Abstract

The dissertation is a comparative study of the role of rhetoric and performativity in Leibniz, Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger, with respect to conscience in the latter three philosophers. In the introduction, the project is characterized as an attempt to trace several instances or stagings of what Paul de Man refers to as a "passage from trope to performativity" and of what Judith Butler refers to in The Psychic Life of Power as a "tropological inauguration of subjectivity." ;The first chapter treats the role of rhetoric in philosophical language, as characterized by Leibniz in his Preface to Nizolius. Specifically, it examines the rhetorical and performative elements that structure Leibniz's account of rhetoric. The second chapter continues the study of the role of figurative language in early modern philosophy with respect to Hobbes's condemnation of metaphor in Leviathan. The dissertation here turns to conscience, for Hobbes uses conscience as his exemplum for the dangers of metaphor, but in fact private conscience proves to be a source of danger to language, knowledge and the stability of the commonwealth in its own right. The third chapter concentrates on Hegel's description of conscience's failures and contradictions in the sphere of morality in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The chapter highlights the relationship between rhetoric and performativity in the senses described in this Introduction, insofar as we argue that the contradictions of conscience in the Phenomenology reflect the tension between the performative successes and rhetorical failures of its conscience's declarations. The last chapter of the dissertation turns to Heidegger's Being and Time in order to consider it as a rhetorical and performative text. We also demonstrate that the call of conscience occupies a peculiar performative role with regard to Being and Time as a whole. The dissertation then concludes with a few words about the relationships between rhetoric, performativity and conscience.