The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time

Cassin distinguishes between the way Freud read the Greeks, reinterpreting their great myths in allegorical fashion, and Lacan’s more nuanced attention to the philosophical arguments, notably of the Sophists and Presocratics, and their understanding of language, speech, or logos. As Lacan says, “The psychoanalyst is a sign of the presence of the sophist in our time, but with a different status,” and Jacques the Sophistbecomes an extended commentary on this sentence.Sophistry is often presented as philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other, yet the two are shown to be inextricably bound together. Cassin uses the term “logology,”coined by Novalis, to connect the shared approach of both Lacan and the Sophists to language, which becomes uncoupled from universal truth as an Aristotelian frame of reference.

Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves

This chapter serves as an introduction to the history and methodology of “doxography” as the deeply problematic means by which Presocratic texts have been transmitted and passed down to us.It highlights the importance of Diogenes Laertius, as one of the most brilliant early doxographers, and the ground-breakingDoxographiGraeci of the nineteenth century German classical scholar and philologist, Herman Diels.Like the sophists, Lacan questions the primacy of truth in both philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse, which is “relegated to the lowly status it deserves.”

The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab-Aristotelianism

This chapter looks at the various negations involved in the “other” of meaning, beyond the philosophically comfortable couple sense/nonsense(Freud’s analysis of jokes as the Unsinn in Sinn), and toward a theorization ofsomething closer to Lacan’s real, as “ab-sense.”This underscores the importance of lack as a foundation of desire—Lacan’s famous dictum “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”—and as a founding principle of “otherness” within language and between languages. A reading of a passage in Democritus points to the way in which this radical otherness of language undermines the very foundation of materialist physics, just as Lacan undermines rationalist models of contemporary science.This in turn becomes a meditation on the nature of feminine sexuality and jouissance, particularly in Lacan’s most important seminar devoted to this question, Encore.

The Drowning of a Fish

The epilogue, bookending what Cassin has termed a “philosophical novella,” is a moving confessional narrative about her first paid job while still a doctoral student, as a tutor teaching Greek topsychotic adolescents in the Etienne Marcel day hospital in Paris. This narrative, while set apart, is also woven into the fabric of the rest of the text, bringing together Lacanian motifs, Greek myths, and a playful attention to the Greek language, as well as her own experiences of helping her profoundly troubled young charges to gain access to their “mother tongue.”It narrates a tragic episode with a particularly troubled young man during a camping trip in the woods.

Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism

At stake in this chapter is a reading of Lacan and the Sophists as sharing a common and radical challenge to the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (something “cannot be and not be at the same time”). This is what Cassin has elsewhere theorized as the Aristotelian “decision of meaning,” or logos as an operation of exclusion of its “bad others,” including polysemy, homonymy, and nonsense.Equivocation becomes for Cassin, as it is for Lacan, not simply one aspect among others of language (and by extension, of translation), but its very condition of possibility. Through a detailed reading of key sections of Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud and Lacan are, when read in the light of Aristotle and in terms of this decision of meaning, seen as perhaps first and foremost Sophists.

Logos-Pharmakon

Pointing to the ambivalence of pharmakon as both poison and remedy, this chapter explores the long tradition of the curative or reparative powers of language, from the sophists through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. The extended reading of Gorgias’sEncomium of Helen shows his dramatic performance as “the first pharmaceutical performance,” since as he talks he produces a new, eternally praiseworthy Helen. Likewise, the TRC is read as a form of psychoanalysis at the level of the nation which is inscribed within a tradition of discursive therapy that goes from sophistry to psychoanalysis, via catharsis. It is less concerned with truth as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” whether it be historical, judicial or individual, but in producing “enough truth” to build the rainbow nation.

“How Kind of You to Recognize Me”

The book begins autobiographically with Cassin recounting how, as a young Hellenist starting to make her name in the early 1970s in Paris, she had been recommended to Lacan to help him get a better understanding of the Presocratics and went on to meet him once a fortnight for several months.Not convinced he in fact understood anything of what she tried to explain to him, the sessions ended quite abruptly in a somewhat comical scene of misrecognition.This missed encounter nonetheless acknowledges the transformative impact Lacanian psychoanalysis would have on Cassin’s approach to philology and philosophy and sets the scene for the rest of the book.