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Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce Qui Fait la Grèce, 1. D’Homère à Héraclite (Seuil, 2004) The importance of the creation of the ancient Athenian democratic polis for Castoriadis’ project is beyond dispute. Yet his written works tend to highlight the fifth century flowering and neglect the longer term trajectory. Ce Qui Fait la Grèce is a welcome rectification of the situation. Beautifully compiled and annotated by Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas and Pascal Vernay, Ce Qui Fait la Grèce presents Castoriadis’ 1982–3 seminar course at the EHESS; it is the first of two planned posthumous volumes of Castoriadis’ seminars on ancient Greece. It comprises 12 seminars (originally 13: one is unfortunately lost). It also includes a previously unpublished paper from 1979, ‘Le pensée politique’, that served as a precursor to the seminars. Vidal-Naquet’s 1999 article ‘Castoriadis et la Grèce ancienne’, in which he identifies the three themes of most importance to Castoriadis vis à vis the Greeks – the polis, history, and thinking poeisis/creation – provides an eloquent foreword. The seminars evince an erudite elaboration of the historical antecedents of the ancient Greek world. Castoriadis offers a genealogy. He journeys from Homer to Heraclites to elucidate the social imaginary significations of the ancient democratic polis as they were pre-figured in the archaic Greek world. Along the way, Castoriadis bespeaks the idea of history as change and transformation; the significance of myths and the complex relation of myths and religion in the Greek tradition; the enduring importance of chaos and kosmos; the place of the individual and the experience of death in the Homeric world and its importance for the democratic breakthrough; and the beginnings of philosophic thought in Anaximander and Heraclites. Throughout, Castoriadis focuses on the specificity of the Greek tradition, which he contrasts to the monotheistic traditions. In stressing the novelty of the Greek path, he begins an anticipatory critique of Eisenstadt’s Axial argument: Castoriadis would see the parallels between civilizations as overstated in that they tend to ignore the divergences and specificities of historical traditions, Greece being a prime case in point. Castoriadis suggests that the ultimate aim of historical enquiry in general is to excavate and analyse the social imaginary significations of the specific society in question. The Greek trajectory, however, holds not only general but particular significance for us: the Greeks were the first to institute history in the strong sense as active not passive, as reflexive self-change and transformation. Rémi Brague’s argument regarding the magnitude of the Greek discovery of the ‘world’ and the concomitant self-reflexive turn is pertinent here. In elaborating then upon the importance and idea of history, Castoriadis argues that the recovery of the historical Greek world is not a mere theoretical exercise (that would be hermeneutics!) but practical: a process of comprehension to transform our own collective situation. Castoriadis situates the roots of the ancient Greek world in archaic

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literature. Although thought of as an heroic world, incipient openings towards autonomy can be located in Homer: the idea of the polis, the world as imbued with a tragic texture (tragedy as a cultural genre of the fifth century could be seen to continue this tradition of depicting the tragic consequences of overstepping/not instituting limits), as well as an immanent critique of the heroic world. The idea of death is key to the Homeric world. For Castoriadis, the meaning and location of death – especially in relation to moira and hubris/dike – within the archaic Greek world was crucial to the development and subsequent creation of autonomy in ancient Athens. As Castoriadis sees it, Homeric death also could be considered the first concept pertaining to and allowing access to an impartial universality: ‘la mort est le premier universal’. The meaning of moira in Homer is essential to Castoriadis’ overall argument regarding the emergence and trajectory of the social imaginary significations that created the world of ancient Athens. In moira Castoriadis detects the germs of autonomy and the rationality of logos. To digress slightly, I note that throughout his writings, Castoriadis contrasts ‘germ’ to ‘model’. For instance, the democratic polis is always characterized as a germ, the term ‘model’ explicitly rejected. For Castoriadis, a model precludes creation as it requires only interpretation. Castoriadis conceives of interpretative activity as intrinsically non-creative: it produces difference, does not create otherness. Castoriadis’ take on Plato’s Demiurge illustrates this well. Hence Castoriadis insists on and persists with ‘germ’. This is unfortunate in my view, given its biological connotations of ‘development’ and tendencies to an inbuilt ‘potential’. I return to this below. Back to the archaic Greek world: Castoriadis sees Homer’s moira as a supreme, impersonal power (puissance) – as distinct from a divinity – that has dominion over humans and gods alike. Moira is neither a human nor a divine creation. As impersonal, moira is seen as a proto-abstract signification which lent or enabled a vision of impersonal order to the world. Castoriadis advances three arguments regarding moira. First, moira allots the limits of the regions of gods and humans (death, in the case of humankind, is the ultimate limit of existence: it is our lot to die). Second, illuminating passages of the Iliad, Castoriadis argues that moira also sets internal limits to human activities that must not be transgressed; an idea which itself rests, says Castoriadis, on a fundamental idea of the world for the Greeks. When limits are transgressed, hubris occurs. This theme is transposed to other registers in later seminars: he discusses the idea of chaos and the fragile imposition of order/kosmos in Hesiod and in an interpretation of Anaximander, where the existence of the world (as excess) itself is seen as hubris – he compares the couplet hubris and dike to chaos and kosmos as profoundly related. Third, Castoriadis insists that moira is not to be understood as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’; it is, rather, that moira sets ultimate limits within which humans can quasi-freely move, that is, to decide to transgress or not.

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Thus, on Castoriadis’ account, at the root of moira the basis for the freedom of choice as rational choice and rational research lies; a co-existence of an impersonal law and the space for rational reflection. In Castoriadis’ view, this freed humans for action in the practical, political and philosophical domains upon which the creation of autonomy drew. We find also – of course – ferment in those spaces hinted at but remaining in shadow. I would like to address two of them here, noting their overlap at the outset: Castoriadis locates the Greek philosophical trajectory as emerging from the permanent struggle against the ‘nightmare’ of non-being. The continuing interplay of chaos/kosmos is undoubtedly a key and fruitful ingredient of the Greek philosophical trajectory. Castoriadis identifies three central oppositions as characteristic of Greek philosophy: being/appearance, truth/opinion and the later nature/law, which he prefers to leave untranslated as physis/nomos. Yet it is actually the physis/nomos opposition of the fifth century by which Castoriadis locates the beginning of philosophy proper. This raises questions regarding the status of pre-Socratic thought (either broadly or narrowly conceived is immaterial here) for Castoriadis. If the birth of philosophy is simultaneous with and consubstantial with the invention of politics qua la politique – that is with the later, and for Castoriadis the most fundamental distinction between nomos and physis – what is the status of Presocratic thought for Castoriadis? Could we be ultimately content with a view that situates Presocratic thought and the novelty of the creation of ‘physis’ in its multiple aspects merely as a stepping stone along the way to autonomy, rather than a fundamental innovation in its own right? Would characterizing it as a proto-philosophy or as comprising the prehistory of philosophy proper – represented by the emergence of the physis/nomos distinction – be sufficient? This leads us to consider the idea of the interrelations between creation, history and interpretation. I would like to suggest that in Ce Qui Fait la Grèce, Castoriadis makes an implicit case for the idea of creation as contextual not absolute. In elucidating the social imaginary significations of the ancient Greek world – in particular, the ancient world of the Athenian breakthrough to autonomy – as they were pre-figured (Castoriadis’ own term) in the archaic Greek world, Castoriadis is recognizing a fundamental interpretative context in which, with which and from which social imaginary significations are created. His argument of creation as ex nihilo, but not cum nor in nihilo, does not hold water here: Castoriadis associates interpretation with the fabrication of difference aligned to an ontology of determinacy (as mentioned above); the not cum or in nihilo qualification does not refer to an interpretative context to creation where an intrinsically creative moment is attributed to interpretation. Indeed, Castoriadis consistently resisted acknowledging the creative moment of interpretation and, conversely, the interpretative moment of creation. Yet the archaic pre-figuration of ancient social imaginary significations strongly suggests a creation/transformation from something to

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something, not from nothing to something: the archaic pre-figurations provide (at least in part) the interpretative context in which the move towards philosophy and politics gathered momentum and the project of autonomy was invented. It suggests a constant interplay between creative interpretation and interpretative creation in the Greek trajectory. It invites us to rethink the meaning of history not just as creation but as (creative) interpretation – for it is only in interpreting history – interpreting the meaning of history – that it becomes (is made-be) history for us. In Ce Qui Fait la Grèce, Castoriadis elucidates the antecedents of the ancient Greek world as they emerged in archaic Greece. He presents us with a genealogical account of constellations of meaning that re-interpret inherited traditions – including religious traditions – in transformative, creative activity. In portraying the longer trajectory from which the project of autonomy blossomed, Ce Qui Fait la Grèce illustrates the way in which the ontological form of the ancient Greek world was created within and from an interpretative context where interpretation itself is not considered as an absence of the creative moment, but as intrinsic to it. Reviewed by Suzi Adams School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University Email: [email protected]

Eugene Gogol, Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of MarxistHumanism (Resource Publications, 2004) In the 1940s, members of Socialisme ou Barbarie and the JohnsonForest Tendency corresponded, the two groups sharing a trajectory from dissident Trotskyism, by way of the critique of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union, towards council communism. The recent English publication of works by Cornelius Castoriadis (On Plato’s Statesman, The Rising Tide of Insignificance, and Figures of the Thinkable) is some signal of the growing interest in, and recognition of, key figures in these groups – most notably, Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and C. L. R. James. The same cannot, though, be said for Raya Dunayevskaya – ‘Forest’ to James’s ‘Johnson’. The present work by Eugene Gogol seeks to addresses this relative neglect. Dunayevskaya (born Rae Spiegel) was born in the Ukraine in 1910, and her family came to America in 1922. Revolutionary, like Castoriadis, as a teenager, Dunayevskaya was expelled from the communist movement, worked in the offices of the American Negro Labour Congress, and had gone over to Trotskyism, all before her 20th birthday. In 1937 she became Trotsky’s Russian language secretary, but broke with him over the analysis of the Soviet Union.