“The psychoanalyst is a sign of the presence of the sophist in our time, but with a different status.” The surprising confluence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the texts of the Ancient Greek sophists in Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis becomes a springboard for Barbara Cassin’s highly original re-reading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan. Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been represented as philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other, and this allows her to draw out the “sophistic” elements of Lacan’s own language or how, as she puts it, Lacan “philosophistises”. What both sophists and Lacan have in common is that they radically challenge the very foundations of scientific rationality, and of the relationship of meaning to language, which is shown to operate performatively, at the level of the signifier, and to distance itself from the primacy of truth in philosophy. Our time is said to be the time of the subject of the unconscious, bound to the sexual relationship which does not exist, by contrast with the Greek political animal. As Cassin demonstrates, in a remarkable tour de force, this can be expressed variously in terms of discourse as a social link that has to be negotiated between medicine and politics, between sense and non-sense, between mastery and jouissance. Published originally in French in 2012, Cassin’s book is translated into English for the first time by Michael Syrotinski and includes his translator’s notes, commentary, and index.
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