As postcolonial studies shifts to a more comparative approach one of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now being ...drawn connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory – Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak – to an earlier generation of French (predominantly ‘poststructuralist’) theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida, and the status of deconstruction generally, has been acknowledged, but has not until now been adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski teases out the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a ‘deconstructive postcolonialism’, and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.
Jacques the sophist Cassin, Barbara; Syrotinski, Michael; Cassin, Barbara
2020, 20191018, 2019
eBook
Shows-and celebrates-how, in taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, psychoanalysts have become our culture's key dissidents in their elevation of ...performance and even inconsistency over capital-T Truth.A highly original reading of psychoanalysis, and the much-discussed work of Jacques Lacan in particular, as inheriting a subterranean anti-philosophical tradition inherited not from Plato and all his mainstream philosophical inheritors but from his antagonists, the Sophists.A fun read: light, witty, and often anecdotal, as in Cassin's amusing opening account of how, early in her career, she served as Lacan's consultant on the intricacies of Greek terms he was trying to apply to psychoanalysis.This may be the most important book of Barbara Cassin, who has established herself as a major thinker on both sides of the Atlantic with her stewardship of the highly influentialDictionary of Untranslatables and her French Voices Grand Prize forNostalgia, as well as two books co-authored with Alain Badiou that have recently appeared from Columbia.
Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy's negativealter 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."
Google me Cassin, Barbara; Syrotinski, Michael
2018, 2017
eBook
A witty, philosophically-informed, and openly polemical critique by Barbara Cassin of Google that looks at Google's claims to organize knowledge, and its alleged ethical basis. This critique goes to ...the heart of the assumed benefits to humanity of increasingly advanced internet technology.
"Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy." In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big ...data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a "good" tech company and its "democracy of clicks," laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: "Organize the world's information," and "Don't be evil." For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.
While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google's playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial "flavors" folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.
Barbara Cassin's
Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis
, recently translated into English, constitutes an important rereading of Lacan, and a sustained commentary not only on his ...interpretation of Greek philosophers, notably the Sophists, but more broadly the relationship between psychoanalysis and sophistry. In her study, Cassin draws out the sophistic elements of Lacan's own language, or the way that Lacan ‘philosophistizes’, as she puts it. This article focuses on the relation between Cassin's text and her better-known
Dictionary of Untranslatables
, and aims to show how and why both ‘untranslatability’ and ‘performativity’ become keys to understanding what this book is not only
saying
, but also
doing
. It ends with a series of reflections on machine translation, and how the intersubjective dynamic as theorized by Lacan might open up the possibility of what is here termed a ‘translatorly’ mode of reading and writing.
Barbara Cassin's monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which ...have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the "Untranslatable" (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe's theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical "entanglements", one of Mbembe's key terms.
In 1988 there was a conference in Heidelberg on the philosophical and political dimension of Heidegger's thought, with contributions from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida and Philippe ...Lacoue-Labarthe. This article considers a number of exchanges between French and German philosophers in the late twentieth century, focusing on the theme of translation. Taking Derrida's intervention as a starting point, the article moves on to explore Victor Klemperer's analysis of the German language under Nazism, Derrida and Maurice Blanchot as readers of Heidegger, Paul de Man and Derrida's interpretations of Walter Benjamin's 'Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers', in the context of the post-war French reception of German thought. The article concludes with a discussion of 'untranslatability', as developed by the French philologist and philosopher, Barbara Cassin, in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), taking the history of the concept and word 'subject' as a way of reflecting on Europe's identity, past, present and future.
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