MANOEUVRING RHETORICITY: HOLLOW CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE WAKE OF MODERNITY
MANOEUVRING RHETORICITY: HOLLOW CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE WAKE OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: In a book published last year by Corin Braga, De la arhetip la anarhetip (From Archetype to Anarchetype), the author elaborates upon the dialectics of two terms (one of them coined by him): archetype vs. anarchetype, each of them attachable, by and large, to two corresponding epistemes: modernism and post-modernism. Yet, although Corin Braga goes to great lengths to present the terms as a coalescing twosome, my attempt will consist in showing that they are, in effect, only a topological delusion. The analysis will benefit from the theoretical import of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts Tyteca, authors of The New Rhetoric. According to Braga, the archetype is to be construed in terms of a compact structure, to be tracked down on the modernist map of coherence, logos, centrality, unitary sense, while the anarchetype is a “poietical mechanism which disallows claims to logos, introducing instead rupture, plurality irreducible to unification”. The rhetorical strategies put forth by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca will show that this stark opposition is premised on a flawed assumption, since an analysis in rhetorical terms exposes the anarchetype as a construction, not an autonomous formation, but an alleged paradigm dependent on the archetype, an apocryphal degeneration of the archetypal ethics. Consequently, to all intents and purposes, the paper will attempt to show that the anarchetype/ anarchetype binary opposition is one expression of many other dangerous dualisms that control meaning in the wake of modernity.

• Details
• Contents