The lack of attention to the problem of rhetoric, or the simple dichotomy between science and rhetoric, induces a tendency to perceive rhetoric as “m… - Dominick LaCapra
" "The lack of attention to the problem of rhetoric, or the simple dichotomy between science and rhetoric, induces a tendency to perceive rhetoric as “merely” rhetorical and to understand scientific truth in terms of a rather blind rhetoric of anti-rhetoric. This tendency, which defines science as the adversary or antithesis of rhetoric, has often been conjoined with a defense of a “plain style” that attempts or pretends to be entirely transparent to its object. It is not uncommon to observe that the anti-rhetoric of plain style or, more elaborately, of “scientificity” is itself a self-denying quest for a certain rhetoric, a rhetoric unadorned by figures, unmoved by emotion, unclouded by images, and universalistic in its conceptual or mathematical scope.
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About Dominick LaCapra
Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
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Additional quotes by Dominick LaCapra
I have no synoptic formula for resolving the various problems I have tried to raise. I would simply end by saying that what emerges from my discussion is the necessity and the difficulty of linking the history of criticism to criticism itself—criticism that is not only literary but sociocultural and political as well. Another way to state this point is to reiterate the need to come to terms with the problem of transference in the relation between past and present. In this respect, the practice of the critic would have to engage the issue of its own situation in the complex intellectual and institutional network formed by elite, official, popular, and “mass” (or commodified) culture. Countering the temptation to replicate in one’s own protocols of interpretation some of the most questionable features of cultural history is for the critic writing the history of criticism—or indeed any form of history—an endeavor that is substantive and self-reflexive at the same time.
For Foucault the true voices of unreason in the modern period went underground in art and literature, and they lacked a sustaining sociocultural background. The unmoored voices of unreason in an obscure dialogue with reason seemed to come not out of the cosmos or even out of a more delimited cultural context but out of the void. Here Foucault refers to such iconic figures as Nietzsche, Holderlin, Artaud, and Sade. He tellingly contrasts the paintings of Bosch and Goya. In Bosch, unreason is a subterranean force of the cosmos; in Goya (at least in certain paintings), unreason erupts from an abyss.
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