World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination

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Stanford University Press, 1997 - 507 páginas
This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. Starting from an inquiry that grows out of the specific context of a society that is experiencing uncertainty as to its ways of living and being, its goals, its values, and its knowledge, one that has been incapable, so far, of adequately understanding the crisis it is undergoing, Castoriadis sets as his task the elucidation of this crisis and its conditions.

The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author s views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting and on the retreat from autonomy to generalized conformity in postmodernism. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort the meaning of May 68 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. The fate of the project of autonomy is considered here in the light of the Greek and the modern political imaginary, the pulverization of Marxism-Leninism, and a recent alleged return of ethics (Habermas, Rawls, McIntyre, Solzhenitsyn, Havel).

In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others in his report on The State of the Subject Today. This section also presents his most current lines of psychoanalytic research and thought on the human nonconscious in the body and on the problem of the psychoanalysis of psychotic subjects, where an alternative coherence on the level of meaning offers a constant challenge to the task of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Castoriadis s highly original investigations of the unruly place of the imagination in Western philosophy round out the book. He examines how Aristotle s original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

 

Contenido

Creation in
3
Reflections on Racism
19
Postmodernism
32
The Movements of the Sixties
47
The Pulverization of MarxismLeninism
58
For
70
The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary
84
S The Ethicists New Clothes
108
Logic Imagination Reflection
246
MerleauPonty and the Weight of
273
Institution of Society and Religion
311
Phusis and Autonomy
331
The Ontological Import of the History of Science
342
Time and Creation
374
Writings
405
Index
441

The Discovery of the Imagination
213

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Acerca del autor (1997)

Cornelius Castoriadis is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a practicing psychoanalyst. In English his books include Crossroads in the Labyrinth and The Imaginary Institution of Society.

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