Ingrid Mayeur

Vers une utopie rhétorique? Ouvrir la voie d’un nouveau monde commun pour refonder la Concorde / Towards a rhetorical utopia: opening a way to a new common world and rebuild Concordia

Our contribution aims at exploring the rhetorical status of charters and declarations of Modernity inspired by the concept of Human Rights. Those texts are necessary to establish or restore social concord facing to an unsatisfactory (recent) past or present, around common values which were matter of consensus. However, unlike the epideictic genre, they own an argumentative part by motivating the need of (re)fund Concord. That part evokes what we might call a “dystopia”, the negative situation that should be distanced. “Figurating” the social reality to be built, from such unpleasant situation, charters and declarations paves the way, like a guide, to a future likely, possible, and consistent (involved therefore in the rhetorical activities as Aristotle, and Perelman after him, defines it). In this way, we should consider them as linked to an utopian project. Showing the consistence of utopian dynamic through a parallelism with the original work of Thomas Morus, we wish to question here the possible existence of a rhetorical genre of utopia, its features and the uses of its rhetorical techne.

L'utopique comme gouvernail des sociétés humaines: Enquête sur une (possible) fonction rhétorique de la Modernité

This paper aims to explore the rhetorical status of charters and declarations of Modernity, explaining which way those texts are necessary to establish or restore social concord and are linked to an utopian project. Showing the consistence of utopian dynamic trough a parallelism with the original work of Thomasus Morus, we also wish to question the possible existence of a rhetorical genre of utopia, and its features