Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis

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* Book: Cornelius Castoriadis. Dialogue. L'Aube, 1999

Review

Michel Bauwens, 2003:

These are the transcripts of series of debates between Cornelis Castoridis, the ex-Trotskyist and eventually post-Marxist Greek thinker who went his own way, that took place on the radio programs of France Culture.

The first conversation is with Mexican author Octavio Paz, and was organized by Alain Finkelkraut. It starts with criticism of modern apathy, the destruction of all value systems by economism and consumerism. It ends with a consensus on the need to revive the conception of the person, not only in its uniqueness , but alsl always in its connection with the other, and in the context of an autonomous society.

The second interview explains his revolt towards certain aspects of Marxism, in particular its determinism and rationalism, and his insistence on therole of the radical personal imaginatin as well as the collective imaginary, the latter creating the institutions. The conversation focuses on psycho-analysis and it discusses the personal and collective fear of death. The religious myth was originally replaced by the immanent myth of progress, in its liberal and Marxist forms, both of which have lost their hold on our imagination and it is this crisis which constitutes the death of meaning in our culture.