Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism

Barbara Cassin

Published by Fordham University Press 2014

Sophistical Practice

Toward a Consistent Relativism

Barbara Cassin

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823256426

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Cassin Barbara :

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and a member of the Académie Française. Her widely discussed Dictionary of Untranslatables has been translated into seven languages, and her Nostalgia: When Are we Ever at Home? won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent books to appear in English are Google Me: One-Click Democracy and, with Alain Badiou, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship.

Reviews

—Bonnie Honig:

To think with Barbara Cassin is a pleasure and a privilege. English
readers will be grateful to Fordham University Press for making
Cassin's work in classics and philosophy available to them finally.
Her unique readings, combining ancient texts and contemporary theory,
breathe new life into everything they touch.

—Soulemane Bachir Diagne:
Nietzsche considered that Socrates mischaracterized the Sophists and exiled them out of the Logos, making their art the other of philosophy, of what became the Platonic-Aristotelian orthodoxy in the history of western thought. Barbara Cassin’s Sophistical Practice undertakes the Nietzschean task of reappraising the Sophists’ enterprise and the lessons that their “other” conception of the Logos has for us, today: about the long suppressed feminine buried under the orthodox history of philosophy, about language and translation, about the meaning of a transitional justice (of the kind illustrated by post-apartheid South Africa) that demands not the absolute Platonic truth-in-itself but the sophistical “enough-truth-for” restoring communities fractured by hate and strife and giving them the sense of a future. This is a superb work of classical erudition at the service of the reflection on contemporary issues.

Paul Earlie:
. . . the publication of this anthology represents a major event in continental thought: a summa of Cassin's multifaceted philosophical project to date.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Toward a New Topology of Philosophy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Unusual Presocratics
one. Who’s Afraid of the Sophists?: Against Ethical Correctness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Two. Speak If You Are a Man, or the Transcendental Exclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
Three. Seeing Helen in Every Woman: Woman and Word Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Part II. Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics
Four. Rhetorical Turns in Ancient Greece Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
Five. Topos/Kairos: Two Modes Of Invention Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
Six. Time of Deliberation and Space of Power: Athens and Rome, the First Conflict Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
Part III. Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy
Seven. From Organism to Picnic: Which Consensus for Which City? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Eight. Aristotle with and Against Kant on the Idea of Human Nature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
Part IV. Performance and Performative
Ten. How to Really Do Things with Words: Per for mance Before the Performative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Eleven. The Performative Without Condition: A University sans appel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Twelve. Genres and Genders. Woman/Philosopher: Identity as Strategy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
Thirteen. Philosophizing in Tongues Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
Part V. “Enough of the Truth For . . .”
Fourteen. “Enough of the Truth For. . .”: On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Fifteen. Politics of Memory: On the Treatment of Hate Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	274
Sixteen. Google and Cultural Democracy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
Seventeen. The Relativity of Translation and Relativism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 384
Keywords: sophistic; rhetorics; performance; performative; TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission); transitional justice; translation; unstranslatable; presocratics

eBook

Published: April 3, 2014
ISBN: 9780823256426