Abstract
This book collects twelve previously untranslated seminars offered by Cornelius Castoriadis in 1982-1983 at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. It also includes important supplemental writings by Castoriadis and a substantive essay by Pierre Vidal-Naquet highlighting Castoriadis’s contributions to the study of the ancient Greece intellectual legacy. Castoriadis’s seminars themselves focus broadly on the interconnection between philosophy and democracy and the way both emerge within a broader, self-critical social imaginary institution already visibly expressed in the work of early Greek poets and Presocratic philosophers. The first two lectures focus on methodology and the philosophical premises of the seminars’ inquiries. The following six lectures focus on Homer, Hesiod, and Greek tragedy, as well as on Greek religion and the social context of mythology broadly. Here, Castoriadis analyses not only textual themes but also the concrete practices which likely conditioned the poems emergence and the methods of investigation (e.g., archaeology) which, today, condition our own access to and understanding of them. The final four lectures focus on the early Greek philosophical tradition, with emphasis on Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Democritus. Here, Castoriadis understands this tradition not to have emerged in an isolated way but to have developed through critical conversation with the preceding mythological traditions and through engagement with the surrounding social, political, and religious practices. The supplemental materials include Castoriadis’s succinct summary of his early seminars’ themes as well as a substantive, previously unpublished essay from 1979, “Political Thought”, which concerns the correlated emergence of democratic institutions and philosophical inquiry. The volume concludes with eminent classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s thoughtful memorial assessment of the significance of Castoriadis’s work on the ancient Greeks.
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