Rhetoric as an Insurmountable Obstacle

What is it about?

In this chapter I show that de Man’s claim that Nietzsche switched the study of rhetoric from persuasion to tropes and figures, and demonstrated that the paradigmatic structure of language is figural or rhetorical, rather than grammatical, referential, or performative, is untenable. De Man’s conclusions regarding the ‘insurmountable obstacle’ of rhetoric and the ‘catastrophic conclusions’ to which it gives rise cannot be said to derive from Rousseau and Nietzsche. I equally try to show the falsity of de Man’s argument that tropes are wholly cognitive and devoid of any aesthetic function, and call into question his accounts of irony, and ‘technically correct rhetorical readings’, by drawing attention to all the pragmatic aspects of language that his account of rhetoric neglects

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