L'Hyperpolitique, Une Passion Francaise: Technologies Rhetoriques de La Domination

Hyperpolitics ? Did I hear you say "hyperpolitics" ?Man is meant to be a political animal. A Frenchman, on the other hand, is a hyperpolitical animal. Man is meant to be an animal endowed with speech. A Frenchman is a hyperspeech animal. The result of this crossover is the peculiar nature of French political society: we passionately love excessive political speech, while at the same time claim that we are reasonable, Cartesian and logical.In France, politics is a dramatization of speech. That which is hyper, overdone and exaggerated instils confidence. We have developed such refined hyperspeech technologies that we have lost sight of their origins, how they work and what effects they produce. Hyperpolitics is the final product of speech machines – those which this book explores.These technologies which produce hyperpolitics supply three major fields of action: the massive public displays of presidential rhetoric, machine assemblies for appealing to the public, the masses, and people, and speech gears mounted and lubricated by such tools as values and ethics management. Understanding hyperspeech technologies requires disassembling the parts of this infernal three-headed machine, studying its components, grasping its tools and, with manual in hand, discovering by whom, how, why and for whom hyperpolitics so vehemently works.Rhetoric historian Philippe-Joseph Salazar holds a Distinguished Chair in Rhetoric at the University of Cape Town (South Africa). Previously, he was the Dean and Director of the Programme in Rhetoric and Democracy at Collège international de philosophie (Paris).