"According to Alain Badiou, we live today in the age of the 'new sophists.' The two crucial breaks in the history of philosophy, Plato's and Kant's, occurred as a reaction to new relativistic attitudes which threatened to demolish the traditional corpus of knowledge: in Plato's case, the logical argumentation of the sophists undermined the mythical foundations of the traditional mores; in Kant's case, empiricists (such as Hume) undermined the foundations of the Leibnizean-Wolfian rationalist metaphysics. In both cases, the solution offered is not a return to the traditional attitude but a new founding gesture which 'beats the sophists at their own game,' i.e., which surmounts the relativism of the sophists by way of its own radicalization (Plato accepts the argumentative procedure of the sophists; Kant accepts Hume's burial of the traditional metaphysics). And it is our hypothesis that Lacan opens up the possibility of another repetition of the same gesture." [...]
"The perception of Lacan as 'anti-essentialist' or 'deconstructionist' falls prey to the same illusion as that of perceiving Plato as just one among the sophists." [...]
"Lacan accepts the 'deconstructionist' motif of radical contingency, but turns this motif against itself, using it to assert his commitment to Truth as contingent." [...]
"To ask 'Is Lacan one among the postmodern new sophists?' is to pose a question far beyond the tedium of a specialized academic discussion. One is tempted to risk a hyperbole and to affirm that everything, from the fate of so-called 'Western civilization' up to the survival of humanity in the ecological crisis, hangs on the answer to this related question: is it possible today, apropos of the postmodern age of new sophists, to repeat mutatis mutandis the Kantian gesture?"
Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 4-5
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