Castoriadis rejects both materialist and idealist dialectics because both are closed to creative imagination

Evidence

Castoriadis therefore seeks to overcome the limitations of both idealist and rationalist political economies. His stinging critique of capitalism departs from “materialist-objectivist” and from “idealist-subjectivist” dialectics. For him both are “closed,” insofar as they fundamentally presuppose that “all experience is exhaustively reducible to rational determinations” (Castoriadis 1975, 54), reflecting the belief that history is defined by extrasocial forces (such as Marx’s laws) rather than society’s own laws. An open dialectics must instead be both nonmaterialist and nonidealist (56). With a single stroke, Castoriadis repudiates Marx’s “Hegelian mystification” of capitalist irrationality and his obfuscation of history’s creative imagination: “a revolutionary transcendence of Hegelian dialectics,” he purports irreverently, “demands not that it be put back on its feet, but that, as a first step, its head be chopped off” (1975, 56). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 157

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘open dialectics’ that grounds Castoriadis’s whole project — the key theoretical move behind homo speculans.
• XREF: Complements the Frankfurt School’s critique of Marx’s closed rationalism — echoes Callinicos and Horkheimer on unhappy consciousness and false first principles.