History, time and politics in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

Abstract

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) is a radical thinker that reflects on the onto-epistemological presuppositions put into play every time that one considers the historical-social as an area where human practices are developed. In this paper, we will try to explore the relationship between history, time and politics in his works. Firstly, we will try to understand the importance of the invention of Athenian democracy and its link between politics and philosophy. Secondly, we will make reference to the relationship that is possible to establish between political imagination and history in order to interpret the meaning of the temporality in the historical-social domain. Finally, we will try to analyze the implications of his onto-epistemological posture for understanding the new meaning of the project of individual and social autonomy reprised with different modalities in Greece and in Western Europe. We believe that the originality of the thinking of Castoriadis consists in linking the analysis of the socio-historical coordinates and a social-political ontology, which aims to “think otherwise” history, time and political activity as the essential possibilities of human beings.