Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric

Rhetoric as Critique: Towards a Rhetorical Philosophy

“…Against this background, Bender and Wellbery (1990) speak of a ‘modernist return of rhetoric’, where rhetoric is no longer understood as a rule-based technique or an artistic doctrine but as a common rhetoricity that cannot be mastered by any explanatory meta-discourse: ‘Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence’ (Bender and Wellbery, 1990: 25). From this it also follows that there is no ‘outside’ of language and speech – neither in terms of a language-free standpoint we could adopt nor in terms of a full and exhaustive description of language.…”

Recanonizing Rhetoric: The SecretinandofDiscourse

“…One way of addressing this past is captured by the phrase revisionist historiography, which has often taken the form of scholarly resistance to canonical accounts lionizing rhetoric's Greek and Roman contexts. Volumes like The Ends of Rhetoric (Bender and Wellbery 1990a), Rethinking the History of Rhetoric (Poulakos 1993), Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Vitanza 1994), Reclaiming Rhetorica (Lunsford 1995), Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric (Ballif 2013), and A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric (Sutton and Mifsud 2015) take up the project of revisionist historiography, each uniquely posing the question of "what it might mean to rewrite histories of rhetoric by regendering or revising them" (Ballif 2013, 1). According to Gerald Graff and Michael Leff (2005), revisionism's signature gesture is to expose the power dynamics latent in rhetoric's historical narrative: "[The] revisionist position opposes itself to any grand narrative about the history of rhetoric constructed from a supposedly fixed and neutral perspective.…”

“…Rhetoricians have developed many revisionist approaches to the history of rhetoric, all of which share the desire to change the discipline's long-standing significance or meaning. Some rhetoricians, drawing on Continental philosophy, have advanced Nietzschean (Whitson and Poulakos 1993), Foucauldian (Bender and Wellbery 1990b), and Derridean (Ballif 2013; Vitanza 1997) frameworks to unsettle rhetoric's conventional historical narratives. Other scholars propose novel methods such as "pan-historiography" (Hawhee and Olson 2013), which toggles between sweeping and focused histories, or emphasize queer frameworks such as gossip (VanHaitsma 2016) and the sensory dimensions of archival texts (Cram 2016; Sutton 2013).…”

Heidegger y el olvido de la retórica

“…Sin embargo, tal como recuerda Paul Ricoeur, "antes de degenerar en fútil, la retórica era peligrosa" (Ricoeur 2001, p. 17) debido a su capacidad para funcionar sin referencia objetual, a su falta de compromiso con la verdad y a su capacidad para mover a los hombres a la acción a través de las palabras. Gracias al giro lingüístico, estas razones volverán a surtir efecto en diversas disciplinas y conducirán a una especie de Renaissance, que se refleja en títulos como "Redescubrimiento" (Vetter y Heinrich 1999, Barthes 1993, "Retorno" (Kopperschmidt 1990, Kopperschmidt 1991, Bender y Wellbery 1990 o "Rehabilitación" (Compagnon 1999). Incluso se llegó a hablar de un "giro retórico" en la filosofía (Simons 1990), cuyo principal cometido era reunir bajo un mismo título todos los esfuerzos por poner al descubierto la fuerte retórica que alimenta los discursos políticos, filosóficos e incluso científicos.…”