Maculate Conceptions: Barbara Cassin’s Autodoxography

This article takes Barbara Cassin’s early self-published ‘Explication de texte: A Beginner’s Guide’ as an originary text of sorts, one bringing into immediate focus an autobiographical dimension that characterizes much of Barbara Cassin’s subsequent writing. This is read alongside the text which, the article argues, uses autobiographical framing to the greatest rhetorical effect, Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis. The two key episodes she recounts are seen as punctually determining moments in her philosophical trajectory, deeply connected to her sense of herself as a woman writer and philosopher, but also contrapuntally in the way in which she reads the texts of Greek philosophy against the grain of accepted dogmatic interpretations. If writing is for Cassin inseparable from the question of continuously writing and rewriting the self otherwise, then her rethinking and rewriting of doxography might be named a kind of autodoxography.