Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Acheron
- Introduction: A praise of folly
- PART I WHERE EGO WAS …
- PART II LET ID BE
- 5 An Cimbrice loquendum sit: speaking and unspeaking the language of homosexual desire
- 6 Paterni nominis religio
- By way of conclusion
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Sample declamations
- List of references
- Index locorum
- General index
6 - Paterni nominis religio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Acheron
- Introduction: A praise of folly
- PART I WHERE EGO WAS …
- PART II LET ID BE
- 5 An Cimbrice loquendum sit: speaking and unspeaking the language of homosexual desire
- 6 Paterni nominis religio
- By way of conclusion
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Sample declamations
- List of references
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
As a rhetorical agency, the Hegelian subject always knows more than it thinks it knows, and by reading itself rhetorically, i.e., reading the meanings it unwittingly enacts against those it explicitly intends, it recovers ever greater dimensions of its own identity.
Judith Butler, Subjects of DesireThe two final Major Declamations of pseudo-Quintilian make for a fitting close to the Latin declamatory corpus as it has been transmitted to us. The chosen theme, “A son suspected of incest with his mother (infamis in matrem),” marks them as two of the most horrible and fantastic specimens of an already outlandish genre. Yet these speeches provide appropriate if fortuitous end-points to the study of declamation for another reason as well. The problem of speech and silence obsesses each. We are therefore going to follow up on the themes of the prior chapter.
Declamation as a genre is fond of the paradoxical, and this time we have arrived at a paradox that goes to the heart of declamation: how does one speak of the unspeakable? In not speaking the unspeakable, what gets said by implication? We will find in these speeches a portrait of the mechanism by which the domain of the speakable is constituted. Moreover the realm of possible discourse is fundamentally related to the set of exclusions, erasures and denials that surround this territory. This unhappy family romance emplots and encodes the rules for normativity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Declamation, Paternity, and Roman IdentityAuthority and the Rhetorical Self, pp. 191 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003