Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism
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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.
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Barbara Cassin has served as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as the President of the College International de Philosophie. A recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, she is a member of the Academie Francaise and an exhibit curator. Her recent books in English translation include Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis (Fordham University Press, 2019), Google Me: One-Click Democracy (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (Fordham University Press, 2016). Her editorial work includes the seminal Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). A translator herself (notably of Hannah Arendt and Peter Szondi), she is the editor of several book series including L’Ordre philosophique.
