Abstract
Abstract: Lev Shestov considers all discourse rhetorical. His work denounces rationalist discourse as an imposture that denies its own appeal to irrational impulses. Fondane’s poetry betrays the same consciousness of rhetoric: while it does not have a persuasive function per se, it involves circuits of address and oratorical concerns. In Fondane, there is a subjectivist tendency at work: selfhood can never be set aside. Fondane locates the self and the passions at the heart of all speech, denouncing philosophy’s pretensions to dispassionate, objective, “rational” discourse.