Castoriadis. Which thought of the society?

This study day will aim to highlight and question the notion of "society" in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), an author who is still marginal in the social sciences, while he remains one of the last intellectuals with an encyclopedic knowledge. Freshly arrived from Greece in 1945, Castoriadis first distinguished himself in France as a political activist within the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1967) – period during which he opposed Marxist orthodoxy by fiercely criticizing the “bureaucratic capitalism” that he then saw in Russia – to then deploy the lineaments of a “project of autonomy”, based on a collective praxis which unfolds creatively in history. For him, a society only becomes truly democratic when it opens itself to unlimited questioning and proposes to voluntarily establish the global institution of its laws. It is from these postulates that the meeting will seek to understand, analyze and criticize a social theory which questions the very foundations and consequences of “modern freedom”.