Barbara Cassin and the words that slip away
Among the new books noted by the Académie française, one immediately made me want to write about it here: Les Mots qui fuient (The Words That Flee) by Barbara Cassin, published by Flammarion on September 30, 2026. When you spend your time learning and exchanging languages, the question of how words leave us hits close to home.
The starting point is simple: how do words slip away from us, is there a way to hold on to them, and what does aging do to language? To answer, the author, a member of the Académie, chose dialogue. She talks with the poet Michel Deguy, the neuroscientists Laurent Cohen, Raphaël Gaillard and Marc Verny, the psychoanalysts Françoise and Jean-Jacques Gorog, the filmmaker Nurith Aviv, the philosopher Alain Badiou, the anthropologist Vinciane Despret, and also with several artificial intelligences set up by Daphné Marnat.
The thread running through it comes down to one question: is forgetting the condition of memory? Through these exchanges the book looks at both personal aging and our own era.
One line quoted in the presentation stayed with me: "Forgetting begins with proper nouns." Anyone who has searched for a name on the tip of their tongue, in their mother tongue or in a foreign one, knows exactly what that means.
I haven't read it yet, so I won't say anything about how successful it is. But including AI among the interlocutors seems to me an interesting choice for a book about the memory of words. I'd be curious to read your own experiences of words that slip away, in any language.
Source: Académie française
The starting point is simple: how do words slip away from us, is there a way to hold on to them, and what does aging do to language? To answer, the author, a member of the Académie, chose dialogue. She talks with the poet Michel Deguy, the neuroscientists Laurent Cohen, Raphaël Gaillard and Marc Verny, the psychoanalysts Françoise and Jean-Jacques Gorog, the filmmaker Nurith Aviv, the philosopher Alain Badiou, the anthropologist Vinciane Despret, and also with several artificial intelligences set up by Daphné Marnat.
The thread running through it comes down to one question: is forgetting the condition of memory? Through these exchanges the book looks at both personal aging and our own era.
One line quoted in the presentation stayed with me: "Forgetting begins with proper nouns." Anyone who has searched for a name on the tip of their tongue, in their mother tongue or in a foreign one, knows exactly what that means.
I haven't read it yet, so I won't say anything about how successful it is. But including AI among the interlocutors seems to me an interesting choice for a book about the memory of words. I'd be curious to read your own experiences of words that slip away, in any language.
Source: Académie française
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