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Jacques the Sophist

Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis
  • Barbara Cassin
  • Translated by: Michael Syrotinski and Michael Syrotinski
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2019

About this book

Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other. Yet sophistry’s emphasis on words and performativity over the fetishization of truth makes it an essential part of our world’s cultural, political, and philosophical repertoire. In this dazzling book, Barbara Cassin, who has done more than anyone to reclaim a mode of thought that traditional philosophy disavows, shows how the sophistical tradition has survived in the work of psychoanalysis.

In a highly original rereading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan, together with works of Freud and others, Cassin shows how psychoanalysis, like the sophists, challenges the very foundations of scientific rationality. In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, the analyst, like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth.

This witty, brilliant tour de force celebrates how psychoanalysts have become our culture’s key dissidents and register, in Lacan’s words, “the presence of the sophist in our time.”

A highly original reading of psychoanalysis, and the much-discussed work of Jacques Lacan in particular, as inheriting a subterranean anti-philosophical tradition inherited not from Plato and all his mainstream philosophical inheritors but from his antagonists, the Sophists.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Barbara Cassin Barbara Cassin has served as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as the President of the College International de Philosophie. A recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, she is a member of the Academie Francaise and an exhibit curator. Her recent books in English translation include Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis (Fordham University Press, 2019), Google Me: One-Click Democracy (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (Fordham University Press, 2016). Her editorial work includes the seminal Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). A translator herself (notably of Hannah Arendt and Peter Szondi), she is the editor of several book series including L’Ordre philosophique. --- Contributor: Michael Syrotinski Michael Syrotinski is Marshal Professor of French at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Deconstruction and the Postcolonial and cotranslator of Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables.

Reviews

Cassin’s most adventurous—and beautifully written—work to date, a far-reaching meditation on the presence in modern thought of the sophistic discourses that philosophy has never succeeded in consigning to the past.---Andrew Parker, Rutgers Unviersity --- Barbara Cassin's truly original and groundbreaking engagement with Greek philosophy, and particularly with sophistry, constitutes one of the milestones of contemporary philosophy. Her book on Jacques Lacan is a paramount example of this achievement, as well as of the novelty and productivity of the perspective opened by it. It is a most compelling reading of Lacan’s oeuvre, pursuing and revealing its unique and radical edge.---Alenka Zupančič, author of What IS Sex?

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    Frontmatter

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    Contents

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    Prologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me”

    1
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    1. Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves

    5
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    2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time

    23
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    3. Logos- Pharmakon

    39
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    4. Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti- Aristotelianism

    59
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    5. The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab- Aristotelianism

    93
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    Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish

    127
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    Acknowledgments

    133
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    Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability

    135
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    Notes

    141
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    Index

    171
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 20, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9780823285778
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823285778
eBook ISBN: 9780823285778
Keywords for this book
Psychoanalysis; sophistry; discourse; sexual relationship; Lacan; Freud; Aristotle; Democritus; homonym; equivocation
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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