The Rhetorical Foundations of Society

main conclusion is that the notions of ‘analogy’ and ‘contiguity’ which are, respectively, the defining grounds of the two tropes, far from being entirely different in nature, tend, on the contrary, to shade one into the other.

And, in film, the plurality of angles and close-ups in Griffith’s production is metonymic in nature, while in Charlie Chaplin and Eisenstein a metaphoric substitution

For Jakobson this alternative applies equally to non-verbal art: in cubism, the succession of synecdoches is essentially metonymic, while in surrealism the quasi-allegorical images lean towards metaphor

2.In that case, is it enough to conceive that ‘beyond’ of the rhetorical form as simply ‘semantic’ – which would necessarily attach it to the level of the signified? Would not the relationship signifier/signified involve a dialectic that takes us beyond semantics, to a materiality of the signifier which inscribes rhetorical displacements in the very structure of the sign? (Let us think in Freud’s ‘verbal bridges’.)

1.If the semantic relations underlying both metaphor and metonymy transcend their rhetorical form, are not those relations anchored in signification as such, beyond classical rhetorical limits, or, alternatively, could not signification be seen as a generalized rhetoric? In other words, could that ‘rhetoricity’ be seen not as an abuse but as constitutive (in the transcendental sense) of signification?

For it is metaphor that retrieves lost Time, but it is metonymy that reanimates it, that puts it back in movement: that returns it to itself and to its true ‘essence’, that is its own escape and its own Search. So here, only here – through metaphor but within metonymy – it is here that the Narrative (Récit) begins.8

Without metaphor Proust (approximately) says, there are no true memories; we add for him (and for everybody): without metonymy, there is no chaining of memories, no history, no novel.

it is not a simple question of recognizing the coexistence of both metaphor and metonymy in the Proustian text, but of showing how they require each other, how without the one shading into the other neither of them could play the specific role expected of them in the constitution of a narrative economy.

But hegemony not accompanied by mass action at the level of civil society leads to a bureaucratism that will be easily colonized by the corporative power of the forces of the status quo.

But my second thesis is that the horizontal dimension of autonomy will be incapable, left to itself, of bringing about long-term historical change if it is not complemented by the vertical dimension of ‘hegemony’ – that is, a radical transformation of the state. Autonomy left to itself leads, sooner or later, to the exhaustion and dispersion of the movements of protest.