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Passion and Knowledge
- Cornelius Castoriadis
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Nothing that can be called thinking is formalized or formalizable; nor can it be likened to a mechanical process (Church's hypothesis). Rather, thinking sets into motion human imagination and passion.
Having already written extensively on the imagination,' I will limit myself here to outlining its basic structure. At the two opposite poles of knowledge, as well as in its center, lies the creative power of the human being, that is, radical imagination. It is thanks to the imagination that the world is presented in this form and not in some other: it is imagination that creates axioms, postulates, and the fundamental patterns that subtend the structures of knowledge; finally, it is imagination that both furnishes the hypothetical models and idea-images of knowledge, and makes possible their potential development and/or insight into them. This imagination, however, both in itself and in its essential operations – which include its social forms, experienced on this level as the creation of an anonymous collective force – is neither formalized nor formalizable. Obviously, the imagination contains – just as does everything else that exists – a totalizing, identity-bearing dimension (which for brevity's sake we have elsewhere called ensidiqt,ce)2; but this dimension of the imagination is not the essential one, neither in its operations nor its results, no more than the arithmetic relations between tones are the essential element of a Bach fugue.
VII - Seminar from January 12, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 115-136
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Summary
To begin, I would like to pick back up and conclude with Greek religion by specifying the four following points, formulated in a negative way: Greek religion is not a revealed religion; it does not accord any privilege to anthropogony; it contains no promise of immortality; its gods have no “national” character, i.e. they are posited as universals.
First, thus, Greek religion is not a revealed religion. For us this is no doubt something obvious, the recollection of which isn’t pertinent except for those who live in the heart of a religion of revelation. But what’s essential is the link between this absence of revelation and the primary imaginary grasp of the world in Greece. There’s no revelation and thus no dogma, no truth ne varietur resting on a transcendent authority. This, for starters, allows for considerable variation in the theological tradition, the coexistence of different theogonies (Homer, Hesiod, and doubtless also other traditions), the local variations of numerous myths. There’s a possibility for transformation, for movement, which would remain abstract were there not also human collectivities willing and able to make something of them. And, in effect, that’s what happened; this abstract possibility became a discussion of social representation. We see here again the traps that are offered us by the causalist interpretations, the explanations that want to take things back to univocal factors in history. For, the absence of revelation and of dogma is not at all a special creation of the Greeks; it’s even the most ordinary case, at least before Judaism. And similarly, nothing is more common than variations in the tradition, in the myths of each society. By starting with a Native American myth, Lévi-Strauss wrote the four volumes of Mythologiques, extending his analysis through innumerable transformations and variants into hundreds of other stories. The simple variation of the representation as such would not be cause for a calling into question the social representation, in Greece any more than elsewhere. But with the help of other elements it does allow for its discussion and, in the end, for it to be called into question.
VI - Seminar from January 5, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 97-114
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Summary
Today we’re going to talk about Homeric religion, and more precisely about what has been called the religious revolution in Homer. It’s a subject that touches on the problem of Greek religion as a whole but more generally on the question of the possibility of our proper relationship—one of analysis, of understanding—to this particular religion, which is at once very distant from us and quite different (despite what has been said about it, particularly from the structuralist side) from a whole set of other religions, myths, or “archaic” beliefs.
It should be emphasized that for modern Western philosophy, Greek religion remains an enigma. About twelve or so years ago, I had just happened to read a book review on the subject in the Times Literary Supplement, in which they admitted to not understanding how a people who created philosophy, geometry, and tragedy could remain attached for the whole of its existence to beliefs so absurd, infantile, aberrant, and so on. Of course, the author of the article had forgotten that his own culture still remains attached to beliefs as absurd and infantile as an immaculate conception by a virgin saint or a being who’s at once man and god, who ascends to heaven and redescends, i.e. in short, all these far-fetched stories, which are neither more nor less absurd than Greek religion or than whatever other belief. Such remarks simply manifest a total misrecognition of what a religion is. But there’s something more to observe regarding the way to approach Homeric religion, or rather three things.
First, what almost always intervenes like a kind of veil over moderns’ eyes, whether they desire it or not, is their preconception regarding religion. For, by religion they mean our religion; just as by civilization, they mean our civilization; by literature they mean our literature; by morality our morality; by good manners or politeness our manners or our politeness. What I’m saying here may seem very elementary and very stupid, but it’s the case. Of course, this preconception is profoundly marked by monotheistic beliefs and by the entire onto-theology that accompanies them.
Contents
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp v-x
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I - Seminar from November 10, 1982
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 3-14
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Summary
The question I am going to take up this year concerns the importance of, and what’s of interest for us in, the Greek world and the tradition one may call Greco-Occidental. To highlight its specificity properly, at times I will have to surrender myself to what is, in many respects, a very perilous exercise of comparing it with certain essential traits of the monotheistic tradition. To that end, I will comment on several aspects of the Old Testament, which, as you know, is the common root of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. My thesis here—and those who have followed me up to this point can doubtless surmise it—is that there is an opposition between the monotheistic tradition as a tradition of heteronomy and the properly speaking Greek or democratic tradition as a tradition of autonomy. We will therefore attempt to go to the roots of the Greek world, i.e. to what one may call the primary grasp of the being of the world and of human existence in the world by the Greeks, prior to all philosophical or political thematization. We will become familiar, thus, with the kernel of all the imaginary significations that are subsequently deployed and instituted in Greece. I would like in what follows to lay out in detail what, in this grasp, eventually came to be explicitly thematized and examined by philosophy, namely the three great oppositions that mark ancient Greek thinking: that between being and appearing (einai and phainesthai); that between truth and opinion (alētheia and doxa); and that between what we call nature and law. On the last, the translation does not allow us to understand what’s at stake; for the Greeks this is the opposition between physis and nomos.
We will also talk about the polis, about the city, about the creation of this form of collective life and of what accompanies it, namely the selfconstitution of a body of citizens who consider themselves autonomous and responsible, and who govern themselves by legislating. Of course, this is not achieved in one day, nor peacefully.
Seminars 1982–1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 1-2
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III - Seminar from November 24, 1982
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 35-54
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Summary
We will approach Homer today. We will have to go back and forth over things, sometimes making amplifications, which won’t occur without repetition, and I request in advance that you excuse me. A preliminary methodological remark. You know this. It’s a banality: The bibliography is immense; it has accumulated for two thousand years and continues to proliferate. Finley, in the preface to the latest edition of The World of Odysseus, observes that in twenty years the “swell of publications” in Homeric research has practically surpassed his capacities for reading. He nevertheless believes he’s read what’s essential. I believe, I know, that I am far from having read not just “what’s essential” but even just a good portion of the texts. Moreover, we’re going to tackle a whole series of additional problems that are tied to the collectivity of discourse on Greece. I already mentioned one of them that’s fundamental, i.e. the reinterpretation and, in the end, imposition of significations. It’s an imposition that has nearly always been non-conscious, except perhaps in recent years and certainly in what we are trying to do here since we are starting out precisely from this idea of a reinterpretation, and we know that we are trying to re-create something. Within every era, of course, different ideological currents also coexist. If you read a certain set of recent literature on ancient Greece, you will behold, for example, that the constitution of the polis and of democracy comes down to an attempt to establish a bürgerliche Gegenwart, a “bourgeois” or “civic” presence. We have here, in fact, a particularly subtle form of Marxism that I would call Lukácsian-Heideggerian. As for the other forms, the majority of Marxists will tell you that everything is explained by slavery. Let’s not forget the professions, the philologists for example, without whom we couldn’t say anything, but who sometimes say absolutely abominable things. There are also these surprising quarrels between archaeologists, philologists, historians, and sociologists.
II - Seminar from November 17, 1982
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 15-34
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This year we’re talking about the creation of democracy in ancient Greece. In one sense, this has to do with the past. Why are we interested in the past and in this past in particular? Before going into this question, there’s another one with respect to which it is good to lay down some points of reference: What connection, other than a passive one, can we have with the past? On what basis and by means of what can we understand it? There’s a response as old as the question itself, proposed since antiquity, and which has made a comeback over the last fifteen or so years, one upheld by very serious and very important historians. Simplifying or perhaps caricaturing it a bit, one could summarize it in the following way: There cannot be any authentic historiography, any history in the sense of an inquiry into and acquaintance with the events of the past. All historiography is thus arbitrary. This is more or less the position of Paul Veyne in a very interesting and very informative book, Writing History. For my part, I think, as such, that this is completely unacceptable in the sense that it drags in a certain direction some considerations that, taken up individually, are completely right. For, in the historical past there are facts that are more or less obscure or more or less certain, but ones about which a rational, reflective inquiry is entirely legitimate and possible. Such an inquiry is neither arbitrary nor any more open to criticism than, for example, the works of anthropologists and archaeologists who, after having uncovered bones dating from four million years ago or even more, try to reconstruct the hominids to whom they belong. Or ones who ask themselves why, approximately sixty or seventy million years ago, the great dinosaurs disappeared, which allowed mammals to develop and dominate the emergent lands. This is an inquiry about perfectly legitimate facts, and it’s entirely the same in the case of history, where there are also things to establish: These cuneiform tablets clearly belong to such and such an era; therefore, these people wrote, wrote certain things, and one has to decipher them.
X - Seminar from February 16, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 161-178
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Summary
Ἀναζίμανδρος […] ἀρχὴν […] ϵἴρηκϵ τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπϵιρον […], ἐζ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένϵσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι͵ καὶ τὴν ϕθορὰν ϵἰς ταῦτα γίνϵσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρϵών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀƛƛήƛοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάζιν, ποιητικωτέροις οὕτως ὀνoμασιν αὐτὰ ƛέγων (DK 12A9/B1).
Before entering into discussion of this fragment of Anaximander, I would like to remind you of what it is that we’re in the middle of. We spoke about two pairs of significations: chaos and kosmos, on the one hand; hybris and dikē, on the other hand. I told you how they’re similar, in my view. If there isn’t an identity or strict term for term equivalence, there’s certainly a very profound kinship. This kinship is nowhere spoken of as such—unless implicitly in this fragment of Anaximander, at least in the way I interpret it—but it is supported by everything we know about the Greek imaginary grasp of the world.
The explication of this non-rigorous homology drives us to distinguish on the anthropological plane between two levels of the meaning of the pair hybris/dikē. At the most profound level, the opposition itself erases itself to make way for something that is simply chaos, a law of annihilation reigning over the world.
XIII - Seminar from March 9, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 225-242
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Summary
Today we are going to wrap up our examination of problems posed by the birth and the first development of philosophy. And if, in this affair, I have taken Heraclitus as the nodal point, it’s because, all while completing in a sense a first cycle of philosophical elaboration, his oeuvre also contains the germs for all that would follow. I remind you that Heraclitus thrived in about 500 BC, and that in this era we already have seventy-five years of explicit philosophy, nearly three centuries of great poetry (Homer, Hesiod), and two centuries of lyric poetry, even if it’s in the sixth century that the latter became developed. And from the start lyric poetry, far from being a simple expression of affects or sentiments, also presents statements of philosophical and political reach. Such is the case with a celebrated passage of Archilochus (second half of the seventh century), which is absolutely surprising in this respect. There’s this career soldier, perhaps a mercenary, who one day fled the battlefield, leaving his shield behind—the most shameful act of cowardice in ancient Greece— and he writes, “I threw down shield; I can always buy another.” This is a frontal assault against the common belief about what virile virtues are, i.e. the bravery of the soldier. Moreover, we would find in lyric poetry, if we had time to pause here, more than an analogical statement implying a critique of the instituted beliefs and norms.
One of the results of this first unfolding, i.e. of the first three-quarters of a century of philosophy, is the separation in and by this movement between being and appearing, between what is and what gives itself to us qua human beings. This is a necessary result of the research in which the Ionians were already engaged when they wanted to find a principle, an archē, as Aristotle would say down the line in writing (or rewriting) this history, which is in effect allo ti para tauta, i.e. something else alongside what appears.
Frontmatter
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp i-iv
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IV - Seminar from December 1, 1982
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 55-78
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Summary
Homer. The subject is, as we have seen, infinitely complex. The interpretations have proliferated contradictorily since antiquity, already from the time of Xenophanes and Plato, burdened sometimes with extreme naϊveties. One of these is obviously the retrojection of what seems self-evident for the interpreter from such and such era, or the refusal to see the difference and even the otherness of what is deposited in these poems. This is a naϊvety from which, as I told you in our first seminar, one can never totally free oneself. One always speaks starting from something, from one’s era, from the society in which one lives. One may certainly criticize one’s own prejudices, preconceptions, and so on, but how could one ever pretend to unbind oneself totally? There’s another naϊvety, symmetrical thereto and just as weighty, which is above all that of the moderns, and which comes down to dealing with the poems—or, for that matter, the entire Greek world—starting from prejudices of the positivist type, which I would almost be tempted to call “ethnologizing.” Through a sort of variant of the enthnocentrist prejudice, they erase every difference between this Homeric world and the other bygone worlds we know of—and this was done by important authors—in order to treat it like a world that’s primitive in the most naϊve—I would say most mindless—sense of the term, i.e. a world that would be situated in the first stages of hominization.
If you think I’m exaggerating, I direct you to a very serious, relatively recent book, the reputation of which is quite high, i.e. The Discovery of the Mind by Bruno Snell. There are two or three chapters on Homer in it, in particular, where one finds this unreasonable assertion—which of course claims to be founded on philological givens and even on those of the plastic arts—according to which the Homeric world has yet to manage to conceive of a unity of the human being and in particular of his psychical powers.
XI - Seminar from February 23, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 179-200
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What we must constantly have in mind when we talk about ancient Greek philosophy—or ancient Greece in general, for that matter—is that this philosophy doesn’t emerge in some sort of clearing of Being but comes to light as a permanent struggle against what we may aptly call a nightmare, the nightmare of non-being, of generation and corruption, and more generally of the inconstancy of what is. This struggle, in the end, comes down to three oppositions: between what is and what appears, which we’ll speak about at length today and doubtless also next time; between opinion and truth; between nature and law, or rather physis and nomos. These oppositions should not, by the way, be kept separate, otherwise the first two become trivial. Although the third (physis/nomos) won’t be formulated explicitly until a bit later, around the middle of the fifth century, we find the first deposits much earlier, and in a sense already in Hesiod.
We spoke about Anaximander, and we saw that the fragment we were discussing can’t truly make sense unless we connect the being of beings [être des étants], or their existence, to being [être] in the sense of essence, and unless one also connects this existence with a universal, impersonal law, i.e. the chreōn that Anaximander talks about, which is a law of constant generation and corruption. This chreōn responds in this fragment to an adikia, i.e. to a hybris which in the end we’re obligated to make coincide with the very fact of existing. We’re obligated in this way because Anaximander doesn’t talk about certain beings who would be particularly unjust or in some way or other malfeasant. He doesn’t say for example that the beings who would like to persist in existence beyond the time imparted to them must pay for this exorbitant pretension; he speaks absolutely, in a universal way: all the beings, ta onta (tois ousi in the plural dative). Of course, we can also see in this assertion the first formulation of a statement that bears on the totality of beings in order to qualify it: it’s characterized by genesis and phthora and subject to chreōn.
IX - Seminar from February 2, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 159-160
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Summary
The transcript for this seminar has unfortunately been lost (see p. xxvii).
VIII - Seminar from January 26, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 137-158
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Summary
To finish up what’s been said and introduce the subject that will occupy us now, I’ll present some considerations about myth in general and, of course, about myth in Greece. Up to now we’ve essentially talked through the Homeric poems, the contents of which are profoundly interwoven with the mythical world. Our discussion is now going to take as its starting point (or as a bridgehead, if you will) the mythical figurations that Hesiod offers in the Theogony, figurations which will, furthermore, subsist for a long time afterwards. Another reason to reflect on myth is this historical problem, i.e. this historiography of knowing whether the birth of philosophy in Greece translates a radical break with mythology (a first position), or whether (a second position) it’s merely a continuation. It’s a discussion that has long occupied and still occupies, for that matter, the specialists. I already suggested that I offer a response that refuses the two terms.
Contrary to what is asserted by what I will call the dominant ideology in sociology and history as it’s expressed especially in structuralism, myth’s meaning or function does not consist in carrying out a logical organization of the world, and particularly not according to a logic of binary oppositions (raw/cooked, honey/ash, etc.). We can indeed find a binary logic in myth, but it is, if you will, merely an instrument. This has nothing surprising about it since, after all, this binary logic is quite simply the fundamental form of what I call ensemblist-identitarian logic or, if you will, an instrumental logic. I mean a logic of classification and of separation which thus proceeds always by A/non-A, yes/no, and which sometimes takes what the logician would simply call contradiction (A/non-A) and pushes it towards a polar opposition (A/“the thing at the extreme conceivable opposite of A”), which is not at all the same. In short, myth, if it contains binary logic, is far from exhausting itself with that. The most perspicacious authors—Vernant, for example—understand this perfectly and show the role of ambiguity in this logic of polarity.
Appendix A - Reports on Teaching
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- The Greek Imaginary
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- 20 October 2023
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Summary
1980–1981 and 1981–1982: Institution of Society and Historical Creation
During the two years of 1980–1981 and 1981–1982, the seminar was dedicated to the question of the specificity of the social-historical as a region of being.
An introductory framing sketched out the limits and aporias that the exact and natural sciences (mathematics, physics, biology) are encountering in the present stage of their development, i.e. the shock rendered against the dictatorship of ensemblistic-identitarian logic and deterministic closure. Without seeking confirmations through “positive” knowledge—nor fearing refutations by it—it is important to notice that the idea of creation, formerly scandalous, no longer seems irreconcilable with the state of this knowledge in its privileged domains.
Society can only be thought of as creation of itself, i.e. as creation once and for all (institutions, social imaginary significations) and as continued creation (history in a narrow sense, social regimes, and particular historical entities).
At the beginning of this creation there is a “contingent” fact, namely the emergence of the human species with its aberrant (or monstrous) biological particularities. The unfitness for life which is characteristic of the human qua simple living being results from the rupture of the living being’s functional regulations due to the emergence of the human psyche and its singular features. These include: the reign of the radical imagination, which breaks with the ensemblistic-identitarian “understanding” of the animal; the disassociation of psychical pleasures and bodily pleasures; and the defunctionalization of pleasure. The psyche is a monad that is self-centered and riveted to the pleasure of pure representation.
After the fact, the institution of society appears as the response that allows for the survival of the human species; but, obviously, this could not provide us with any “explanation.” The social-historical is a field of creation that makes itself exist while making exist the institution and the social imaginary significations that incarnate it. The individual, resultant from a process of social fabrication, is possible only by means of the violent imposition of forms on the psychical monad, i.e. forms for which no production or deduction, whether formal or material, is conceivable: language, rules, values, objects, reality, world.
V - Seminar from December 15, 1982
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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- 28 February 2023, pp 79-96
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Summary
I’ll remind you of our approach. It’s through our search for the roots or first elements of what we may call the Greek grasp of the world that we’re interested in the Homeric poems. In our inquiry we thus inevitably consider what came afterwards. It’s a tautology, if you will, but it has its importance; we need not conceal the fact that this is an attitude filled with dangers. Consider the example of the beginnings of a critique of the heroic world in Homer, in particular in the famous dialogue, or rather yelling match, between Odysseus and Thersites in Book II of the Iliad, a one-way yelling match, for that matter. Thersites is a man of the people; he’s truly the representative of the anonymous mass explicitly devalorized by Homer, including in his appearance: he’s very ugly, he’s squinting, he limps, and so on. He castigates Agamemnon, criticizes the conduct of the war and the war itself. We could say that we have here, perhaps, the first document written in which the exploited classes try to transform an imperialist war into a civil war, as one will later say (I’m only half joking). And it’s Odysseus, filled with arrogance, who responds to him, who insults him, who strikes him with his skēptron, which is the insignia of royal power held by the one who is addressing other heroes. Thersites cannot—dares not—reply; he weeps from sadness while the masses laugh in a cowardly way at the spectacle of this poor simpleton. We see here an extremely entrenched opposition, and a dividing line in value, between the heroes and the profanum vulgus, the polloi, or as one will say later on, the ochlos, the dēmos (this term in Homer doesn’t have the sense it will carry later on); only the heroes truly exist, and the others are just the mass that follows along. Here, there’s an aristocratic conception of the world—very obvious and very important in the poems—which will certainly survive subsequently.
Appendix B - Political Thought
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 20 October 2023
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Summary
Here is the central point of the matter: there has not been, up to the present, any genuine political thought. There has been, during certain periods in history, a real political activity and the thinking implicit in this activity. But explicit political thought has only been political philosophy, that is to say, the province of philosophy, subordinated to it, enslaved to metaphysics, chained to philosophy’s non-conscious assumptions, and strained by its ambiguities.
This assertion may appear paradoxical. It will appear less so if we recall that by political I mean the lucid activity that aims at the institution of society by society itself, and that such an activity has a meaning as a lucid activity only within the horizon of the question: What is society? What is its institution? With a view to what, this institution? However, the answers to these questions have always been tacitly borrowed from philosophy, which in turn has dealt with them only by violating their specificity through beginning with something else, i.e. the being of society/history as beginning with the divine, natural, or rational being; creative and instituting activity as beginning with conformity to a norm given from elsewhere.
But the paradox is real. Philosophy is born in Greece simultaneously and consubstantially with the explicit political movement (democracy). These two emerge as calling into question the socially instituted imaginary. They arise as interrogations that are profoundly joined through their object: the established institution of the world and of society and its relativization through the recognition of doxa and nomos, which in turn also leads to the relativization of this relativization, in other words, to the search for an internal limit to a movement that is, in itself and in principle, interminable and indeterminate (apeiron). Take the question, “Why is our tradition true and good? Why is the power of the Great King sacred?” Not only does it not arise in an archaic or traditional society; it cannot emerge, and it does not make sense. Greece makes exist—creates ex nihilo—this question. The socially established image (representation) of the world is not the world.
XII - Seminar from March 2, 1983
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
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- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 28 February 2023, pp 201-224
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Summary
Today we will once again turn, as with Anaximander, to the texts themselves, with this difference, namely that instead of analyzing a single passage in a deep way, I will try to collect and comment on what remains with us from Heraclitus, namely a bit less than a 140 fragments (I’ll come back to this). If I wanted to take up Heraclitus here, it was for several reasons. First of all, it’s because it interests me passionately. Next, it’s because this is the first philosopher in Western history whose transmitted corpus allows for a work of interpretation that goes beyond the exercise of divination about a singular fragment or (as with Xenophanes) about a handful of lines. Thirdly and above all, it’s because with him we already find ourselves fully within philosophy, with all its splendor and indeed its obscurity. And this is especially because, as I told you last time, in this perpetual circle that philosophy and simply thinking travel, Heraclitus marks the achievement of a first movement; he completes—forgive me if I abuse the image—a first turn. For, let’s repeat that Heraclitus, the same as Anaximander, didn’t write in a void, as lots of interpreters seem tacitly to presuppose, particularly Heidegger. He takes full account of the world that surrounds him and of all that preceded him, all while separating himself very strongly from it. We could say that he made a sort of synthesis out of it in the Hegelian sense, i.e. what he denies isn’t ignored by him but—while being refuted and abolished—is implicitly contained in his own thinking. Heraclitus arrives at a crucial moment, which is (to take up the traditional terminology, which is inadequate in my view) at the end of the archaic period and the start of the great classical period. According to the doxographic tradition, he was born around 540 and thrived around 505–500. He is thus about forty years old at the turn of the century. To situate things, I’ll remind you of some other dates: Xenophanes was born around 570 and died around 470; Pythagoras was born around 570 and died around 490; Aeschylus was born around 525 and died in 456; Pindar was born in 518 (or 522); Parmenides, around 515; Herodotus, around 485.
Index
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Translated by John Garner, University of West Georgia, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, University of New Mexico
-
- Book:
- The Greek Imaginary
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 28 February 2023, pp 299-307
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