Obituary: Castoriadis and the democratic tradition
نویسنده
چکیده
The death of Castoriadis gave rise to the expression of very diverse comments on a significant but also controversial intellectual output. Thus, on the one side, the intellectual establishment in France and his native Greece expressed an uncritical admiration for his work, without any deeper understanding of its radical anti-establishment meaning, usually on the basis of the anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet elements in his work. On the opposite side, parts of the Marxist Left, particularly the Trotskyte Left, proceeded to either a wholesale rejection of his work, on account of the conservative ideological and political positions they find in it, or counterpoised the late “humanistic” character of his work to his early revolutionary thought. Finally, in his native Greece, ex-left wing intellectuals who have now developed a kind of ideological “soup” mixing Christian culture and ethics with nationalism, were not hiding their rage against a thinker who has effectively shown (unlike some contemporary anarchists in the Anglo-Saxon world) the fundamental incompatibility between spiritualism in general, religion and nationalism on the one hand, and autonomy, real democracy and the liberatory project on the other.
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