World in Fragments

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).