S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique

S Journal addresses key issues in Lacanian psychoanalysis and its related fields of philosophy, film, literary criticism, and political ideology critique.

Forthcoming issue S13: Barbara Cassin

Known for directing the Dictionary of Untranslatables (Princeton University Press, 2014) and her polemic against Google – Google-moi: la deuxième mission de l’Amérique (Paris: Albin-Michel, 2007) – French philosopher Barbara Cassin made her name with a magisterial rereading of the work of the Ancient sophists – L’Effet sophistique, 1995 - rescuing them from their Platonic and adjectival positioning as the casuistical and commercial others of philosophy. With painstaking philological care, inspired by Derrida and Heidegger yet somehow escaping their rhetorical ploys – perhaps due to a deeper transference to Gorgias – Cassin unearths and rebuilds the Sophist’s ‘logological’ conception of the relationship between discourse and time against Plato and Aristotle’s tendency to spatialize both discourse and time, in particular in the form of the ‘trope’. This reinterpretation of the doctrine, value, position and legacy of the sophists opens up the possibility of different histories of philosophy, indeed of different practices of writing beyond what has been called ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’. Not only does she unravel the Platonic distinction between philosopher and sophist to a point of unrecognizability and indetermination, but she also gives us some measure of the oppressive and disenabling weight of this mistaken dichotomy through the centuries right up until present-day partitions of discourses and allocations of prestige.

Cassin’s work leads its readers to imagine not only other scenes of philosophical writing, but also other practices of pedagogy, in which there is no longer any master to trace the disciple’s steps before her so as to guide her, but where the question of sexuation prefigures any assumed performance of gender.

Enquiries to Oliver Feltham (ofeltham[at]aup.edu) or Sigi Jottkandt (sjottkandt[at]gmail.com)

Extended deadline for submissions: 31 January, 2021