Abstract In order to understand the stakes and approach of Rüdiger Campe's work on Fürsprache, it is illuminating to observe how, across his career, Campe brings together deconstructive, dialectical, and historicizing operations. Affekt und Ausdruck ( Affect and Expression, 1990) deconstructs traditional periodizing categories and literary‐historical conventions; and Game of Probability (2002, trans. 2012) depicts a historical shift in which a scale of probability supplanted an earlier dichotomy of actuality and possibility. An earlier review (1994) of mid‐twentieth‐century rhetoric scholarship presents Campe's dialectical twist on the seeming opposition between Klaus Dockhorn's Gadamerian approach to rhetoric, emphasizing historicizing‐anthropological approaches, and Heinrich Lausberg's monumental, structuralist‐influenced, logical‐analytic handbook of rhetoric. Campe's work on Fürsprache, finally, reflects a dialectical synthesis of these two approaches to rhetoric. The strategic speech to an audience and an empathic relationship entail the deconstruction of a dominant “intersubjective” model of speech situations, evoking numerous dialectical complications introduced by the institutional context and the multiplication of roles within the constellation of advocate, client, and judge.
Résumé Cet article examine Frissons d’A. de Lorde comme une expression de ce que l’on peut appeler une « horreur du réel », où l’effroi ne procède plus principalement de l’irruption du surnaturel mais de la rencontre entre fragilité psychique, déterminismes sociaux et violence institutionnelle. L’analyse s’appuie sur une lecture psychanalytique des troubles perceptifs et des formes pathologiques de la subjectivité, tout en mobilisant la théorie du fantastique ainsi qu’une réflexion, inspirée de M. Foucault, sur les formes du pouvoir, afin de situer l’œuvre lordienne dans l’évolution des représentations de la peur au tournant des XIX e et XX e siècles. Trois niveaux d’analyse sont distingués : le registre psychologique, où l’intériorité perturbée transforme le réel en source d’angoisse ; le registre social, où la misère et les déterminismes collectifs façonnent les trajectoires individuelles ; enfin le registre institutionnel, où les dispositifs de contrôle et les formes de pouvoir contribuent à la production de la violence. L’étude montre que ces trois dimensions demeurent étroitement liées et participent à une redéfinition du fantastique, désormais enraciné dans le quotidien, les fragilités de la psyché et les structures sociales et institutionnelles. L’horreur apparaît ainsi moins comme une rupture avec le réel que comme la révélation de ses failles, de ses tensions et de dérèglements.
Abstract Zadie Smith's short story “The Silence” (2025) traces the midlife transformation of Sharon, a London hospital administrator whose inner narrative and social speech gradually dissolve into “a sort of blank.” This paper argues that Sharon's silence does not erase selfhood but shifts how it is registered; as voice recedes, existence is re‐inscribed in a dispersed network of material traces: photographs, aging bodies, spatial gestures, objects, and digital interfaces. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's theory of the narratable self, Wittgenstein's Tractatus , and Roland Barthes's account of the punctum, the paper reads “The Silence” as a meditation on existence once language fails. It focuses on four domains—the retreat of narrative voice; the aging body as somatic archive; the office photograph wall as minor archive; and the Kraków Chakra as a site where bodily gesture, stone, and collective touch converge into an anonymous yet persistent trace. Together these domains support a reading of the story as a formally precise account of late‐life subjectivity in contemporary British fiction and prepare the ground for what this essay terms a traceable self.
Abstract Ancient rhetoric instructs the advocate to evoke in themselves the emotions they wish to elicit in the judge in order to successfully act as the Fürsprecher (advocates) of their clients. Taken to its extreme, this formula of “affection through auto‐affection” renders the figure of the Fürsprecher a double‐sided representative who compensates for the impossibility of direct communication between the two parties. Against this purely functional model of Fürsprache , this essay discusses the biblical Hebrew prophet and the Jewish shtadlan as two instances of Fürsprecher who break from the ideal of a seamless “affection through auto‐affection” by acting as “middlepersons”—individual parties who occupy the fraught middle of an otherwise impossible communication and make it visible. Rather than betraying the task of the advocate, these figures, each in their own way, attain their role as intercessors precisely because they cannot act as completely disinterested placeholders. Owing to their exemplarity and enduring cultural legacy, these figures offer an alternative perspective on the rhetorical tradition of human communication and its modern imprint on the problem of intersubjectivity. At the same time, this perspective unravels a fundamental ambivalence in the figure and practice of the Fürsprecher that exceeds the Hebrew and Jewish contexts.
Abstract This essay examines rhetoric from the standpoint of “ Fürsprache ” or advocacy speech. This perspective brings into focus the interconnections between rhetoric's legal institution, its form of speech and overarching objectives, and its particular linguistic procedures. Rhetoric thus appears as part of the larger history of the communicative function of discourse and the situations in which speech and other forms of linguistic utterance occur. First, the essay contrasts two fundamental types of speech situation in the European tradition: rhetorical speech and the situation of mutual—or contractual—exchange. On this basis, it then reconstructs the possibility of a history of rhetoric that begins with the shift from the former to the latter of the two types.
