The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis The story of a revered European thinker, a literary legacy, family squabbles, and Internet bootlegging
By SCOTT McLEMEE
As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during the early 1980s, Bill Brown began publishing Not Bored!, a photocopied journal of small circulation inspired by what Mr. Brown calls "the ultra-left milieu": revolutionary thinkers and organizations considered too extreme by orthodox Socialist and Communist parties. You can still subscribe to the hard-copy edition, but today most readers discover it through notbored.org. Many of them seek it out for the site's impressive archive of classic ultra-leftist texts.
Mr. Brown's Web site is prominent enough within a certain political subculture. But it is hardly the place one would expect to be the first English-language publisher of a book that would normally be issued by a major academic press. Then again, the circumstances behind The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep), by Cornelius Castoriadis, are anything but normal.
A Greek philosopher, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary theorist, Mr. Castoriadis moved to Paris after World War II. By the 1960s, his analysis of the Soviet economy as a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" was a subterranean influence on radical activists around the world. His later work on questions of social theory, philosophy of science, and ecological politics has appeared in English translation from Blackwell Publishing, the MIT Press, and Stanford University Press. Mr. Brown calls The Rising Tide an "electro-samizdat" publication -- but Mr. Castoriadis's estate regards it as a pirate edition of the thinker's work.
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