The Ghosts of Rhetoric

Abstract

Rhetoric has always been haunted. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology, this essay asks why that is, and what the ghost wants from contemporary rhetorical scholarship. The aim is not to exorcise the ghosts in order to find rhetoric’s true object. With Hamlet, Marx and Derrida, the essay argues that time is always “out of joint”. The ghost arises from the exclusions every symbolic order makes, so the dream of an ideal, ghost-free state is an ideological fantasy. Following Žižek’s reading of Marx, ideology is then located in our attempts to conjure, name and banish the ghost, not in false consciousness. Plato’s critique of Gorgianic rhetoric appears as such an exorcism. Gorgias, by contrast, offers an ethics that starts from the haunted present. Here rhetoric can find a critical heritage. Avoiding both dogmatic idealism and cynical relativism, it can take up the critique of contemporary ideologies, from Platonic doctrines of ideas to neo-fascist populism.

Cite

APA

Stagnell, A. (2015). Retorikens spöken. In E. Bengtson & F. Buhre (Eds.), Förledd och förtjust: Andra generationens retorikvetare tar ordet (pp. 73–85). Södertörns högskola.

@incollection{stagnell2015,
  author    = {Stagnell, Alexander},
  title     = {Retorikens spöken},
  booktitle = {Förledd och förtjust: Andra generationens retorikvetare tar ordet},
  editor    = {Bengtson, Erik and Buhre, Fredrik},
  series    = {Södertörn retoriska studier},
  number    = {3},
  pages     = {73--85},
  publisher = {Södertörns högskola},
  address   = {Huddinge},
  year      = {2015}
}