Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry

Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry1 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy Translated by Alex Ling Abstract: In this text Cassin and Narcy begin their reassessment of the mode of thought that is sophistry, which has historically functioned as the (negative) “other” of classical philosophy. To this end, the authors first present a close reading of Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, understood as a concerted “strategy against sophism” that, in establishing a logical basis for metaphysics, seeks to relegate the former to the sidelines once and for all. What proves ineliminable in this operation, however, and which “resurfaces beyond metaphysics,” is discourse itself. Cassin and Narcy then set about exploring the contemporary resurgences of sophistry, first through the discourse of (novelistic) fiction, then, more rigorously, in the work of Jacques Lacan, whose own thought poses radical challenges to the relation of language to meaning. T he initial objective of this seminar was to take stock of a form of thought that resists Platonism and evades metaphysics: sophistry, 1. Translator’s Note: This work was originally published as Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy, “Présocratiques et post-modernes: les effets de la sophistique,” Le Cahier (Collège international de philosophie) 1 (octobre 1985), 54–63. The Journal of Continental Philosophy would like to express its extreme gratitude to Professors Cassin and Narcy, not only for permission to publish, but also for providing clarification and helpful background information on the text, and to Professor François Ladouceur for his invaluable assistance with parts of the translation. Unless otherwise noted (i.e., provided within ‘Translator’s Notes’), citations from Aristotle’s Metaphysics have been translated directly from Cassin and Narcy’s French text. © Journal of Continental Philosophy, volume 1, Issue 2 (2020) All rights reserved. ISSN: 2688-3554 doi: 10.5840/jcp202121515 pp. 217–231 218 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy which has served since the Pre-Socratics as an alternative to the classical Parmenidean-Hegelian line of philosophy. This would mean not only rediscovering, beneath the occultation carried out through the works of Plato and Aristotle, the sophistry of classical Greece, but also bringing to light how this alternative has continued on regardless. The first stage therefore consisted in coming to terms with the process whereby Aristotle completes the Platonic gesture by establishing a regime of discourse that would legislate over the entire history of metaphysics. We call this regime semantics, in reference to Aristotle’s decisive gesture by which saying and signifying something are rendered equivalent. Taking this step involves outlining the key statements of Book Gamma of the Metaphysics, understood in terms of a strategy against sophistry. 1. Book Gamma conjoins the study of the first principle of the science of being qua being—the so-called principle of non-contradiction—with a refutation of Protagoras. Here Aristotle proceeds to reinscribe certain Platonic elements (specifically, the doxographic, sophistic-physics of the Theaetetus) within the framework of “signifying something.”2 This marks a shift in strategy: Plato’s nullifying [dirimant] argument— that sophistry is self-contradictory—is only mentioned at the very end by way of “refrain” (Chapter 8, 1012b14). Aristotle’s strategy can be described as follows: he reduces the discourse of sophistry (Protagoras) to the discourse of physics (Heraclitus), which he extends to ordinary phenomenology (all those who seek out the truth). He then converts this physics discourse, which believes that it escapes the principle of non-contradiction, into an Aristotelian regime of discourse. In resisting this normalization, a remainder—those who speak “for the pleasure of speaking,” “for the love of discourse”—find themselves, so long as they stick to this position, definitively sidelined. 2. The principle of non-contradiction is “the most stable of all” (it is the best-known: “the one thing about which it is impossible to be completely mistaken”; it depends on nothing else: “anyone who seeks to 2. T/N: Aristotle defines the framework of “signifying something,” or of having a single definite meaning, in Book Gamma, Chapter 4, 1006a29–1006b18. Cf. “what is meant by ‘having a definite meaning’ [σημαίνειν έν] is just this: if some arbitrary item is a man, and if there is something that you have to be in order to be a man, then this will be what it is to be a man for that item,” Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), 1006a31–33. Note that the original Greek literally translates as “signifying one [thing].” Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 219 understand any being whatsoever needs to grasp this principle,” Chapter 3, 1005b11–18). However, not only do we come up against some ill-mannered people who demand its demonstration, but all of them are, without exception, exceptions. TABLE OF OPPONENTS OF THE PRINCIPLE: I. Those who speak under the effect of an II. Those who speak for the pleasure of aporia3 speaking (Chapter 5, 1009a16–22. NB they are indistinguishable in what they are saying.) I.1. “Heraclitus” (Chapter 3, 1005b25) = the physicists resumed: Chapter 5, 1009a23 Thesis: opposites belong simultaneously to the same object Examples: Anaxagoras, Democritus I.2. “Protagoras” (Chapter 4, 1007b22) = the sophists resumed: Chapter 5, 1009a64 Thesis: all phenomena are true Examples: Empedocles, Democritus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Homer = those who seek out and love truth the most The Heraclitans—Cratylus 3. Remarks on I. 3.1 The sophists are physicists: • Protagoras is reduced to Heraclitus from the beginning of Chapter 5: if Protagoras, then Heraclitus (1009a6–12); if Heraclitus, then Protagoras (1009a12–15). The same applies for the two “Heraclitan” lineages I.1 and I.2 (1010a11). • Both discourses fall back on the same conception, according to which thought = sensation = alteration (1009b12). Protagoras’s thesis, which sees the introduction of “phenomenon”5 into the terminology (1009a8, 1009b1, 1009b14, 1010b1, 1011a18), is the 3. T/N: The aporia here concerns the impossibility of any direct demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction (hence Aristotle’s reliance on a demonstration through refutation or elenchus). 4. T/N: Cassin and Narcy’s original text erroneously repeats Chapter 4, 1007b22 here. 5. T/N: Note that the Greek φαινόμενα (literally: phenomena) is generally rendered as “appearance” in most English translations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, including W. D. Ross’s benchmark 1908 “Oxford” translation, and Hugh Lawson-Tancred’s more recent and widely-available Penguin Classics edition. 220 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy most immediate physics thesis shared by all the Pre-Socratics, including Parmenides. 3.2 The solution [remède] of “signifying something.” Aristotle persuades all those who refute the principle of non-contradiction that they actually adhere to it. 3.2.1 It is necessary to better identify the “something”—the reference of physics discourse—so that it can be better signified. The phenomenon leads them astray (“what changes, at the point at which it is changing, provides them with a real reason to believe it is not what it is,” 1010a16), and, discussing almost nothing, they almost dispense with discourse altogether.6 Still, they have to consider that there is a substratum of change, that distinctions do escape contradiction, that there exists a supersensible and immobile “something,” with respect to which what they have selected is “inferior.” 3.2.2 Irrespective of the visibility of the phenomenon, the “something” that they refer to [signifient] when they speak is at least identifiable: not the wine, at times sweet, at other times not, but the sweet itself, which does not change (1010b21–26). They therefore fall victim to the general regime of the “demonstration by refutation” of the principle, or to Aristotle’s master stroke [coup d’Aristote]: the same (meaning) cannot simultaneously belong and not belong to the same (word). 3.2.3 They refute themselves not through logical contradiction, as in Plato, but through contradiction between theory and practice, between what they say and what they do. Indeed, were they consistent, then: • they would be silent, like Cratylus moving his finger (Chapter 5, 1010а12; Chapter 4, 1006a12–15); • they would fall into the well, being incapable of discerning it as “not good” to fall into, and, moreover, being unable to 6. T/N: Discussing Cratylus’s appropriation of the legacy of Heraclitus, Aristotle notes how “his mature position was that speech of any kind was radically inappropriate and that expression should be restricted exclusively to the movement of the finger,” Metaphysics, 1010a11–12 (Lawson-Tancred translation). Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 221 distinguish it from non-wells, since the Heraclitan contradiction is always accompanied by the Anaxagorean “all things together” (Chapter 4, 1008b14–27; Chapter 5, 1010b9–11; Chapter 6, 1011a7–11). As with ordinary phenomenology, were Protagoras’s sophistry consistent with itself then it would be both silent and impotent. Reading Gamma only forces it to become what it is—Aristotelian. 4. Remarks on II. “Those who speak for the pleasure of speaking” represent a different kind of sophistry, one that is irreducible to physics; while their discourse is indiscernible from that of the Protagoreans, they differ in their intention. 4.1 Analysis of Chapter 5, 1009a16–22: We cannot persuade them (this is how we recognize them), for in refusing the regime of “signifying something,” they believe that they do not have to think what they are saying, and thereby evade Aristotle’s master stroke. All we can do is “constrain” them by locating ourselves in the field of pure discourse, which is their natural environment, and proposing “a refutation of what they say using their own words and articulations.” On this kind of refutation on the grounds of expression, see the Sophistical Refutations.7 4.2 Analysis of Chapter 6, 1011a15–16: When faced with such adversaries, however, even this kind of refutation is impossible. The refutation is actually a syllogism of the contradiction— since they reject the principle of non-contradiction, being brought into contradiction with themselves does not amount to a defeat for them: “Those who seek nothing but constraint in discourse are asking for the impossible. In fact, they believe they have the right to be contradictory as soon as they speak” (c.f. the Ross translation: “they demand to be allowed to contradict themselves—a claim which contradicts itself from 7. T/N: Aristotle, “Sophistical Refutations,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle Volume I: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Johnathan Barnes, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984). See especially Chapter 7, 169a22–169b2. 222 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy the very first”).8 This refutation therefore constitutes not so much their cure as a “remedy against them [remède contre eux]” intended to protect their listeners. Those who speak for the pleasure of speaking, and limit themselves to this, constitute the remainder of the Aristotelian procedure: the unspeakable [innommable] class of speaking plants is the trace of a discursive regime other than that of signifying something.9 4.3 Analysis of 1011a22: Aristotle nevertheless goes on to reclaim a part of this remainder by attributing to it a supplementary determination: that of “maintaining their discourse.” Maintaining one’s discourse by accepting the principal dialectical rule of not contradicting oneself, thus maintaining one’s position as a respondent, is distinct from maintaining the thought of what one says, which characterized the good will of those in the aporia. Aristotle thereby ensures the return to the fold of the principle of dialectical or eristic sophists described by Plato (compare, for example, Book Gamma, Chapter 6, 1011a17–33, with Theaetetus, 159e–160c: how the proponents of truth’s relativity must speak so as not to contradict each other). We can now complete the table as follows: Principle of non-contradiction signifying something Negators of the principle I II By aporia For the pleasure of speaking I.1 I.2 II.1 II.2 “Heraclitus” “Protagoras” by maintaining by reclaiming their discourse the impossible non-contradiction Heraclitism philosophical sophistry persuasion dialectical sophistry constraint 8. T/N: Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary by W. D. Ross, ed. and trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 1011a15–16. Note that Cassin and Narcy also refer here to Jules Tricot’s 1962 French translation of La Métaphysique (Paris: Vrin) as a further point of comparison. 9. T/N: According to Aristotle, those who reject the principle of non-contradiction and simply “speak for the sake of speaking” amount to nothing more than plants that speak: “it is absurd to attempt to reason with one who will not reason about anything, in so far as he refuses to reason. For such a man, as such, is seen already to be no better than a mere plant,” Metaphysics, 1006a13–15 (Ross translation). Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 223 5. The sophistry represented by Protagoras’s thesis “all phenomena are true” presupposes an immediate agreement between being, thinking and saying, and falls under a Pre-Socratic regime of truth. Aristotle simultaneously performs a disjunction of the three planes of ontology, logic, and practice, and their conjunction in the principle of non-contradiction and the requirements of signification. He thereby converts philosophical sophistry, reduces dialectical sophistry to the inanity of a purely logical game, and relegates sophistic sophistry to the sidelines by excluding it at a stroke from the essence of things, from the meaning of words, and from the being of humanity. Relegation in perpetuity: “at the whim of contradictory affirmations that man is capable of producing at leisure concerning one and the same thing, he releases himself from his own essence to pass into non-essence, he breaks all relation to being as such.”10 The advantages of the preceding analysis are twofold. On the one hand, it allows us to understand how, by instituting a regime of discourse whose ruling body is “science,” Aristotle clears the ground for the entire history of metaphysics, and in this respect, deserves to be called “modern.” Yet on the other hand, by showing how this strategy ultimately ends in an operation of exclusion or of relegation, the analysis of the Aristotelian refutation gives us the best indication of the resilience of sophistic discourse. The history of “rehabilitations” of sophistry in fact shows that the effort to reinterpret what Plato and Aristotle have said about sophistry (their “testimony”) is constantly subordinated to the judgement they have brought upon it: it is always a question of reevaluating the devaluations (phenomenology, subjectivism), and of demonstrating that sophistry is not so unworthy of philosophy. By contrast, extracting what survives of sophistry in Plato and Aristotle’s actual texts, or identifying what of it proves ineliminable, allows us to rediscover its meaning. Along with sophistry, what is obscured and which resurfaces beyond metaphysics, is discourse, and the differing status of its omnipotence. Hence the second stage of the research: the exploration of the resurgences, both explicit and implicit, of a discourse that will from this point forward be transgressive. 10. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Tome 1, trans. Pierre Klossowski (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 468. 224 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy Examination of the Second Sophistic and the birth of the Greek novel shows that the discourse of fiction is one of the paradigms of this transgression. History, with the logography of Herodotus and Thucydides, was one of the major examples of sophistic prose.11 Once it has submitted to Aristotelian law [les canons aristotéliciens] (Polybius), the inherent power of a discourse that is not shackled to a “real” finds its great resource in fiction: the indiscernibility, within the discourse, of the true and the false. The invention of the novel against the Poetics: it is here, after the Greek novel (which is not yet called novel, and in fact has no name), that an entire history of the novel, from Cervantès to Borges, finds its place. More specifically: following the Mallarméan rupture, with the development of a post-Aristotelian poetics, meaning a poetics no longer enslaved to the ideals [canons] of representation, there is the possibility of a discourse openly liberated from Aristotelian control. Yet we must wait for the expression of the repressed in psychoanalysis to hear it in full. “Generally speaking,” Lacan notes, “language proves to be a field more rich in resources than if it were merely the field in which philosophical discourse has inscribed itself over the course of time.”12 For once, it is about “giving something back to metaphysics,” as opposed to “holding up in its manger.”13 What does the “more” refer to here? Benveniste puts it as simply as possible: “we are in a language which acts as much as it expresses.”14 Not only does language “express”—saying what 11. T/N: The French word histoire plays a complex role here. On the one hand, the fact that it can mean both “story” and “history”—a dual signification which is absent in English—not only highlights the problem of homonymy but also underscores the interplay of fiction and history and the consequent indiscernibility of truth and falsity. Moreover, “History” of course served as a generic title for many defining works of the period: both Herodotus and Polybius (mentioned in the following sentence) authored books called The Histories, while Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the logographers (from the Greek logos, meaning “story” or “prose”) were technically predecessors of Herodotus and Thucydides, and are generally considered (at best) chroniclers of history rather than historians per se. It was in part by breaking with this logographic tradition that Herodotus and Thucydides laid out the groundwork for the discourse of historiography proper. 12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 (Encore), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999), 30 (trans. modified). 13. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 61 (trans. modified). 14. T/N: Cf. “Everything [in the analytic experience] proclaims the advent of a technique that makes language its field of action and the special instrument of its efficacy. But then a fundamental question arises: just what is this ‘language’ which acts Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 225 I see (phenomenology), saying what I am (ontology)—but it “acts”: as a good pharmakon, it is capable of transforming the other or myself, just as it is capable—as both the character and stratagem of Helen makes clear to us15—of establishing or of producing a world-effect. Lacan, like sophistry, articulates this activity of language in two stages: a critical stage, in relation to philosophy, and an affirmative [positif] stage, wherein a number of key formulas are clarified. In the two texts that appear most explicit in this regard—his 1972–1973 seminar Encore, and his address delivered at the second Rome Congress (November 1, 1974)16—he first targets Parmenides, and very precisely, the two theses that found ontology and provide philosophical discourse with its physiognomy for centuries to come. The first is that “being is and not-being is not.” “It is precisely because he was a poet that Parmenides says what he has to say to us in the least stupid of manners. Otherwise, the idea that being is and that not-being is not, I don’t know what that means to you, but personally I find that stupid. And you must not believe that it amuses me to say so.”17 The second thesis concerns the identity or the co-belonging of being and thought: “Je pense donc je souis18 [. . .] is, all the same, better than what Parmenides said. The obscurity of the conjunction of noein [thinking] and of einai [being], as much as it expresses something?,” Emile Benveniste, “Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), 66. 15. T/N: For an overview of the strategic use of the figure of Helen in art and philosophy since the time of Homer, see Barbara Cassin, “Seeing Helen in Every Woman: Woman and Word,” in Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 57–71. In this instance the principal reference is of course to the pre-Socratic philosopher and sophist Gorgias, who argued for the totalizing power of language in his Encomium of Helen: “speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity [. . .]. The power of speech has the same effect on the disposition of the soul as the disposition of drugs on the nature of bodies,” Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen,” in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, ed. and trans. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 191–192. 16. T/N: See Lacan, Book XX: Encore; and Jacques Lacan, “La Troisième,” La Cause freudienne 79 (2011), 11–33. Note that this address was actually delivered at the 7th Congress of the École freudienne de Paris à Rome. 17. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 22. 18. T/N: Here Lacan rewrites Descartes famous “je pense donc je suis”—“I think therefore I am”—by adding an “o” to the closing suis such that it becomes souis. Spelt this way, with the spoken accent falling on the oui or the “yes,” Lacan can be seen to 226 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy it just doesn’t work out for poor Plato.”19 And with regard to Aristotle: “his error is to imply that what is thought of [le pensé] is the image of the thought [la pensée], or in other words, that being thinks.”20 Taken together, these two theses ensure that it is impossible to say and to think what is not, and ontology defines itself here as the saying of what is. It therefore appears to be simply begging the question: “The discourse of being presumes that being is, and that is what holds it.”21 Aside from the denial of any amusement in saying it, this is precisely the starting point of Gorgias’s “On Not Being.” Here Gorgias shows how, when one applies the principles of Parmenides’ ontology to itself, which will become those of identity and non-contradiction, it generates its own reversal. For example, if one can neither say nor think what is not, then it suffices for me to say and think that “chariots race upon the open sea” to ensure that chariots do indeed race upon the open sea.22 Only ontology establishes the sophistical banality of the impossibility of lies and of falsehoods. Ontology acts as if the being of which it had something to say was already there, and so no longer has any need to worry about adequation. Gorgias makes clear that it is only in so far as ontology forgets, not being, but rather that it is itself a discourse, that it is able to hold its ground and take center stage. With respect to ontology, the sophistic thesis and the Lacanian thesis are as one: being is an “effect of speaking,” “a fact of speaking.”23 It seems that it is precisely on this point—in positioning himself thus—that Lacan must be called a sophist. Of course, unlike Lacan, the sophists were be playing on the certainty of Descartes’s cogito: “I think therefore yes I am,” i.e., I am certain that I am, and more specifically, I am certain of being me. 19. Lacan, “La Troisième,” 12. 20. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 105 (trans. modified). 21. Ibid., 119. 22. T/N: Cf. “if there is anything, it is unknowable. If it could be known, then whatever could be thought must have being, and whatever has no being (if it really has none) could not be thought. But if this were so, no one would say anything false—not even if he were to speak of chariots racing in the sea; for then all these things would really be the case,” Gorgias, “On Not Being,” Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, ed. and trans. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 208. 23. T/N: While having no discernible effect on the overall argument, it is nevertheless worth noting that although Cassin and Narcy provide page 107 of the French edition (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller) of Encore as a reference here, Lacan does not actually specify being as “a fact of speaking” [un fait de dire], but rather as “a fact of what is said” [un fait de dit], Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 118. Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 227 much more exclusively practitioners, teachers and orators, such that they left nothing in the way of reflections on their practice. Moreover, as we have already noticed, it is always with some regret that Lacan observes that he is not a Parmenidean, a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Heideggerian, a philosopher. And finally, it goes without saying that Lacan has recourse to other concepts, in particular those of subjectivity and linguistics. But, put very briefly, if these two worlds are nonetheless comparable, this is precisely because the sophists and Lacan share the same other: the “normal” philosophical regime of discourse. Let us simply indicate that the most adequate definition of this normal regime is to be constructed out of Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction is only supported by the deliberate conflation [confusion expresse] of “saying” and “signifying something that has the same meaning for itself as for others.”24 This identification is explicitly elaborated by Aristotle as a defense against sophistry. It is therefore at least plausible that a pre-Aristotelian regime and a post-Aristotelian regime like psychoanalysis can communicate in their non-compliance, or even their anti-Aristotelianism. To clarify this position, which we might designate “logology” (using Novalis’s term),25 we will try to position Lacanian and sophistical quotations side by side. Being is a fact of what is said [un fait de dit]: it simply means that “there’s no such thing as a pre-discursive reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse.”26 We need to reverse the direction of meaning, which passes not from being to saying, but from saying to being. Or, in the terms of Gorgias’s “On Not Being”: “it is not discourse that indicates the outside, but the outside that reveals discourse.”27 Thus, far from being anterior, “reality,” “the outside”—in a word, being—always conforms after the fact to the discourse that brought about its prediction, and, like Helen, only holds on to its existence, this fetishized accretion of breath, by being spoken of [discouru]. 24. T/N: See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1006a19–23. 25. T/N: See Novalis, “Logological Fragments I,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (New York: SUNY, 1997), 47–66. 26. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 32. 27. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos VII, 85. T/N: Cf. “it is not that speech is indicative of the external thing; rather, the external thing becomes revelatory of speech,” Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, ed. and trans. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18. 228 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy A series of negative propositions follow on from this that accuse traditional scientific discourses of naivety. “Cosmology,” for example: “isn’t there something in analytic discourse that can introduce us to the following: that every subsistence or persistence of the world as such must be abandoned?”28 Or “physics”: “in what sense does this new science concern the real?”29 (and in a similar Aristotelian vein, “behaviourism”).30 And finally, the “history” that can be extrapolated from “the history of Christianity,” where “there is not a single fact that cannot be challenged,” and where the whole truth is that of “‘dit-mension,’ the ‘mension’ of what is said.”31 This series of negations culminates in the formula: “there is no metalanguage,” by which we should understand, as expected, that “there is no language of being,” and Lacan can finally neutralize the fundamental ontological proposition by assigning to it an index of enunciation [un indice d’énonciation] characteristic of the doxographic procedure: “being is, as they say, and non-being is not.” We will conclude on the power of logology itself: “I distinguish myself from the language of being. That implies that there may be verbal fiction. I mean, fiction on the basis of the word.”32 That being is a fact of what is being said invites us to take some precautions with regard to signification. The elementary precaution, which would give rise to a reflection on the specificity of writing, is without doubt that of “distinguishing the dimension of the signifier.” “Distinguishing the dimension of the signifier only takes on importance when it is posited that what you hear, in the auditory sense of the term, bears no relation whatsoever to what it signifies.”33 And just as logology does not proceed from being to saying, but rather from saying to being, we will not pass from the signified to the signifier, but vice versa: “the sig- 28. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 43. 29. Ibid., 105. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 107. T/N: Lacan’s neologism “dit-mension”—a pun that unfortunately falls rather flat in English—obviously plays on the word “dimension.” Broken into its component parts, dit (pronounced “di”) means “say” or “said,” while mension is itself a neologism incorporating mansion (i.e., a mansion or dwelling), mention (i.e., to note or mention something), and even mensonge (i.e., a “lie” or a “falsehood”). In effect, Lacan is saying that truth is a dimension of the spoken word: it is “the residence of what is said,” Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 96. 32. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 118. 33. Ibid., 29. Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 229 nified is not what you hear. What you hear is the signifier. The signified is the effect of the signifier.”34 The sophists, like the stoics, did not employ this kind of terminology. It is nonetheless perfectly clear that their critique of ontology relies on the autonomy of a discourse defined as sound, in terms of hearing and listening—the voice of Helen: “Just as sight does not come to know the sounds of the voice, so hearing does not hear colors but only sounds, and the speaker speaks, but he speaks neither a color nor a thing [. . .]. For to begin with, what he says is not a color, but a said [un dire]. So there is neither conceiving nor seeing color, no more than noise, there is only hearing it.”35 Psychoanalysis, like sophistry, makes the signifier whistle and whir [fait bruire le signifiant], and it is for this reason that Lacan lacanizes, and Gorgias, as his contemporaries said with no less hainamoration, “gorgianizes.”36 Indeed, the great resource of the signifier is that it blurs the certitude of meaning—mono-directional [sens unique] and “mono-semic” [l’un-sens] ever since Aristotle—by playing on equivocation: “interpretation [. . .] is not the interpretation of meaning, but a play of equivocation. This is why I have put the emphasis on the signifier in language.”37 In order to censor the Etourdit,38 we might reread Aristotle’s 34. Ibid., 33. 35. T/N: Cf. “Just as vision does not recognize sounds, so hearing does not hear colors, but sounds. And a speaker speaks, but what he says is not a color or a thing. For to begin with, someone who speaks does not say a sound or a color, but a word, so that a color cannot be thought, nor can a sound, but it is only possible to see a color and hear a sound,” Gorgias, “On Not Being,” 208–209. 36. T/N: Lacan’s neologism hainamoration combines the French haine (“hate”) and énamouré (“enamored”)—or more precisely énamoration (“enamoration”). While the word can be awkwardly rendered into English as “hate-loving,” I have nonetheless opted to leave it in the original French. Cf. Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 90, esp. note 1. “Gorgianize,” for its part, which is a term we first encounter in the writings of Philostratus—see Philostratus’s “Lives of the Sophists,” in The Older Sophists, ed. Rosamond Sprague, trans. George Kennedy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), 31—can be seen to play on the verb “gorgonize,” meaning “to stupefy” or “to petrify.” 37. Lacan, “La Troisième,” 20. 38. T/N: The title of Lacan’s famously difficult-to-read 1972 essay “L’Étourdit” plays on the verb étourdir, “to daze” or “stun,” while the addition of the final silent “t” spells dit, i.e., to “say” or have “said.” “To censor the Étourdit” might then amount to reducing the stupefying effect of speech, or of signification in general (or in other words: to de-gorgianize discourse). Lacan’s essay has been the subject of a later work by Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons 230 Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy Sophistical Refutations, where, after having bemoaned the original sin of language—there are fewer words than there are things, and we speak them, in short, as we use pebbles for counting39—he tracks down the equivocation characteristic of fallacies [sophismes]. The fallacies arising from confusions in thought are easy enough to refute by using the ontological, logical and physical categories, or through definition. But against those who subscribe solely to elocution (lexis)—for example, to accent, to the concatenation and division of syllables and words, to modulations of the voice, in short, to the pure play of signifying—Aristotle can manage little more than a simple return to sender, and a relegation, precisely, to insignificance. An insignificance that the pun can nevertheless render explicit. Let us appreciate how closely all of these theses are linked. The fiction of the word signals the rupture with philosophy (“How can I get the philosophical use of my words out of your heads, by which I mean their filthy use”).40 The subsisting and substantive object disappears, in deference to the effect and the efficacy of this effect: “the objet a [. . .] is the object about which there is, precisely, no idea (this is what justifies my reservations [. . .] regarding Plato’s pre-Socratism) [. . .]. The symbolic, the imaginary and the real: this is the statement [l’énoncé] of what effectively operates in your speech when you situate yourself in the analytic discourse, when you become an analyst. But these terms do not truly emerge except for and through this discourse.”41 A further area in which sophistry never ceases to inspire debate is politics. Think of Rousseau’s debt to the myth of Protagoras and to his theory of the social contract. If the political thought of the sophists has enjoyed a on Lacan, trans. Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 39. T/N: Cf. Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 165a6–14. Whereas W. A. Pickard-Cambridge’s standard English translation omits all reference to counting stones or pebbles, the allusion is more apparent in Pieter Sjoerd Hasper’s recent version: “[S]ince it is impossible to have a discussion while adducing the things themselves, and we use words as symbols instead of the things, we assume that what follows for words, also follows for the things (just as with stones for those who do calculations). It is not the same, however, since the words are limited, just like the number of sentences, whereas the things themselves are unlimited in number. It is then inevitable that the same sentence or a single word signify several things,” “Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations: A Translation,” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 15 (2012), 14. 40. Lacan, “La Troisième,” 14. 41. Ibid., 15. Pre-Socratics and Post-Moderns: The Effects of Sophistry 231 better fate, however, this is certainly not due to the fact that it would constitute a separate element. The art of speaking cultivated by the sophists is in a way consubstantial with the art of politics, since it is the orator who holds the key to the production of homonoia. The model of consensus governing the city is provided by the sophistic critique of ontology, which opposes a dispersal of singularities to the immediate unity of Eleatic being—a dispersion that has yet to be aggregated. Two areas of research can be identified here: 1. The ambivalence of the idea of consensus in the First Sophistic: tyranny or democracy, natural law or positive law? This dilemma is obvious in the texts of the sophists (see for example Antiphon), but at the same time it provokes a debate about democracy that is as long as the history of philosophy itself: cf. first and foremost Plato and Aristotle, all the way up to contemporary figures (Nietzsche, but also the debate between Max Weber and Leo Strauss); or Rousseau, who we have already mentioned. 2. If the First Sophistic was directly focused on politics in action, the Second Sophistic, during the Roman Empire, invents a political fiction. Here, through the omnipresent reference to the city, the democratic question becomes an image of idealized heroes and of the people. This is where we see, with the contemporary invention of new genres like biography (Plutarch), the birth of a mythology and a schema destined to serve as matrices of political representation for many years to come: witness the French Revolution, and everything that subsists of its symbolic universe. Thus we arrive at the ambivalence of the Second Sophistic itself: freedom of fiction on the one hand, consecration of images which serve as models on the other. And what happens with Sade is the intersection of the writing of transgression with the subversion of good political sense.