About political structures of terror: disputes around the concept of violence and totalitarianism in the intellectual experience of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort (1946-1967)

Abstract

The paper aims to understand how certain events in the history of communism during the 1940s and 1950s affected the intellectual work of two French philosophers during such period: Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. More than understand the thinking of both authors through their intellectual trajectories, I try to comprehend the importance of the share of intellectual and political spaces by them through their joint participation in the french group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. I support the hypothesis that the understanding of Castoriadis and Lefort ideas (in their similarities, differences and disputes) might complexify the understanding of the history of left though in the twentieth century and its relations with the phenomenon of violence.