Lieux Communs (France) / Political Group for Autonomy (Greece)

Differing Perspectives on the Left

A workshop with Lieux Communs (France) / Political Group for Autonomy (Greece) with Nikos Malliaris held on April 5, 2014, at the Sixth Platypus International Convention. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Every year at the Platypus International Convention, speakers from various perspectives are asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series. [Read More]

Trotsky and Trotskyism, Lecture 7

1953--1963

Part 7 of the Summer 2012 Platypus Affiliated Society Primary Reading Group Lecture Series: Trotsky and Trotskyism. Recorded on 21st July, 2012 at The New School, New York. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Week 7 Readings * recommended / * supplemental reading Cornelius Castoriadis, “The workers and organization” (1959) * Cliff Slaughter, “What is revolutionary leadership?” (1960) * Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party/U. [Read More]

On the Relationship between Psychoanalysis and Emancipatory Politics

Castoriadis, Marx, and Freud on Time and Emancipation

ON TWO OCCASIONS, Sigmund Freud observed that politics, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis are all impossible professions. Cornelius Castoriadis attempted to make sense of this cryptic observation in a 1994 essay entitled “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” in which he argued that, not only are these three “professions” structurally analogous, they are also entangled with each other such that the “impossible” realization of pedagogical or psychoanalytic aims is ultimately conditional upon an emancipatory political transformation. [Read More]