Jacques the Sophist

Barbara Cassin, Michael Syrotinski

Description

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."

Sujets

• Literary theory
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism
• Deconstruction

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 22 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823285778
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

J a c q u e s t h e S o p h i s t

Jacques the Sophist Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

Barbara Cassin Translated and with notes by Michael Syrotinski

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was first published in French asJacques le Sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychanalyse, by Barbara Cassin © EPEL, 2012. Published by arrangement with Agence littéraire Astier-Pécher. All rights reserved.

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This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.

Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture–Centre National du Livre.

This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture–National Center for the Book.

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

c o n t e n t s

Prologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me”

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

 2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time

 3.

Logos-Pharmakon

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

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

Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish

Acknowledgments Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability Notes Index

v

1

5

2

3

39

59

93

127

133 135 141 171

I don’t know how to approach, why not say it, the truth — No more than woman. I have said that the one and the other are the same thing, at least to man.

—Jacques Lacan,Encore

Thirty-six buttocks make eighteen asses.

—Jeanne Bréchon, a.k.a. Tomère

p r o l o g u e “How Kind of You to Recognize Me”

—Hello, is this Lacan? — Certainly not.

Do you remember what Lacan said about agalma in the “Proposition of the 9 October 1967”? “As in all these particular cases that make up the miracle of the Greeks, this one presents us with only a closed Pandora’s box. Open, it is psycho- 1 analysis, which Alcibiades had no need of.” As a prologue of sorts, I would like to present a closed Pandora’s box, ancient Greece as it finds its way to the philologist philosophers, those limping centaurs à la Nietzsche. This Greece, or rather its texts, and above all its pre-Socratic texts, including the texts of the sophists, finds its way to us in fragments via what is called “doxography,” and it will be up to the reader to open it, even if locks are missing even more than keys. This question of the relationship between the transmission of antiquity, via its schools and texts, and the transmission of psychoanalysis was once asked of me by a now departed Argentinian friend, Ezequiel de Olaso, who was very close to Borges. I answered him first of all with an anecdote — all doxography, as we will see, works by anecdote. I narrated the circumstances by which Lacan — it must have been around 1975— asked me to talk to him about doxography.

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