Abstract
“Rhetoric in Hegel” is meant as the treatment of rhetoric in the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, one of the author’s posthumous works. It is a short exposition whose content does not reoccur in Hegel’s systematic works. These remarks on persuasive speech, focused on oratorical and historiographical prose, are not significant for the economy of Hegel’s thought. Yet in his texts on aesthetics and in his systematic works, traditional elocutionary and argumentative rhetorical figures appear without theoretical or historical justification. Such figures raise questions about the relationships of logic, language, and politics in Hegel and draw attention to analogical semantic isotopes. This is what is meant by “Hegel’s rhetoric”: a rhetoric that goes beyond the author’s own definition, that deserves analysis from the perspective of Hegel’s dialectics, and that reflects in important ways on contemporary topicality.