Cassin and the Scene of Teaching

How might we teach philosophy with untranslatables? This paper develops an answer to this question by examining discussions of teaching in the work of Barbara Cassin, with a particular focus on one scene to which she consistently returns — her early experience in the Étienne-Marcel hospital. Taking its lead from a keyword that she uses to describe this experience, ‘invention’, and analysing her discussions of this word in ‘ Topos/Kairos: Two Modes of Invention’ and Nostalgia: When are We Ever at Home?, the article argues that Cassin teaches according to a model of sophistic improvisation that we might imitate in turn.