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press. 1993. Page 273.

Capitalist culture is disintegrating before our very eyes—

but so is the old proletarian culture. What is socialism

today, not for us and those near to us, a few hundred

individuals in an ocean of three billion souls, but for

actual workers in society today? And internationalism?

What, for them, is “the [working] class”? Worse than

nothing-a nothingness covered by the ruins of the

previous ideology that prevents them half the time

(during the other half, it is the mystification of capitalism

that takes over) even from seeing, and in any case from

thinking, reality clearly…

Amid this culture that is decomposing more and more

each day, in its capitalist wing as well as in its “working-

class” wing, we ought to take our stand as the total

negation of that which is established and as the

expression of people’s genuine aspirations. We therefore

ought to mark a radical rupture with the ideology and

values of official society, which are, in fact, shared, with

only minor variations, by supposedly working-class

organizations.

Cornelius Castoriadis. Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and

Social Writings. Volume 3. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press. 1993. Pages 10-11.

The true Marxism is not a philosophy, and that Marxism

(which incidentally encompasses everything—Stalinism

and anti-Stalinism, and the whole life of the world) is the

one we hold to. Perhaps one day, after incredible

detours, the proletariat will rediscover its role as the

universal class, and will once more take over that

universal Marxist criticism which for the moment has no

historical impact or bearing. The Marxist identity of

thought and action which the present calls into question

is thus postponed till a later date. The appeal to an

indefinite future preserves the doctrine as a way of

thinking and a point of honor at the moment it is in

difficulty as a way of living. According to Marx, this is

precisely the vice of philosophy. But who would guess it,

since at the same time it is philosophy which is made the

scapegoat? Non-philosophy, which Marx taught for the

profit of the revolutionary praxis, is now the refuge of

uncertainty. These writers know better than anyone that

the Marxist link between philosophy and politics is

broken.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Ted

Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, editors. Evanston, Illinois:

Northwestern University Press. 2007. Pages 223-224.

The main concern of our time is going to be to reconcile

the old world and the new. In the face of this problem,

the U.S.S.R. and the recent adversaries are perhaps on

the same side, the side of the old world. Be that as it

may, the end of the Cold War is in sight. The West can

scarcely show up well in peaceful competition if it does

not invent a democratic way of managing its economy. At

present, the development of industrial society here is

marked by extraordinary disorder. Capitalism

haphazardly extends its giant branches, puts the

economies of nations at the mercy of dominant

industries which choke their towns and highways, and

destroys the classical forms of the human establishment.

At all levels immense problems appear; not just

techniques but political forms, motives, a spirit, reasons

for living need to be found.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Ted

Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, editors. Evanston, Illinois:

Northwestern University Press. 2007. Page 320.

The Stalinist regime, from its birth, ceaselessly destroyed

itself to the precise extent that, in comformity with its

role, it was building an entirely different society from

that which had produced it: in Stalin’s last years,

Stalinism had forged all the instruments for its

liquidation. It was a relict, in profound contradiction with

the real structure of the new society. The U.S.S.R. had

acquired an enormous military potential: the Red Army

was strong enough to reach the Atlantic in forty-eight

hours; the armament industry was making atomic

bombs. It wasn’t sure that the Russians would win in a

world conflict, but it already appeared that one could not

attack them without putting the human race on the brink

of total disappearance. In the same time—and in spite of

Stalin’s systematic distrust—a great Communist power

had just been bom, which had made its revolution itself,

without help, and which—contrary to the Peoples

Democracies—indissolubly united, from the beginning,

the requirements of socialist construction with those of

the national interest …. [W]hen Stalin had announced

that the Soviet industry was making nuclear weapons,

when Mao had proclaimed the Chinese Republic, this

“retractile” attitude became more and more dangerous:

the relationship of forces tending to balance out, the

Stalinist aggressiveness was changing its direction in spite

of itself and becoming objectively offensive. The Korean

war was the test: it is clear that the U.S.S.R. is not

responsible for it and that these local operations

represent an episode of the conflict—quite serious in

other respects—which was then setting Peoples China

against the America of MacArthur and of the “China

lobby.” But the American Government judged otherwise.

One knows by what press campaigns the public was

panicked and how anti- Sovietism was aggravated. In any

case, the “awakening” of the U.S.A., the hardening of its

policy, McCarthyism and the decision to rearm Germany

testify to a sudden panic: the U.S.S.R. becoming strong

enough to reveal its imperialism, the war clan took on

increasing importance in the U.S.A. The Kremlin had to

resign itself to war or take an attitude more in keeping

with its new and terrible power.

Jean-Paul Sartre. The Ghost of Stalin. Martha H. Fletcher

(with the assistance of John R, Kleinschmidt), translator.

New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1968. Pages 93-95.

In 1939 [Henri] Lefebvre published his first major work in

the Marxist tradition, Dialectical Materialism, which for a

brief period became a textbook in party schools and

study groups. In contrast to the Soviet-inspired

contributions to this genre, Lefebvre’s book is a

sophisticated, mostly non-dogmatic treatment of its

subject, which stresses the pre-Socratic and Hegelian

roots of the dialectic, avoids formulaic discussions that

can be found, for example, in Stalin’s Dialectical and

Historical Materialism, which explicates the three “laws”

of the dialectic — contradiction, the transformation of

quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation —

criticizes mechanistic materialism as a form of scientism

(a mode of thought that arose in the French

Enlightenment, and became subject to [Karl] Marx’s

critique but which reappears as Marxist dogmatism

during the periods of the second [Socialist] and third

[Communist] Internationals). In this book Lefebvre

shows, in embryo, the relevance of dialectics as a

method for understanding social relations, especially

everyday life, a suggestion that is elaborated after the

war. After participating in the resistance during World

War Two, in its aftermath Lefebvre became perhaps the

party’s major intellectual spokesperson. Between 1945

and 1948 he engaged, most famously, in a series of

public debates with [Jean-Paul] Sartre and other

members of the independent left journal, Les Temps

Modernes, which, in its early years, was the leading

intellectual voice for a putative “third camp” of political

formation — a perspective that Sartre and Merleau

Ponty shared with the tendency of French Trotskyism

associated with the Socialism or Barbarism group whose

most prominent figures were Cornelius Castoriadis and

Claude Lefort. These groups adhered neither to the

Soviet Union nor to the Western capitalist powers. How

did this non-dogmatic Marxist justify his leading role in a

party whose subservience to Stalin and the arid

ideologies of post-war Marxism-Leninism were

legendary? With the hindsight of the collapse of Eastern

European Communism it is difficult to imagine the

powerful reputation enjoyed by the Soviet Union among

workers, peasants and intellectuals.

Stanley Aronowitz. Against Orthodoxy: Social Theory and

Its Discontents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of

St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2015. Page 79.

Henri Lefebvre

Born 16 June 1901Hagetmau, France

Died 29 June 1991(aged 90)Navarrenx, France

Alma mater University of Paris(MA, 1920;[1] DrE,1954)[2]

Era 20th-centuryphilosophy

Region Western philosophy

School ContinentalphilosophyWestern MarxismHegelian Marxism

Doctoralstudents

Jean Baudrillard

Maininterests

Everyday life ·dialectics · alienation ·mystification · socialspace · urbanity ·rurality · modernity ·literature · History

Notableideas

Critique of everydaylife · theory of

Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre (/ləˈfɛvrə/ lə-FEV-rə, French: [ɑ̃ʁi ləfɛvʁ]; 16June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher andsociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life,for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the productionof social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, andcriticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolificcareer, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundredarticles.[4] He founded or took part in the founding of severalintellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La RevueMarxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.[5]

BiographyThe critique of everyday lifeThe social production of space

Criticism and response

BibliographyReferencesSourcesFurther readingExternal links

Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studiedphilosophy at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), graduating in1920. By 1924 he was working with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman,Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer, and Pierre Morhange in thePhilosophies group seeking a "philosophical revolution".[6] Thisbrought them into contact with the Surrealists, Dadaists, and othergroups, before they moved towards the French Communist Party(PCF).

Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and became one of the mostprominent French Marxist intellectuals during the second quarter ofthe 20th century, before joining the French resistance.[7] From 1944 to1949, he was the director of Radiodiffusion Française, a French radiobroadcaster in Toulouse. Among his works was a highly influential,anti-Stalinist text on dialectics called Dialectical Materialism (1940).Seven years later, Lefebvre published his first volume of The Critique

Contents

Biography

moments ·rhythmanalysis · rightto the city · theproduction of socialspace

Influences

Karl Marx · G. W. F. Hegel ·Friedrich Nietzsche · FriedrichEngels · Vladimir Lenin · MartinHeidegger · Gaston Bachelard ·

Roland Barthes · François Rabelais· Jean-Jacques Rousseau ·

Heraclitus · Kostas Axelos · MauriceMerleau-Ponty

Influenced

Guy Debord · Jean Baudrillard ·Michel de Certeau · David Harvey ·

Raoul Vaneigem · Edward Soja ·Fredric Jameson · the SituationistInternational · Mark Poster · Neil

Smith · Jean-Paul Sartre[3]

of Everyday Life.[8] His early work on method was applauded andborrowed centrally by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique ofDialectical Reason (1960). During Lefebvre's thirty-year stint withthe PCF, he was chosen to publish critical attacks on opposedtheorists, especially existentialists like Sartre and Lefebvre's formercolleague Nizan,[9] only to intentionally get himself expelled from theparty for his own heterodox theoretical and political opinions in thelate 1950s. He then went from serving as a primary intellectual for thePCF to becoming one of France's most important critics of the PCF'spolitics (e.g. immediately, the lack of an opinion on Algeria, and moregenerally, the partial apologism for and continuation of Stalinism) andintellectual thought (i.e. structuralism, especially the work of LouisAlthusser).[10]

In 1961, Lefebvre became professor of sociology at the University ofStrasbourg, before joining the faculty at the new university atNanterre in 1965.[11] He was one of the most respected professors,and he had influenced and analysed the May 1968 student revolt.[12]

Lefebvre introduced the concept of the right to the city in his 1968book Le Droit à la ville[13][14] (the publication of the book predatesthe May 1968 revolts which took place in many French cities).Following the publication of this book, Lefebvre wrote severalinfluential works on cities, urbanism, and space, including TheProduction of Space (1974), which became one of the most influentialand heavily cited works of urban theory. By the 1970s, Lefebvre hadalso published some of the first critical statements on the work of post-structuralists, especially MichelFoucault.[15] During the following years he was involved in the editorial group of Arguments, a New Leftmagazine which largely served to enable the French public to familiarize themselves with Central Europeanrevisionism.[16]

Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex careerand influence:

the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, lessthan a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and outof fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also ofsociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.[17]

One of Lefebvre's most important contributions to social thought is the idea of the "critique of everyday life",which he pioneered in the 1930s. Lefebvre defined everyday life dialectically as the intersection of "illusionand truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does notcontrol",[18] and is where the perpetually transformative conflict occurs between diverse, specific rhythms: thebody's polyrhythmic bundles of natural rhythms, physiological (natural) rhythms, and social rhythms (Lefebvreand Régulier, 1985: 73).[19] The everyday was, in short, the space in which all life occurred, and betweenwhich all fragmented activities took place. It was the residual.[20] While the theme presented itself in manyworks, it was most notably outlined in his eponymous three-volume study, which came out in individualinstallments, decades apart, in 1947, 1961, and 1981.

The critique of everyday life

Lefebvre argued that everyday life was an underdeveloped sector compared to technology and production, andmoreover that in the mid 20th century, capitalism changed such that everyday life was to be colonized—turnedinto a zone of sheer consumption. In this zone of everydayness (boredom) shared by everyone in societyregardless of class or specialty, autocritique of everyday realities of boredom vs. societal promises of free timeand leisure, could lead to people understanding and then revolutionizing their everyday lives. This wasessential to Lefebvre because everyday life was where he saw capitalism surviving and reproducing itself.Without revolutionizing everyday life, capitalism would continue to diminish the quality of everyday life, andinhibit real self-expression. The critique of everyday life was crucial because it was for him only through thedevelopment of the conditions of human life—rather than abstract control of productive forces—that humanscould reach a concrete utopian existence.[21]

Lefebvre's work on everyday life was heavily influential in French theory, particularly for the Situationists, aswell as in politics (e.g. for the May 1968 student revolts).[22] The third volume has also recently influencedscholars writing about digital technology and information in the present day,[23] since it has a section dealingwith this topic at length, including analysis of the Nora-Minc Report (1977); key aspects of information theory;and other general discussion of the "colonisation" of everyday life through information communicationtechnologies as "devices" or "services".

Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (theproduction of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is thecentral argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La Production del'espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainlywithin human geography, as seen in the current work of authors such as David Harvey, Dolores Hayden, andEdward Soja, and in the contemporary discussions around the notion of spatial justice. Lefebvre is widelyrecognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory,embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever-expanding reach of theurban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities(which is treated in La Pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were allthemes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, among other aspects, with the deeptransformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omnipresence (the "complete urbanizationof society").

Lefebvre contends that there are different modes of production of space (i.e. spatialization) from natural space('absolute space') to more complex spaces and flows whose meaning is produced in a social way (i.e. socialspace).[24] Lefebvre analyzes each historical mode as a three-part dialectic between everyday practices andperceptions (le perçu), representations or theories of space (le conçu) and the spatial imaginary of the time (levécu).[25]

Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex socialconstruction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices andperceptions. This argument implies the shift of the research perspective from space to processes of itsproduction; the embrace of the multiplicity of spaces that are socially produced and made productive in socialpractices; and the focus on the contradictory, conflictual, and, ultimately, political character of the processes ofproduction of space.[26] As a Marxist theorist (but highly critical of the economic structuralism that dominatedthe academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space isfundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. The social production of space iscommanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance (see Antonio Gramsci).

The social production of space

(Social) space is a (social) product ... the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought andof action ... in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence ofdomination, of power.[27]

Lefebvre argued that every society—and, therefore, every mode of production—produces a certain space, itsown space. The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and thingsin space—it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself—Lefebvre arguesthat the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of itsspatiality). Then if every society produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaringitself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar abstractionincapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticizedSoviet urban planners on the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced themodernist model of urban design (interventions on physical space, which were insufficient to grasp socialspace) and applied it onto that context:

Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing anappropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, andof their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.[28]

In his book The Urban Question, Manuel Castells criticizes Lefebvre's Marxist humanism and approach to thecity influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche. Castells' political criticisms of Lefebvre's approach to Marxismechoed the structuralist Scientific Marxism school of Louis Althusser of which Lefebvre was an immediatecritic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some may argue that theacceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the longand theoretically dense The Production of Space.

In "Actually-Existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Specificity of (Still-)Socialist Urbanism,"Michal Murawski critiques Lefebvre's dismissal of actually existing socialism by showing how socialist statesproduced differential space.[29]

1925 "Positions d'attaque et de défense du nouveau mysticisme", Philosophies 5–6 (March).pp. 471–506. (Pt. 2 of the "Philosophy of Consciousness" (Philosophie de la conscience)project on being, consciousness and identity, originally proposed as a DES[30] thesis to LéonBrunschvicg and eventually abandoned—Lefebvre's DES 1920 thesis was titled Pascal etJansénius (Pascal and Jansenius).)[1][31]

1934 with Norbert Guterman, Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx, Paris: NRF (numerousreprintings).1936 with Norbert Guterman, La Conscience mystifiée, Paris: Gallimard (new ed. Paris: LeSycomore, 1979).1937 Le nationalisme contre les nations (Preface by Paul Nizan), Paris: Éditions socialesinternationales (reprinted, Paris: Méridiens-Klincksliek, 1988, Collection "Analyseinstitutionnelle", Présentation M. Trebitsch, Postface Henri Lefebvre).1938 Hitler au pouvoir, bilan de cinq années de fascisme en Allemagne, Paris: Bureaud'Éditions.

Criticism and response

Bibliography

1938 with Norbert Guterman, Morceaux choisis de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard (3 reprintings 1938–1939; in the reprinted Collection "Idées", 2 vols. 1969).1938 with Norbert Guterman, Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard.1939 Nietzsche, Paris: Éditions sociales internationales.1946 L'Existentialisme, Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire.1947 Logique formelle, logique dialectique, Vol. 1 of A la lumière du matérialisme dialectique,written in 1940–41 (2nd volume censored). Paris: Éditions sociales.1947 Descartes, Paris: Éditions Hier et Aujourd'hui.1947 Critique de la vie quotidienne, L'Arche1942 Le Don Juan du Nord, Europe – revue mensuelle 28, April 1948, pp. 73–104.1950 Knowledge and Social Criticism, Philosophic Thought in France and the USA AlbanyN.Y.: State University of New York Press. pp. 281–300 (2nd ed. 1968).1958 Problèmes actuels du marxisme, Paris: Presses universitaires de France; 4th edition,1970, Collection "Initiation philosophique"1958 (with Lucien Goldmann, Claude Roy, Tristan Tzara) Le romantisme révolutionnaire, Paris:La Nef.1961 Critique de la vie quotidienne II, Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté, Paris:L'Arche.1963 La vallée de Campan - Etude de sociologie rurale, Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance.1965 Métaphilosophie, foreword by Jean Wahl, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, Collection"Arguments".1965 La Proclamation de la Commune, Paris: Gallimard, Collection "Trente Journées qui ontfait la France".1968 Le Droit à la ville, Paris: Anthropos (2nd ed.); Paris: Ed. du Seuil, Collection "Points".1968 La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, Paris: Gallimard, Collection "Idées". Trans.Sacha Rabinovitch as Everyday Life in the Modern World. Allen Lane The Penguin Press,1971.1968 Dialectical Materialism, first published 1940 by Presses Universitaires de France, as LeMatérialisme Dialectique. First English translation published 1968 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.ISBN 0-224-61507-61968 Sociology of Marx, N. Guterman trans. of 1966c, New York: Pantheon.1969 The Explosion: From Nanterre to the Summit, Paris: Monthly Review Press. Originallypublished 1968.1970 La révolution urbaine Paris: Gallimard, Collection "Idées".1970 Du rural à l'urbain Paris: Anthropos.1971 Le manifeste différentialiste, Paris: Gallimard, Collection "Idées".1971 Au-delà du structuralisme, Paris: Anthropos.1972 La pensée marxiste et la ville, Tournai and Paris: Casterman.1973 La survie du capitalisme; la re-production des rapports de production. Trans. Frank Bryantas The Survival of Capitalism. London: Allison and Busby, 1976.1974 La production de l'espace, Paris: Anthropos. Translation and Précis.1974 with Leszek Kołakowski Evolution or Revolution, F. Elders, ed. Reflexive Water: TheBasic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir. pp. 199–267. ISBN 0-285-64742-31975 Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, ou le royaume des ombres, Paris: Tournai, Casterman.Collection "Synthèses contemporaines". ISBN 2-203-23109-21975 Le temps des méprises: Entretiens avec Claude Glayman, Paris: Stock. ISBN 2-234-00174-9

1978 with Catherine Régulier La révolution n'est plus ce qu'elle était, Paris: Éditions Libres-Hallier (German trans. Munich, 1979). ISBN 2-264-00849-01978 Les contradictions de l'Etat moderne, La dialectique de l'Etat, Vol. 4 of 4 De 1'Etat, Paris:UGE, Collection "10/18".1980 La présence et l'absence, Paris: Casterman. ISBN 2-203-23172-61981 Critique de la vie quotidienne, III. De la modernité au modernisme (Pour unemétaphilosophie du quotidien) Paris: L'Arche.1981 De la modernité au modernisme: pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien, Paris: L'ArcheCollection "Le sens de la marché".1985 with Catherine Régulier-Lefebvre, Le projet rythmanalytique Communications 41.pp. 191–199.1986 with Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud, "International Competition for the NewBelgrade Urban Structure Improvement", in Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade,Vancouver: Fillip Editions. ISBN 978-0-9738133-5-71988 Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx'sDeath, D. Reifman trans., L.Grossberg and C.Nelson (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation ofCulture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press; New York: Macmillan. pp. 75–88. ISBN 0-252-01108-21990 Du Contrat de Citoyenneté, Paris: Syllepse, 1990.1991 The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, John Moore trans., London: Verso. Originallypublished 1947. ISBN 0-86091-340-61991 with Patricia Latour and Francis Combes, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre P. Latourand F. Combes, eds. Paris: Messidor, Collection "Libres propos".1991 The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans., Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Originally published 1974. ISBN 0-631-14048-41992 with Catherine Regulier-Lefebvre Éléments de rythmanalyse: Introduction à laconnaissance des rythmes, preface by René Lorau, Paris: Ed. Syllepse, Collection"Explorations et découvertes". English translation: Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everydaylife, Stuart Elden, Gerald Moore trans. Continuum, New York, 2004.1995 Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes September 1959-May 1961, J. Moore, trans.,London: Verso. Originally published 1962. ISBN 1-85984-961-X1996 Writings on Cities, Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, trans. and eds., Oxford: BasilBlackwell. ISBN 0-631-19187-92003 Key Writings, Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, eds. London/New York:Continuum.2009 State, Space, World: Selected Essay, Neil Brenner, Stuart Elden, eds. Gerald Moore, NeilBrenner, Stuart Elden trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.2014 Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. (http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/toward-an-architecture-of-enjoyment), L. Stanek ed., R. Bononno trans. (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press), the first publication in any language of the book written in 1973.

1. Schrift (2006), p. 152.2. Schrift (2006), p. 153.3. Ian H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, Berghahn Books, 2004, p. 176: "Sartre praised highly

[Lefebvre's] work on sociological methodology, saying of it: 'It remains regrettable that Lefebvrehas not found imitators among other Marxist intellectuals'."

4. Shields, Rob (1999). Lefebvre Love and Struggle. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-09370-5.5. Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 427. ISBN 9780415252256.

References

6. Michel Trebitsch: Introduction to Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre1_MT.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20160608040420/http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre1_MT.html) 8 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine

7. Mark Poster, 1975, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser, PrincetonUniversity Press

8. "Lefebvre on the Situationists: AnInterview" (http://www.notbored.org/lefebvre-interview.html).Retrieved 17 May 2016.

9. Radical Philosophy obituary, Spring 1992 (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9838) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20030626092609/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9838) 26 June 2003 atthe Wayback Machine

10. Henri Lefebvre and Leszek Kołakowski. Evolution or Revolution; F. Elders (ed.), ReflexiveWater: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir. pp. 199–267. ISBN 0-285-64742-3

11. "Préface de : Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume III. (1981)" (https://web.archive.org/web/20160608022258/http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre3_MT.html). Archivedfrom the original (http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre3_MT.html) on 8 June 2016.Retrieved 17 May 2016.

12. Vincent Cespedes, May 68, Philosophy is in the Street! (Larousse, Paris, 2008).13. Mark Purcell, Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant (h

ttp://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/geojournal.pdf), GeoJournal 58: 99–108, 2002.14. "Right to the City" as a response to the crisis: "Convergence" or divergence of urban social

movements? (http://www.reclaiming-spaces.org/crisis/archives/266) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20120310001029/http://www.reclaiming-spaces.org/crisis/archives/266) 10 March2012 at the Wayback Machine, Knut Unger, Reclaiming Spaces

15. Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991 (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9838) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20030626092609/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9838) 26 June 2003 at theWayback Machine

16. Gombin, Richard (1971). The Origins of Modern Leftism. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-021846-6.,p40

17. Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991.18. Lefebvre, Henri (1947). The Critique of Everyday Life. Verso. ISBN 978-1844671946., p4019. Lefebvre, Henri; Regular, Catherine (2004). Rhythmanalysis. Continuum. ISBN 978-

0826472991.20. "Préface à : Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I. Introduction" (https://web.archi

ve.org/web/20160608040420/http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre1_MT.html).Archived from the original (http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/Trebitsch/pref_lefebvre1_MT.html) on 8 June2016. Retrieved 17 May 2016.

21. Elden, 2004, pp. 110–126.22. Ross, Kristin (2005). May 68 and its afterlives. University of Chicago. ISBN 978-0226727998.23. Shaw, Joe; Graham, Mark (February 2017). "An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content,

Control, and the Urbanization of Information" (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fanti.12312). Antipode.49 (4): 907–927. doi:10.1111/anti.12312 (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fanti.12312).

24. Place, A Short Introduction by Tim Cresswell25. Shields, Rob, Places on the Margin, Routledge, 1991, ISBN 0-415-08022-3, pp. 50–58.26. Stanek, Lukasz, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of

Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. ix.27. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991, ISBN 0-631-18177-6. p. 26.28. Lefebvre, Henri The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991, ISBN 0-631-18177-6. p. 59

Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, London/New York:Continuum, 2004.Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers, BlackwellPublishing, 2006.

Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006)Goonewardena, K., Kipfer, S., Milgrom, R. & Schmid, C. eds. Space, Difference, Everyday Life:Reading Henri Lefebvre. (New York: Routledge, 2008)Sue Middleton, Henri Lefebvre and Education: Space, History, Theory (New York: Routledge,2016)Andrzej Zieleniec: Space and Social Theory, London 2007, p. 60–97.Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, andUrban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017)Chris Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life, and the Right to the City (NewYork/London: Routledge, 2012)Shields, R.,Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle(New York/London: Routledge, 1998)

Quotations related to Henri Lefebvre at WikiquoteThe Ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist: The Work of Henri Lefebvre (https://web.archive.org/web/20070822182640/http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/view/175) byStanley Aronowitz, in: Situations, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 133–155 (PDF available).Henri Lefebvre, Urban Research and Architecture Today (http://www.henrilefebvre.org)Review of The Production of Space in Not Bored (http://www.notbored.org/space.html)Review of The First Situationist Symphony in Not Bored (http://www.notbored.org/symphony.html)"La Somme et la Reste" Newsletter (in French) (http://www.lasommeetlereste.com/article-henri-lefebvre-le-retour-69430706.html)"Henri Lefebvre: Philosopher of Everyday Life" (2001) by Rob Shields (https://web.archive.org/web/20111006160316/http://www.cul-studies.com/english/emessenge/200412/324.html)Lefebvre, Love and Struggle - Spatial Dialectics (London: Routledge 1999) by Rob Shields (https://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&vid=ISBN0415093694&vid=ISBN0415093708&vid=ISBN0415093708&vid=ISBN0415093694&vid=ISBN0415093694&vid=LCCN98020945#v=onepage&q&f=false) Includes largely complete bibliography of Henri Lefebvre's work.Review of Lefebvre, Love and Struggle (https://web.archive.org/web/20110726100724/http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2003/October/Lefebvre%C2%AD_Oct03.htm)

29. Murawski, Michał (October 2018). "Actually-Existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics, and theSpecificity of (Still-)Socialist Urbanism" (https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0010417518000336/type/journal_article). Comparative Studies in Society and History. 60 (4): 907–937. doi:10.1017/S0010417518000336 (https://doi.org/10.1017%2FS0010417518000336).ISSN 0010-4175 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0010-4175).

30. DES stands for diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA thesis.31. Elden 2004, p. 96.

Sources

Further reading

External links

"An English Précis of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'Espace" Urban and RegionalStudies Working Paper (Sussex University 1986) by Rob Shields (https://www.ualberta.ca/~rshields/f/prodspac.htm)"Bioinformatic Alignments" by Jordan Crandall (https://web.archive.org/web/20160303225319/http://www.krcf.org/krcfhome/PRINT/nonlocated/nlonline/nonJordan.html)"Central Europe and the Nationalist Paradigm" (University of Texas at Austin 1996) byKatherine Arens (http://www.cas.umn.edu/publications/papers.html)"La Méthode d'Henri Lefebvre" in Multitudes by Rémi Hess (in French) (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=618)Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes byChristian Schmid (in German) (https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Tt9Pm4WsCNMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA7&dq=Christian+Schmid,+Henri+Lefebvre+und+die+Produktion+des+urbanen+Raumes&ots=rUbssP-plv&sig=qb6ClzUxsU9wVfz1Pcw_JXIqPKk#v=onepage&q&f=false)"Postmodern Spacings" in Postmodern Culture by Mark Nunes et al. (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/8.3spacings.html)"Towards a Heuristic Method: Sartre and Lefebvre" (http://www.ingentaconnect.com//content/berghahn/sartre/1999/00000005/00000001/art00002) by Michael Kelly in Sartre StudiesInternational, vol. 5, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–15.Henri Lefebvre on Space Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/henri-lefebvre-on-space) by Lukasz Stanek

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre in March 1967

Born Jean-Paul CharlesAymard Sartre21 June 1905Paris, France

Died 15 April 1980(aged 74)Paris, France

Education École NormaleSupérieure, Universityof Paris[1] (B.A.; M.A.,1928)

Partner(s) Simone de Beauvoir(1929–1980; his death)

Era 20th-centuryphilosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Continental philosophy,existentialism,phenomenology,existentialphenomenology,[2]

hermeneutics,[2]

Western Marxism,anarchism (late)

Maininterests

Metaphysics,epistemology, ethics,

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːrtrə/, US also /ˈsɑːrt/;[7]

French: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a Frenchphilosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist,biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in thephilosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of theleading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Hiswork has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonialtheory, and literary studies, and continues to influence thesedisciplines.

Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominentfeminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone deBeauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the culturaland social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, whichthey considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflictbetween oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi,literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became thedominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in hisprincipal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et leNéant, 1943).[8] Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his workExistentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme,1946), originally presented as a lecture.

He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despiteattempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honorsand that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into aninstitution."[9]

BiographyEarly lifeWorld War IICold War politics and anticolonialismLate life and death

ThoughtCareer as public intellectualLiteratureCriticismWorksSee alsoReferences

Contents

consciousness, self-consciousness,literature, politicalphilosophy, ontology

Notableideas

Bad faith, "existenceprecedes essence",nothingness, "Hell isother people",situation,transcendence of theego ("every positionalconsciousness of anobject is a non-positionalconsciousness ofitself"),[3][4] Sartreanterminology

Influences

Kierkegaard,[2] de Beauvoir,Flaubert, Hegel, Heidegger,

Husserl, Bergson, Kojève, Wahl,Bachelard, Darwin, Freud, Marx,

Stekel, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche,Nizan, Levinas, Proust, Céline,

Lefebvre,[5] Rousseau[6]

Influenced

Aron, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler,Camus, de Beauvoir, Fanon,

Guevara, Laing, Goffman, Merleau-Ponty, Gorz, Lukács, Debord,Deleuze, Jeanson, Leibowitz,

Lacan, Pinter, Quito, Rancière, vanFraassen

Signature

SourcesFurther readingExternal links

By SartreOn Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only childof Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie (Schweitzer).[10] His mother was of Alsatian origin and the firstcousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, whose father LouisThéophile was the younger brother of Anne-Marie's father.[11] WhenSartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he mostlikely contracted in Indochina. Anne-Marie moved back to herparents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from herfather Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who taught Sartremathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very earlyage.[12] When he was twelve, Sartre's mother remarried, and thefamily moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in partdue to the wandering of his blind right eye (sensory exotropia).[13]

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophyupon reading Henri Bergson's essay Time and Free Will: An Essay onthe Immediate Data of Consciousness.[14] He attended the CoursHattemer, a private school in Paris.[15] He studied and earnedcertificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, generalphilosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, as well as his diplômed'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) in Paris atthe École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education thatwas the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers andintellectuals.[16] (His 1928 M.A. thesis under the title "L'Image dansla vie psychologique: rôle et nature" ["Image in Psychological Life:Role and Nature"] was supervised by Henri Delacroix.)[16] It was atENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, friendshipwith Raymond Aron.[17] Perhaps the most decisive influence onSartre's philosophical development was his weekly attendance atAlexandre Kojève's seminars, which continued for a number ofyears.[18]

From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters.[19][20] In 1927, hisantimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularlyupset the director Gustave Lanson.[21] In the same year, with his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou andHerland,[22] he organized a media prank following Charles Lindbergh's successful New York City–Parisflight; Sartre & Co. called newspapers and informed them that Lindbergh was going to be awarded anhonorary École degree. Many newspapers, including Le Petit Parisien, announced the event on 25 May.Thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing

Biography

Early life

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-PaulSartre in Beijing, 1955

was a stunt involving a Lindbergh look-alike.[21][23][24] The public'sresultant outcry forced Lanson to resign.[21][25]

In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, whostudied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a notedphilosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable andlifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,[26] thoughthey were not monogamous.[27] The first time Sartre took theagrégation, he failed. He took it a second time and virtually tied forfirst place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded firstplace, with Beauvoir second.[28][29]

From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre (atthe Lycée de Le Havre, the present-day Lycée François-Ier (LeHavre), 1931–1936), Laon (at the Lycée de Laon, 1936–37), and,finally, Paris (at the Lycée Pasteur, 1937–1939, and at the LycéeCondorcet, 1941–1944;[30] see below).

In 1932, Sartre read Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkableinfluence on him.[31]

In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français d'Allemagne in Berlin where he studiedEdmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read EmmanuelLevinas's Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl'sPhenomenology).[32]

The neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a wholegeneration of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.[33]

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.[34][35] He was capturedby German troops in 1940 in Padoux,[36] and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war—in Nancy and finallyin Stalag XII-D, Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerningChristmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, later tobecome a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Because of poor health (heclaimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941.According to other sources, he escaped after a medical visit to the ophthalmologist.[37] Given civilian status,he recovered his teaching position at Lycée Pasteur near Paris and settled at the Hotel Mistral. In October 1941he was given a position, previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law,at Lycée Condorcet in Paris.

After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialismeet Liberté ("Socialism and Liberty") with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In spring of 1941, Sartresuggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting that the Socialisme et Liberté assassinate prominent warcollaborators like Marcel Déat, but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified tomake bombs or hurl grenades".[38] The British historian Ian Ousby observed that the French always had farmore hatred for collaborators than they did for the Germans, noting it was French people like Déat that Sartrewanted to assassinate rather than the military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, and thepopular slogan always was "Death to Laval!" rather than "Death to Hitler!".[39] In August Sartre and deBeauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both

World War II

Sartre (third from left) and otherFrench journalists visit GeneralGeorge C. Marshall in the Pentagon,1945

Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the causeof Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et libertésoon dissolved and Sartre decided to write instead of being involvedin active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies,and No Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans, and alsocontributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.

In his essay "Paris under the Occupation", Sartre wrote that the"correct" behaviour of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisiansinto complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural asnatural:

The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, throughthe streets. They did not force civilians to make way forthem on the pavement. They would offer seats to oldladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness forchildren and would pat them on the cheek. They hadbeen told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined,they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some ofthem even displayed a naive kindness which could findno practical expression.[40]

Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions,people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which ledSartre to remark "We could not be natural".[41] French was a language widely taught in German schools andmost Germans could speak at least some French. Sartre himself always found it difficult when a Wehrmachtsoldier asked him for directions, usually saying he did not know where it was that the soldier wanted to go, butstill felt uncomfortable as the very act of speaking to the Wehrmacht meant he had been complicit in theOccupation.[42] Ousby wrote: "But, in however humble a fashion, everyone still had to decide how they weregoing to cope with life in a fragmenting society ... So Sartre's worries ... about how to react when a Germansoldier stopped him in the street and asked politely for directions were not as fussily inconsequential as theymight sound at first. They were emblematic of how the dilemmas of the Occupation presented themselves indaily life".[42] Sartre wrote the very "correctness" of the Germans caused moral corruption in many peoplewho used the "correct" behavior of the Germans as an excuse for passivity, and the very act of simply trying tolive one's day-to-day existence without challenging the occupation aided the "New Order in Europe", whichdepended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals.[40]

Throughout the occupation, it was German policy to plunder France, and food shortages were always a majorproblem as the majority of food from the French countryside went to Germany.[43] Sartre wrote about the"languid existence" of the Parisians as people waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of trucks bringingfood from the countryside that the Germans allowed, writing: "Paris would grow peaked and yawn withhunger under the empty sky. Cut off from the rest of the world, fed only through the pity or some ulteriormotive, the town led a purely abstract and symbolic life".[43] Sartre himself lived on a diet of rabbits sent tohim by a friend of de Beauvoir living in Anjou.[44] The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay fullof maggots, and despite being hungry, Sartre once threw out one rabbit as uneatable, saying it had moremaggots in it than meat.[44] Sartre also remarked that conversations at the Café de Flore between intellectualshad changed, as the fear that one of them might be a mouche (informer) or a writer of the corbeau (anonymousdenunciatory letters) meant that no one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship.[45]

Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, the Abwehr alonehad already recruited 32,000 French people to work as mouches while by 1942 the Paris Kommandantur wasreceiving an average of 1,500 letters/per day sent by the corbeaux.[46]

Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed inshop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out,as what had made Paris special was gone.[47] Paris had almost no cars on the streets during the occupation asthe oil went to Germany while the Germans imposed a nightly curfew, which led Sartre to remark that Paris"was peopled by the absent".[48] Sartre also noted that people began to disappear under the occupation,writing:

One day you might phone a friend and the phone would ring for a long time in an empty flat. Youwould go round and ring the doorbell, but no-one would answer it. If the concierge forced thedoor, you would find two chairs standing close together in the hall with the fag-ends of Germancigarettes on the floor between their legs. If the wife or mother of the man who had vanished hadbeen present at his arrest, she would tell you that he had been taken away by very polite Germans,like those who asked the way in the street. And when she went to ask what had happened to themat the offices in the Avenue Foch or the Rue des Saussaies she would be politely received andsent away with comforting words" [No. 11 Rue des Saussaies was the headquarters of theGestapo in Paris].[49]

Sartre wrote the feldgrau ("field grey") uniforms of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of the Order Policewhich had seemed so alien in 1940 had become accepted, as people were numbed into accepting what Sartrecalled "a pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which the eye almost expected to find among the dark clothes ofthe civilians".[50] Under the occupation, the French often called the Germans les autres ("the others"), whichinspired Sartre's aphorism in his play Huis clos ("No Exit") of "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" ("Hell is otherpeople").[51] Sartre intended the line "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" at least in part to be a dig at the Germanoccupiers.[51]

Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by AlbertCamus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends withCamus until 1951, with the publication of Camus's The Rebel. Sartre wrote extensively post-war aboutneglected minority groups, namely French Jews and black people. In 1946, he published Anti-Semite and Jew,after having published the first part of the essay, “Portrait de l’antisémite,” the year before in Les Tempsmodernes, No. 3. In the essay, in the course of explaining the etiology of "hate," he attacks antisemitism inFrance[52] during a time when the Jews who came back from concentration camps were quicklyabandoned.[53] In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning the condition of African Americans in theUnited States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them in the country—in his second Situationscollection. Then, in 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s l’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésienègre et malgache (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry), he wrote “Black Orpheus” (re-publishedin Situations III), a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy Sartre developed in Being andNothingness. Later, while Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher andresistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation,and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartrewas a writer who resisted; not a resister who wrote.

In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte, where he was to producemost of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962. It was from there that he helped establish aquarterly literary and political review, Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), in part to popularize histhought.[54] He ceased teaching and devoted his time to writing and political activism. He would draw on hiswar experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).

Cold War politics and anticolonialism

Jean-Paul Sartre (middle) andSimone de Beauvoir (left) meetingwith Che Guevara (right) in Cuba,1960

The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being andNothingness (1943), gave way to a second period—when the worldwas perceived as split into communist and capitalist blocs—of highlypublicized political involvement. Sartre tended to glorify theResistance after the war as the uncompromising expression ofmorality in action, and recalled that the résistants were a "band ofbrothers" who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that did not existbefore nor after the war.[55] Sartre was "merciless" in attackinganyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the Germanoccupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal tospare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from beingexecuted.[55] His 1948 play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) inparticular explored the problem of being a politically "engaged"intellectual. He embraced Marxism but did not join the Communist Party. For a time in the late 1940s, Sartredescribed French nationalism as "provincial" and in a 1949 essay called for a "United States of Europe".[56] Inan essay published in the June 1949 edition of the journal Politique étrangère, Sartre wrote:

If we want French civilization to survive, it must be fitted into the framework of a great Europeancivilization. Why? I have said that civilization is the reflection on a shared situation. In Italy, inFrance, in Benelux, in Sweden, in Norway, in Germany, in Greece, in Austria, everywhere wefind the same problems and the same dangers ... But this cultural polity has prospects only aselements of a policy which defends Europe's cultural autonomy vis-à-vis America and the SovietUnion, but also its political and economic autonomy, with the aim of making Europe a singleforce between the blocs, not a third bloc, but an autonomous force which will refuse to allowitself to be torn into shreds between American optimism and Russian scientificism.[57]

About the Korean War, Sartre wrote: "I have no doubt that the South Korean feudalists and the Americanimperialists have promoted this war. But I do not doubt either that it was begun by the North Koreans".[58] InJuly 1950, Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes about his and de Beauvoir's attitude to the Soviet Union:

As we were neither members of the [Communist] party nor its avowed sympathizers, it was notour duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over thenature of this system, provided that no events of sociological significance had occurred.[59]

Sartre held that the Soviet Union was a "revolutionary" state working for the betterment of humanity andcould be criticized only for failing to live up to its own ideals, but that critics had to take in mind that the Sovietstate needed to defend itself against a hostile world; by contrast Sartre held that the failures of "bourgeois"states were due to their innate shortcomings.[55] The Swiss journalist François Bondy wrote that, based on areading of Sartre's numerous essays, speeches and interviews "a simple basic pattern never fails to emerge:social change must be comprehensive and revolutionary" and the parties that promote the revolutionarycharges "may be criticized, but only by those who completely identify themselves with its purpose, its struggleand its road to power", deeming Sartre's position to be "existentialist".[55]

Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc in spite of its human rights violations,arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive"[60] and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union[61]

to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik".[62] Sartre's expression "workers ofBillancourt must not be deprived of their hopes"[62] (Fr. "il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt"), became acatchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell the whole truth to the workers in order to avoiddecline in their revolutionary enthusiasm.[63]

Sketch of Sartre for the NewYork Times by Reginald Gray,1965

In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartre visited the Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "completefreedom of criticism" while condemning the United States for sinking into "prefascism".[64] Sartre wrote aboutthose Soviet writers expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union "still had the opportunity of rehabilitatingthemselves by writing better books".[65] Sartre's comments on Hungarian revolution of 1956 are quiterepresentative to his frequently contradictory and changing views. On one hand, Sartre saw in Hungary a truereunification between intellectuals and workers[66] only to criticize it for "losing socialist base".[67] Hecondemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956.[68]

In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges.Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth".[69]

In 1973 he argued that "revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, andtheir death is the only way".[70] A number of people, starting from Frank Gibney in 1961, classified Sartre as a"useful idiot" due to his uncritical position.[71]

Sartre came to admire the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka, a man who favored a "Polish road to socialism"and wanted more independence for Poland, but was loyal to the Soviet Union because of the Oder-Neisse lineissue.[72] Sartre's newspaper Les Temps Modernes devoted a number of special issues in 1957 and 1958 toPoland under Gomułka, praising him for his reforms.[72] Bondy wrote of the notable contradiction betweenSarte's "ultra Bolshevism" as he expressed admiration for the Chinese leader Mao Zedong as the man who ledthe oppressed masses of the Third World into revolution while also praising more moderate Communist leaderslike Gomułka.[72]

As an anti-colonialist, Sartre took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria, and the use oftorture and concentration camps by the French in Algeria. He became an eminent supporter of the FLN in theAlgerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121. Consequently, Sartre became adomestic target of the paramilitary Organisation armée secrète (OAS), escaping two bomb attacks in the early'60s.[73] He later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during theAlgerian War of Independence.[74] (He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopteddaughter in 1965.) He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell andothers, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunalin 1967.

His work after Stalin's death, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critiqueof Dialectical Reason), appeared in 1960 (a second volume appearingposthumously). In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a morevigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended byconcluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity wasfallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works ofMarx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx weredecisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. In the late1950s, Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were tooapolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced byFrantz Fanon stated to argue it was the impoverished masses of the ThirdWorld, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out therevolution.[75] A major theme of Sarte's political essays in the 1960s was ofhis disgust with the "Americanization" of the French working class whowould much rather watch American TV shows dubbed into French thanagitate for a revolution.[55]

Hélène de Beauvoir's house inGoxwiller, where Sartre tried to hidefrom the media after being awardedthe Nobel Prize

Jean-Paul Sartre in Venice in 1967

Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. AfterGuevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete humanbeing of our age"[76] and the "era's most perfect man".[77] Sartre would also compliment Guevara byprofessing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ranparallel".[78] However he stood against the persecution of gays by Castro's government, which he compared toNazi persecution of the Jews, and said: "In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals".[79]

During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader inStammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment.[80]

Towards the end of his life, Sartre began to describe himself as a "special kind" of anarchist.[81]

In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account ofthe first ten years of his life, Les Mots (The Words). The book is anironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation hadunexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided themodel of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartreconcluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for realcommitment in the world. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature but he declined it. He was the first Nobellaureate to voluntarily decline the prize,[82] and remains one of onlytwo laureates to do so.[83] According to Lars Gyllensten, in the bookMinnen, bara minnen ("Memories, Only Memories") published in2000, Sartre himself or someone close to him got in touch with theSwedish Academy in 1975 with a request for the prize money, butwas refused.[84] In 1945, he had refused the Légion d'honneur.[85] The Nobel prize was announced on 22October 1964; on 14 October, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from thelist of nominees, and warning that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread;[86] on23 October, Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. He said he did not wish to be"transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs. West cultural struggle byaccepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution.[86] Nevertheless, he was that year'sprizewinner.[87] After being awarded the prize he tried to escape the media by hiding in the house of Simone'ssister Hélène de Beauvoir in Goxwiller, Alsace.

Though his name was then a household word (as was "existentialism"during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with fewpossessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life,such as the May 1968 strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968during which he was arrested for civil disobedience. President Charlesde Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don'tarrest Voltaire".[88]

In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartrereplied:

I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays]No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then mytwo philosophical works, more particularly the secondone, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on

Late life and death

Sartre's and de Beauvoir's grave inthe cimetière du Montparnasse

Sartre's and de Beauvoir's grave in2016, with a new gravestone. Notethe Metro tickets left by visitors.

Genet, Saint Genet. ... If these are remembered, thatwould be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more.As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, Iwould like people to remember the milieu or historicalsituation in which I lived, ... how I lived in it, in terms ofall the aspirations which I tried to gather up withinmyself.[89]

Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially because of themerciless pace of work (and the use of amphetamine)[90] he puthimself through during the writing of the Critique and a massiveanalytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both ofwhich remained unfinished. He suffered from hypertension,[91] andbecame almost completely blind in 1973. Sartre was a notorious chainsmoker, which could also have contributed to the deterioration of hishealth.[92]

Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from edema of the lung. He hadnot wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise Cemetery between hismother and stepfather, so it was arranged that he be buried atMontparnasse Cemetery. At his funeral on Saturday, 19 April, 50,000Parisians descended onto boulevard du Montparnasse to accompanySartre's cortege.[93][94] The funeral started at "the hospital at 2:00p.m., then filed through the fourteenth arrondissement, past all Sartre'shaunts, and entered the cemetery through the gate on the BoulevardEdgar Quinet". Sartre was initially buried in a temporary grave to theleft of the cemetery gate.[95] Four days later the body was disinterredfor cremation at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and his ashes were reburiedat the permanent site in Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right of thecemetery gate.[96]

Sartre's primary idea is that people, as humans, are "condemned to befree".[97] "This may seem paradoxical because condemnation isnormally an external judgment which constitutes the conclusion of ajudgment. Here, it is not the human who has chosen to be like this.There is a contingency of human existence. It is a condemnation oftheir being. Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone tocreate their own existence, for which they are then responsible. They cannot not be free, there is a form ofnecessity for freedom, which can never be given up."[98] This theory relies upon his position that there is nocreator, and is illustrated using the example of the paper cutter. Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter,one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings haveno essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence".[97] Thisforms the basis for his assertion that because one cannot explain one's own actions and behavior by referring toany specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. "We are left alone, withoutexcuse." "We can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us."[99]

Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. Weneed to experience "death consciousness" so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; theauthentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.[100] Death draws the final point when we as

Thought

beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world.[101] Inthis way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence. "We can oppose authenticity to aninauthentic way of being. Authenticity consists in experiencing the indeterminate character of existence inanguish. It is also to know how to face it by giving meaning to our actions and by recognizing ourselves as theauthor of this meaning. On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying tooneself in order to escape this anguish and the responsibility for one’s own existence."[98]

As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea), which servesin some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page fromthe German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-lifesituations, and that novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value todiscursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. With such purpose, thisnovel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starklyconscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. Assuch, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive inthem.

He also took inspiration from phenomenologist epistemology, explained by Franz Adler in this way: "Manchooses and makes himself by acting. Any action implies the judgment that he is right under the circumstancesnot only for the actor, but also for everybody else in similar circumstances."[102]

This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Beingand Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act inthe world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of hisexistence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life issuffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste—specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term fromFriedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality ofexistence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot getaway from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world.

The novel also acts as a realization of some of Immanuel Kant's fundamental ideas about freedom; Sartre usesthe idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability tochoose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a wayto show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, forthe freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas proves tobe bitterly rejected.

Also important is Sartre's analysis of psychological concepts, including his suggestion that consciousnessexists as something other than itself, and that the conscious awareness of things is not limited to theirknowledge: for Sartre intentionality applies to the emotions as well as to cognitions, to desires as well as toperceptions.[103] "When an external object is perceived, consciousness is also conscious of itself, even ifconsciousness is not its own object: it is a non-positional consciousness of itself."[104]

While the broad focus of Sartre's life revolved around the notion of human freedom, he began a sustainedintellectual participation in more public matters towards the end of the Second World War, around 1944–1945.[105] Before World War II, he was content with the role of an apolitical liberal intellectual: "Nowteaching at a lycée in Laon ... Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse andRaspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he waspublished."[106] Sartre and his lifelong companion, de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the world aboutus was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out".[107]

Career as public intellectual

Jean-Paul Sartre andSimone de Beauvoir at theBalzac Memorial

Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chiefprotagonist in The Age of Reason, which was completed during Sartre's firstyear as a soldier in the Second World War. By forging Mathieu as an absoluterationalist, analyzing every situation, and functioning entirely on reason, heremoved any strands of authentic content from his character and as a result,Mathieu could "recognize no allegiance except to [him]self",[108] though herealized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seemutterly absurd to go on existing".[109] Mathieu's commitment was only tohimself, never to the outside world. Mathieu was restrained from action eachtime because he had no reasons for acting. Sartre then, for these reasons, wasnot compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and it took the invasionof his own country to motivate him into action and to provide a crystallizationof these ideas. It was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and theatrocities of the war can be seen as the turning point in his public stance.

The war opened Sartre's eyes to a political reality he had not yet understooduntil forced into continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyedSartre's illusions about isolated self-determining individuals and made clearhis own personal stake in the events of the time."[110] Returning to Paris in1941 he formed the "Socialisme et Liberté" resistance group. In 1943, afterthe group disbanded, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group,[111] in which he remained an active participantuntil the end of the war. He continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of warand captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it throughliterature".[112]

The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre's work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a newjournal, Les Temps modernes, in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal, and thus himself, with the Leftand called for writers to express their political commitment.[113] Yet, this alignment was indefinite, directedmore to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left.

Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept;neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished; instead, in true existential fashion, "culture was alwaysconceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention." This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as apragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause otherthan the belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this overarching theme offreedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines".[114] Therefore, hewas able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political andeconomic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks thatregulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminateinformation. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in theworld."[115]

Sartre always sympathized with the Left, and supported the French Communist Party (PCF) until the 1956Soviet invasion of Hungary. Following the Liberation the PCF were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy, whichappeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of communism and into Sartre's ownexistentialism.[116] From 1956 onwards Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent the French workingclasses, objecting to its "authoritarian tendencies". In the late 1960s Sartre supported the Maoists, a movementthat rejected the authority of established communist parties.[2] However, despite aligning with the Maoists,Sartre said after the May events: "If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changedprofoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist."[117] He would later explicitly allow himself to becalled an anarchist.[118][119]

In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged Sartre in political matters, he set forth abody of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explorealternative solutions to the problems posed there".[120] The greatest difficulties that he and all publicintellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of the world that were outdating theprinted word as a form of expression. In Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary forms remaininnately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media' forms must beembraced" if Sartre's ethical and political goals as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: thedemystification of bourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural,of the working class.[121]

The struggle for Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media anddestroy the role of the intellectual. His attempts to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it wasoften these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough, however, to circumvent some of theseissues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in anewspaper column for example, and vice versa.[122]

Sartre's role as a public intellectual occasionally put him in physical danger, such as in June 1961, when aplastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerian self-determination at the time had led Sartre to become a target of the campaign of terror that mounted as thecolonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took place the next year and he had begun to receivethreatening letters from Oran, Algeria.[123]

Sartre wrote successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism andliterary biography. His plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell isother people."[124] Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major work of fiction was The Roads toFreedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roadsto Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism.

John Huston got Sartre to script his film Freud: The Secret Passion.[125] However it was too long and Sartrewithdrew his name from the film's credits.[126] Nevertheless, many key elements from Sartre's script survive inthe finished film.[127]

Despite their similarities as polemicists, novelists, adapters, and playwrights, Sartre's literary work has beencounterposed, often pejoratively, to that of Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948 the Roman CatholicChurch placed Sartre's œuvre on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books).

Some philosophers argue that Sartre's thought is contradictory. Specifically, they believe that Sartre makesmetaphysical arguments despite his claim that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcusecriticized Being and Nothingness for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself:"Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specifichistorical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thusbecomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory."[128] In Letter on Humanism,Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism:

Literature

Criticism

Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia andessentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said thatessentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysicalstatement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of thetruth of Being.[129]

The philosophers Richard Wollheim and Thomas Baldwin have argued that Sartre's attempt to show thatSigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious is mistaken was based on a misinterpretation of Freud.[130][131]

Richard Webster considers Sartre one of many modern thinkers who have reconstructed Christian orthodoxiesin secular form.[132]

Brian C. Anderson denounced Sartre as an apologist for tyranny and terror and a supporter of Stalinism,Maoism, and Castro's rule over Cuba.[133] The historian Paul Johnson asserted that Sartre's ideas had inspiredthe Khmer Rouge leadership: "The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between one-fifth and one-thirdof the nation was starved to death or murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who werefor the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre – 'Sartre's Children' as I call them."[134] Sartre'sphilosophy, and his actions in the world, were opposed by a group of French literati dubbed the Hussards.

Sartre, who stated in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that, "To shoot down a Europeanis to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: thereremains a dead man and a free man", has been criticized by Anderson and Michael Walzer for supporting thekilling of European civilians by the FLN during the Algerian War. Walzer suggests that Sartre, a European,was a hypocrite for not volunteering to be killed.[133][135]

Sartre's preface is omitted from all editions of The Wretched of the Earth printed from 1967 onward. Thereason for this is for his public support for Israel in the Six-Day War. Fanon's widow, Josie considered Sartre'spro-Israel stance as inconsistent with the anti-colonialist position of the book so she omitted the preface.[136]

When interviewed at Howard University in 1978, she explained "when Israel declared war on the Arabcountries [during the Six-Day War], there was a great pro-Zionist movement in favor of Israel among western(French) intellectuals. Sartre took part in this movement. He signed petitions favoring Israel. I felt that his pro-Zionist attitudes were incompatible with Fanon's work".[136]

The critic, poet, essayist and philosopher Clive James excoriated Sartre in his book of mini biographiesCultural Amnesia (2007). James attacks Sartre's philosophy as being "all a pose".[137]

Plays, screenplays, novels,and short stories

Nausea / La nausée (1938)The Wall / Le mur (1939)Bariona / Bariona, ou le filsdu tonnerre (1940)The Flies / Les mouches(1943)No Exit / Huis clos (1944)Typhus, wr. '44, pub. '07;adapted as The Proud andthe Beautiful

Philosophic essays

The Transcendence of theEgo / La transcendance del'égo (1936)Imagination: APsychological Critique /L'imagination (1936)Sketch for a Theory of theEmotions / Esquisse d'unethéorie des émotions (1939)The Imaginary / L'imaginaire(1940)

Critical essays

Anti-Semite and Jew /Réflexions sur la questionjuive (wr. 1944, pub. 1946)Baudelaire (1946)Situations I: LiteraryCritiques / Critiqueslittéraires (1947)[138]

Situations II: What IsLiterature? / Qu'est-ce que lalittérature ? (1947)

Works

The Age of Reason / L'âgede raison (1945)The Reprieve / Le sursis(1945)The Respectful Prostitute /La putain respectueuse(1946)The Victors (Men WithoutShadows) / Morts sanssépulture (1946)The Chips Are Down / Lesjeux sont faits (screenplay,dir. Jean Delannoy; 1947)In the Mesh / L'engrénage(1948)Dirty Hands / Les mainssales (1948)Troubled Sleep (London ed.(Hamilton) has title: Iron inthe soul) / La mort dansl'âme (1949)Intimacy (1949)The Devil and the GoodLord / Le diable et le bondieu (1951)Kean (1953)Nekrassov (1955)The Crucible (screenplay,1957; dir. RaymondRouleau)The Condemned of Altona /Les séquestrés d'Altona(1959)Hurricane over Cuba /written and printed in 1961in Brazil, along with RubemBraga and Fernando Sabino(1961)Freud: The Secret Passion(screenplay, 1962; dir. JohnHuston)The Trojan Women / LesTroyennes (1965)The Freud Scenario / Lescénario Freud (1984)

Being and Nothingness /L'être et le néant (1943)Existentialism Is aHumanism /L'existentialisme est unhumanisme (1946)Existentialism and HumanEmotions / Existentialisme etémotions humaines (1957)Search for a Method /Question de méthode (1957)Critique of DialecticalReason / Critique de laraison dialectique (1960,1985)Notebooks for an Ethics /Cahiers pour une morale(1983)Truth and Existence / Véritéet existence (1989)

"Black Orpheus" / "Orphéenoir" (1948)Situations III (1949)Saint Genet, Actor andMartyr / S.G., comédien etmartyr (1952)[139]

The Henri Martin Affair /L'affaire Henri Martin (1953)Situations IV: Portraits(1964)Situations V: Colonialismand Neocolonialism (1964)Situations VI: Problems ofMarxism, Part 1 (1966)Situations VII: Problems ofMarxism, Part 2 (1967)The Family Idiot / L'idiot dela famille (1971–72)Situations VIII: Autour de1968 (1972)Situations IX: Mélanges(1972)Situations X: Life/Situations:Essays Written and Spoken /Politique et Autobiographie(1976)

Autobiographical

Sartre By Himself / Sartre par lui-mème (1959)

The Words / Les Mots (1964)[139]

Witness to My Life & Quiet Moments in a War / Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres (1983)War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War / Les carnets de la drole de guerre (1984)

Sartre's Roads to Freedom TrilogySituation (Sartre)Place Jean-Paul-Sartre-et-Simone-de-Beauvoir1964 Nobel Prize in Literature

1. At the time, the ENS was part of the University of Paris according to the decree of 10 November1903.

2. "Jean-Paul Sartre" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/). Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy. Retrieved 27 October 2011.

3. Sartre, J.-P. 2004 [1937]. The Transcendence of the Ego. Trans. Andrew Brown. Routledge, p.7.

4. Siewert, Charles, "Consciousness and Intentionality" (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/consciousness-intentionality/), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

5. Ian H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, Berghahn Books, 2004, p. 176: "Sartre praised highly[Lefebvre's] work on sociological methodology, saying of it: 'It remains regrettable that Lefebvrehas not found imitators among other Marxist intellectuals'."

6. "Sartre's Debt to Rousseau" (http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Fa92/sartD.pdf) (PDF). Retrieved 2 March 2010.

7. "Sartre" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sartre). Random House Webster's UnabridgedDictionary.

8. McCloskey, Deirdre N. (2006). The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (https://archive.org/details/bourgeoisvirtues00mccl). University of Chicago Press. p. 297 (https://archive.org/details/bourgeoisvirtues00mccl/page/n315). ISBN 978-0-226-55663-5.

9. "Minnen, bara minnen" (ISBN 978-91-0-057140-5) from year 2000 by Lars Gyllensten. Addressby Anders Österling, Member of the Swedish Academy. Retrieved on: 4 February 2012.

10. Forrest E. Baird (22 July 1999). Twentieth Century Philosophy (https://books.google.com/books?id=E5IbAQAAMAAJ). Prentice Hall. p. 226. ISBN 978-0-13-021534-5. Retrieved4 December 2011.

11. "Louis Théophile Schweitzer" (http://roglo.eu/roglo?lang=en&m=NG&n=Louis+Th%C3%A9ophile+Schweitzer&t=PN). Roglo.eu. Retrieved 18 October 2011.

12. Brabazon, James (1975). Albert Schweitzer: A Biography. Putnam. p. 28.13. Jean-Paul Sartre, by Andrew N. Leak, (London 2006), page 16-1814. Jean-Paul, Sartre; Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Jonathan Webber (2004) [1940]. The Imaginary: A

Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Routledge. pp. viii. ISBN 978-0-415-28755-5.

See also

References

15. "Quelques Anciens Celebres" (https://web.archive.org/web/20150618133955/http://www.hattemer.fr/fr/l-ecole/association-des-anciens-eleves/). Hattemer. Archived from the original (http://www.hattemer.fr/fr/l-ecole/association-des-anciens-eleves/#) on 18 June 2015. Retrieved30 June 2015.

16. Schrift, Alan D. (2006). Twentieth-century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury00schr). Blackwell Publishing. pp. 174 (https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury00schr/page/n196)–5. ISBN 978-1-4051-3217-6.

17. Memoirs: fifty years of political reflection, By Raymond Aron (1990)18. Auffret, D. (2002), Alexandre Kojeve. La philosophie, l'Etat, la fin de l'histoire, Paris: B. Grasset19. Jean-Pierre Boulé (2005), Sartre, self-formation, and masculinities (https://books.google.com/b

ooks?id=wlukeHj_TKEC&pg=PA53), p.,5320. Cohen-Solal 1987, pp. 61–62 "During his first years at the Ecole, Sartre was the fearsome

instigator of all the revues, all the jokes, all the scandals."21. Gerassi 1989, pp. 76–77 (https://books.google.com/books?id=XStvJEokm7gC&pg=PA76)22. Godo, Emmanuel (2005), Sartre en diable (https://books.google.com/books?id=oT9lAAAAMAA

J), p. 4123. Hayman, Ronald (1987), Sartre: a life (https://books.google.com/books?id=eCpBAQAAIAAJ),

pp. 69, 31824. "Jean-Paul Sartre – philosopher, social advocate" (http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/sartre.shtm

l). Tameri.com. Retrieved 27 October 2011.25. Drake, David (2005). Sartre (https://books.google.com/books?id=yuL98MtZ5poC&pg=PA26).

Haus Publishing. p. 6. ISBN 978-1-904-34185-7.26. Humphrey, Clark (28 November 2005). "The People Magazine approach to a literary

supercouple" (https://web.archive.org/web/20071231192609/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002648627_teteatete28.html). The Seattle Times. Archived from the original (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002648627_teteatete28.html) on 31 December 2007.Retrieved 20 November 2007.

27. Siegel, Liliane (1990). In the shadow of Sartre. Collins (London). p. 182. ISBN 978-0-00-215336-2.

28. Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York:Harper Torchbooks, 1960) xiv.

29. Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Touchstone Book, 1990), pp. 145–146.

30. Harold Bloom (ed.), Jean-Paul Sartre, Infobase Publishing, 2009, p. 200.31. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l'âge, Gallimard, 1960, p. 158.32. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty vivant", in Situations, IV: portraits, Gallimard, 1964, p. 192.33. Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, Psychology Press, p. 19.34. Fulton 1999, p. 7.35. Van den Hoven, Adrian; Andrew N. Leak (2005). Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (http

s://archive.org/details/sartretodaycente00hove). Andrew N. Leak. Berghahn Books. pp. viii.ISBN 978-1-84545-166-0.

36. Boulé, Jean-Pierre (2005). Sartre, Self-formation, and Masculinities (https://archive.org/details/sartreselfformat0000boul/page/114). Berghahn Books. p. 114 (https://archive.org/details/sartreselfformat0000boul/page/114). ISBN 978-1-57181-742-6.

37. Bakewell, Sarah (2016). At the Existentialist Café. Chatto&Windus. p. 158. ISBN 978-1-4735-4532-8.

38. Ousby 2000, p. 218.39. Ousby 2000, p. 225.40. Ousby 2000, p. 54.

41. Ousby 2000, p. 57-58.42. Ousby 2000, p. 151.43. Ousby 2000, p. 70.44. Ousby 2000, p. 127.45. Ousby 2000, p. 148.46. Ousby 2000, p. 146.47. Ousby 2000, p. 161.48. Ousby 2000, p. 172.49. Ousby 2000, p. 173.50. Ousby 2000, p. 170.51. Ousby 2000, p. 168.52. Cohen-Solal, Annie; Cabanel, Patrick; Simon-Nahum, Perrine; Jaduken, Jonathen; Melinge,

Yoann (7 June 2013). "Table ronde autour de "Sartre, le judaïsme et le protestantisme" : Sartreet ses contemporains" (à l'occasion de la Nuite Sartre 2013 à l'ENS)" (http://savoirs.ens.fr//expose.php?id=1245). savoirs.ens.fr. Retrieved 8 December 2020.

53. Wieviorka, Annette (1995). Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l'oubli (https://books.google.com/books?id=-RNWAAAAYAAJ) (in French). Hachette. pp. 168–173. ISBN 978-2-01-278737-7.

54. Fulton 1999, p. 12.55. Bondy 1967, p. 26.56. Bondy 1967, p. 29.57. Bondy 1967, p. 29-30.58. Bondy 1967, p. 34.59. Bondy 1967, p. 25.60. Bondy 1967, p. 28: "To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes,

recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp."61. Bondy 1967, p. 38: "In Stalin's day this seemed a private refinement and what was of particular

importance then was Sartre's strong resistance to any form of opposition to the communistbloc."

62. Bondy, p. 3363. "désespérer Billancourt" (https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/correcteurs/2007/12/21/desesperer-billan

court/). Langue sauce piquante (in French). 21 December 2007. Retrieved 10 March 2020.64. Bondy 1967, p. 28.65. Bondy 1967, p. 41.66. Bondy, 1967, p. 37: "In 1956 Sartre saw in Hungary the kind of revolution of which he had

dreamed: a contact between intellectual circles and broadly based mass movements, anactivism shared by intellectuals and workers, revolution as an explosion of spontaneity.Reading Sartre's reply to Camus after fourteen years, we are struck by the mixture ofdishonesty and bubbling verve with which Sartre indulges in misquotation in order to ridiculehis opponents with the quick wit of the experience playwright."

67. "Du côté des intellectuels : Sartre et la Hongrie" (https://journal.lutte-ouvriere.org/2006/11/01/du-cote-des-intellectuels-sartre-et-la-hongrie_14080.html). Lutte Ouvrière : Le Journal (in French).Retrieved 10 March 2020.

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69. Sartre, Jean-Paul (19 November 1964). "Nouvel Observateur". "La faute la plus énorme aprobablement été le rapport de Khrouchtchev, car la dénonciation publique et solennelle,l’exposition détaillée de tous les crimes d’un personnage sacré qui a représenté si longtempsle régime est une folie quand une telle franchise n’est pas rendue possible par une élévationpréalable et considérable du niveau de vie de la population... Le résultat a été de découvrir lavérité à des masses qui n’étaient pas prêtes à la recevoir."

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(rev. ed.). New York: Monthly Review. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-58367-293-8.74. Le Sueur, James D.; Pierre Bourdieu (2005) [2005]. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity

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Sources

Further reading

Robert Doran, "Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Debate with Lévi-Strauss", YaleFrench Studies 123 (2013): 41–62.Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.Judaken, Jonathan (2006) Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism andthe Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971.Suzanne Lilar, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967.Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-PaulSartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.Élisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault,Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.Edward Said, 2000: My Encounter with Sartre (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n11/edward-said/diary), London Review of BooksJean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian vanden Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.P.V. Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (http://pvspade.com/Sartre/pdf/sartre1.pdf). 1996.Gianluca Vagnarelli, La democrazia tumultuaria. Sulla filosofia politica di Jean-Paul Sartre,Macerata, EUM, 2010.Jonathan Webber, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Routledge, 2009.H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Porträtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tübingen:Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996.H. Wittmann, L'esthétique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from German by N.Weitemeier and J. Yacar, Éditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris2001.H. Wittmann, Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom, edited by DirkHoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs, vol. 13, Frankfurt/M:Peter Lang 2009. ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8.

Jean-Paul Sartre (https://curlie.org/Society/Philosophy/Philosophers/S/Sartre%2C_Jean-Paul/)at CurlieJean-Paul Sartre (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/637) on Nobelprize.org

Works by or about Jean-Paul Sartre (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Sartre%2C%20Jean-Paul%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Jean-Paul%20Sartre%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Sartre%2C%20Jean-Paul%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Jean-Paul%20Sartre%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Sartre%2C%20J%2E%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Jean-Paul%20Sartre%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Sartre%2C%20Jean-Paul%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Jean-Paul%20Sartre%22%29%20OR%20%28%221905-1980%22%20AND%20Sartre%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at Internet Archive"Americans and Their Myths" (http://www.thenation.com/article/americans-and-their-myths)—Sartre's essay in The Nation (18 October 1947 issue)Sartre Texts (https://web.archive.org/web/20110408111752/http://www.philosophyarchive.com/index.php?title=Sartre) on Philosophy Archive

External links

By Sartre

Sartre Internet Archive (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/index.htm) onMarxists.org (https://www.marxists.org/)Works by Jean-Paul Sartre (https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL117592A) at Open LibraryGeorge H. Bauer Jean Paul Sartre Manuscript Collection. General Collection, Beinecke RareBook and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

UK Sartre Society (https://web.archive.org/web/20150730033039/http://www.sartreuk.org/)Alfredo Gomez-Muller: Sartre, de la nausée à l'engagement. Paris, éditions du Félin, 2014.Groupe d'études sartriennes (http://www.ges-sartre.fr/), ParisSartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (https://web.archive.org/web/20140213031344/http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/works/sartre.htm) essay by Andy Blunden"Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sartre-ex.htm), InternetEncyclopedia of Philosophy"Sartre's Political Philosophy" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sartre-p.htm), Internet Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy"Jean-Paul Sartre" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/)—Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophySartre.org (https://web.archive.org/web/20050304090811/http://www.sartre.org/)—Articles,archives, and forumCritique and Engagement: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–2015), Labyrinth 1/2015 (http://www.axiapublishers.com/ojs/index.php/labyrinth/issue/view/2), edited by Yvanka B. RaynovaHistory and Choice: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–2015), Labyrinth 2/2015 (http://www.axiapublishers.com/ojs/index.php/labyrinth/issue/view/3), edited by Yvanka B. Raynova"The Second Coming of Sartre" (https://web.archive.org/web/20050901150544/http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article226073.ece), John Lichfield, The Independent, 17June 2005"The World According to Sartre" (https://web.archive.org/web/20061114015013/http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/extras/sartre.htm)—essay by Roger KimballReclaiming Sartre (http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj102/pitt.htm) A review of IanBirchall, Sartre Against Stalinism"Sartre's Existential Marxism and the Quest for Humanistic Authenticity" (https://web.archive.org/web/20120417081727/http://www.hrfd.hr/u/dokumenti/19%20Jakopovich.pdf)—essay byDaniel Jakopovich in the journal Synthesis PhilosophicaBiography and quotes of Sartre (http://atheisme.free.fr/Biographies/Sartre_e.htm)Living with Mother. Sartre and the problem of maternity (http://www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=300) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20090210130501/http://www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=300) 10 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine, BenedictO'Donohoe, International WebjournalSens Public."L'image de la femme dans le théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre – Jean-Paul Sartre: sexiste?" byStephanie Rupert (https://archive.today/20121209175828/http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2006-0912-200835/MA%20Eindwerkstuk%202006%20Eindversie.doc)Pierre Michel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Octave Mirbeau (https://www.scribd.com/doc/2358674/Pierre-Michel-JeanPaul-Sartre-et-Octave-Mirbeau)."Sartre" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20041007.shtml)—In OurTime on Radio 4 (RealAudio)Sartre: philosophy, literature, politics (articles) (http://www.sens-public.org/spip.php?article544),Sens Public (international Web journal)

On Sartre

Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life (http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm)Louis Menand (26 September 2005). "Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre andBeauvoir (Book review of the republished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir)" (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/26/050926crbo_books?currentPage=all). The New Yorker.Retrieved 9 June 2012.Newspaper clippings about Jean-Paul Sartre (http://purl.org/pressemappe20/folder/pe/015376)in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

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Cornelius Castoriadis

Born 11 March 1922Constantinople, Ottoman Empire(present-day Istanbul, Turkey)

Died 26 December 1997 (aged 75)Paris, France

Nationality Greek, French[1]

Other names Corneille Castoriadis,[2] "PierreChaulieu," "Paul Cardan," "Jean-Marc Coudray"

Education 8th Gymnasium of Athens[3]

University of Athens(1937–1942: B.A., 1942)[4]

University of Paris(Dr. cand., 1946–1948)[5]

University of Nanterre(DrE, 1980)[6]

Notable work List

The Imaginary Institution ofSociety (1975)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth(1978–1999, 6 vols.)

Spouse(s) List

Catherine May[7]

(m. unkn.–unkn.; divorced)

Piera Aulagnier(m. 1968–1984; divorced)

Zoe Christofidi(m. unkn.–1997; his death)

Era 20th-century philosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Continental philosophy

Post-phenomenology[8]

Western Marxism/post-Marxism[9][10][11] (early)

Libertarian socialism[12][11] (late)

Revolutionary socialism[13]

Classical republicanism[14]

Philosophy of praxis[15]

Post-Lacanian psychoanalysis[16]

Institutions École des hautes études ensciences sociales

Libertarian socialism[12][11] ·

Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis[a] (Greek: Κορνήλιος Καστοριάδης;[b] 11 March 1922 – 26 December 1997)was a Greek-French[1] philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The ImaginaryInstitution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.[108]

His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activistcircles.[109]

BiographyEarly life in AthensParis and the Chaulieu–Montal TendencyEarly philosophical researchCareer as economist and distancing from MarxismPsychoanalystPhilosopher of history and ontologistSovietologistLater life

PhilosophyAutonomy and heteronomyThe imaginarySocial constructionismChaosThe Ancient Greeks and the modern West

Lasting influenceMajor publicationsSee alsoNotesReferencesSourcesFurther readingExternal links

Cornelius Castoriadis (named after Saint Cornelius the Centurion)[110] was born on 11 March 1922in Constantinople,[110] the son of Kaisar ("Caesar") and Sophia Kastoriadis.[111] His family had tomove in July 1922[110] to Athens due to the Greek–Turkish population exchange. He developed aninterest in politics after he came into contact with Marxist thought and philosophy at the age of13.[112] At the same time he began studying traditional philosophy after purchasing a copy of thebook History of Philosophy (Ιστορία της Φιλοσοφίας, 1933, 2 vols.) by the historian of ideasNikolaos Louvaris.[112]

Sometime between 1932 and 1935, Maximiani Portas (later known as "Savitri Devi") was the Frenchtutor of Castoriadis.[113] During the same period, he attended the 8th Gymnasium of Athens in KatoPatisia,[3] from which he graduated in 1937.

His first active involvement in politics occurred during the Metaxas Regime (1937), when he joinedthe Athenian Communist Youth (Κομμουνιστική Νεολαία Αθήνας, Kommounistiki NeolaiaAthinas), a section of the Young Communist League of Greece. In 1941 he joined the CommunistParty of Greece (KKE), only to leave one year later in order to become an active Trotskyist.[114] Thelatter action resulted in his persecution by both the Germans and the Communist Party.

In 1944 he wrote his first essays on social science and Max Weber,[115] which he published in amagazine named Archive of Sociology and Ethics (Αρχείον Κοινωνιολογίας και Ηθικής, ArcheionKoinoniologias kai Ithikis). Castoriadis heavily criticized the actions of the KKE during the

Contents

Biography

Early life in Athens

Maininterests

political philosophy ·developmental psychology ·psychoanalysis · economics ·sovietology · social criticism ·ecology · philosophy of science ·philosophy of history · ontology ·epistemology · aesthetics

Notableideas

List

The Project of Autonomy,[17]

the radical imaginary[18]

underlying social institutions,[19]

radical imagination,[20]

the social imaginary,[21] socialimaginary significations,[22]

proto-representation (Ur-Vorstellung),[23] the monadic coreof the psyche,[24]

"the unconscious exists only as anindissociablyrepresentative/affective/intentionalflux,"[25]

rejecting the reduction ofrepresentation to perception,[26]

"the first delegation of the drive inthe psyche is the affect,"[27] thepsyche and the anonymouscollective are irreducible to eachother,[28] sublimation as theprocess by means of which thepsyche is forced to replace itsprivate objects of cathexis withobjects that have value throughtheir social institution,[29] socialfabrication of the individual,[30]

social constructionism,[31][32]

lability of investments (labilité desinvestissements),[33] identifyingrepresentational activity as priorto reflection,[34] being-in-itself ascreative of its own properworld,[35]

idiogenesis/koinogenesis,[36] theworld as a product of Chaos,[37]

ontological magma,[38]

identitary-ensemblist logic(logique ensembliste-identitaire),[39] the Cantoriandefinition of 'set' implies theschema of separation,[40] proto-institutions of legein andteukhein,[39][41]

Wo Ich bin, soll Es auftauchen("Where Ego is, Id must springforth"),[42] conflict of desires,[43]

the Social-Historical,[44] themethodology of elucidation(élucidation),[45] circle ofcreation,[46] the paradox ofhistory,[47] society's leaning on thefirst natural stratum,[48] "creationis ex nihilo, but it is neither innihilo nor cum nihilo,"[49]

vis formandi,[50] radical alterity(altérité radicale),[51] time ascreation/destruction of forms,[52]

societas instituans/societas

December 1944 clashes between the communist-led ELAS on one side, and the Papandreougovernment aided by British troops on the other.

In December 1945, three years[4] after earning a bachelor's degree in law, economics and politicalscience from the School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences of the University of Athens(where he met and collaborated with the Neo-Kantian intellectuals Konstantinos Despotopoulos,Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Konstantinos Tsatsos),[94][116] he got aboard the RMS Mataroa,[117] aNew Zealand ocean liner, to go to Paris (where he remained permanently) to continue his studiesunder a scholarship offered by the French Institute of Athens. The same voyage—organized byOctave Merlier—also brought from Greece to France a number of other Greek writers, artists andintellectuals, including Constantine Andreou, Kostas Axelos, Georges Candilis, Costa Coulentianos,Emmanuel Kriaras, Adonis A. Kyrou, Kostas Papaïoannou, and Virgile Solomonidis.[118][119][120]

Once in Paris, Castoriadis joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI). He andClaude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French PCI in 1946. In 1948, theyexperienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",[121] leading them to break away to foundthe libertarian socialist and councilist group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (S. ou B., 1949–1966), which included Jean-François Lyotard[122] and Guy Debord as members for a while, andprofoundly influenced the French intellectual left. Castoriadis had links with the group known as theJohnson–Forest Tendency until 1958. Also strongly influenced by Castoriadis and Socialisme ouBarbarie were the British group and journal Solidarity and Maurice Brinton.

In the late 1940s, he started attending philosophical and sociological courses at the Faculty of Lettersat the University of Paris (faculté des lettres de Paris), where among his teachers were GastonBachelard,[116][123][124] the epistemologist René Poirier, the historian of philosophy Henri Bréhier(not to be confused with Émile Bréhier), Henri Gouhier, Jean Wahl, Gustave Guillaume, AlbertBayet, and Georges Davy.[123] He submitted a proposal for a doctoral dissertation on mathematicallogic to Poirier, but he eventually abandoned the project.[93][116] The working title of his thesis wasIntroduction à la logique axiomatique (Introduction to Axiomatic Logic).[5][93]

At the same time (starting in November 1948), he worked as an economist at the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) until 1970, which was also the year when heobtained French citizenship. Consequently, his writings prior to that date were publishedpseudonymously, as "Pierre Chaulieu," "Paul Cardan," "Jean-Marc Coudray" etc.

In his 1949 essay "The Relations of Production in Russia",[125] Castoriadis developed a critique ofthe supposed socialist character of the government of the Soviet Union. According to Castoriadis, thecentral claim of the Stalinist regime at the time was that the mode of production in Russia wassocialist, but the mode of distribution was not yet a socialist one since the socialist edification in thecountry had not yet been completed. However, according to Castoriadis' analysis, since the mode ofdistribution of the social product is inseparable from the mode of production,[126] the claim that onecan have control over distribution while not having control over production is meaningless.[127]

Castoriadis was particularly influential in the turn of the intellectual left during the 1950s against theSoviet Union, because he argued that the Soviet Union was not a communist but rather abureaucratic capitalist state, which contrasted with Western powers mostly by virtue of its centralizedpower apparatus.[128] His work in the OECD substantially helped his analyses.

In the latter years of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Castoriadis came to reject the Marxist theories ofeconomics and of history, especially in an essay on "Modern Capitalism and Revolution", firstpublished in Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1960–61 (first English translation in 1963 by Solidarity).Castoriadis' final Socialisme ou Barbarie essay was "Marxism and Revolutionary Theory",published in April 1964 – June 1965. There he concluded that a revolutionary Marxist must chooseeither to remain Marxist or to remain revolutionary.[129][13]

When Jacques Lacan's disputes with the International Psychoanalytical Association led to a split andthe formation of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964, Castoriadis became a member (as anon-practitioner).[130]

In 1968 Castoriadis married Piera Aulagnier, a French psychoanalyst who had undergonepsychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan from 1955 until 1961.[131]

Paris and the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency

Early philosophical research

Career as economist and distancing from Marxism

Psychoanalyst

instituta,[53] abolition of the wagesystem,[54][55] administration ofjustice by popular tribunals,[56]

plan factory,[57] democraticplanning,[58] totalitarian (Soviet)vs. fragmented (Western)bureaucratic capitalism,[59] the"final contradiction" ofcapitalism,[60] relativelyautonomous evolution oftechnique,[61] liberal oligarchy,[62]

pseudo-rational mastery,[63] thenomos–physis distinction,[64] threespheres of social action (oikos,the private/private or domesticsphere; agora, the public/privateor implicitly political sphere;ekklesia, the public/public orexplicitly political sphere),[65][66]

ecological self-limitation(degrowth),[67][68]

Gödelian argument,[69][70] theGreco-Occidentalparticuliarity,[71][72] democracy asprocedure (formalist) vs.democracy as regime(substantivist),[73] criticism ofstructuralism (logicism) andfunctionalism (physicalism),[74]

criticism of spiritualist andmaterialist dialectic,[75] criticism ofMarxian economics,[76][77] capitalas power,[55][78][79] criticism ofMarx's theory of history,[80]

criticism of Lacanianism,[81]

criticism of the poststructuralisttheory of the subject,[82] criticismof the New Philosophers[83][84]

Influences

Aristotle, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, LeonTrotsky, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,[85] GastonBachelard, René Poirier, Paul Ricœur, Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, Hannah Arendt,[86] SusanIsaacs,[87] Melanie Klein,[88] Piera Aulagnier, G. L.

Boggs,[89] Rosa Luxemburg,[90] GyörgyLukács,[90] Joan Robinson,[91] C. L. R. James, J.

G. Fichte,[92] Martin Heidegger,[92] EdmundHusserl,[93] Max Weber,[94] Jacques Ellul,[95]

André Leroi-Gourhan,[96] Jacques Derrida,[97]

Giambattista Vico,[98] Jean Laplanche,[87] Jean-Bertrand Pontalis,[87] Serge Latouche, Francisco

Varela[99]

Influenced

Daniel Cohn-Bendit,[100] Maurice Brinton, ClaudeLefort, Serge Latouche, Takis Fotopoulos, Guy

Debord, Jean Baudrillard,[101] Andrew Arato, HansG. Furth,[102] Hans Joas, Harald Wolf, EdgarMorin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet,[103] Vincent de

Gaulejac, Richard Rorty, Graham Ward, GeorgesLapassade, Vincent Descombes, René Lourau,

Shimshon Bichler, Jonathan Nitzan, RobinHahnel,[104] Marcel Gauchet, Yorgos Oikonomou,Laurent Van Eynde, Sophie Klimis, Raphaël Gély,Myriam Revault d'Allonnes, François Roustang,

Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, NicoleLoraux,[105] Johann Pál Arnason, Elias

In 1969 Castoriadis and Aulagnier split from the EFP to join the Organisation psychanalytique delangue française (OPLF), the so-called "Quatrième Groupe",[132] a psychoanalytic group that claimsto follow principles and methods that have opened up a third way between Lacanianism and thestandards of the International Psychoanalytical Association.[133]

Castoriadis began to practice analysis in 1973 (he had undergone analysis in the 1960s first withIrène Roubleff and then later with Michel Renard).[132][134]

In 1967, Castoriadis submitted a proposal for a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of history toPaul Ricœur (then at the University of Nanterre).[135] An epistolary dialogue began between thembut Ricœur's obligations to the University of Chicago in the 1970s were such that their collaborationwas not feasible at the time.[136] The subject of his thesis would be Le fondement imaginaire dusocial-historique (The Imaginary Foundations of the Social-Historical)[136] (see below).

In his 1975 work, L'Institution imaginaire de la société (Imaginary Institution of Society), and in Lescarrefours du labyrinthe (Crossroads in the Labyrinth), published in 1978, Castoriadis began todevelop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable othernessthat must always be socially instituted and named in order to be recognized. Otherness emerges inpart from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form towhat Castoriadis terms the (ontological) "magma[137][38][138] of social significations"[22][139] allowsthe psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mentalindeterminacy and alterity.

For Castoriadis, self-examination, as in the ancient Greek tradition, could draw upon the resources ofmodern psychoanalysis. Autonomous individuals—the essence of an autonomous society—mustcontinuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflection. He writes:

... psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy.For, each person's self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannothave an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would notinterrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes]tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn't exist outside theindividuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society dependsessentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society.[140]

Castoriadis was not calling for every individual to undergo psychoanalysis, per se. Rather, byreforming education and political systems, individuals would be increasingly capable of critical self-and social reflexion. He offers: "if psychoanalytic practice has a political meaning, it is solely to theextent that it tries, as far as it possibly can, to render the individual autonomous, that is to say, lucidconcerning her desire and concerning reality, and responsible for her acts: holding herselfaccountable for what she does."[141]

In his 1980 Facing the War text, he took the view that Russia had become the primary world militarypower. To sustain this, in the context of the visible economic inferiority of the Soviet Union in thecivilian sector, he proposed that the society may no longer be dominated by the one-party statebureaucracy but by a "stratocracy"[142]—a separate and dominant military sector with expansionistdesigns on the world. He further argued that this meant there was no internal class dynamic whichcould lead to social revolution within Russian society and that change could only occur throughforeign intervention.

In 1980, he joined the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) asDirecteur d'études (Director of Studies).[143] He had been elected Directeur de recherche (Directorof Research) in EHESS at the end of 1979[6] after submitting his previously published material inconjunction with a defense of his intellectual project of connecting the disciplines of history,sociology and economy through the concept of the social imaginary[144][145] (see below). Histeaching career at the EHESS lasted sixteen years.[146]

In 1980, he was also awarded his State doctorate from the University of Nanterre; the final title of histhesis under Ricœur (see above) was L'Élément imaginaire de l'histoire[6] (The Imaginary Element inHistory).

In 1984, Castoriadis and Aulagnier divorced.[131]

Philosopher of history and ontologist

Sovietologist

Later life

Petropoulos, Frieder Otto Wolf, Lorraine Code, E.P. Thompson, Jean-Claude Michéa, Danilo

Martuccelli, Sudipta Kaviraj, John B. Thompson,Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Anthony Giddens,[106]

Zygmunt Bauman, Nikolas Kompridis, FranciscoVarela[107] Gabriel Rockhill

In 1989, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences by Panteion University and in1993 another one in Education Sciences by the Democritus University of Thrace.[147]

In 1992, he joined the libertarian socialist journal Society and Nature (established by TakisFotopoulos) as a writer; the magazine also featured such writers as Murray Bookchin and NoamChomsky.[148]

He died on 26 December 1997 from complications following heart surgery. He was survived by ZoeChristofidi (his wife at the time of his death), his daughter Sparta (by an earlier relationship with Jeanine "Rilka" Walter,[149] "Comrade Victorine" in theFourth International),[150] and Kyveli, a younger daughter from his marriage with Zoe.[151][152]

Edgar Morin proposed that Castoriadis' work will be remembered for its remarkable continuity and coherence as well as for its extraordinary breadth whichwas "encyclopaedic" in the original Greek sense, for it offered us a paideia, or education, that brought full circle our cycle of otherwise compartmentalizedknowledge in the arts and sciences.[153] Castoriadis wrote essays on mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society,economics, politics, philosophy, and art.

One of Castoriadis' many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understoodin terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without strict determinations,[21] butin order to be socially recognized it must be instituted as revolution. Any knowledge of society and social change can exist only by referring to (or bypositing) social imaginary significations.[22] Thus, Castoriadis developed a conceptual framework where the sociological and philosophical category of thesocial imaginary has a central place and he offered an interpretation of modernity centered on the principal categories of social institutions and socialimaginary significations;[19] in his analysis, these categories are the product of the human faculties of the radical imagination and the social imaginary, thelatter faculty being the collective dimension of the former.[154] (According to Castoriadis, the sociological and philosophical category of the radicalimaginary[18] can be manifested only through the individual radical imagination and the social imaginary.)[20][155][156] However, the social imaginarycannot be reduced or attributed to subjective imagination, since the individual is informed through an internalisation of social significations.[157][158]

He used traditional terms as much as possible, though consistently redefining them. Further, some of his terminology changed throughout the later part of hiscareer, with the terms gaining greater consistency but breaking from their traditional meaning (thus creating neologisms). When reading Castoriadis, it ishelpful to understand what he means by the terms he uses, since he does not redefine the terms in every piece where he employs them.

The concept of autonomy was central to his early writings, and he continued to elaborate on its meaning, applications, and limits until his death, gaining himthe title of "Philosopher of Autonomy." The word itself is Greek, where auto means "for/by itself" and nomos means "law." It refers to the condition of"self-institution" by which one creates their own laws, whether as an individual or as a whole society. And while every society creates their owninstitutions, only the members of autonomous societies are fully aware of the fact, and consider themselves to be the ultimate source of justice.[159] Incontrast, members of heteronomous societies (hetero- 'other') delegate this process to an authority outside of society, often attributing the source of theirtraditions to divine origins or, in modern times, to "historical necessity."[160] Castoriadis then identified the need of societies not only to create but tolegitimize their laws, to explain, in other words, why their laws are just. Most traditional societies did that through religion, claiming their laws were givenby God or a mythical ancestor and therefore must be true.

An exception to this rule is to be found in Ancient Greece, where the constellation of cities (poleis) that spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean,although not all democratic, showed strong signs of autonomy, and during its peak, Athens became fully aware of the fact as seen in Pericles' FuneralOration.[161] Castoriadis considered Greece, a topic that increasingly drew his attention, not as a blueprint to be copied but an experiment that could inspirea truly autonomous community, one that could legitimize its laws without assigning their source to a higher authority. The Greeks differed from othersocieties because they not only started as autonomous but maintained this ideal by challenging their laws on a constant basis while obeying them to the samedegree (even to the extent of enforcing capital punishment), proving that autonomous societies can indeed exist.

Regarding modern societies, Castoriadis notes that while religions have lost part of their normative function, their nature is still heteronomous, only that thistime it has rational pretenses. Capitalism legitimizes itself through "reason," claiming that it makes "rational sense",[162] but Castoriadis observed that allsuch efforts are ultimately tautological, in that they can only legitimize a system through the rules defined by the system itself. So just like the Old Testamentclaimed that "There is only one God, God," capitalism defines logic as the maximization of utility and minimization of costs, and then legitimizes itselfbased on its effectiveness to meet these criteria. Surprisingly, this definition of logic is also shared by Communism, which despite the fact it stands inseeming opposition, it is the product of the same imaginary, and uses the same concepts and categories to describe the world, principally in material termsand through the process of human labor.

The term "imaginary" originates in the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (see the Imaginary) and is strongly associated with Castoriadis'work. 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 meansomething other than themselves. They are, so to speak, "final meanings" that the society in question has imposed on the world, on itself.[163] Because thesemeanings (manifestations of the "radical imaginary" in Castoriadian terminology) do not point to anything concrete, and because the logical categoriesneeded to analyze them are derived from them, these meanings cannot be analysed rationally. They are arational (rather than irrational), and must thereforebe acknowledged rather than comprehended in the common use of the term. Castoriadis' views on concept formation is in sharp contrast to that ofpostmodernists like Jacques Derrida, who explicitly denies the existence of concepts "in and off themselves".[164]

Radical imaginary is at the basis of cultures and accounts for their differences. In his seminal work The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis arguesthat societies are founded not as products of historical necessity, but as the result of a new and radical idea of the world, an idea that appears to spring fullyformed and is practically irreducible. All cultural forms (laws and institutions, aesthetics and ritual) follow from this radical imaginary, and are not to beexplained merely as products of material conditions. Castoriadis then is offering an "ontogenetic",[165] or "emergentist" model of history, one that is

Philosophy

Autonomy and heteronomy

The imaginary

apparently unpopular amongst modern historians,[166] but can serve as a valuable critique of historical materialism. For example, Castoriadis believed thatAncient Greeks had an imaginary by which the world stems from Chaos, while in contrast, the Hebrews had an imaginary by which the world stems fromthe will of a rational entity, God or Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. The former developed therefore a system of direct democracy where the laws were everchanging according to the people's will while the second a theocratic system according to which man is in an eternal quest to understand and enforce thewill of God.

Traditional societies had elaborate imaginaries, expressed through various creation myths, by which they explained how the world came to be and how it issustained. Capitalism did away with this mythic imaginary by replacing it with what it claims to be pure reason (as examined above). That same imaginaryis the foundation of its opposing ideology, Communism. By that measure he observes (first in his main criticism of Marxism, titled the Imaginary Institutionof Society,[167] and subsequently in a speech he gave at the Université catholique de Louvain on February 27, 1980)[168] that these two systems are moreclosely related than was previously thought, since they share the same industrial revolution type imaginary: that of a rational society where man's welfare ismaterially measurable and infinitely improvable through the expansion of industries and advancements in science. In this respect Marx failed to understandthat technology is not, as he claimed, the main drive of social change, since we have historical examples where societies possessing near identicaltechnologies formed very different relations to them. An example given in the book is France and England during the industrial revolution with the secondbeing much more liberal than the first.[167] Similarly, in the issue of ecology he observes that the problems facing our environment are only present withinthe capitalist imaginary that values the continuous expansion of industries. Trying to solve it by changing or managing these industries better might fail,since it essentially acknowledges this imaginary as real, thus perpetuating the problem.

Castoriadis also believed that the complex historical processes through which new imaginaries are born are not directly quantifiable by science. This isbecause it is through the imaginaries themselves that the categories upon which science is applied are created. In the second part of his Imaginary Institutionof Society (titled "The Social Imaginary and the Institution"), he gives the example of set theory, which is at the basis of formal logic, which cannot functionwithout having first defined the "elements" which are to be assigned to sets.[169] This initial schema of separation[40] (schéma de séparation, σχήμα τουχωρισμού) of the world into distinct elements and categories therefore, precedes the application of (formal) logic and, consequently, science.

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.Since he believed that social norms and morals ultimately derive from a society's unique idea of the world, which emerges fully formed at a given momentin history and cannot be reduced further. From this he concluded that any criteria by which one could evaluate these morals objectively are also derivedfrom the said imaginary, rendering this evaluation subjective. This does not mean that Castoriadis stopped believing in the value of social struggles for abetter world, he simply thought that rationally proving their value is impossible.

This however does not mean that Castoriadis believed there is no truth, but that truth is linked to the imaginary which is ultimately arational. In his bookWorld in Fragments, which includes essays on science, he explicitly writes that "We have to understand that there is truth - and that it is to be made/to bedone, that to attain [atteindre] it we have to create it, which means, first and foremost, to imagine it".[170] He then quotes Blake who said "What is nowproved was once only imagin'd".

The concept of Chaos, as found in Ancient Greek cosmogony, plays a significant role in Castoriadis' work, and is connected to the idea of the"imaginary".[37][171] Castoriadis translates the Greek word "chaos" as nothingness.[172] According to him, the core of the Greek imaginary was a worldthat came from Chaos rather than the will of God as described in Genesis. Castoriadis concludes that the Greeks' imaginary of a "world out of chaos" waswhat allowed them to create institutions such as democracy, because— if the world is created out of nothing— man can model it as he sees fit,[173] withouttrying to conform to some divine law. He contrasted the Greek imaginary to the Biblical imaginary in which God is a "willing" (i.e. intentional) agent andman's position is to understand God's will and act according to it.

Castoriadis views the political organization of the ancient Greek cities (poleis) not as a model to imitate, rather as a source of inspiration towards anautonomous society. He rejects also the term city state used to describe Ancient Greek cities; for him the administration of Greek poleis was not that of aState in the modern sense of the term, since Greek poleis were self–administrated. The same goes for colonisation since the neighbouring Phoenicians, whohad a similar expansion in the Mediterranean, were monarchical till their end. During this time of colonization, however, around the time of Homer's epicpoems, we observe for the first time that the Greeks, instead of transferring their mother city's social system to the newly established colony, instead, for thefirst time in known history, legislate anew from the ground up. What also made the Greeks special was the fact that, following the above, they kept thissystem as a perpetual autonomy which led to direct democracy.

This phenomenon of autonomy is again present in the emergence of the states of northern Italy during the Renaissance,[174] again as a product of smallindependent merchants.

He 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, onthe other hand, the spirit-crushing force of capitalism. These are respectively characterized as the creative imaginary and the capitalist imaginary:

I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly laid out, at least in itsgeneral orientation. That's the road of the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, andcynicism at the same time as it is that of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of "rational mastery,"pseudorational pseudomastery, of an unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that is to say, for nothing, and of atechnoscience that has become autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the domination of this capitalist imaginary.The other road should be opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of theproject of individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and ofthe creative imaginary.[175]

Social constructionism

Chaos

The Ancient Greeks and the modern West

He argues that, in the last two centuries, ideas about autonomy again come to the fore: "This extraordinary profusion reaches a sort of pinnacle during thetwo centuries stretching between 1750 and 1950. This is a very specific period because of the very great density of cultural creation but also because of itsvery strong subversiveness."[176]

Castoriadis has influenced European (especially continental) thought in important ways. His interventions in sociological and political theory have resultedin some of the most well-known writing to emerge from the continent (especially in the figure of Jürgen Habermas, who often can be seen to be writingagainst Castoriadis).[177] Hans Joas published a number of articles in American journals in order to highlight the importance of Castoriadis' work to a NorthAmerican sociological audience,[178] and Johann Pál Arnason has been of enduring importance both for his critical engagement with Castoriadis' thoughtand for his sustained efforts to introduce it to the English speaking public (especially during his editorship of the journal Thesis Eleven).[179] In the last fewyears, there has been growing interest in Castoriadis's thought, including the publication of two monographs authored by Arnason's former students: JeffKlooger's Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Brill), and Suzi Adams's Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation (Fordham University Press).

Original French

Mai 68 : la brèche [The Breach], Fayard, 1968 (under the pseudonym Jean-Marc Coudray; co-authored with Edgar Morin and ClaudeLefort)La Société bureaucratique [Bureaucratic Society] in two volumes: Les Rapports de production en Russie and La Révolution contre labureaucratie, 1973L'Expérience du mouvement ouvrier [The Experience of the Labor Movement] in two volumes: Comment lutter and Prolétariat etorganisation, 1974L'Institution imaginaire de la société [The Imaginary Institution of Society], Seuil, 1975Les Carrefours du labyrinthe [Crossroads in the Labyrinth], Volume I, 1978Le Contenu du socialisme [On the Content of Socialism], 1979—originally published in three parts in S. ou B. (July 1955; translated inPSW 1, pp. 290–307 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1955/socialism-1.htm)), S. ou B. (July 1957; translated in PSW 2, pp.90–154 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1957/socialism-2.htm)), and S. ou B. (January 1958; translated in PSW 2, pp. 155–192 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1958/socialism-3.htm))Capitalisme moderne et révolution [Modern Capitalism and Revolution] in two volumes, 1979De l'écologie à l'autonomie [EA] [From Ecology to Autonomy] (avec Daniel Cohn-Bendit et le Public de Louvain-la-Neuve), 1981Devant la guerre [Facing the War], Volume I, 1981 (a second volume was never published)Domaines de l'homme [Domains of Man] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe II), 1986La Brèche: vingt ans après (réédition du livre de 1968 complété par de nouveaux textes) [The Breach: Twenty Years After], 1988Le Monde morcelé [World in Fragments] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe III), 1990La Montée de l'insignifiance [The Rising Tide of Insignificancy] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe IV), 1996Fait et à faire [Done and To Be Done] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe V), 1997

Posthumous publications

Η Αρχαία Ελληνική Δημοκρατία και η Σημασία της για μας Σήμερα [Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Us Today], Athens:Ypsilon, 1999 (based on a lecture delivered in Leonidio on 17 August 1984)Figures du pensable [Figures of the Thinkable] (Les carrefours du labyrinthe VI), 1999Sur Le Politique de Platon [Commentary on The Statesman of Plato], 1999Sujet et vérité dans le monde social-historique. La création humaine 1 [Subject and Truth in the Social-Historical World. HumanCreation 1], 2002Ce qui fait la Grèce, 1. D'Homère à Héraclite. La création humaine 2 [What Makes Greece, 1. From Homer to Heraclitus. HumanCreation 2], 2004Φιλοσοφία και επιστήμη. Ένας διάλογος με τον Γεώργιο Λ. Ευαγγελόπουλο [Philosophy and Science. A Discussion with Yorgos L.Evangelopoulos], Athens: Eurasia books, 2004, ISBN 960-8187-09-5Une Société à la dérive, entretiens et débats 1974–1997 [A Society Adrift], 2005Post-scriptum sur l'insignifiance : entretiens avec Daniel Mermet ; suivi de dialogue [Postscript on Insignificance], 2007Fenêtre sur le chaos [Window on the Chaos] (compiled by Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay), Seuil, 2007,ISBN 978-2-02-090826-9 (Castoriadis' writings on modern art and aesthetics)Ce qui fait la Grèce, 2. La cité et les lois. La création humaine 3 [What Makes Greece, 2. The City and Laws. Human Creation 3], 2008L'Imaginaire comme tel [The Imaginary As Such], 2008Histoire et création : Textes philosophiques inédits, 1945–1967 [History and Creation: Unedited Philosophical Texts 1945–1967], 2009Ce qui fait la Grèce, 3. Thucydide, la force et le droit. La création humaine 4 [What Makes Greece, 3. Thucydides, Force and Right.Human Creation 4], 2011La Culture de l'égoïsme [The Culture of Egoism] (transcription of an interview that Castoriadis and Christopher Lasch gave to MichaelIgnatieff in 1986; translated into French by Myrto Gondicas), Climats, 2012, ISBN 978-2-08-128463-0 (interview about the topic of theretreat of individuals from public space into private matters)Écrits politiques 1945–1997 [Political Writings 1945–1997] (compiled by Myrto Gondicas, Enrique Escobar and Pascal Vernay),Éditions du Sandre:

La Question du mouvement ouvrier [The Question of Workers' Movement] (vols. 1 and 2), 2012Quelle démocratie ? [What Democracy?] (vols. 3 and 4), 2013La Société bureaucratique [The Bureaucratic Society] (vol. 5), 2015

Lasting influence

Major publications

The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Devant la guerre et autres écrits [Facing the War and Other Writings] (vol. 6), TBA[180]

Sur la dynamique du capitalisme et autres textes, suivi de l'impérialisme et la guerre [On the Dynamics of Capitalism and OtherTexts Followed by Imperialism and War] (vol. 7), TBA[180]

Dialogue sur l'histoire et l'imaginaire social [Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary], 2016 (transcription of an interview thatCastoriadis gave to Paul Ricœur)

Selected translations of works by Castoriadis

The Imaginary Institution of Society [IIS] (trans. Kathleen Blamey). MIT Press, Cambridge 1997 [1987]. 432 pp. ISBN 0-262-53155-0.(pb.)The Castoriadis Reader [CR] (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis). Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1997. 470 pp. ISBN 1-55786-704-6. (pb.)World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination [WIF] (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis). StanfordUniversity Press, Stanford, CA 1997. 507 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2763-5.Political and Social Writings [PSW 1]. Volume 1: 1946–1955. From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism(ed./trans. David Ames Curtis). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 348 pp. ISBN 0-8166-1617-5.Political and Social Writings [PSW 2]. Volume 2: 1955–1960. From the Workers' Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Ageof Modern Capitalism (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. 363 pp. ISBN 0-8166-1619-1.Political and Social Writings [PSW 3]. Volume 3: 1961–1979. Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the AutonomousSociety (ed./trans. David Ames Curtis). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1992. 405 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2168-3.Modern Capitalism and Revolution (https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_capitalism_and_revolution.html?id=kuLrAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y) [MCR] (trans. Maurice Brinton), London: Solidarity, 1965 (including an introduction and additional English material byBrinton; the second English edition was published by Solidarity in 1974, with a new introduction by Castoriadis)Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Essays in Political Philosophy [PPA] (ed. David Ames Curtis). Oxford University Press, NewYork/Oxford 1991. 306 pp. ISBN 0-19-506963-3.Crossroads in the Labyrinth [CL] (trans. M. H. Ryle/K. Soper). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1984. 345 pp.On Plato's Statesman [OPS] (trans. David Ames Curtis). Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2002. 227 pp."The Crisis of Western Societies." TELOS 53 (Fall 1982). New York: Telos Press (http://www.telospress.com).Figures of the Thinkable [FT B] (trans. Helen Arnold). Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2007. 304 pp. (Also trans. anon. February2005: <http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf> [FT A].)A Society Adrift. Interviews and Debates, 1974–1997 [SA] (trans. Helen Arnold). Fordham University Press, New York 2010. 259 pp.(Also trans. anon. October 2010: A Society Adrift: More Interviews and Discussions on The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, IncludingRevolutionary Perspectives Today. Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service.<http://www.notbored.org/ASA.pdf>.)"The Dilapidation of the West: An Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis" (trans. David Ames Curtis), Thesis Eleven, May 1995, 41(1):94–114."Psychoanalysis and Politics", in: Sonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow (eds.), Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis,Philosophy, and Culture, Routledge, 1994, pp. 1–12 (also in: World in Fragments, 1997, pp. 125–136)Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis [PI B] (ed./trans. Gabriel Rockhill and John V. Garner). Continuum,London 2011. 160 pp. ISBN 978-1-4411-3960-3. (hb.) (Also trans. anon. March 2011: Postscript on Insignificancy, including MoreInterviews and Discussions on the Rising Tide of Insignificancy, followed by Five Dialogues, Four Portraits and Two Book Reviews [PIA]. Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service. <http://www.notbored.org/PSRTI.pdf>.)The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep) [RTI]. Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service.Electronic publication date: December 2003. <http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf>.Democracy and Relativism: A Debate [DR]. Translated from the French by John V. Garner. Rowan & Littlefield, 2019. ISBN 978-1786610959.Window on the Chaos, Including "How I Didn't Become a Musician" – Beta Version [WC]. Translated from the French and editedanonymously as a public service. Electronic publication date: July 2015. <http://www.notbored.org/WoC.pdf>.

Autopoiesis, a term inspired by Castoriadis' philosophy[107]

The French autonome movementVerstehen, Castoriadis' adopted methodology of studying social meaningWorkers' council

a. /ˌkæstəriˈædɪs/; French: [kastɔʁjadis]b. Greek: [kastoriˈaðis]

See also

Notes

References

1. Memos 2014, p. 18: "he was ... granted full French citizenship in1970."

2. He was known to intimates as "Corneille" (Dosse 2014, pp.514–5).

3. Marianthi Bella, "In my Neighborhood, Patisia ..." (http://www.glinos.gr/v1/public/image/files/30_original.pdf), Glinos Foundation,2013, p. 5.

4. "Castoriadis, Cornelius, 1922–1997" (http://www.biblionet.gr/author/6451) at E.KE.BI / Biblionet

5. Cornelius Castoriadis, Histoire et création : Textesphilosophiques inédits, 1945–1967, Seuil, 2009, Section I,Chapter 4.

6. Schrift 2006, p. 112.7. Dosse 2014, p. 94.8. Suzi Adams, "Towards a Post-Phenomenology of Life:

Castoriadis' Naturphilosophie" (http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/108/216), Cosmos and History: TheJournal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 4, Nos. 1–2(2008).

9. Andrew Arato. From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory. Essayson the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (https://books.google.com/books/about/From_Neo_Marxism_to_Democratic_Theory.html?id=8U7MQlYJgZAC&redir_esc=y). M.E. Sharpe, 1993,pp. 122–45. ISBN 978-0-7656-1853-5.

10. Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend. Key Thinkers from CriticalTheory to Post-Marxism (https://books.google.com/books?id=Cjyg3-2qWSwC&dq=). London: Sage Publications. 2006, pp. 13–37. ISBN 978-1-84787-716-1.

11. Benoît Challand, "Socialisme ou Barbarie or the PartialEncounters Between Anarchism and Critical Marxism", in: AlexPrichard, Ruth Kinna, Dave Berry, Saku Pinta (eds.), LibertarianSocialism: Politics in Black and Red (https://books.google.com/books?id=3PQv7y7zMBsC&hl=fr&source=gbs_navlinks_s&redir_esc=y), Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 210–231, esp. 210,"... Castoriadis's evident legacy to Left-libertarian thinking andhis radical break with orthodox Marxist-Leninism ..."

12. Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, Duke University Press,2000, Translator's Foreword by David Ames Curtis, p. xxiv,"Catoriadis, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, now Lefort ... arethemselves quite articulate in their own right and historicallyassociated with a libertarian socialist outlook..."

13. Arthur Hirsh, The French Left, Black Rose Books, 1982, p. 126.14. Suzi Adams (ed.). Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts (https://b

ooks.google.com/books?id=ws_aAgAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s). London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014,"Democracy" entry by Ingerid S. Straume: "[Castoriadis'] thoughtcertainly reflects ideas of radical, participatory and directdemocracy, communitarianism and republicanism ...". ISBN 978-1-4411-7290-7.

15. Tassis 2007, pp. 1 and 26.16. Fernando Urribarri, "Castoriadis: the Radical Imagination and

the Post-Lacanian Unconscious" (http://the.sagepub.com/content/71/1/40.short), Thesis Eleven, November 2002, 71(1): 40–51.

17. FT B, p. 78.18. IIS, p. 146.19. IIS, p. 160: "We do not need, therefore, to 'explain' how and why

the imaginary, the imaginary social significations and theinstitutions that incarnate them, become autonomous."

20. IIS, p. 373.21. IIS, p. 3.22. IIS, p. 359.23. IIS, p. 287.24. IIS, p. 298.25. IIS, p. 274.26. IIS, p. 336.27. IIS, p. 282; confer Freud's term (Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz des

Triebes "ideational representative of the drive" (Sigmund Freud,"Die Verdrängung" contained in the volume InternationaleZeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, Vol. III, Cahier 3, 1915, p.130 (https://archive.org/stream/InternationaleZeitschriftFuumlraumlrztlichePsychoanalyseBandIiiHeft3/Z_III_1915_3#page/n3/mode/2up)).

28. IIS, p. 177.29. IIS, p. 312.30. WIF, pp. 131 and 263; Elliott 2003, p. 91.31. PPA, p. 151.32. Yannis Stavrakakis. "Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with

Social Constructionism and the Political in Castoriadis andLacan." Constellations, 9(4):522–539 (2002).

33. Les carrefours du labyrinthe: Le monde morcelé (1990), p. 218.34. WIF, p. 268. (Confer Fichte's original insight.)35. An Eigenwelt that is organized through its own time (Eigenzeit);

WIF, p. 385.36. IIS, p. 281.37. IIS, p. 46.38. "A magma is that from which one can extract (or in which one

can construct) an indefinite number of ensemblist organizationsbut which can never be reconstituted (ideally) by a (finite orinfinite) ensemblist composition of these organizations." (IIS, p.343.)

39. IIS, p. 175.40. IIS, pp. 224–5.41. From the Ancient Greek λέγειν "to say, speak" and τεύχειν "to

make."42. This is Castoriadis' version (IIS, p. 104) of Freud's motto Wo Es

war, soll Ich werden ("Where Id was, Ego shall come to be"; seeSigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung indie Psychoanalyse: 31. Vorlesung).

43. IIS, p. 281.44. IIS, p. 2.45. Elucidation is a methodology pertaining to historical research

(research on the social-historical conditions of possibility) whichis "inseparable from a political aim and a political project" (IIS,pp. 2–3).

46. "The institution presupposes the institution: it can exist only ifindividuals fabricated by the institution make the institution exist"(WIF, p. 315). Klooger has compared Castoriadis' idea of the'circle of creation' with Heidegger's idea of the 'hermeneuticcircle' (Klooger 2009, p. 254). S. Gourgouris (2003) pointed outthat the circle of creation is "a circle whose Being is nowhere,since in itself it accounts for the meaning of Being, a meaningthat is always inevitably a human ... affair," and that, contrary towhat Heidegger advocates, the circle of creation "is neverbroken by revelation (by 'unconcealment'—aletheia)" (StathisGourgouris, Does Literature Think? (https://books.google.com/books?id=oUVbzpnJRPAC&dq=), Stanford University Press, 2003,p. 153).

47. The paradox arising from the assertion that historicalconsciousness universalizes historical knowledge; see IIS, pp.34–5; Klooger 2009, p. 242; Konstantinos Kavoulakos,"Cornelius Castoriadis on Social Imaginary and Truth", Ariadne12 (2006), pp. 201–213.

48. IIS, p. 208.49. Castoriadis posits that new forms are radically novel; this,

however, does not imply neither that ontological creation has noprior foundation—it is not in nihilo—nor that it has no constraints—it is not cum nihilo. Confer: FT B, pp. 241, 258.

50. "Being is creation, vis formandi: not the creation of 'matter-energy,' but the creation of forms" (Fait et à faire, p. 212).

51. "For what is given in and through history is not the determinedsequence of the determined but the emergence of radicalotherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty." (IIS, p. 184.)

52. "[T]ime is essentially linked to the emergence of alterity. Time isthis emergence as such—whereas space is "only" its necessaryconcomitant. Time is creation and destruction—that means, timeis being in its substantive determinations." (WIF, p. 399.)

53. WIF, p. 13.54. PSW 2, p. 126: "Absolute Wage Equality".55. Cornelius Castoriadis, "From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to

Us" (trans. Andrew Arato), Social Research 45(4):667–738,1978, esp. p. 738: "It is a question of the destruction of economicmotivations, by destroying the "socially objective" conditions ofits [sic] possibility: the differentiation of revenues."

56. PSW 2, p. 152: "As for the administration of justice [in a socialisteconomy], it will be in the hands of rank-and-file bodies."

57. PSW 2, p. 121.58. PSW 2, p. 147.59. PSW 3, p. 252.60. "Capitalism can function only by continually drawing upon the

genuinely human activity of those subject to it, while at the sametime trying to level and dehumanize them as much as possible."(IIS, p. 16.)

61. MCR, p. 46.62. PI A, p. 66.63. PPA, ch. 9.64. CL, p. 325.65. FT B, p. 124.66. CR, p. xi.67. EA, p. 19.68. Suzi Adams, Jeremy Smith (eds.), Social Imaginaries, 1(1),

Spring 2015, p. 38: "Ecological autonomy in [Castoriadis']assessment is 'the question of the self-limitation of society'..."

69. CL, pp. 153–4.70. Jeff Klooger, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (https://boo

ks.google.com/books?id=7ObcK83Qi8QC&dq=), BRILL, 2009,pp. 226–229.

71. PPA, ch. 5.72. Jens Hoyrup, Ιn Measure, Number, and Weight: Studies in

Mathematics and Culture, SUNY Press, 1994, p. 121.73. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Democracy as Procedure and

Democracy as Regime", Constellations 4(1):1–18 (1997).74. IIS, pp. 141, 170, 181.75. IIS, pp. 54–6.76. MCR, p. 29.77. CL, p. 269.78. FT A: "What Democracy? (including Passion and Knowledge)",

p. 227.79. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A

Study of Order and Creorder, Routledge, 2009, pp. 148–9:"According to Cornelius Castoriadis ..., [e]quivalence inexchange ... came not from anything intrinsic to commodities, butfrom what the Greek called the nomos. It was rooted not in thematerial sphere of consumption and production, but in thebroader social–legal–historical institutions of society. It was notan objective substance, but a human creation. ... In all pre-capitalist societies, prices – and distribution more generally –were determined through some mixture of social struggles andcooperation. Authoritarian regimes emphasized power anddecree, while more egalitarian societies used negotiation,volition and even gifts..." and p. 306: "The power role of themarket cannot be overemphasized... Cornelius Castoriadis ...proclaims that 'where there is capitalism, there is no market; andwhere there is a market, there cannot be capitalism'".

80. IIS, p. 66.81. CL, pp. 46–115: "Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation";

Elliott 2003, p. 92.82. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The State of the Subject Today",

American Imago, Winter 1989, 46(4), pp. 371–412 (also in: WIF,pp. 137–171). Cf. V. Karalis (2005). "Castoriadis, Cornelius(1922–97)," in: John Protevi (ed.), The Edinburgh Dictionary ofContinental Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp.86–7.

83. PSW 3, pp. 272–80.84. Christos Memos. "Castoriadis and Social Theory: From

Marginalization to Canonization to Re-radicalization". In: AlexLaw and Eric Royal Lybeck (eds.). Sociological Amnesia: Cross-currents in Disciplinary History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p.190.

85. WIF, pp. 273–310.

86. See: Dosse 2014, p. 104; Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Destiniesof Totalitarianism," Salmagundi 60 (Spring/Summer 1983): 108;Peter Murphy, "Romantic Modernism and the Greek Polis",Thesis Eleven, February 1993, 34(1): 42–66. For a comparativeanalysis of Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, seeGillian Robinson's "The Greek Polis and the DemocraticImaginary", Thesis Eleven, February 1995, 40(1): 25–43.Castoriadis criticizes Arendt in his interview "The Idea ofRevolution" (published as "L'Idée de révolution" in Le Débat 57,Nov.–Dec 1989 and Le monde morcelé (1990), pp. 155–71; firsttranslated in English in Cornelius Castoriadis, "Does the Idea ofRevolution Still Make Sense?", Thesis Eleven, May 1990, 26(1):123–138) and in his talk "The Athenian Democracy: False andTrue Questions" (given in Paris in 1992 and published as "Ladémocratie athénienne: fausses et vraies questions" in LaMontée de l'insignifiance, 1996; first published in English inPierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes theAthenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and of Timein Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century tothe Death of Plato, Humanities Press, 1996, p. 119ff.).

87. IIS, p. 401.88. Sean McMorrow, "Concealed Chora in the Thought of Cornelius

Castoriadis: A Bastard Comment on Trans-Regional Creation",Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and SocialPhilosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2012).

89. Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test (https://books.google.com/books?id=x0dv5I51WJkC&dq=), Duke University Press, 2000,Translator's Foreword by David Ames Curtis, p. xxxiii.

90. P. Chaulieu, "Lukács et Rosa", Socialisme ou Barbarie n° 26(November 1958) reproduced in: Daniel Guérin. RosaLuxembourg et la spontanéité révolutionnaire. Paris:Flammarion, 1971, pp. 157–58.

91. FT B, p. 61.92. Dosse 2014, p. 237.93. Dosse 2014, p. 44.94. Dosse 2014, p. 22.95. Dosse 2014, p. 441.96. IIS, p. 400.97. Dosse 2014, p. 223; IIS, p. 396.98. PPA, ch. 4, p. 56.99. "Castoriadis: The Living Being and Its Proper World" (http://www.

iep.utm.edu/castoria/#SSH3bii): entry by John V. Garner, InternetEncyclopedia of Philosophy.

100. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, ObsoleteCommunism: The Left-Wing Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans(London: André Deutsch Ltd., 1968), p. 133.

101. Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxismand Democratic Theory, Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 94.(https://books.google.com/books?id=EcCrAgAAQBAJ&dq=)

102. Furth, H.G., Desire for Society (https://books.google.com/books?id=LIOV0ZEH_WIC&dq=), Springer, 1996. Chapter 11.

103. Vidal-Naquet et Castoriadis : une affinité intellectuelle etpolitique (http://www.pierre-vidal-naquet.net/spip.php?article17),by Olivier Fressard, 25 September 2006.

104. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Socialism Today andTomorrow: Socialism in Theory and Practice (https://books.google.com/books?id=n3LYQYht5cIC&dq=), South End Press, 1981,p. 384.

105. Carol Atack, "Radicalising the Classical Imaginary: CorneliusCastoriadis and the École de Paris" (https://academia.edu/1688049/Radicalising_the_Classical_Imaginary_Cornelius_Castoriadis_and_the_Ecole_de_Paris), July 8, 2011.

106. Anthony Giddens, Social Theory Today (https://books.google.com/books?id=DsOEjreGrNEC&dq=), Stanford University Press,1988, p. 110 n. 34.

107. Francisco Varela, "Autonomy and closure: The resonances ofCastoriadis' thought in the life sciences", CNRS and CREA,École Polytechnique, Paris.

108. "Cornelius Castoriadis Dies at 75" (http://www.agorainternational.org/abouttext.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20040614185124/http://www.agorainternational.org/abouttext.html)2004-06-14 at the Wayback Machine

109. Tassis 2007, p. 4; Tasis 2007, pp. 27–8.

10. Dosse 2014, p. 13.11. Tasis 2007, p. 37.12. Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Interview Cerisy

Colloquium (1990) (http://agorainternational.org/enccaiint.pdf), p.2 (French original: Entretien d'Agora International avecCornelius Castoriadis au Colloque de Cerisy (1990) (http://agorainternational.org/fr/CCAIINT.pdf)).

13. Dosse 2014, p. 17.14. At the time, Castoriadis was under the influence of the Trotskyist

militant Agis Stinas (Tasis 2007, pp. 40–1).15. Suzi Adams. Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation (https://

books.google.com/books/about/Castoriadis_s_Ontology.html?id=CKRFYgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y). New York: FordhamUniversity Press, 2011, p. 218. ISBN 978-0-8232-3459-2.

16. Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Interview CerisyColloquium (1990) (http://agorainternational.org/enccaiint.pdf), p.4.

17. Tasis 2007, p. 42.18. Tasis 2007, p. 43.19. Dosse 2014, p. 37.20. François Bordes, "Exil et création : des penseurs grecs dans la

vie intellectuelle française" (https://books.google.fr/books?id=yQqz6w72At0C&pg=PA63&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false), inServanne Jollivet, Christophe Premat, Mats Rosengren, Destinsd'exilés, Le Manuscrit, 2011, p. 66.

21. Castoriadis, Cornelius; L'Anti-Mythes (January 1974). "AnInterview with C. Castoriadis". Telos (23): 133.

22. Howard, Dick (1974). "Introduction to Castoriadis". Telos (23):117.

23. Dosse 2014, pp. 43–4.24. Tasis 2007, pp. 67–8.25. PSW 1, pp. 135–158.26. "[L]e mode de répartition du produit social est inséparable du

mode de production." (P. Chaulieu, "Les rapports de productionen Russie", Socialisme ou Barbarie n° 2 (May 1949) reproducedin La Société bureaucratique - Volumes 1–2, Christian BourgoisÉditeur, 1990, p. 164.)

27. "L'Idée que l'on puisse dominer la répartition sans dominer laproduction est de l'enfantillage." (La Société bureaucratique -Volumes 1–2, p. 166.)

28. Peter Osborne (ed.), A Critical Sense: Interviews withIntellectuals (https://books.google.com/books?id=7zyESK4VH4EC&dq=), Routledge, 2013, p. 17.

29. "Marxism and Revolutionary Theory" later became the first of thetwo parts of IIS (the second being "The Social Imaginary and theInstitution", a previously unpublished follow-up to "Marxism andRevolutionary Theory"). The relevant quote from IIS, p. 14 is:"Starting from revolutionary Marxism, we have arrived at thepoint where we have to choose between remaining Marxist andremaining revolutionaries".

30. Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co. University ofChicago Press. p. 433.

31. "Piera Aulagnier née Spairani" entry atPsychoanalytikerinnen.de (http://www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de/france_biographies.html#Aulagnier)

32. Tasis 2007, p. 216.33. Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor (2005). "Quatrième Groupe (O.P.L.F.),

Fourth Group." (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3435301211.html) In: A. de Mijolla (Ed.), International dictionary ofpsychoanalysis, vol. 3 (p. 1429). Farmington Hills, MI: ThomsonGale.

34. Dosse 2014, p. 175.35. Dosse 2014, p. 264.36. Dosse 2014, pp. 264–5.37. From the contemporary geological term magma, "blend of molten

or semi-molten rock", from the Ancient Greek μάγμα (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dma%2Fgma), "thick unguent" (SuziAdams, ed., 2014, ch. 6).

138. Klooger, Jeff. "The Guise of Nothing: Castoriadis onIndeterminacy, and its Misrecognition in Heidegger and Sartre,"Critical Horizons 14(1), 2013, p. 7: "'Magma' is the nameCastoriadis gives to the mode of being which he sees asunderlying all others, and which is characterized by anindeterminacy in which particular determinations come to be, butwithout congealing into inalterable forms, and withoutdiminishing the potential for the emergence of new and differentdeterminations."

139. Subsequent attempts by Castoriadis at formalizing the notion ofmagma were not successful. According to logician AthanassiosTzouvaras, the properties of a magma that Castoriadis proposedwere either unformalizable or inconsistent (see AthanassiosTzouvaras, "Sets with dependent elements: Elaborating onCastoriadis' notion of 'magma'" (http://users.auth.gr/tzouvara/Texfiles.htm/Castor.pdf) [n.d.]).

140. FT A: "Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads" (essaybased on a speech given in Abrantes in November 1996), p.151. The quote appears in a slightly different translation in FT B(Figures of the Thinkable, trans. by Helen Arnold, StanfordUniversity Press, 2007), pp. 89–90.

141. FT A: "First Institution of Society and Second-Order Institutions"(essay based on a lecture presented on December 15, 1985 inParis), p. 163.

142. Castoriadis, Cornelius (February 1980). "Facing the War". Telos(46): 48.

143. Sophie Klimis and Laurent Van Eynde (eds.), L'imaginaire selonCastoriadis: thèmes et enjeux, Facultés Universitaires SaintLouis à Bruxelles, 2006, p. 47 n. 8.

144. Dosse 2014, pp. 305–11.145. He had proposed in his application form the creation of a Chair

in Recherches sur les régimes sociaux contemporains,"Research on contemporary social systems" (Dosse 2014, p.308), which he eventually occupied.

146. OPS, p. xxi.147. Dosse 2014, pp. 350–1.148. Chris Atton, Alternative Literature: A Practical Guide for

Librarians, Gower, p. 41.149. Tasis 2007, pp. 43 and 85 n. 23.150. Anon. (2003), Foreword to The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (htt

p://www.notbored.org/foreword.html)151. Tasis 2007, p. 81.152. Alex Economou: Obituary – Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997)

(https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol7/no2/economou.html)

153. Morin, Edgar (30 December 1997). "An encyclopaedic spirit" (https://web.archive.org/web/20080611154828/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=10264).Radical Philosophy. Archived from the original (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=10264) on 11 June 2008. Retrieved 3 April 2008.

154. Marcela Tova, "The imaginary term in readings about modernity:Taylor and Castoriadis conceptions" (http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/815/81500904.pdf), Revista de Estudios Sociales 9, June 2001,pp. 32–39.

155. Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imaginationand the Imaginary (https://books.google.com/books?id=Au0YBQAAQBAJ&dq=), Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 50.

156. Nicolas Poirier, "Cornelius Castoriadis. L'Imaginaire radical" (http://www.cairn.info/revue-du-mauss-2003-1-page-383.htm),Revue du MAUSS, 1/2003 (No. 21), pp. 383–404.

157. "The Social Imaginary and the Institution" in IIS, pp. 167–220.Also in CR, pp. 196–217.

158. Schismenos 2013, p. 86.159. Castoriadis, Cornelius; L'Anti-Mythes (January 1974). "An

Interview with C. Castoriadis". Telos (23): 152.160. "Alienation appears first of all as the alienation of a society to its

institutions, as the autonomization of institutions in relation tosociety." (IIS, p. 115.)

161. Cornelius Castoriadis. Ce qui fait la Grèce : Tome 3, Thucydide,la force et le droit. Seuil 2011. (Séminaire of 13 February 1985.)

François Dosse. Castoriadis. Une vie. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7071-7126-9.Anthony Elliott. Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory (https://books.google.com/books?id=wslr_Esvs1UC&dq=). Rowman &Littlefield, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7425-2690-7.Christos Memos. Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique and Radical Alternatives (https://books.google.com/books?id=ygC-BQAAQBAJ&dq=). Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-1-137-03447-2.Alan D. Schrift. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. John Wiley & Sons, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4051-4394-3.Theofanis Tasis. Καστοριάδης. Μια φιλοσοφία της αυτονομίας [Castoriadis. A philosophy of autonomy]. Athens: Eurasia books.December 2007. ISBN 978-960-8187-22-1.Theofanis Tassis. Cornelius Castoriadis. Disposition einer Philosophie. 2007. FU Dissertationen Online (http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/receive/FUDISS_thesis_000000002898).Alexandros Schismenos. Η Ανθρώπινη Τρικυμία. Ψυχή και Αυτονομία στη Φιλοσοφία του Κορνήλιου Καστοριάδη [The HumanTempest. Psyche and Αutonomy in the Philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis]. Athens: Exarcheia, 2013. ISBN 978-618-80336-5-8.

Nelly Andrikopoulou. Το ταξίδι του Ματαρόα, 1945 [Mataroa's Voyage, 1945]. Athens: "Hestia" Printing House, 2007. ISBN 978-960-05-1348-6.Giorgio Baruchello and Ingerid S. Straume (eds.). Creation, Rationality and Autonomy: Essays on Cornelius Castoriadis. AarhusUniversitetsforlag. 2013. ISBN 978-878-75-6499-1.Maurice Brinton. For Workers' Power. Selected Writings (https://books.google.com/books?id=_ztHKlN_ObwC&dq=) (ed. DavidGoodway). Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0.David Ames Curtis, "Socialism or Barbarism: The Alternative Presented in the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis." Revue Européenne desSciences Sociales, 86 (December 1989): 293–322.<https://www.academia.edu/13495706/Socialism_or_Barbarism_The_Alternative_Presented_in_the_Work_of_Cornelius_Castoriadis>.Dimitris Eleas. Ιδιωτικός Κορνήλιος: Προσωπική Μαρτυρία για τον Καστοριάδη [Private Cornelius: Personal Testimony aboutCastoriadis]. Athens: Angelakis, July 2014. ISBN 978-618-5011-69-7.Andrea Gabler. Antizipierte Autonomie. Zur Theorie und Praxis der Gruppe "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (1949–1967). Hanover: OffizinVerlag, 2009. ISBN 978-3-930345-64-9.Jürgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: "Excursus on Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution." Polity Press, 1990,pp. 327–35. ISBN 0-7456-0830-2.Axel Honneth. "Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Cornelius Castoriadis' Theory of Society". In: The Fragmanted World ofthe Social. Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (https://books.google.com/books?id=zKxkigoKGosC&dq=) (ed. Charles Wright),SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 168–183. ISBN 978-1-4384-0700-5.Hans Joas. Pragmatism and Social Theory (https://books.google.com/books?id=pxqc02veu2kC&dq=%22). University of ChicagoPress, 1993, pp. 154–171. ISBN 978-0-226-40042-6Vrasidas Karalis (ed.). Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy. Brill, 2009. ISBN 978-90-04-27858-5.Alexandros Kioupkiolis. Freedom After the Critique of Foundations: Marx, Liberalism, Castoriadis and Agonistic Autonomy (https://books.google.com/books?id=aOKx3wezJ_QC&vq=). Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 0-230-27912-0.Jeff Klooger. Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (https://books.google.com/books/about/Castoriadis.html?id=7ObcK83Qi8QC&redir_esc=y). Brill, 2009. ISBN 978-90-04-17529-7.Yannis Ktenas and Alexandros Schismenos.(eds.) Η Σκέψη του Κορνήλιου Καστοριάδη και η Σημασία της για μας Σήμερα [TheThought of Cornelius Castoriadis and its Significance for Us Today]. Athens: Eurasia books. 2018. ISBN 978-618-5027-89-6.Serge Latouche. Cornelius Castoriadis ou l'autonomie radicale. Le Passager Clandestin, 2014. ISBN 978-2-36935-008-8.Johann Michel. Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists: Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Castoriadis. Rowman & LittlefieldInternational, 2014. ISBN 978-1-78348-094-4.

62. Cornelius Castoriadis (1999). « La rationalité du capitalisme » inFigures du Pensable, Paris: Seuil.

63. IIS, pp. 142–3.64. Jacques Derrida. Positions. University of Chicago Press, 1982,

p. 57 (https://books.google.gr/books?id=OCJonuW4L_EC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA57#v=onepage&q=no%20concept%20is&f=false).

65. Yannis Ktenas. How Castoriadis read Weber: Meaning, values,and imaginary institution. Published: March 6, 2018 fromPUBLIC SEMINAR (http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/03/how-castoriadis-read-weber/).

66. Ricardo Duchesne. Uniqueness of Western Civilization. BRILL,2011, p. 267 (https://books.google.gr/books?id=pWmDPzPo0XAC&lpg=PP1&dq=The%20Uniqueness%20of%20Western%20Civilization&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=ontogenetic&f=false).

67. IIS, p. 23.68. EA, p. 9.69. IIS, pp. 223–5.70. WIF, p. 373.71. FT B, p. 80.

172. Note that he doesn't entirely exclude its definition, in chaostheory, as a state of maximum entropy.

173. Castoriadis advocated that "[t]he surging forth [surgissement] ofsignification—of the institution, of society—is creation and self-creation. ... Signification emerges to cover over the Chaos, thusbringing into being a mode of being that posits itself as negationof the Chaos" (WIF, p. 315).

174. WIF, p. 72; cf. Renaissance republics.175. FT A: "Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads," p. 146.176. FT A: "Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads," p. 134.177. Elliott 2003, p. 101.178. Joas, H. 1989. "Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The

Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis's PoliticalPhilosophy", American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 4: 5 (March),1184–99.

179. Arnason, J. P. 1989. "Culture and Imaginary Significations",Thesis Eleven, February 1989, 22(1): 25–45.

180. Ecrits politiques, Cornelius Castoriadis, Livres, LaProcure.com(https://web.archive.org/web/20150718153609/http://www.laprocure.com/ecrits-politiques-1945-1997-cornelius-castoriadis/9782358211031.html)

Sources

Further reading

Mathieu Noury. Cornelius Castoriadis, sociologue ? Critique sociologique de l'ontologie de la création imaginaire sociale (http://www.fss.ulaval.ca/cms_recherche/upload/aspectssociologiques/fichiers/noury2011.pdf). Revue Aspects Sociologiques, 18(1), March 2011.Yorgos Oikonomou (ed.), Η Γένεση της Δημοκρατίας και η Σημερινή Κρίση [The Birth of Democracy and Contemporary Crisis]. Athens:Eurasia books. 2011. ISBN 978-960-8187-77-1.Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, "Risked democracy: Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks" (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/risked-democracy-2). Radical Philosophy 166 (March/April 2011).Jean-Louis Prat. Introduction à Castoriadis. Paris: La Découverte. 2007. ISBN 978-2-7071-5083-7.Richard Rorty. "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future." Northwestern University Law Review, 82(2):335–51 (1988).Alexandros Schismenos and Nikos Ioannou. Μετά τον Καστοριάδη. Δρόμοι της Αυτονομίας στον 21ο Αιώνα. [After Castoriadis. Roadsto Autonomy in the 21st Century]. Athens: Exarcheia, 2014. ISBN 978-618-5128-03-6.Schismenos, Alexandros. "Imagination and Interpretation: On the dialogue between Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur" (http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/01/imagination-and-interpretation/).Schismenos, Alexandros. "Time in the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis." (https://socratesjournal.com/index.php/SOCRATES/article/view/316) SOCRATES. 5(3 and 4):64–81 (April 2018).Alexandros Schismenos, Nikos Ioannou and Chris Spannos. Castoriadis and Autonomy in the Twenty First Century (https://castoriadis-and-autonomy-book.info/). London: Bloomsbury, 2021. ISBN 9781350123373, 9781350123380.Society of Friends of Cornelius Castoriadis. Ψυχή, Λόγος, Πόλις [Psyche, Logos, Polis]. Athens: Ypsilon, 2007. ISBN 978-960-17-0219-3.Yannis Stavrakakis. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (https://books.google.com/books?id=zYA251byjVYC&vq=).Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 37–65. ISBN 0-7914-7329-5.Yavor Tarinski. Short Introduction to the Political Legacy of Castoriadis (https://www.aftoleksi.gr/2020/04/24/short-introduction-to-the-political-legacy-of-castoriadis-ebook/). Athens: Aftoleksi, 2020.Thesis Eleven, Special Issue 'Cornelius Castoriadis', 49(1), May 1997. London: Sage Publications. ISSN 0725-5136.John B. Thompson. Studies in the Theory of Ideology (https://books.google.com/books?id=4nryBXmTFw0C&source=gbs_navlinks_s).University of California Press, 1984, Chapter 1: "Ideology and the Social Imaginary. An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort". ISBN 978-0-520-05411-0.Marcela Tovar-Restrepo, Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy: New Approaches to Subjectivity, Society, and Social Change (https://books.google.com/books?id=3j-__aKL888C&dq=). Continuum International Publishing, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4411-5226-8.Joel Whitebook. "Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche: Habermas and Castoriadis on the Unconscious". In: MaurizioPasserin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on ThePhilosophical Discourse of Modernity (https://books.google.com/books?id=P4kg3t6j5FgC&dq=castoriadis&source=gbs_navlinks_s).MIT Press, 1997, pp. 172–193. ISBN 978-0-262-54080-3.

Media related to Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikimedia Commons Quotations related to Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikiquote Cornelius Castoriadis at Wikibooks The dictionary definition of anerithmon gelasma at Wiktionary

Overviews

"Cornelius Castoriadis" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/castoria). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Interviews

Videotaped interview (http://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis.html) with Chris MarkerInterview with Cornelius Castoriadis for the show "Paraskinio," of the Greek television network ET1 (1984) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs9ZsKj-o1k) on YouTube (with English subtitles)"Broadcast information on radio interviews with Cornelius Castoriadis" (http://inatheque.ina.fr/Ina/ws/dlr/dlweb/general/ResultSet?w=NATIVE%28%27ITOUSTEXT+ph+like+%27%27Cornelius+Castoriadis%27%27%27%29&r=1&rpp=50&upp=0) (in French). InstitutNational de l'Audiovisuel. Retrieved 17 December 2013. (The files and documents kept at the Inathèque de France can be consulted atthe consultation centre at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

Obituaries; biographies

Cornelius Castoriadis 1922–1997 (http://libcom.org/history/articles/1922-1997-cornelius-castoriadis/) at the libertarian communistwebsite libcom.org, 27 September 2003David Ames Curtis. "Cornelius Castoriadis: An Obituary." Salmagundi, Spring–Summer 1998: 52–61. Reprinted as "CorneliusCastoriadis: Philosopher of the Social Imagination." Free Associations, 7:3 (1999): 321–30. Available online:<http://www.agorainternational.org/about.html>.Symposium: Cornelius Castoriadis, 1922–1997 (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/symposium-cornelius-castoriadis-1922%e2%80%931997), obituaries and profiles by Axel Honneth, Edgar Morin, and Joel Whitebook, Radical Philosophy magazine, July/August1998 (access restricted to subscribers)"Obituary: Castoriadis and the democratic tradition" (http://www.democracynature.org/vol4/fotopoulos_castor.pdf) by Takis Fotopoulos,Democracy & Nature, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1997)

Bibliographies; analyses; critiques

The Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website (http://www.agorainternational.org) contains bibliographies and videographies inmany languages, a Castoriadis interview, a "Teaching Castoriadis" section, videos from the 1990 Castoriadis Colloqium at Cerisy

External links

(France), and the complete text of the Socialisme ou Barbarie magazine series (texts scanned in the original French), as well as "News"items of current and past interestL'Association Castoriadis (http://castoriadis.org) with bibliography, news, media events, original articles (in French)"Castoriadis" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/castoria/): entry by John V. Garner, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Cornelius Castoriadis and the triumph of the will" (http://www.marxists.de/trotism/callinicos/4-3_heresies.htm) by Alex Callinicos,Chapter 4.3 of Trotskyism, 1990Cornelius Castoriadis (http://libcom.org/tags/cornelius-castoriadis), critical analysis at the libertarian communist website libcom.org"An Introduction to Cornelius Castoriadis' Work" (http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number6/castoriadis1.htm) by Fabio Ciaramelli, Journalof European Psychoanalysis #6, Winter 1998 (access restricted to subscribers)"The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis" (http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i29/29a01401.htm) by Scott McLemee, Chronicle ofHigher Education, 26 March 2004 (access restricted to subscribers) (reprint (http://www.notbored.org/strange-afterlife.html))Full text of the Cornelius Castoriadis symposium (http://nome.unak.is/previous-issues/issues/vol3_2/) held at the University of Akureyri,from the special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum, e-magazine of Nordic and Mediterranean studies, December 2008Houston, Christopher, "Islam, Castoriadis and autonomy" (https://www.academia.edu/630731/Islamism_Castoriadis_and_Autonomy).Thesis Eleven, February 2004, 76(1), pp. 49–69Suzi Adams, "Castoriadis' long journey through Nomos: Institution, creation, interpretation" (https://www.academia.edu/516975/Castoriadis_Long_Journey_Through_Nomos_Institution_Creation_Interpretation). Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 70 (June), 269–295 (2008)Linda M.G. Zerilli (2002), "Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130328112200/http://www.arts.yorku.ca/politics/ncanefe/docs/castoriadis%20and%20arendt.pdf), doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00302 (https://doi.org/10.1111%2F1467-8675.00302)"The autonomy project and Inclusive Democracy: a critical review of Castoriadis' thought" (http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no2_takis_castoriadis.htm), by Takis Fotopoulos, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2008)"Unities and Tensions in the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis With Some Considerations on the Question of Organization" (https://issuu.com/magmareview/docs/athens-nostrikeoutword_1_) by David Ames Curtis, talk delivered to "Autonomy or Barbarism"-sponsored eventin Athens, 7 December 2007Exchange of letters between Cornelius Castoriadis and Anton Pannekoek (http://viewpointmag.com/deviations-part-1-the-castoriadis-pannekoek-exchange/), originally published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, translated and introduced by Viewpoint Magazine (http://viewpointmag.com/)

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Claude LefortBorn 21 April 1924

Paris,[1] France

Died 3 October 2010(aged 86)Paris,[2][3] France

Alma mater University of Paris

Era Contemporaryphilosophy

Region Western philosophy

School ContinentalphilosophyWestern Marxism(1942–1958)Libertarian socialism[4]

(1946–1958)Anti-totalitarian left[5]

(after 1958)

Maininterests

Political philosophy,phenomenology,totalitarianism

Notableideas

Totalitarianism as theabolition of theseparation betweenstate and societyDemocracy as thesystem characterizedby theinstitutionalization ofconflict within society

Influences

Machiavelli, La Boétie, Tocqueville,Marx, Kantorowicz, Arendt,

Merleau-Ponty, Solzhenitsyn,Castoriadis

Influenced

Marcel Gauchet, Miguel Abensour,Daniel Cohn-Bendit[6]

Claude LefortClaude Lefort (/ləˈfɔːr/; French: [ləfɔʁ]; 21 April 1924 – 3 October2010) was a French philosopher and activist.

He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, thephenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty[7] (whose posthumouspublications Lefort later edited).[8] By 1943 he was organising afaction of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste at theLycée Henri-IV in Paris.

Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him.From 1946 he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu–MontalTendency, so called from their pseudonyms Pierre Chaulieu(Castoriadis) and Claude Montal (Lefort). They published On theRegime and Against the Defence of the USSR, a critique of both theSoviet Union and its Trotskyist supporters. They suggested that theUSSR was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that itconsisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western Europeansocieties. By 1948, having tried to persuade other Trotskyists of theirviewpoint, they broke away with about a dozen others and foundedthe libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort's textL'Expérience prolétarienne was important in shifting the group's focustowards forms of self-organisation.

For a time Lefort wrote for both the journal Socialisme ou Barbarieand for Les Temps Modernes.[9] His involvement in the latter journalended after a published debate during 1952–4 over Jean-Paul Sartre'sarticle The Communists and Peace. Lefort was for a long timeuncomfortable with Socialisme ou Barbarie's "organisationalist"tendencies. In 1958 he, Henri Simon and others left Socialisme ouBarbarie[10] and formed the group Informations et Liaison Ouvrières(Workers' Information and Liaison).

In his academic career, Lefort taught at the University of São Paulo, atthe Sorbonne and at the École des Hautes Études en SciencesSociales (EHESS), being affiliated to the Centre de recherchespolitiques Raymond Aron.[11] He has written on the early politicalwriters Niccolò Machiavelli and Étienne de La Boétie and explored"the Totalitarian enterprise" in its "denial of social division... [and] ofthe difference between the order of power, the order of law and theorder of knowledge".[12]

BiographyPhilosophical work

Conception of totalitarianism

Contents

The double fence societyThe organicist vision of societyThe fragility of the system

Conception of democracy

PublicationsEnglish translations

ReferencesSources

Lefort studied at the Sorbonne.[13] He became a Marxist in his youth under the influence of his teacher,Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From 1944, he belonged to the small French Trotskyite. In 1946, he met CorneliusCastoriadis who came to Paris from Greece. Right away, they formed a faction in the Trotskyist PartiCommuniste Internationaliste called "Chaulieu–Montal Tendency", that left the party and became theSocialism or Barbarism group and which, in 1949, started a journal with this name.

Socialism or Barbarism considered the USSR to be an example of state capitalism and gave its support to anti-bureaucratic revolts in Eastern Europe — especially the uprising in Budapest in 1956. Differences of opinionbrought about a schism within Socialism or Barbarism, and Lefort sided with Henri Simon, one of thefounders of the group Informations et Liaison Ouvrières (Workers' Information and Liaison)—later renamed"Informations et Correspondance Ouvrieres" (Worker's Information and Correspondence)—in 1958. That yearhe abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution and ceased his militant activism.[14]

After having worked amongst other places, in 1947 and 1948 for UNESCO, in 1949 Lefort passed theaggregation in philosophy: he taught at the high school in Nîmes (1950) and in Reims (1951). In 1951, he wasrecruited as a sociology assistant at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch. In the year 1952 (following a disputewith Gurvitch), he was detached from the sociology section of the CNRS, until 1966, with a break of twoyears (1953–1954), when he was professor of philosophy at University of São Paulo (Brazil). As for theCNRS, the support of Raymond Aron led to his recruitment as a teacher of sociology at the University ofCaen, where he worked from 1966 to 1971, the year when he defended as his doctoral thesis his book onMachiavelli, The Labour of Work. That same year, he was again hired as a researcher in the sociology sectionof the CNRS until 1976, when he joined the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he stayeduntil his retirement in 1989.

The intellectual work of Lefort is strongly tied to his participation, often tension filled, in successive journals.With Les Temps Modernes ("Modern Times") – introduced by Merleau-Ponty – he took part in the "gatheringsof collaborators" and wrote from 1945 until his debate with J. P. Sartre in 1953. In Socialism or Barbarism(which lasted from 1949 to 1967 and of which he was the co-founder), he was active until 1950, then from1955 to 1958. He was involved in Textures (established in 1969) from 1971 to the end (1975) and there hebrought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour. With them (as well as Pierre Clastres and Marcel Gauchet) hecreated Libre in 1977, which was published up until 1980, when there were some disagreements withCastoriadis as well as with Gauchet. From 1982 to 1984, he led Passé-Present where amongst others MiguelAbensour, Carlos Semprún Maura, Claude Mouchard and Pierre Pachet participated. These last two as well asClaude Habib formed the reading committee of the Littérature et Politique that Lefort founded for the publisherÉditions Belin in 1987.

Biography

No doubt he assigned less importance to the research centers at which he had participated in EHESS: theCECMAS (center of the study of mass communication), founded by Georges Friedmann and whichwelcomed Edgar Morin, then the Centre Aron, which he frequented just before his death.

When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, Lefort took charge of the publication of his manuscripts. In the 1970s, hedeveloped an analysis of bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe. He read The Gulag Archipelago andpublished a book on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His main ideas on Stalinist totalitarianism were published in1981 in a collection titled L'Invention démocratique.

Lefort was part of the political theorists who put forward the relevance of a notion of totalitarianism which wasrelevant to Stalinism as well as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the bigcategories used in the western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny.However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the notion to Nazi Germany and the SovietUnion between 1936 and 1953, Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in the second half of thecentury, that is, to an era when terror, a central element of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its mostextreme dimensions.

It is in the study of these regimes, and the reading of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by AleksandrSolzhenitsyn, where he developed his analysis of totalitarianism.

Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a double "fence": Totalitarianism abolishes the separationbetween state and society: the political power permeates society, and all preexisting human relations – classsolidarity, professional or religious cooperations – tend to be replaced with a one-dimensional hierarchybetween those who order and those who obey. This is made possible especially through the associationbetween state and the party hierarchy which is always very close, so that the party hierarchy becomes theeffective power. Lefort, like other theorists, thus identifies the destruction of public space and its fusion withthe political power as a key element of totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism denies what Lefort calls "the principle of internal divisions of society", and its conception ofsociety is marked by "the affirmation of the totality". Every organization, association or profession is thussubordinated to the planning of the state. The differences of opinion, one of the values of democracy, isabolished so that the entire social body is directed towards the same goal; even personal tastes becomepoliticized and must be standardized. The aim of totalitarianism is to create a united and a closed society, inwhich the components are not individuals and which is defined completely by the same goals, the sameopinions and the same practices. Stalinism thus knew the "identification of the people to the proletariat, of theproletariat to the party, of the party to the management, of the management to the 'Égocrate'".[15]

Lefort demonstrates the central difference between totalitarianism and dictatorship: a dictatorship can admitcompeting transcendental principles, like religion; the ideology of the totalitarian party is religion. Adictatorship does not aim for the destruction and absorption of society, and a dictatorial power is a power of thestate against society, that presupposes the distinction of the two; the plan of a totalitarian party is to merge statewith society in a closed, united and uniform system, subordinated under the fulfilment of a plan – "socialism"in the case of the USSR. Lefort calls this system "people-one": "The process of identification of power andsociety, the process of homogenisation of the social space, the process of the closing up of society and theauthority to enchain it in order to constitute the totalitarian system."[16]

Philosophical work

Conception of totalitarianism

The double fence society

The totalitarian system, unified and organized, presents itself like a body, the "social body": "dictatorship,bureaucracy and apparatus need a new system of bodies".[17] Lefort returns to the theories of ErnstKantorowicz on the "two bodies of the king", in which the person of the totalitarian leader, besides hisphysical and mortal body, is a political body representing the one-people. In order to ensure its properfunctioning and to maintain its unity, the totalitarian system requires an Other, "the evil other",[18] arepresentation of the exterior, the enemy, against which the party combats, "the representative of the forces ofthe old society (kulaks, bourgeois), [...] the emissary of the stranger, of the imperialistic world".[19]

The division between the interior and the exterior, between the One-people and the Other, is the only divisionthat totalitarianism tolerates, since it is founded upon this division. Lefort insists on the fact that "theconstitution of the One-people necessitates the incessant production of enemies"[19] and also speaks of their"invention". For example, Stalin prepared to attack the Jews of USSR when he died, i.e., designing a newenemy, and in the same way, Mussolini had declared that bourgeois would be eliminated in Italy after WorldWar II.

The relation between the one-people and the Other is a prophylactic command: the enemy is a "parasite toeliminate", a "waste". This exceeds the simple rhetorical effect that was commonly used in the contemporarypolitical discourse, yet in an underlying way it is part of the metaphorical vision of the totalitarian society as abody. This vision explained how the existence both of enemies of the state and their presence in the bosom ofthe population, were seen as an illness. The violence roused against them was, in this organicist metaphor, afever, a symptom of the fight of the social body against the illness, in the sense that "the campaign against theenemy is feverish: the fever is good, it's the sign, in the society, of the evil to counteract".[20]

The situation of the totalitarian leader within this system is paradoxical and uncertain, for he is at the same timea part of the system – its head, who commands the rest – and the representation of the system – everything. Heis therefore the incarnation of the "one-power", i.e., the power executed in all parts of the "one-people".

Lefort didn't consider totalitarianism as a situation almost as an ideal type, which could potentially be realizedthrough terror and extermination. He rather sees in it a set of processes which have endings that cannot beknown, thus their success cannot be determined. If the will of the totalitarian party to realize the perfect unityof the social body controls the magnitude of its action, it also implies that the goal is impossible to achievebecause its development necessarily leads to contradictions and oppositions. "Totalitarianism is a regime with aprevailing sense of being gnawed away by the absurdity of its own ambition (total control by the party) andthe active or passive resistance of those subjected to it" summarised the political scientist Dominique Colas.[21]

Claude Lefort formulates his conception of democracy by mirroring his conception of totalitarism, developingit in the same way by analyzing regimes of Eastern Europe and USSR. For Lefort democracy is the systemcharacterized by the institutionalization of conflict within society, the division of social body; it recognizes andeven considers legitimate the existence of divergent interests, conflicting opinions, visions of the world that areopposed and even incompatible. Lefort's vision makes the disappearance of the leader as a political body – theputting to death of the king, as Kantorowicz calls it – the founding moment of democracy because it makes theseat of power, hitherto occupied by an eternal substance transcending the mere physical existence of monarchs,into an "empty space" where groups with shared interests and opinions can succeed each other, but only for atime and at the will of elections. Power is no longer tied to any specific programme, goal, or proposal; it is

The organicist vision of society

The fragility of the system

Conception of democracy

nothing but a collection of instruments put temporarily at the disposal of those who win a majority. "In Lefort'sinvented and inventive democracy," writes Dominique Colas, "power comes from the people and belongs tono one."[22]

Democracy is thus a regime marked by its vagueness, its incompleteness, against which totalitarianismestablishes itself. This leads Lefort to regard as "democratic" every form of opposition and protest againsttotalitarianism. The opposition and protest creates, in a way, a democratic space within the totalitarian system.Democracy is innovation, the start of new movements, the designation of new issues in the struggle againstoppression, it is a "creative power capable of weakening, even slaying the totalitarian Leviathan".[23] ALeviathan whose paradoxical frailty Lefort emphasises.

The separation of civil society from the state, which characterizes modern democracy, is made possible by thedisembodiment of society. A democratic country can also experience this inventive character when any groupof citizens with a legitimate struggle may seek to establish new rights or defend its interests.

Lefort does not reject representative democracy, but does not limit democracy to it. For instance, he includesthe social movements in the sphere of legitimate political debate.

La Brèche, en collaboration avec Edgar Morin, P. Coudray (pseudonyme de CorneliusCastoriadis), Fayard, Paris, 1968.Éléments d'une critique de la bureaucratie, Droz, Genève, 1971. 2nd edition with Gallimard,Paris, 1979."The Age of Novelty". Telos 29 (Fall 1976). Telos Press, New York..Le Travail de l'œuvre, Machiavel, Gallimard, Paris, 1972 (republié coll. « Tel », 1986).Un Homme en trop. Essai sur l'archipel du goulag de Soljénitsyne, Le Seuil, Paris, 1975(republié, Le Seuil poche – 1986).Les Formes de l'histoire, Gallimard, Paris, 1978.Sur une colonne absente. Autour de Merleau-Ponty, Gallimard, Paris, 1978.L'Invention démocratique. Les Limites de la domination totalitaire, Fayard, Paris, 1981.Essais sur le politique : XIXe et XXe siècles, Seuil, Paris, 1986.Écrire à l'épreuve du politique, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1992.La Complication, Fayard, Paris, 1999.Les Formes de l'histoire. Essais d'anthropologie politique, Gallimard, Paris, «Folio Essais»,2000.Le Temps présent, Belin, Paris, 2007.

The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (MIT Press,1986)Democracy and Political Theory (MIT Press, 1989)Writing: The Political Test (Duke University Press, 2000)Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press,2007)Machiavelli in the Making (Northwestern University Press, 2012)"Proletarian Experience (1952)" (https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/26/proletarian-experience),Viewpoint Magazine 3 (September 2013).

Publications

English translations

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Claude_Lefort&oldid=1036788811"

1. Le Baut (2011), p. 2142. "Claude Lefort est décédé" (http://blog.passi

on-histoire.net/?p=7439) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110716022705/http://blog.passion-histoire.net/?p=7439) 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine

3. Disparitions (page 70) – Le Monde (http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/70.html)

4. Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test,Duke University Press, 2000, Translator'sForeword by David Ames Curtis, p. xxiv:"Castoriadis, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ... Lefort ... are themselves quitearticulate in their own right and historicallyassociated with a libertarian socialistoutlook..."

5. James D. Ingram (2006), "The Politics ofClaude Lefort's Political: BetweenLiberalism and Radical Democracy", ThesisEleven 87(1), 2006, pp. 33–50, esp. p. 48 n.8.

6. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel Cohn-Bendit,Obsolete Communism: The Left-WingAlternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans(London: André Deutsch Ltd., 1968), p. 133.

7. Anonymous (1976), p. 1738. Merleau-Ponty (1968)9. Anonymous (1976), p. 176

10. Castoriadis, Cornelius; Anti-Mythes(January 1974). "An Interview with C.Castoriadis". Telos (23): 133.

11. "Centre de recherches politiques RaymondAron: Claude Lefort" (http://crpra.ehess.fr/document.php?id=31). EHESS. Retrieved2008-09-27.

12. Lefort (2000)13. Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century

French Philosophy: Key Themes AndThinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 154.

14. Paul Lucardie, Democratic Extremism inTheory and Practice: All Power to thePeople, Routledge, 2013, Ch. 4:Jacobinland (The New Left, 'autogestion'and council-democracy): "In his later work,Lefort moved further away from Marxism andcouncilism..."

15. Lefort (1981), p. 17516. Lefort (1981), p. 10317. Lefort (1981), p. 10918. Lefort (1981), p. 17619. Lefort (1981), p. 17320. Lefort (1981), p. 17421. Colas (1986), p. 58722. Colas (1986), p. 58923. Colas (1986), p. 586

Anonymous (1976). "An interview with Claude Lefort". Telos. 1976 (30): 173–192.doi:10.3817/1276030173 (https://doi.org/10.3817%2F1276030173). S2CID 219190998 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:219190998).Colas, Dominique (1986). "Lefort Claude, 1924– : L'invention démocratique. Les limites de ladomination totalitaire, 1981". In François Châtelet; Olivier Duhamel; Évelyne Pisier (eds.).Dictionnaire des œuvres politiques. Quadrige / Référence. 329 (4th ed.). Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France. pp. 585–591. ISBN 2-13-051878-8.Le Baut, Hervé (2011). Présence de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Harmattan.ISBN 9782296446670.Lefort, Claude (1981). L'invention démocratique. Les limites de la domination totalitaire. Paris:Fayard.Lefort, Claude (2000). "Philosopher?". Writing: The Political Test. Duke University Press.pp. 236–251. ISBN 0-8223-2520-9.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press.ISBN 2-07-028625-8.

References

Sources

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S U N D A Y , N O V E M B E R 1 7 , 2 0 1 3

Albert Camus at 100: reclaiming hisradical,democratic legacy

November 7 is the 100thanniversary of the birth ofAlbert Camus, the author ofThe Rebel, The Stranger, ThePlague, the Myth of Sysiphus,and other works and the winnerof the 1957 Nobel Prize forLiterature. The odds are highthat if you are of a certain age,you were assigned to read oneor more of these in high schoolor college. I know I was. Iremember liking the Camus Iread, but haven't thought abouthim for years. I doubt thatCamus is still taught.

Existentialism and the absurd are out of date.

But I am thinking that Camus is not passe and am pleased to see thatothers agree.

Sean Carroll, in the Huffington Post explains "Why Camus HasEndured"

World War II produced a pantheon of great statesmen who ralliedtheir countries in their hour of need. But even the immenselypopular Churchill and de Gaulle promptly fell out of favor aftervictory. One prominent voice of the war, however, managed notonly to grow in influence in peacetime, but continues to enjoywidespread admiration and popularity today: the writer AlbertCamus.

On the centennial of his birth into a poor family in Algiers, andmore than 50 years after his tragic death in an auto accident,Camus and his works still attract intense interest around theworld. The struggles in which Camus fought ‐‐ World War II, theCold War, Algeria ‐‐ have long passed, why has he endured sowell?

University of Houston history professor Robert Zaretsky, author of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (2010) and A Life Worth Living:Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (2013) had two veryinteresting interesting articles on Camus published about Camus onHuffington Post and In These Times

On Huffington Post he concludes 7 Things You Didn't Know About AlbertCamus

Camus was not George Orwell's twin who, separated at birth,was raised in French Algeria. Orwell was taller and wore tweed.The rumor is, however, understandable. Both men smokedrelentlessly, both men were tubercular, both men died too youngand both men acted on their political convictions: Orwell duringthe Spanish Civil War, Camus during World War II. (Camus hadalso wanted to join the republicans in France, but histuberculosis prevented him from doing so.) Both men remainedon the Left, despite the very best efforts of the French andBritish Lefts, mesmerized by communism, to disown them. Bothmen, with their moral lucidity and personal courage, wereessential witnesses not just to their age, but remain so for ourown age as well.

Zaretsky's In These Times article "Reading Camus in Tunisia: TheRebel and the Arab Spring."

Arab voices have begun to echo the man who was once seen asan apologist for French colonialism. The Moroccan magazineZamane recently identified Camus as the “moralist missing inthis new century of fear,” while the Tunisian intellectual AkramBelkaid, discussing the self‐immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi—the foundational act of Arab Spring—exclaimed: “Yesterday itwas Camus, today it is Bouazizi: He is no longer part of ourworld, but he is not silent. His cry is primal: he demands theright to dignity.” And though Algeria remains quiet, its writersincreasingly turn to Camus. Assia Djebar, for one, has placedCamus in the pantheon of Algeria’s—not French Algeria’s—political martyrs. The Algerian writer Hamid Grine published anovel titled Camus dans le narguilé (Camus in the Hookah), inwhich the narrator discovers that his biological father was noneother than the author of The Stranger. This leads to his odysseyfor both his real father and the literary legacy lost to Algeria.

The November 7 NPR report on Camus narrowly focused on Camus'Algerian connection and included the strange comment that "Thoughhe hailed from the left, today he's embraced by conservatives." This is a clumsy formulation that implies Camus started on the left, butended up somewhere else.

Camus, in fact, was a man of the left. He resigned from UNESCO inprotest when Franco's Spain was admitted. This was not an isolatedprotest. Even after he became a best‐selling and affluent author,Camus wrote for and served on the editorial boards of small journalsof the non‐totalitarian left.

Lou Marin, a European anarchist activist and writer, has written avery useful and informative essay The Unknown Camus: Albert Camusand the Impact of his Contributions as a Journalist to the Pacifist,Anarchist and Syndicalist Press ( (I suspect that Marin's essay mayneglect Camus' relationships with other segments of the left.)

Here are a few quotes

In 1948 Camus set up an organisation to help political prisonersin Franco’s Spain, the Soviet Union and other authoritarianregimes, the Groupes de liaison international (GLI)(International Liaison Groups)....the proletarian activists andthe intellectuals collaborating within the GLI were positionedsomewhere in between Trotskyite and anarchist milieus, butwere working together in this campaign.

It sees that Camus adopted a "third camp" position on the Cold War. Camus was on the editorial board of La Révolution prolétarienne

which warned of a new world war in the Cold War era of the1950s and worked for a concept of peace based on anti‐Stalinistpremises.

Marin also provides important information about Camus and Algeriawhich is usually ignored.

an additional appeal by Camus, dated October 1957, in which hecondemns the assassinations of the armed Algerian LiberationFront, Front de Libération nationale (FLN), and the murderouscampaign it was waging against the syndicalists of the Algerianindependence movement under Messali Hadj (1898‐1974). In thisappeal, Camus poses crucial questions. For example: do theseassassination tactics against fellow nationalist‐syndicalistssuggest a totalitarian character on the part of the FLN? Everysyndicalist killed, Camus argues, reduces the legitimacy of theFLN a little further. He considers it a duty for anarchists to speakout publicly against the good conscience’ of an anti‐colonialistleft that justifies everything, and against political murder withintheir own ranks in the first place.

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New Appeal to ReasonPolitics from a democratic left perspective from the middle of the United States

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And the conclusion

While we are happy about the Camus renaissance in France –after two decades of decided neglect by the pro‐Sartre Europeanleft of the 1970s and 1980s – and while we welcome arehabilitation of Camus’ critique of violent tactics andnationalism in the face of a civil war in Algeria, we neverthelessreject this kind of opportunistic appropriation of Camus byFrench New Philosophers such as André Glucksmann and others,who are nowadays nothing more than cheapapologists for the ruling capitalist system and the Frenchright. To present Camus as a right‐wing critic of totalitarianismis to put him back in the bipolar context of the Cold War, whereSartre and Jeanson wanted to place him during the debates ofthe 1950s, and from which Camus always wanted to flee with thehelp of his anarchist friends and the relationship he maintainedwith anarchist, pacifist and syndicalist periodicals.

(Another account of Camus and anarchism can be found here.)

Posted by Unknown at 10:24 AM

Labels: Albert Camus, anarchism, democratic left

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