Agora Update

The latest update from the Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Web site carried a number of interesting pieces for those who are interested by those kinds of things.

We have received word of the death of Murray Bookchin on July 30, 2006. Bookchin (b. January 14, 1921), a former Trotskyist like Castoriadis, shared Castoriadis's advocacy of direct democracy and even preceded the latter in his concern with environmental issues. Castoriadis discussed Bookchin's municipally-based, ecologically-informed, anarchist views briefly in Crossroads in the Labyrinth. They both joined the Editorial Advisory Board of Society & Nature in the 1990s. When Bookchin and his partner Janet Biehl resigned from this journal in 1997--considering it, among other things, too "Castoriadian"--Agora International's David Ames Curtis wrote a reply, "On the Bookchin/Biehl Resignations and the Creation of the New Liberatory Project" http://www.agorainternational.org/dnweb1.html, at Castoriadis's request and with his approval, the text appearing only a year and a half later in censored form in the successor journal, Democracy & Nature. It was on account of D&N's censorship effort that Castoriadis had determined to leave its Editorial Advisory Board as soon as the censored version appeared, a decision he was not able to carry out, however, due to his own intervening illness and death. Bookchin later wrote Curtis a conciliatory letter acknowledging that Castoriadis's views deserved further examination, but ill health and other priorities kept Bookchin from realizing his aim of writing such a text.

We have received word of the death of the historian and social activist Pierre Vidal-Naquet on July 29, 2006. Vidal-Naquet (b. July 23, 1930), a sympathizer of Socialisme ou Barbarie since the mid-1950s, formed a discussion group in the early 1960s with Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Jean-Pierre Vernant and others called the "Cercle Saint-Just" (later renamed the "Centre de Recherches et d'Études Sociales et Politiques," or CRESP). It was Castoriadis who came to the defense of Vidal-Naquet in a 1979 polemic with Bernard-Henri Lévy--with Castoriadis's contribution now available as "The Vacuum Industry" in The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep) http://www.notbored.org/RTI.html. And it was Vidal-Naquet who soon thereafter introduced Castoriadis for his election to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Castoriadis joined Clisthène l'Athénien authors Vidal-Naquet and Pierre Lévêque at a March 27, 1992 Georges Pompidou Center meeting instigated by Agora International, organized by Stephane Barbery, David Ames Curtis, Clara Gibson Maxwell, and Pascal Vernay, and moderated by Christian Descamps of the Espace Séminaire Philosophie on the occasion of the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of Cleisthenes' reforms in ancient Athens. Vidal-Naquet's oration at Castoriadis's funeral on January 3, 1998 later appeared in translation as his "Homage to Cornelius Castoriadis" in the review Common Knowledge.