L’infinito della lingua: la retorica e lo scarto della parola = The infinite of language: rhetoric and the gap of word

Abstract

The infinite of language: rhetoric and the gap of word. This essay will explore the inner connectedness between three philological sights: first, a rarely visited place in the Aristotelian theory on discourse, second, some reflections on rhetoric as art in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, third, psychoanalytic reflections on language. I intend to show how the art of rhetoric – precisely in its status as art – presents a moment, in which human speech is no longer reducible to knowledge. Instead of merely functioning as a doctrine on the use of language, rhetoric stages the event of the spoken word, a word that exceeds narrow conceptions of meaning