Jacques the Sophist

Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis

By: Barbara Cassin, Michael Syrotinski (Translator)

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eBook | 22 October 2019 | Edition Number 1

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192 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24

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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."

Industry Reviews

Cassin's most adventurous-and beautifully written-work to date, a far-reaching meditation on the presence in modern thought of the sophistic discourses that philosophy has never succeeded in consigning to the past.