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.

L'archipel des idées de Barbara Cassin constitue un ensemble de textes indépendants les uns des autres, sans ordre systématique, dans lesquels sont mêlées des réflexions ayant trait aussi bien à la philosophie antique qu'à des questions contemporaines comme le relativisme culturel ou la démocratie.

A one-of-a-kind reference to the international vocabulary of the humanities This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that (...) influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities. (shrink)

Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality. In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and (...) what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought. (shrink)

Google ist nicht nur ein weltumspannender Konzern, der wie kein zweiter für die Macht einer Suchmaschine im Besonderen und des Internets im Allgemeinen einsteht. Barbara Cassin analysiert in diesem Gespräch aus dem Jahr 2009 die Rhetorik und das Sendungsbewusstsein von Google, das darin besteht, »die gesamte Information der Welt zu organisieren«. Dieser von Cassin als global, gewalttätig und total charakterisierte Anspruch beeinflusst auch zeitgenössische Vorstellungen von Demokratie, Kultur und Wissenschaft. Dass dieser Einfluss nicht nur positive Effekte hat, (...) wird im Verlauf des Gesprächs deutlich. Google is not only a worldwide enterprise that represents like no other the power of search engines and the Internet in general. In this interview from 2009 Barbara Cassin analyzes Google's rhetoric and sense of mission, which is “to organize all the information in the world.” Cassin characterizes this claim as global, violent and total, and shows that it also influences contemporary notions of democracy, culture and science. In the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that this influence not only has positive effects. (shrink)

Google is not only a worldwide enterprise that represents like no other the power of search engines and the Internet in general. In this interview from 2009 Barbara Cassin analyzes Google's rhetoric and sense of mission, which is “to organize all the information in the world.” Cassin characterizes this claim as global, violent and total, and shows that it also influences contemporary notions of democracy, culture and science. In the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that (...) this influence not only has positive effects. (shrink)

CITES. — Barbara Cassin, vous êtes spécialiste d’études helléniques et avez publié un ouvrage remarqué intitulé L’Effet sophistique1. Comment en êtes-vous venue àl’ « effet Google » et quelle est la continuité de la pensée grecque aux manières..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance; or, How to Really Do Things with WordsBarbara CassinTranslated by Andrew Goffey"How to do things with words?" How can you really do things with nothing but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of discourse that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a "performative" in Austin's sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies considerably in extension (...) and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a "world effect."Making the connection with performativity is all the more tempting, as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse, cannot be rendered better than by "performance," on condition that "performance" is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a "happening," an "event," an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus)—something like an "exploit."1"Performative" is Austin's own invention, acclimated to French by Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); thereafter it was immediately adopted and popularized by Émile Benveniste (1966). "Performance" is a much older term, which, after ceaseless borrowings to and fro between English and French, has seen its meaning shifted and extended accordingly. Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English "performer" [End Page 349] was coined from Old French parfournir (from medieval Latin perfurnire) and/or parformer; in addition French borrowed the term at least three times, if the Dictionnaire culturel de la langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races to mean the "manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public"; in 1953, to denote "individual result in the accomplishment of a task"; and in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, to mean the opposite of "competence." In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport (performance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics (performance/competence), and modern art (performance in the sense of happening).Let us start with the relationship between performance and performative. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, without naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the "locutionary" on the one hand and the "illocutionary" or performative on the other, calling it the "perlocutionary" ("per" precisely as in "performative").2But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contemporary frame of reference that informs us today: he "invented" the performative as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty, the permeability, of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: "It is time [...] to make a fresh start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which by saying something we do something). Perhaps some clarification and definition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, 'doing something' is a very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not 'doing something'?" (1975, 91–92).In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the difference between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary has for a long time been in a "tangle". It is not so easy to differentiate between the three. All three are, precisely, "acts" of language, and without doubt the categories are at once abstract, slippery, and overlapping. The "locutionary" or "constative," a "normal" statement, is an utterance that "says something"; it is an "act of saying something" (1975, 100): "The cat is on the mat" has a meaning (both a "sense" and a "reference") and is susceptible of being either true or false. For... (shrink)

Nous n'avons pas choisi d'etre aristoteliciens. Nous ne le sommes pas moins que les autres. Le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique accomplit la relegation de la sophistique qui n'a jamais ete achevee par Platon, en instaurant un regime de discours qui fera loi pour toute l'histoire de la metaphysique. Regime que nous appelons semantique, en reference au geste decisif d'Aristote qui fait equivaloir dire et signifier quelque chose. Il faut et il suffit qu'un sophiste lui dise Bonjour! pour qu'Aristote demontre, (...) que bon gre mal gre, il se place sous la juridiction de ce qu'on appelle depuis lors le principe de non-contradiction. La mise en demeure de parler fait office d'arme absolue, et la decision du sens est le foyer de la science de l'etre en tant qu'etre. Pas d'instauration du principe sans adversaire, donc sans stategie: cela suffit pour jeter le soupcon sur l'impression que donne Gamma d'une evidence definitive. (shrink)

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light (...) on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words, language, and rhetoric do things," creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences. (shrink)

Barbara Cassin, philosophe et philologue, directrice de recherche au CNRS a, notamment, dirigé le Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles . Elle explique, dans cet entretien, que les langues ne sont nullement interchangeables, comme l'a bien montré Humboldt au XIXe siècle : cette analyse s'applique tout autant aujourd'hui, à l'heure d'Internet et de Google. Il est donc aberrant et dangereux de faire du tout-à-l'anglais une panacée, sous prétexte qu'il s'agirait d'une solution à la fois plus simple, plus (...) économique et plus démocratique. C'est aberrant, car la pluralité des langues est un atout , de même que, par voie de conséquence, la traduction. C'est dangereux, car en cherchant à épurer les langues de leurs équivoques et la traduction de l'intraduisible, on appauvrit irrévocablement la pensée et l'on s'empêche par là même de comprendre le monde actuel dans toute sa diversité et donc de bénéficier de la mondialisation.Barbara Cassin, philosopher and philologist, director of research at CNRS, in particular, led the European Vocabulary of Philosophies. Untranslatable Dictionary . It explains in this interview, that languages ​​are not at all interchangeable, as clearly shown Humboldt in the nineteenth century   e: This analysis applies equally today, at the time of the Internet and Google . It is therefore absurd and dangerous to all-to-English panacea, under the pretext that this would be a solution to the simpler, cheaper and more democratic. This is absurd, because the multiplicity of languages ​​is an asset , as well as, consequently, translation. This is dangerous because trying to purify their ambiguous language and translating the untranslatable, is irrevocably impoverished thinking and we thus prevents an understanding of the contemporary world in all its diversity and therefore benefit from globalization. (shrink)

What does metalanguage mean, if not translation?“The language of Europe is translation,” Umberto Eco once said. What if, from a philosophical point of view, as well as from a political point of view, the language of the world, and not only the language of Europe, were translation?My point of departure in and of translation is my recent, still ongoing, experience with the French Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, dictionnaire des intraduisibles,1 as well as its translations into other languages, particularly into English, (...) as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.2 I will first describe how the problematic of translation and untranslatability made us work and think “together,” as a... (shrink)

"Le psychanalyste, c'est la présence du sophiste à notre époque, mais avec un autre statut", dit Lacan en 1965. Est-ce cela qui le poussa à consulter Barbara Cassin sur la doxographie? Dans le fil de cette rencontre, les outils de L'helléniste servent à montrer les similitudes entre parole analytique et discours sophistique et selon quelles voies Jacques le Sophiste fait passer du "sens dans le non-sens" (lapsus et mots d'esprit) au "foncier non-sens de tout usage du sens". Aristote (...) est ici interpellé par un Lacan, sophiste moderne, qui pointe la "connerie" du Stagyrite à l'endroit du principe de non-contradiction. Comment parle-t-on, comment pense-t-on la manière dont on parle, quand on place avec Lacan l'énoncé "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" en lieu et place du premier principe aristotélicien? (shrink)

First, I love Greek language, a language which allow me to perceive what a language is, and what translation could mean. Then, I think it is because of Heidegger. At the time, we used to study classical antiquity and the pre-socratics through Heidegger and Nietzsche’s work. My own philosophical question was : « Is it possible to be Presocratic in some other way than the Heideggerian one? » The answer determinated my interest and passion for the sophists. I found it (...) extraordinary when I realized that Gorgias and his treatise « On Nature or the Non-Existent » presented a new way of thinking about Parmenides. If you are a Heideggerian, Parmenides is the origin of philosophy, the origin of thought. But very quickly, only fifty years after Parmenides, Gorgias came and said: « Look, what Parmenides says about Being, he could say about Non-being, and I myself can say it about Non-being. So, is Being an origin, an “Es gibt”, "There Is", just needing to be unconcealed? Or is it simply a product of Parmenides’ poem : Being is an effect of saying, and I can show it ». And he did show it, quite critically. This was my first insight. (shrink)

In this text Cassin and Narcy begin their reassessment of the mode of thought that is sophistry, which has historically functioned as the (negative) “other” of classical philosophy. To this end, the authors first present a close reading of Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, understood as a concerted “strategy against sophism” that, in establishing a logical basis for metaphysics, seeks to relegate the former to the sidelines once and for all. What proves ineliminable in this operation, however, and which (...) “resurfaces beyond metaphysics,” is discourse itself. Cassin and Narcy then set about exploring the contemporary resurgences of sophistry, first through the discourse of (novelistic) fiction, then, more rigorously, in the work of Jacques Lacan, whose own thought poses radical challenges to the relation of language to meaning. (shrink)

By Aristotle’s own admission, homonymy and amphiboly, or syntactic homonymy, are unlikely to be accidental features of the Greek language (nor of any language, nor of language as such), but rather a radical evil that can at best be subdued, through recourse to categories, for example. Or we could choose to follow the sophists and exploit it by aiming at an essentially sonorous consensus. But then such texts would constitute a radical evil for translation.

Ao afirmar que se pode simular a filosofia, mas não a eloqüência, Quintiliano destrói a problemática platônica da imitação (o que é de se imitar é bom, o inimitável é melhor ainda) e justifica a afirmação ao julgar o orador não por sua intenção, mas por seu ato.

among all those magnificent horned beasts at the head of which Monsieur le Préfet does us the honour of being seated, him standing at the prow of the splendid herd of the local bovine race, and taking the helm with a clear and watchful eye, while the sails, propelled by the magnificent native draught horse, carry along the straight course of prosperity the man of Champagne, who does not fear its twists and turns The Prisoner of the Buddha, Franquin, Greg, (...) Jidehem. (shrink)

L'un a les flancs bleutes, l'autre la poitrine gluante; une nageoire pousse ici sur un dos, surgit la une queue; tantot la tete manque, tantot le reste; la main de celui-ci ondule, et celui-la reclame en hurlant ses pieds qui s'evanouissent. Introduisant a la polymorphie de l'animal, le frontispice, ainsi commente par Philostrate, est deploye a travers ce receuil qui explore la difference entre homme, animal et plante. De la medecine a la religion, en passant par les modeles et contre-modeles (...) politiques, les metaphores et les fables, l'imagerie et la logique, textes et images y sont analyses. Car l'animal (dit-on meme animal en grec?) est l'un des lieux de polemique majeurs pour determiner les ruptures au sein de l'Antiquite greco-latine et mieux fixer les coupures entre Antiquite et Modernite. (shrink)

Chacun naît dans la ou dans les langues qu'on parle autour de lui. Mais qu'est-ce qu'une langue "maternelle"? Et qu'arrive-t-il quand on en apprend une autre? Si chaque langue dessine un monde, qu'est-ce qui se dessine quand on en parle plusieurs? Passer d'une langue à l'autre, en apprenant, en traduisant, c'est s'aventurer dans une autre manière de faire passer le sens. Toutes ces manières, lorsqu'on les frotte les unes aux autres, s'enrichissent : on comprend mieux ce que l'on essaye de (...) dire quand on sait que cela se dit autrement, dans une autre langue, avec d'autres mots, qui ne disent peut-être pas tout à fait la même chose. (shrink)

How to avoid that light on facts and past acts implodes any community which tempts a refondation? The treatment of the hatred, which accompanies civil war, is one of the most pointed cyclical problems in politics The essay concerns two procedures of exception : in Athens, after civil war, decree of 403, first procedure of amnesty ; and, in current South Africa, the commission of the Truth and Conciliation. That one confronts with a «normal» procedure: that of the management of (...) the sensitive archives, such as we practise it in France. On this way, one hopes to put in light certain links among political and practical discursive, and some teachings as for the manners of which can be formed the truth and the politics. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la sophistique? Un mouvement des Lumieres, rationalisation de l'essor democratique dans les cites grecques? Ou au contraire un conservatisme d'hommes epris de culture et de beau langage? Une philosophie de la conscience et de l'authenticite existentielle, ou une pratique utilitariste et devoyee des pouvoirs du logos, une non-philosophie? Le lecteur francais, reduit jusqu'ici a une vulgate platonico-aristotelicienne, ignore l'existence et les enjeux d'un debat, qui n'est pourtant pas de pure erudition. C'est un debat d'histoire de la philosophie, qui (...) engage les procedures et les strategies selon lesquelles la philosophie a fabrique et utilise son alter ego. C'est un debat hermeneutique, qui rend manifeste la pregnance et les divergences des horizons qui servent a interpreter les quelques vestiges anthentiquement sophistiques parvenus jusqu'a nous. C'est enfin un debat de pensee, propre a suggerer que des alternatives qui vont de soi - comme progres ou reaction, ethique ou immoralite, raison ou irrationalisme -, peuvent se trouver deplacees, dans tous les sens du terme, a l'occasion d'un examen plus attentif et instruit du discours sophistique. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la sophistique? Un mouvement des Lumieres, rationalisation de l'essor democratique dans les cites grecques? Ou au contraire un conservatisme d'hommes epris de culture et de beau langage? Une philosophie de la conscience et de l'authenticite existentielle, ou une pratique utilitariste et devoyee des pouvoirs du logos, une non-philosophie? Le lecteur francais, reduit jusqu'ici a une vulgate platonico-aristotelicienne, ignore l'existence et les enjeux d'un debat, qui n'est pourtant pas de pure erudition. C'est un debat d'histoire de la philosophie, qui (...) engage les procedures et les strategies selon lesquelles la philosophie a fabrique et utilise son alter ego. C'est un debat hermeneutique, qui rend manifeste la pregnance et les divergences des horizons qui servent a interpreter les quelques vestiges anthentiquement sophistiques parvenus jusqu'a nous. C'est enfin un debat de pensee, propre a suggerer que des alternatives qui vont de soi - comme progres ou reaction, ethique ou immoralite, raison ou irrationalisme -, peuvent se trouver deplacees, dans tous les sens du terme, a l'occasion d'un examen plus attentif et instruit du discours sophistique. (shrink)

Este artigo tenta mostrar como o triunfo da ontologia sobre a sofística só é possível no momento em que, com Aristóteles, se rompe o vínculo entre ser e dizer, chave tanto da constituição da ciência do ser em Parmênides quanto da possibilidade de sua refutação pelos argumentos da " logologia" sofística.

The present paper discusses the characteristics of performative speech through three distinct but related episodes: 1. the ancient origins of “convincing speech“ in Homeric and Sophistic discourse; 2. the treatment of linguistic issues through speech by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; 3. present-day language as determined and constituted by the plurality of languages, between the Scylla and Charybdis of “Globish” and “ontological nationalism”. John L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts as laid down in How to do Things With (...) Words serves as a contemporary frame of reference throughout the argument. (shrink)

This article tells the story of a double adventure. Firstly, that of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, which was published in 2004 by Editions du Seuil/Le Robert. This was an innovative tool that used the ‘untranslatables’ — defined as ‘not that which is not translated, but that which one never stops translating’ — in order to explore the key symptoms of the differences between languages in the philosophies of Europe. Secondly, that of the translations and transpositions of (...) this work, written originally in the French language, into a dozen or so other languages, including English, Arabic, Ukrainian and Romanian, each of which brought to it a different set of concerns. The gesture of translating the original volume into different languages necessitates a genuine reflection on the weighty problem of the génie des langues, and on translation itself as a form of philosophizing with differences. (shrink)

What is sophistics ? What are the genuine reasons of philosophers'hostility, from Plato and Aristotle to Habermas and Badiou ? This text offers a new definition of sophistics as critique of mainstream ontology and a description of the efficiency of such a critical view, through a comprehensive explanation of the primitive scenery between Parmenides'Poem and Gorgias' Treatise of Non-being, and Aristotle's settlement of the principle of non-contradiction in book Gamma of Metaphysics.

L’évaluation doit servir à classer, c’est-à-dire à justifier des déclassements ou désengagements d’État. Elle touche aujourd’hui la santé, la justice, la police, la gestion des flux dits migratoires, l’identité dite nationale, l’école maternelle, le lycée, l’enseignement dit supérieur et la recherche, moribonde. On l’appelle Revue générale des politiques publiques ...

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (...) (Bollack) and the philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)