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

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.