Form and Energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M)

Abstract

For Barbara Cassin, the distinguished French philosopher and Greek philologist, and editor of the acclaimed Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, the question of form coalesces at the juncture of several intertwined disciplinary interests, and theoretical enterprises: the ever-expanding ‘Untranslatables’ project, in which literary and aesthetic form are at the heart of a very different way of 'doing philosophy' multilingually; the reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a form of modern-day sophistry; and the critique of Google’s domination of the information age.  This chapter reads 'form' in her work through a consideration of how it functions in each of a series of interrelated operations   — the sophistic challenge to Platonic or Aristotelian form; the status of transformation in Lacanian psychoanalysis; an Austinian performative reading of political discourse; and how the so-called information age is redefining the very form itself of knowledge — all of which, I will argue, are tied in different ways to the core notion of the untranslatable.