Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis
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.”

1130660950
Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis
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.”

24.99 In Stock
Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

eBook

$24.99  $32.99 Save 24% Current price is $24.99, Original price is $32.99. You Save 24%.

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

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.”


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780823285761
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication date: 10/22/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Barbara Cassin (Author)
Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and a member of the Académie Française. Her widely discussed Dictionary of Untranslatables has been translated into seven languages, and her Nostalgia: When Are we Ever at Home? won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent books to appear in English are Google Me: One-Click Democracy and, with Alain Badiou, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship.

Michael Syrotinski (Translator)
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.

Table of Contents

Prologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me” | 1

1. Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves | 5

2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time | 23

3. Logos-Pharmakon | 39

4. Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism | 59

5. The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab-Aristotelianism | 93

Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish | 127

Acknowledgments | 133

Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability | 135

Notes | 141

Index | 171

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews