Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism
Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism
At stake in this chapter is a reading of Lacan and the Sophists as sharing a common and radical challenge to the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (something “cannot be and not be at the same time”). This is what Cassin has elsewhere theorized as the Aristotelian “decision of meaning,” or logos as an operation of exclusion of its “bad others,” including polysemy, homonymy, and nonsense.Equivocation becomes for Cassin, as it is for Lacan, not simply one aspect among others of language (and by extension, of translation), but its very condition of possibility. Through a detailed reading of key sections of Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud and Lacan are, when read in the light of Aristotle and in terms of this decision of meaning, seen as perhaps first and foremost Sophists.
Keywords: decision of meaning, equivocation, Freudian jokes, homonymy, nonsense, sense
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
