Sophistical Practice

Toward a Consistent Relativism

Barbara Cassin

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780823256396
  9780823256389
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823256419
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself.In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words,
language, and rhetoric do things, " creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community.Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what "is") and today is German.Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new
paradigm for the human sciences.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A NEW TOPOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHY

1. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (New York: Norton, 1999), 120.

2. Cassin, L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard), 1995.

3. See my books There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship with Alain Badiou (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) and Jacques le Sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychanalyse (Paris: Epel, 2012).

4. Aristotle, Topics, book 1, 11: 105a (cf. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984]). In this book, all translations from the Greek are, with stated exceptions, my own. These have in turn been rendered as directly as possible from French into English to minimize the risk of giving quotations at a double remove from the original. Various translations could sometimes be given for one and the same passage. References are given directly in the text when no ambiguity is possible.

5. The dictionary is currently being translated into many languages: Arabic, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Persian, for example; three volumes in Ukrainian and one in Arabic have already been published (see http://intraduisibles.org). The English version, which has been edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, will be published in Spring 2014 under the title Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).

6. For a discussion of Globish, see Barbara Cassin, Plus d’une langue (Paris: Bayard, 2012).

7. Secondary or high school, which culminates with a baccalaureate. Philosophy is taught in the final year.

8. See “Noyade d’un poisson,” in Avec le plus petit et le plus inapparent des corps (Paris: Fayard, 2007), as well as Cassin, Jacques le Sophiste.

9. A phrase often applied to certain nineteenth-century French poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine because of their interest in socially marginal elements.

10. How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).

1. WHO’S AFRAID OF THE SOPHISTS? AGAINST ETHICAL CORRECTNESS

1. Parmenides (Winter semester 1942/43), ed. M. S. Frings, 1982, 2nd edn. 1992, XII, p. 142

2. Francis Ponge, “La cruche,” in Pièces (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 209–10.

3. Aristotle, Topics. See Introduction, note 4.

4. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. M. Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). I am referring here to the first paragraph of fragment 15, which begins, “Philosophistieren ist dephlegmatisieren—Vivificiren.” The paragraph has been omitted from Stoljar’s English translation of fragment 15.

5. For a full translation of Parmenides in French, see Sur la nature ou sur l’étant: Le grec, langue de l’être? trans. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil, Points-bilingues, 1998). For a full translation of Gorgias in French, see L’effet sophistique, 128–32. For an English translation, see, for example, Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948): Parmenides, 41–46, and Gorgias, 127–38.

6. This is the first sentence of Gorgias’s Treatise On What Is Not, or On Nature, as transmitted in ps. Aristotle, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias, 979a12s. I have edited this text in Si Parménide, which is available online (http://www.centreleonrobin.fr/index.php/membres/9-cassin-barbara/3).

7. On translation problems in Parmenides, see part V, chap. 17, “The Relativity of Translation and Relativism.”

8. Heidegger’s translation appears in English in Krell and Capuzzi’s partial translation of Heidegger’s Parmenides as “For Thinking and Being Are the Same,” in Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 79.

9. This sentence belongs to the other version of the same treatise by Gorgias transmitted by Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII, 65–87 (here 79). See Freeman, Ancilla, 129.

10. Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet. Fascicule XXIV: Tour aux figures, amoncellements, cabinet logologique (Geneva: Weber, 1973), 115.

11. Novalis, “Monologue,” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 92–93.

12. Gorgias in ps. Aristotle, On Melissus …, 980b4.

13. I am paraphrasing Francis Ponge’s formidably dry statement. See Pratiques d’écriture ou l’inachèvement perpétuel (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 40. See part V, chap. 17, “The Relativity of Translation and Relativism,” 330.

14. Arendt, “Philosophie et politique,” Cahiers du Grif 33 (1986): 90. This lecture was originally given in 1954.

15. See “Truth and Politics,” in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1993), 259.

16. See part I, chap. 2, “Speak If You Are a Man, or the Transcendental Exclusion.”

17. Metaphysics, Gamma, 4 1006a 12–13, in Books Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon, 2nd ed., trans. Christopher Kirwan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). All subsequent in-text citations are based on modifications of this edition.

18. Ibid., 14–15.

19. Ibid., 5 1009a, 21–22.

20. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 45.

21. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), 157.

22. Apel, “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of a Rational Foundation of Ethics in the Scientific Age,” in Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 225.

23. Apel, “Rekonstruktion der Vernunft durch Transformation der Transzendentalphilosophie.” Interview. Concordia 10 (19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introduction: Toward a New Topology of Philosophy
• I. Unusual Presocratics
• II. Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics
• III. Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy
• IV. Performance and Performative
• V. “Enough of the Truth For …”
• Notes
• Index