Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a left-wing intellectual of post-war France who gave ancient Greece an important place in his wide-ranging system of thought. Adding to the number of English translations of his writings on ancient Greece, The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982-1983 will certainly be of interest for those without French interested in this aspect of Castoriadis’ work.[1] I can think of two groups, aside from devoted readers of Castoriadis, who may be interested. First, readers of current English-language scholarship on Greek democracy may be curious—for Castoriadis has a minor presence in this scholarship.[2] More generally, this book will be worth considering for anyone invested in the tradition of theorizing about modern politics and philosophy by theorizing about Greek politics and philosophy. To this tradition (which includes the likes of Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss, Karatani, to name a few) Castoriadis makes a distinctly socialist-existentialist contribution.
This book translates Ce qui fait la Grèce 1: D’Homère à Héraclite, the first in a series of volumes of the seminars given by Castoriadis at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris from the early eighties to the mid-nineties. The book contains the transcripts for twelve of the thirteen sessions of that year (record of the ninth session has been lost). The editors have supplied useful footnotes throughout and set the stage with a thought-provoking introduction. These are supplemented well by the translators’ humbler notes and introduction. The book also includes three additional texts: a very brief report by Castoriadis on the seminars from 1980-1982 preceding the ones on Greece, a previously unpublished essay by Castoriadis entitled “Political Thought”, and an homage to Castoriadis written by Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The “Political Thought” essay, in my opinion, pulls together the book by laying out more completely Castoriadis’ vision of Greece than what is offered in the seminars, which themselves are limited to archaic Greece. The essay by Vidal-Naquet is elegant and astute; it also picks up on the debate between the two made available at the end of the English edition of Cleisthenes the Athenian; it will be especially appreciated by those interested in the history of the Paris School and Castoriadis’ relation to it.
The book’s central claim is that Greek philosophy and politics are characterized by the same collective insight or attitude (or “imaginary”).[3] This insight/attitude is that society has no meaning or purpose or method apart from what it creates for itself. Such an insight/attitude gives rise, on Castoriadis’ reading, to the theoretical institution of questioning received truths (philosophy) and the practical institution of contesting and changing received laws and institutions (politics). Only imperfectly, however, do Greek philosophy and politics, in their separation, manifest their foundational insight/attitude. A more perfect manifestation would be an activity of self-critical self-creation that is dynamically theoretical and practical at once. This imperfection—present also in the modern socialist movements that occupied Castoriadis throughout his life—means that “there has not been, up to the present, any genuine political thought” (249).
In these seminars Castoriadis’ method is to identify hints or seeds of this “genuine political thought” in various literary and philosophical sources. He discusses the poems of Homer (seminars III-V) and Hesiod (VIII), Greek mythology and common religious concepts (VI-VIII), the fragments of Anaximander (X), Heraclitus (XI-XII), and other Presocratics from Parmenides to Democritus (XIII). These discussions touch on various additional topics such as the hoplite revolution (III), Greek mathematics (III), the tragic view of life (V), and lyric poetry (XIII), among other things.
The style of these seminars is casual, genial, and digressive. They lack the literary finesse of those of Lacan or Foucault, but they are much more lucid. Castoriadis employs a few coinages of his own (“imaginary,” “magma,” and, perhaps most extravagantly, “ensemblist-identitarian”), without always explaining them; but their meanings are easy enough to decipher based on their context or with the translator’s notes—if not, one can consult other works.[4] Although his tone is generally authoritative, he is quite reflective about his hermeneutic method—indeed, I found the strongest seminars to be the programmatic ones (I-II), which contain clear-eyed and compelling discussions of his aim and approach.
As a work of political philosophy, this book engages with classical scholarship with welcome seriousness and candor. Castoriadis does not make archaic Greece into a mystified source of authority for his own views, as other philosophers, however learned, have often done (one thinks especially of Heidegger, whom Castoriadis amusingly roasts in seminar X). Thanks to this, and to the editors’ indispensable notes, non-classicists are given an entry point to explore for themselves the relevant scholarly debates. These debates include: the unity of the Homeric poems, the nature of “Homeric man,” the Near-Eastern origins of Greek thought, the transition from mythos to logos, the relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus, whether Heraclitus was politically an aristocrat or democrat, and more. Scholars of ancient Greek thought, however, should already be familiar with these debates and will have less to learn in this respect.
In that vein, I would say that this is not quite a work of classical scholarship. It is too little in conformity with current disciplinary standards to intervene directly in the scholarly debates. Its use of evidence is too selective, its argumentation too assertive, its conclusions too speculative.
Still, as a work of ‘speculation’ (in the sense now of ‘speculative philosophy’), it undeniably can be of value for classicists. For it articulates a definite position, one that honors ancient Greece’s contribution to human freedom. Moreover, it does this while engaging with the intellectual concerns of the twentieth century. For instance, accepting the Nietzschean/Heideggerian view that the birth of metaphysics was a deviation and forgetting of a deeper insight, Castoriadis argues against aristocratic (Nietzsche) and post-humanist (Heidegger) interpretations of this insight, insisting instead that the insight was a radically democratic one.[5] Similarly, while recognizing the Marxist/historical-materialist explanations of political superstructure in terms of economic base (whether it be slave economy or proto-bourgeois-peasant economy), Castoriadis argues that such explanations are necessary but not sufficient—a collective decision was also required to institute a self-governing society. I also appreciate Castoriadis’ polemics against anthropological approaches that would primitivize the Greeks—from Snell’s “discovery of mind” to the structuralist elevation of conceptual systems over freedom of thought (in seminar XIII Democritus appears as a critic of structuralism avant la lettre). Moreover, making a bold anthropological judgement of his own, Castoriadis marks his disagreement with the tendency (often associated with Jean-Pierre Vernant) to derive philosophy from politics—for him, rather, both philosophy and politics emanate from more fundamental collective decisions (even if not always conscious) about how to orient human life. Castoriadis helpfully stakes out these positions, even if he does not argue them with the rigour of a professional classicist.
A minor point, but it would have been nice if the translators had mentioned the relevance of Castoriadis for contemporary debates about classical Greek democracy. Josiah Ober, for example, has influentially argued that “ideology” in democratic Athens was a collective expression of a collective self-image and a collective means for enforcing that self-image.[6] Against this arguably rose-tinted interpretation of Athenian politics, however, I like to read the work of Nicole Loraux, who brings out those aspects of democratic ideology that were self-deceiving and/or instrumentalized by partisan groups within Athens to conceal social divisions under the cover of a false unity.[7] It has been little remarked upon that Loraux was consciously problematizing Castoriadis’ vision, by keeping open certain questions, such as: what did the democratic “imaginary” overlook, who promoted it, and to whose benefit? But perhaps this is a more appropriate matter for the future English editions of the seminars of subsequent years, which focus on classical Athens.
The book’s formatting is convenient, and the typography is pleasing to eye. The only significant typo/mistranslation that I noticed was on page 292 (“hellenic,” rather than “hellenistic,” for “hellénistique”).
Vidal-Naquet concludes his homage by remarking that Castoriadis makes us hear, once more, “the immeasurable laughter of the Greek sea,” the loss of which had been lamented by Rilke (298). I am undecided whether I agree with Vidal-Naquet on this point, but I do find Castoriadis’ vision of Greece generally compelling and attractive. It will no doubt help orient some of us who are making our own sea-voyages on that vast and wonderous expanse.
Notes
[1] Aside from the scattered remarks about ancient Greece in The Imaginary Institution of Society (MIT, 1987), see “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford, 1991), Castoriadis’ debate with Pierre Vidal-Naquet published as an appendix to Cleisthenes the Athenian (Humanities Press, 1996), and On Plato’s Statesman (Stanford, 2002).
[2] For example, Castoriadis is mentioned in some of the essays in Johann Arnason, Kurt Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner (eds.), The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[3] Castoriadis follows French thinkers like Sartre and Lacan in using “imaginary” as a noun with special philosophical significance.
[4] For example: Suzi Adams, Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts (Bloomsbury, 2014).
[5] In The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton, 2018), André Laks has separated interpreters of the Presocratics into two camps: those who find in the Presocratics the unfolding of a kind of scientific or enlightened rationality and those (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger) who value in the Presocratics that which precedes and, in their view, is more important than such rationality. Castoriadis’ position, which sees in the Presocratics a kind of rational reflection on collective politics, does not fall easily into either category.
[6] Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1989)
[7] The Invention of Athens (Harvard, 1986).