Lecture by Barbara Cassin

Barbara Cassin 

Presenting an idea ?
Lecture in French

"How do you show something you can't see? How do you show an idea? Can you go from a book to an exhibition? I will try to answer these kinds of questions by drawing on my dual experience of the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles and exhibitions on language and translation, in Marseilles, Geneva, Buenos Aires, soon in Luxembourg, and even in Villers-Cotterêts, each time trying to understand the place and reinvent it." 

Barbara Cassin is a philologist, Hellenist and philosopher, specialising in Greek philosophers and the rhetoric of modernity. Director of research at the CNRS, translator and director of collections devoted to philosophy, she became director of the Léon-Robin Centre in 2006 and then, in 2010, president of the Collège international de philosophie, for which she also directs the journal Rue Descartes for UNESCO. She has accompanied the Collège International de Philosophie throughout its history, edited collections with Alain Badiou at Seuil and then Fayard, created UNESCO's Revue des Femmes Philosophes and taught in a wide variety of settings, from day hospitals for psychotic adolescents to the most prestigious foreign universities.

In 2012, Barbara Cassin was awarded the Grand Prix de philosophie by the Académie française for the body of her work and, in 2018, the CNRS gold medal. That same year, she was elected to the Académie française, in Philippe Beaussant's 36th chair.

Barbara Cassin has also curated exhibitions, in particular on translation (Après Babel, traduire, at Mucem) and co-curated the permanent exhibition at the Cité internationale de la langue Française - Château de Villers-Cotterêts, due to open on 30 October 2023. She has just given five lectures at the Chaire du Louvre, devoted to L'Odyssée, un roman graphique: Homère en philosophe, to mark the reopening of the Galerie Campana at the Musée du Louvre. 

Brief bibliography: L'Effet sophistique (Gallimard ed., 2022); Quand dire c'est vraiment faire (Fayard ed., 2018); Le Bonheur, sa dent, douce à la mort. Autobiographie philosophique (Fayard ed., 2020); Amnistie et pardon : pour une ligne de partage entre éthique et politique (Le Genre humain ed., Seuil, 2004); Vocabulaire européen des philosophies - Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (collective work, ed. Seuil - Le Robert, 2004). The latter work has been translated and reinvented in a dozen languages.

This programme of lectures is a co-production of UCArts - Direction de la Culture d'Université Côte d'Azur and the National Museums of the 20th Century in the Alpes-Maritimes. The six conferences are organised in partnership with the Association of the Friends of the Marc Chagall national Museum. 

The programme has been put together by the museum in collaboration with Josiane Rieu, professor of 16th-century French literature at the Université Côte d'Azur and member of the CTEL, Centre Transdisciplinaires d'Epistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts Vivants. 

To find out more about our conferences programme for the 2023-24 season

Barbara Cassin. Picture : © DR / Elle magazine, 2023