The Rhetoricity of Philosophical Practice: On the Rhetorical Audience in Perelman and Ricœur after the Badiou-Cassin Debate

Despite fundamentally disagreeing over the nature of philosophy and sophistry in their ongoing debate, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin both agree that rhetoric is a dead end for contemporary thought. For Badiou, the proud Platonist, rhetoric’s concern with audiences and their opinions leaves it entirely divorced from truths. For Cassin, the avowed sophist, rhetoric was never anything more than a philosophical ruse designed to contain the creative power of genuine sophistic discourse. Motivated by the incompatibility of their respective interpretations, this dissertation asks whether rhetoric might not have more to offer than Badiou and Cassin suggest. Responding to their criticisms, we argue that rhetoric remains an indispensable area of concern for philosophy. To support our argument, we draw on the work of Chaïm Perelman (as well as his collaborative work with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca) and Paul Ricœur. To different degrees, both Perelman and Ricœur manage to suspend philosophy’s long-standing prejudice against rhetoric and reconsider the significance of the fact that all discourse is oriented towards an audience. After clarifying the stakes of their own debate, Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy allows us to expand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s technical notion of the “rhetorical audience” – which refers to the specific way in which a discourse constructs its hearer or reader. Rather than continue to oppose philosophy and rhetoric as competing disciplines, we use our expanded notion of audience to expose what we call the “rhetoricity” of discourse – the rhetorical dimension of human action often obscured by philosophy’s deep-rooted mistrust of its ancient rival.

We begin our argument in Chapter One with an examination of the Badiou-Cassin Debate. Our aim here is to understand Badiou and Cassin’s reasons for rejecting rhetoric while at the same time highlighting the incompatibility of their assessments. After analysing Badiou and Cassin’s respective positions, we show how both their critiques converge on rhetoric’s concern with audiences. For different reasons, both criticize rhetoric for conceptualizing addressivity in an overly narrow or limited way. Thus, whether approached from the perspective of Badiou’s philosophy or Cassin’s sophistics, rhetoric’s concern with audiences would appear to make it a dead end for contemporary thought.

Before responding to Badiou and Cassin’s criticisms, Chapter Two turns to the “new rhetoric” project of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. Our aim here is to see how the idea of the rhetorical audience has been understood on its own terms, prior to the criticisms of Badiou and Cassin. To this end, we offer a general interpretation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s most important work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1958). Here we highlight the central methodological role of the rhetorical audience in their theory of argumentation – the very concept that Badiou and Cassin take to be most problematic about rhetoric. We then survey the reception of the new rhetoric project across various disciplines, drawing attention to its relative neglect by philosophers. This not only helps to contextualize Badiou and Cassin’s criticisms, but also those of Paul Ricœur which we discuss in Chapter Five.

Building on our interpretation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation, Chapters Three and Four reintroduce Badiou and Cassin into the discussion. Here, we re-examine their criticisms of rhetoric by staging a trial with Perelman. Our aim in these chapters is to determine whether rhetoric is truly a dead end for philosophy, in the manner that Badiou and Cassin allege, or whether there remains something of value in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s rediscovery of rhetoric. While Badiou and Cassin identify certain problems with Perelman’s own philosophical position, we argue that these problems are remediable within the original ambit of the new rhetoric project. Specifically, we argue that neither Badiou nor Cassin’s critiques fully appreciate the significance of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s notion of the rhetorical audience. Thus, rather than do away with rhetoric and discard the notion of the rhetorical audience altogether, we conclude that Badiou and Cassin’s criticisms should instead motivate the search for an expanded conception of audience.

Chapter Five begins our search for an expanded conception of audience by turning to Ricœur. Given that Ricœur does not himself understand his work in rhetorical terms, we first examine several key works from the 1950s to the 1970s that reveal his latent concern with rhetoric. To fully justify this connection, we then reconstruct the “missed encounter” between Perelman and Ricœur in The Rule of Metaphor (1975). By bracketing Ricœur’s own (often borrowed) conception of rhetoric, we argue that a similar concern with audiences is not at all foreign to Ricœur’s thinking, but something he confronts on his own terms, albeit under the banner of hermeneutics. This overlapping concern with audiences brings us to Ricœur’s contribution to an expanded conception of the rhetorical audience. By analogy to Ricœur’s critique of romantic hermeneutics, we argue that it is possible to move away from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “romantic” conception of audience in the direction of what we call the “audience of the text”. Significantly, this extension does not require us to abandon rhetoric for hermeneutics but reframe the way rhetoric is understood. Instead of conceiving it narrowly as a discipline, we argue that rhetoric should instead be understood as a particular dimension of discourse. In other words, that all discourse has a rhetorical dimension, or “rhetoricity”.

Having justified the possibility and fruitfulness of using Ricœur to expand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work, Chapter Six examines three threads in Ricœur’s philosophy that come into focus when viewed through the lens of the rhetorical audience. Pace Cassin and Badiou, each thread illustrates the value of rhetoric for contemporary critical thought. (1) To Cassin’s charge that rhetoric is toophilosophical, we argue that Ricœur’s emphasis on “refiguration” in his threefold conception of mimesis reconciles the tension between a sophistic theory of performance and a rhetorical theory of audience. (2) To Badiou’s charge that rhetoric is too sophistical, we argue that Ricœur’s reflections on ideology and phronesis show why rhetoric is inescapable – even for a philosophy which rejects Perelman’s pluralism. (3) Beyond Badiou and Cassin, however, we also argue that Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology can incorporate rhetoric as a basic human capacity. Most visible in the production and reception of arguments, our rhetorical capacity plays an essential yet underappreciated role in philosophical and social scientific critique.