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Cornelius CastoriadisCornelius Castoriadis was born March 11, 1922, in Constantinople (Istanbul) and his family moved soon after to Athens. After earning degrees in Political Science, Economics and Law from the University of Athens, he moved to Paris to continue his studies in 1945. He had been an active Trotskyist in Athens but broke with the Trotskyists in Paris in 1948 to and joined Claude Lefort and others in founding the group and journal "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (1949-1966), which eventually included Jean-Franois Lyotard as a member. At the same time, he worked as an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development until 1970. Although he was active in the political movements of the 1960s, his interests shifted from direct political action and revolution towards seeking to understand the relationship of the human individual to social formations. This led him towards more philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of human social and political life and he trained as a psychoanalyst and began to practice in 1974. In his 1975 work L'institution imaginaire de la société (Imaginary Institution of Society) and in Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Crossroads in the Labyrinth) published in 1978, Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named to be recognized. Otherness emerges in part from the activity of the psyche itself. Creating external social institutions that give stable form to what Castoriadis terms the magma of social significations allows the psyche to create stable figures for the self, and to ignore the constant emergence of mental indeterminacy and alteriety. Castoriadis died in 1997. External links Castoriadis, Cornelius Castoriadis, Cornelius
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