The first thing to give Lacan pause for thought was the word doxography. The word, I dare not say the signifier, but the word in any case.
Doxography. It is easy to see how it is formed. Graphy is ...inscribing or putting down in writing; doxography is a matter of going from the oral to the written, from one modality of transmission to another, from one modality of memory to another. Going, more precisely, from enthusiasm to a kind of scratching.
“Enthusiasm” is oral for the Greeks, it is the way in which a god “puts him or herself in,”
“I am master enough of lalangue, the one called French, to have arrived at what fascinates in witnessing the jouissance that is properly part of the system. An opaque jouissance because it excludes ...sense. We had suspected it for some time. To be post-Joycean is to know it.”¹
This sentence indeed excludes sense or meaning—but only just. If there were no protestation of mastery, we would have our doubts, and we would follow the path of its meaning by permitting ourselves to transform the performance into a typographical error. But when one Lacanizes, there is neither metareading nor metalanguage,
PROLOGUE Cassin, Barbara
Jacques the Sophist,
10/2019
Book Chapter
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 psychoanalysis, which Alcibiades had no need of.”¹
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
Freud accustomed psychoanalysis, a Greek word par excellence, to a certain Greece: the Greece of muthos, both myth and story, fiction-fixion, the Greece of Greek Tragedies—Oedipus, Electra, ...Antigone—and of their interpretations, starting with Aristotle’s Poetics and his catharsis. Through his own readings, his references to high German culture from the turn of the century, he finds there what he needs when he needs it, such as Eros and Thanatos, or Empedocles’s Love and Hate. All of this he knows well and makes use of. But, once again, his world is the world of muthos, where phylogenesis and the
EPILOGUE Cassin, Barbara
Jacques the Sophist,
10/2019
Book Chapter
She went camping with kids who were mad.
The day before in the evening, with an entomologist, they had cooked rabbit for forty, but in the early hours yellow bubbles started to appear, like Lake ...Titicaca, and everything had to be thrown out.
Ten of them headed off with canned goods, sardines, cassoulet, pineapples, concentrated milk, to set up camp near to the pond. It was the hottest summer since 1904, the air was breaking up, the forest was steaming, the pond was spewing slightly foul-smelling mist, perfect for hippopotamuses and inflatable mattresses. After all, there was a man, a
Logos-Pharmakon Cassin, Barbara
Jacques the Sophist,
10/2019
Book Chapter
The first effect of a discourse relating to itself, that is, disconnected from reference, is to be a drug that treats/poisons. Logos is a kind of pharmakon.
The external resemblance between sophistry ...and psychoanalysis is only too striking. What is most scandalous, from the perspective of both philosophy and public opinion, is that sophists or psychoanalysts sell their discursive know-how, and always at too high a price. They sell what should not be sold, like the “whores” to whom Xenophon’s Socrates compares them and, since it is, it becomes something quite different: no longer wisdom and truth but skill and
If the two worlds, Lacanian and sophistic, are comparable, it is precisely because both the sophists and Lacan have the same other: the “normal” philosophical regime of discourse, defined by the ...equivalence between “saying” and “meaning something,” namely, “something that has one and the same meaning for oneself and for others.” Aristotle elaborates this series as a means of defending against sophistry; this normative decision is clear for Lacan.¹ It is thus at least plausible that an anti-Aristotelian regime and a post-Aristotelian regime such as Lacanian psychoanalysis could communicate through their non-Aristotelianism, even if the different kinds of “non-” (a
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 (not) 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 (or metalanguage), 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
(innate character or 'genius' of a language), and on translation itself as a form of philosophizing with differences.
