How Not to Win: Cassin and Badiou

As leading representatives of the contemporary clash between sophistry and philosophy, Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou have, for the last three decades, been engaged in a very public battle of ideas. This article explores the positions — and positioning — of both thinkers to determine why neither side has been able to claim victory. It examines Cassin’s and Badiou’s distinct but not entirely opposed understanding of sophistry/sophistics, as well as the importance both place on Parmenides’ poem, On Nature, in rethinking the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Although a Cassin-Badiou debate never really takes place, for reasons examined here, their exchanges have much to tell us much about philosophical debate today and its indebtedness to long-standing assumptions about the agonistic nature of argument.