Abstract
Reviews 215 expediency. Jean-Louis Labarrière treats Aristotle's remarkable compari son of deliberative oratorical style to skiagraphia, or chiaroscuro, in painting. In Section IV, Alexander Nehamas, in an essay that first appeared in Rorty's 1992 collection on the Poetics, writes on pity and fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics, while André Laks (following influential essays by G. E. R. Lloyd, J. Lallot, and I. Tamba-Mecz and Paul Veyne) attempts a unifying interpretation of Aristotle's theory of metaphor. We have here, then, a formidable collection of essays by students of ancient philosophy, one which future scholars of rhetoric will need to take into account. If the shadow of Plato looms large behind most of the essays, that should come as no great surprise. As is the case with all col lections, it would be easy to fault this one for what is omitted or ignored here: it would have been valuable, for example, to have such a group of philosophers comment in more detail on the presocratic / sophistic back ground of the Rhetoric. But that would be to miss the virtues of what is included. I prefer, as I have indicated, to take the publication of this col lection as an auspicious omen for the philosophical study of rhetoric in general, and of the Rhetoric in particular. John T. Kirby Barbara Cassin, L'effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, NRF Essais, 1995), 693 pp. To readers who are not quite acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of French publishing, the release by Gallimard of Barbara Cassin's L'effet sophistique may seem unremarkable. However, for such a mainstream publisher to take the major step of printing nearly seven hundred pages of rhetorical analysis, even in a series devoted to philosophy (NRF Essais), is most remarkable. It means, in terms of France's intellectual landscape, that "rhetoric" has broken into a different field of readership, more accus tomed to reading (and giving credence to) Jean-François Lyotard than, say, Marc Fumaroli. Setting aside this strategic effect, L'effet sophistique bears all the charac teristics of being a major work on at least three counts. Firstly, it heralds a shift in French philosophy from denying history of rhetoric the status of a discipline to its reincorporation in philosophical debates. However, Cassin's work keeps its distance from both deconstruc tion and history of ideas (as in De Romilly's Les grands sophistes dans 216 RHETORICA l'Athènes de Périclès [Paris: De Fallois, 1998]). Secondly, L'effet sophistique has the merit to question sources and to provide new translations and insights into mistranslations (Cassin also heads a team working on a Vocabulaire européen des philosophies). A main tenet of Cassin's method is to immerse her reading-as-translation into the history of readings of particu lar texts such as Gorgias' Praise of Helen or Sextus Empiricus' Aduersus mathematicos VU, 65-87, or Galen's Libellus de captionibus and excerpts from Lucian as well as the remains of Antiphon the Sophist. Thirdly, it offers conceptual tools to formulate a theory of political or civic discourse not unrelated to current debates on the nature of democracy, diversity, and human rights. In this respect, L'effet sophistique truly does justice to the art of rhetoric by inscribing an analysis of the Sophists in the history of their reception by ancient and modern philosophy and in "current affairs." What is most topical is the way Cassin articulates the opposition of what she terms "Arendts' Greece" and "Heidegger's Greece" (pp. 248-69), by way of conclusion to a chapter on "City as Performance." She elucidates how Arendt constructs the primacy of politics over philosophy by resort ing to Protagoras. L'effet sophistique formulates one central question: in the conflict between the two logoi that haunts ancient thought, between ontology and logology, between the Sophist and the Philosopher, how did the First and the Second Sophistics position themselves as key operators in the inven tion of "fictionality"? Can we reconstruct the rhetorical history of that "Other" of philosophy and of good Politics, the Rhetor—either Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon or Philostratos, Ælius Aristides, Lucian, and Longus—and, in the process, obtain a...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 1997-03-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.1997.0023
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