Abstract

Reviews 225 aggiornata bibliografía, offrono un panorama orgánico e articolato della straordinaria vitalita della forma declamazione e della sua adattabilitá ai contesti storici e cultuiali piú vari. 1 risultati della ricerca, innovativi e propositi\i, confeimano la finalitá dei seminari, di esplorare la complessitá di un filone di studi particolarmente fertile e ricco di spunti. Graziana Brescia Università di Foggia Delphine Reguig-Naya, Le Corps des Idées: Pensées et Poétiques du Langage dans l'Augustinisme de Port-Royal. Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, Mme de La Fayette, Racine. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007. 836 pp. Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 361 pp. Alberto Bordogna, Gli Idoli del Foro: Retorica e Mito nel Pensiero di Giambattista Vico. Rome: Aracne, 2007. 171 pp. Recently, a number of books have appeared that restate more precisely the terms of the debate that enveloped rhetoric in the period of its occlusion between approximately 1650 and 1800. For decades historians of rhetoric have been conscious of the broad and virulent attack on rhetoric, both as practice and as theory, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In com­ parison to its centrality in the Renaissance and its conspicuous reinvention in late modernity, the decline of rhetoric in the intervening period is striking. Yet increasingly scholars have begun to show that any history of rhetoric in this period must go beyond the headline critiques of the art of persuasion mounted by many of the leading philosophical authorities of the age. Indeed, a number of sophisticated studies have begun to appear that trace the ironic afterlife of rhetorical categories in intellectual projects that both emblematize eighteenth-century inquiry and eschew any overt allegiance to rhetoric as a disciplinary formation (see David L. Marshall, "Early Modern Rhetoric: Recent Research in German, Italian, French, and English," Intellectual History Review 17 (2007): 75-93). This review examines some of the issues involved in the problem of language in early modern thought by tracing them through recent work on Port-Royal, Locke, Vico, and—briefly—Herder. As Delphine Reguig-Naya attests time and again in her recent treatment of Port-Royal writers on the subject of language, the ideal for thinkers such as Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole is often a kind of transparency in which language becomes a window on the mind free from distortion (p. 35). Thought is presumed to exist independently of its expression and, as a result, the task of expression is to render faithfully something already fully formed internally. This basic assumption about the separability of thought and language is related to a series of other points of departure that mark the Port-Royal school and figure prominently in many early modern critiques of 226 RHETORICA rhetorical assumptions about language: that the word and not the sentence is the more basic linguistic unit (p. 39), that syntax ought to mirror the structure of thought (p. 73), that representations arrived at arbitrarily are preferable to the lines of inquiry set in motion by the myriad formulations of resemblance (p. 93), that the mind moves much more quickly than speech and on a different track (p. 187), and that the equivocation of terms is the most dangerous problem posed by the embodiment of thought in signs (p. 195). Yet precisely because Port-Royalist anthropology owed so much to the Christian sense of the fall, rhetoric is also understood to be inevitable. If the sensuality of rhetorical address is suspect, it can (and must) be used on behalf of the good. Thus, even if enthymemes are characteristic of the kind of compromises and abbreviations that the tongue must make in order to keep pace with the brain, they are also so natural that they cannot simply be legislated out of existence (p. 63). Likewise, despite its reliance on the equivocating quality of resemblance, metaphor is endemic in language (p. 470). If the traditional domain of rhetorical self-consciousness—direct oral exchange—is more dangerous because of the diversity and potency of the various sensual media in play, the Port-Royalists place an equally rhetorical emphasis on the particular form of language that was the staple of hermeneutic activity—namely, textual...