Rhetoric, discourse and the hermeneutics of public speech

Abstract

What insights and advantages do rhetorical approaches offer over other methods of exploring social and political discourse? This article aims to clarify the contribution of rhetorical analysis by exploring its distinctive, hermeneutic attention to public speech. Public speaking is, accordingly, viewed as a practice of assembling meaningful interpretations in specific situations. Central here is a temporal dimension. Analysing rhetoric involves grasping discourse, on the one hand, as concretely situated in response to proximate constraints and, on the other hand, as a medium to move beyond the situation towards a future. Following John Caputo’s reading of Derrida, I argue that, examined rhetorically, public speech enacts a ‘negotiation’ of past and future, intertwining conditional – and hence partially calculable – positions with an ‘unconditional promise’ to prepare for what comes. Although compatible with other approaches, rhetorical analysis is uniquely attuned to this intrinsically ethical and political quality of discursive action.