Jacques the Sophist

Jacques the Sophist Jacques the Sophist Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis Barbara Cassin Translated and with notes by Michael Syrotinski fordham university press New York 2020 Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book was first published in French asJacques le Sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychanalyse, by Barbara Cassin © EPEL, 2012. Published by arrangement with Agence littéraire Astier- Pécher. All rights reserved. Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français. Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture–Centre National du Livre. This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture–National Center for the Book. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1 First edition contents Prologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me” 1 1. Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves 5 2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time 23 3. Logos- Pharmakon 39 4. Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti- Aristotelianism 59 5. The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab- Aristotelianism 93 Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish 127 Acknowledgments 133 Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability 135 Notes 141 Index 171 v I don’t know how to approach, why not say it, the truth— No more than woman. I have said that the one and the other are the same thing, at least to man. — Jacques Lacan, Encore Thirty- six buttocks make eighteen asses. — Jeanne Bréchon, a.k.a. Tomère prologue “How Kind of You to Recognize Me” — Hello, is this Lacan? — Certainly not. Do you remember what Lacan said about agalma in the “Proposition of the 9 October 1967”? “As in all these particular cases that make up the miracle of the Greeks, this one presents us with only a closed Pandora’s box. Open, it is psychoanalysis, which Alcibiades had no need of.”1 As a prologue of sorts, I would like to present a closed Pandora’s box, ancient Greece as it finds its way to the philologist philosophers, those limping centaurs à la Nietzsche. This Greece, or rather its texts, and above all its pre- Socratic texts, including the texts of the sophists, finds its way to us in fragments via what is called “doxography,” and it will be up to the reader to open it, even if locks are missing even more than keys. This question of the relationship between the transmission of antiquity, via its schools and texts, and the transmission of psychoanalysis was once asked of me by a now departed Argentinian friend, Ezequiel de Olaso, who was very close to Borges. I answered him first of all with an anecdote— all doxography, as we will see, works by anecdote. I narrated the circumstances by which Lacan— it must have been around 1975— asked me to talk to him about doxography. 1 2 Prologue Gloria calls me one Sunday morning in the country. Out of breath, I dismount from my horse and run to the telephone (at the time we had more than twenty horses in our gamekeeper’s house and were responsible for working them professionally). Gloria, the secretary in general of the chief medical officer in general— a kind of universal analogous to that of the apples Chirac would eat, in the epigraph to Alain de Libera’s La que- relle des universaux: “I like apples in general.”2 As it happened, my uncle was also a chief medical officer and was, moreover, an intern at the same time and with Lacan (the exasperated kitchen staff, it is said—phêsin — had given Lacan a well- cooked placenta in sauce to eat). “Stay on the line, please. The doctor would like to speak with you.” “Hello,” said the doctor, and I replied, “Hi! How are you?” “How kind of you to recognize me. Jacques Lacan.” It is Jacques Lacan, whom I have never met, and not Jacques Caroli. Just to give a sense of the “misfit” of the start of my relationship to Lacan and of how doxography and psychoanalysis first brushed against one another. I supposed that some analysand had spoken to him about me on a couch (worse than a pillow) and of the effect produced when I gave night lessons to those analysts supposed to know, who wanted to learn, truly mad with the desire to know, philosophers as well as sopho- philes, lovers of knowledge and connoisseurs of love. At the time we were reading not only Plato’s Phaedrus but everything before Plato that even Lacan, like Freud, did not have to hand; starting with Hesiod’s Theogony, following which any Oedi- pus acquired a rawer force, as it deals with everything from incest to emas- culation of a son by the father, with Gaia the Earth sheltering her children in her entrails so that Ouranos the Sky would not devour them, and Cronus their son castrating his father, whose sperm mixed with the sea made Aph- rodite, before his son Zeus then castrated him. So it was around the time Lacan was tying and untying his Borromean knots on his desk, a very particular time, late in his life, when he was not thinking about starting a school, which he had done long ago, but rather what to do with his school, which he never stopped doing until its dissolu- tion and beyond. I would go along to the rue de Lille, regularly, punctually, in the morning more or less every two weeks for quite a few months (if I have forgotten dates and times, I do remember the clothes I bought to go and meet him). One morning, sitting at his desk with his back to me, and fiddling with his knots, he says to me: “Go see Gloria.” My eyes staring at his back, I reply: “You’re going to pay me, aren’t you?” Prologue 3 He turns around, unreadable, his opaque or sore eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, and he says: “You are Stéphanie Gilot, aren’t you?” I go to see Gloria, and no one pays anyone a thing. Did I in fact say or did I only think loudly enough that it could not not be heard: Things have come full circle, it is over because it ends as it began, mistakenly identifying someone. How nice of you to recognize me, Jacques Lacan /You are Stéphanie Gilot, aren’t you? A good- humored double mis- prision, which puts me in my place from the start and leaves me the oppor- tunity and responsibility to bring it to a close. It lightens everything. The outbound mistake opened up the unforeseeable possibility of meeting him and being propelled into the position of immediately dismissed master, after a year of mounting anxiety, as one section of my head continuously sharpened and turned toward him what I was able to say with my not- yet thirty- year- old philology- philosophy, all the more tightly wound because of its fragility; the return mistake produced the splat of an ending with all the panache of kairos. It was true, then, that he did not listen, that he waited to hear, that he heard nothing of the texts I had chosen or of my demon- strations and hypotheses. Or worse.3 What a strange maniac I must have been in the Greek original. In writing this today, I do in fact think: 1. That it was not without determining my relationship to psychoanalysis. No need to go see an analyst, the delightful everyday misprisions are pretty effective.4 2. That it was not without determining my relationship to Hellenic studies. The exposition of doctrines and findings trouvailles( ), of knowledge, is— too bad for peers5 and detractors— first and fore- most a discourse. Lacan was curious to learn, then, from the first great transmissions how, through his school, he could get himself and psychoanalysis out [faire passer]. I hardly need to point out that “faire passer” in French also means to abort— to abort a child. As if the series of theoretical and practical mechanisms he had put in place, all of his mêkhanai (machinations, machines, and machins, or contraptions), the Écrits, the seminars, the mathemes, the school, the “pass,” the cartels, the cardos, were still not enough.6 He was looking for a Pandora’s box like doxography. Allow me to recall the conclu- sion to the Congress on Transmission in June 1979. My proposition, the one which begins the process of what is known as la passe (passing on), whereby I trust in something one might call 4 Prologue transmission, if such a transmission of psychoanalysis were possible.

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