Rethinking Castoriadis’s Concept of Self-Limitation: The Case of Swiss Women’s Suffrage
Anna Weithaler & Florian Pistrol
What the paper says
For there to be democracy, there must be self-limitation. This is one of the key ideas in the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis. Yet he says little about what exactly self-limitation means. The examples he gives by way of illustration – Sophocles’ Antigone and the graphe paranomon – are only of limited help. His interpretation of the former is highly idiosyncratic; his account of the latter relies on considerable simplification. This article makes up for this lack of clarity. We show that there are two kinds of self-limitation. One is about matters within the demos ; the other concerns who should belong to it. Our interest is in shedding light on the latter. We do this by drawing on the history of women’s suffrage in Switzerland and by reading Castoriadis against Castoriadis. Our argument is that self-limitation is best understood as a reciprocal process, as something required of both those who already belong to the body politic and those who wish to join it.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.