Jacques the Sophist

Jacques the Sophist PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
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.”

Jacques the Sophist

Jacques the Sophist PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.”

There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship PDF Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality. In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.

Sophistical Practice

Sophistical Practice PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823256413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance

The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance PDF Author: Shirley Zisser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003845886
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance: A Lacanian Perspective examines a selection of cultural phenomena of the English Renaissance, all of which include a focus on language, from a Lacanian perspective. The book examines four inter-related cultural symptoms of the English Renaissance: the paucity of painting, the interest in rhetoric, the emergence of a literary style focusing on form and a fascination with the myth of Orpheus. The book argues that the English Renaissance, an apex of rhetorical theory, can offer psychoanalysis further knowledge concerning the intrication of language and flesh, especially where feminine jouissance is at stake. These language-centred phenomena emerge against the backdrop of a peculiar configuration of the visual field, which in contrast to other cultures of the European Renaissance is largely barren of painting other than portraiture. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, scholars of Renaissance culture and those interested in the psychoanalytic study of culture.

JACQUES THE SOPHIST

JACQUES THE SOPHIST PDF Author: CASSIN.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823288779
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Rhetoricity of Philosophy

The Rhetoricity of Philosophy PDF Author: Blake D. Scott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040102409
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This book aims to recast the way that philosophers understand rhetoric. Rather than follow most philosophers in conceiving rhetoric as a specific way of speaking or writing, it shows that rhetoric is better understood as a dimension of all human discourse and action—what the author calls “rhetoricity”. This book provides the first philosophical treatment of rhetoricity. It is motivated by two ongoing developments. The first is the debate between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin about philosophy’s relation to rhetoric. Both Badiou and Cassin are critical of rhetoric, albeit for different reasons. Second, there has been a growing resurgence of interest in rhetoric considering the recent rise in authoritarian politics as well as new forms of propaganda driven by “persuasive technologies”. This book identifies the common target of Badiou’s and Cassin’s otherwise incompatible critiques: rhetoric’s conception of audience. It offers a fresh take on the “new rhetoric” project of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, putting their work into conversation with the Badiou-Cassin debate. The book then turns to the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in search of an expanded conception of audience. It shows that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy allows us to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s psychological notion of audience to texts themselves and to argue that human beings have a rhetorical capacity to reflect on audiences in search of what is potentially persuasive. The Rhetoricity of Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in contemporary European philosophy, rhetoric, argumentation studies, and social theory.

Hume

Hume PDF Author: James A. Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521837251
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
This is the first intellectual biography of the British philosopher and historian David Hume.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350184160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature's influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker

The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker PDF Author: Jacques Taminiaux
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791438626
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Argues that Hannah Arendt's two major philosophical works, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, reveal not a dependency upon Heidegger, but rather a constant and increasing ironic debate with him.

Plato's Republic

Plato's Republic PDF Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745663516
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
Plato's Republic is one of the most well-known and widely discussed texts in the history of philosophy, but how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2500 years after it was originally composed? Alain Badiou invents a new genre in order to breathe fresh life into Plato's text and restore its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has retranslated the work from the original Greek and, by making various changes, adapted it for our times. In this innovative reimagining of a classic text, Badiou has removed all references specific to ancient Greek society, from the endless exchanges about the moral courage of poets to those political considerations that were only of interest to the aristocratic elite. On the other hand, Badiou has expanded the range of cultural references: here philosophy is firing on all cylinders, and Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud and Hegel. They demonstrate the enduring nature of true philosophy, always ready to move with the times. Moreover, Badiou the dramatist has made the Socratic dialogue a true oratorial contest: in his version of the Republic, the interlocutors have more in mind than merely agreeing with the Master. They stand up to him, put him on the spot and thereby show thought in motion. Through this work of writing, scholarship and philosophy, we are able, for the first time, to read a version of Plato's text which is alive, stimulating and directly relevant to our world today.