Cassin has resisted being ‘assigned an essence’ as a woman philosopher but played extensively with the sedimented resonances of this designation. This article asks how Barbara Cassin's interest in providing ‘enough of the truth’ been extended to sexual difference and gender. What is the effect of understanding these as matters of translation and (un)translatability?

As leading representatives of the contemporary clash between sophistry and philosophy, Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou have, for the last three decades, been engaged in a very public battle of ideas. This article explores the positions — and positioning — of both thinkers to determine why neither side has been able to claim victory. It examines Cassin's and Badiou's distinct but not entirely opposed understanding of sophistry/sophistics, as well as the importance both place on Parmenides’ poem On Nature in rethinking (...) the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Although a Cassin–Badiou debate never really takes place, for reasons examined here, their exchanges have much to tell us much about philosophical debate today and its indebtedness to long-standing assumptions about the agonistic nature of argument. (shrink)

How might we teach philosophy with untranslatables? This paper develops an answer to this question by examining discussions of teaching in the work of Barbara Cassin, with a particular focus on one scene to which she consistently returns — her early experience in the Étienne-Marcel hospital. Taking its lead from a keyword that she uses to describe this experience, ‘invention’, and analysing her discussions of this word in ‘ Topos/Kairos: Two Modes of Invention’ and Nostalgia: When are We Ever at (...) Home?, the article argues that Cassin teaches according to a model of sophistic improvisation that we might imitate in turn. (shrink)

This article opens by considering a famous line from Gorgias that Cassin repeatedly returns to, namely, a line where Gorgias calls logos a great dunastês. In particular, the article examines Cassin’s translation of dunastês as ‘sovereign’ and demonstrates how describing the logos as a sovereign is connected to Cassin’s view of the ‘almightiness of speech’. Next, it examines Cassin’s critique of Derrida when it comes to power, above all, that he is an apologist for impotence. It argues that Cassin misunderstands (...) Derrida and fails to acknowledge how Derrida’s notion of the unconditional is without power but not without force. It then examines why Cassin’s sovereign logology is opposed to Globish. Her remarks about Globish are analysed and shown to be problematic on both an empirical and conceptual level, by putting her notion of Globish into conversation with the work of various sociolinguists, as well as Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

This article aims to illuminate the power as well as some of the limitations of Cassin’s post-Lacanian theorization of how speech acts on speaker and listener, has meaning, and gets a grip on ‘things out there’. The article focuses on a narrow case study, namely what Cassin writes about paying to speak to a psychotherapist. First, it elucidates her elliptical comments about the ‘scandal’ of ‘paying for it’ and what this tells us about ‘truth’ and ‘value’ in psychotherapeutic conversations, especially (...) conversations about payment. This involves grounding these theories in clinical realities more concretely than is usually done. The article then reflects critically on her position both by contextualizing it against what psychotherapists themselves have said about ‘money talk’ and by making explicit the developmental narrative that underpins the Lacanian theory, to which the article sketches an alternative inspired principally by Donald Winnicott. (shrink)

This article takes Barbara Cassin’s early self-published ‘Explication de texte: A Beginner’s Guide’ as an originary text of sorts, one bringing into immediate focus an autobiographical dimension that characterizes much of Barbara Cassin’s subsequent writing. This is read alongside the text which, the article argues, uses autobiographical framing to the greatest rhetorical effect, Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis. The two key episodes she recounts are seen as punctually determining moments in her philosophical trajectory, deeply connected to her sense (...) of herself as a woman writer and philosopher, but also contrapuntally in the way in which she reads the texts of Greek philosophy against the grain of accepted dogmatic interpretations. If writing is for Cassin inseparable from the question of continuously writing and rewriting the self otherwise, then her rethinking and rewriting of doxography might be named a kind of autodoxography. (shrink)