Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"The psychoanalyst is a sign of the presence of the sophist in our time, but with a different status." The surprising confluence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the texts of the Ancient Greek sophists in Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis becomes a springboard for Barbara Cassin's highly original re-reading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan. Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been represented as philosophy's negative alter ego, its bad other, and this allows her to draw out the "sophistic" elements of Lacan's own language or how, as she puts it, Lacan "philosophistises". What both sophists and Lacan have in common is that they radically challenge the very foundations of scientific rationality, and of the relationship of meaning to language, which is shown to operate performatively, at the level of the signifier, and to distance itself from the primacy of truth in philosophy. Our time is said to be the time of the subject of the unconscious, bound to the sexual relationship which does not exist, by contrast with the Greek political animal. As Cassin demonstrates, in a remarkable tour de force, this can be expressed variously in terms of discourse as a social link that has to be negotiated between medicine and politics, between sense and non-sense, between mastery and jouissance. Published originally in French in 2012, Cassin's book is translated into English for the first time by Michael Syrotinski, and includes his translator's notes, commentary, and index.
Synopsis
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."
Synopsis
Sophistry has long been philosophy's bad other, yet in many ways, its emphasis on words and performativity remain more important than philosophical Truth. This book celebrates an underground survival of the sophistical tradition in the work of work of psychoanalysis, and its determination to take seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation.