TRANSLATED FROM "Politique, rhétorique et art du mensonge" published in l'Encyclopédie de l'Agora (Québec) in 2017.
Let us nevertheless begin with what seems immutable, if only to reassure ourselves. The typology of lies and the arguments justifying their political use have hardly changed since Aristotle and Machiavelli laid the foundations. Today as yesterday, knowing that the end justifies certain means, it is a matter for those who want to keep and/or extend their power to apply the rules of rhetoric [3] , to master therefore "the art of appearance", alias the lie for the intransigent Kantians. The following postulate stated by Machiavelli still seems to be in force, at least tacitly and in 2017 more explicitly, in the headquarters of all electoral campaigns: "The vulgar," he writes in The Prince , "always take appearances and judge only by the event [...]. Men are so simple and so weak that he who wants to deceive always finds dupes [...]. The character of peoples is changeable; they are easily led towards an opinion, but it is difficult to keep them there." [4] .
Aristotle, Machiavelli and Scheherazade understood that seduction is power.
That said, even if the premises seem unchanged, the stakes and modern methods far exceed the good recipes of the Florentine's art of governing. Manipulation and control of speech have become a sine qua non condition for any victory, whether on the electoral battlefield or on that of military combat [5] . This is all the more true since new technologies have forever changed the human ethical landscape: in short, even in politics, we lie more than ever, but never more as before.
First, we lie better. Opinion polls and techniques of expression, whether applied to the structures of language or its emotional content, have progressed so well that all political discourse is technically "constructed" [6] to knowingly include lies, whether these are called "untruth", "falsification", "omission", "propaganda" or "disinformation" or the latest "alternative facts" proposed by the White House. Better still, we can now alter images and sounds to the point that the boundary between the virtual and the real is gradually disappearing in the human brain.
Then we lie more on a universal scale and in all areas. The media groups that spread lies "now have two new characteristics: first, they deal with everything that is written, everything that is image-based, everything that is sound-based, and they spread this through the most diverse channels (print press, radio, terrestrial television, cable or satellite, via the Internet and all kinds of digital networks). Second characteristic: these groups are global, planetary, global, and not just national or local." [7] They form what Ramonez calls a "fifth estate" [8] , because if we lie better, there is now a global audience to seduce.
Then, this multifaceted power is in no way a fragmentation insofar as it is in the process of becoming a "single multifaceted global discourse" controlled by global economic groups: "Giant companies like News Corps, Viacom, AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Microsoft, Bertelsmann, United Global Com, Disney, Telefónica, RTL Group, France Télécom, etc., now have new possibilities for expansion due to technological upheavals. The "digital revolution" has broken down the boundaries that previously separated the three traditional forms of communication: sound, writing, image." [9] . This phenomenon is worrying in more than one way when we know that modern dictatorships have used all the resources of the image to create a "label" and a "demarcation" [10] .
Finally, the strategists of speech and image are increasingly aware that 1) all totalitarianisms involve systematic control and manipulation of language 2) that genocides do not have to be bloody... It is enough to kill the language and finally 3) why Al Qaeda's first slogan was: Give us poets.
Each of these themes deserves an article of its own. Today, let's focus on the new rhetoric as practiced in the United States for the past twenty years. It is rich in lessons.
…..We lie more effectively
Let us first present some examples of relatively recent but well-documented political lies. They illustrate both the new avenues open to new powers and the challenges posed to jurists determined to defend democracies governed by the rule of law based on objective information, education, and text. The first two are factual lies, fabricated using modern propaganda tools. The third is rhetorical manipulation, less detectable at first glance but more dangerous because it affects deep brain structures.
The propaganda lie, known as a state lie, is thought out and deliberate. It is based on specific facts and can be constructed from scratch, provided that its authors are aware that they are spreading a lie whose scope and impact they have planned in advance. The process itself is not new, and excellent syntheses on the history of propaganda abound with examples of this nature [11] . The novelty comes only from the fact that specialized agents (the "Spin Doctors" [12] ) use the most advanced marketing techniques for this purpose and draw on the most recent discoveries in the so-called cognitive human sciences.
It was, moreover, a public relations marketing agency that fabricated the lie that will serve as our first example. We may remember the affair of the incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital in 1990, during the invasion of the latter by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi armies . A young woman gave this testimony, tears in her eyes and handkerchief in hand, before the American Congress : "While I was there," she sobbed, "I saw the Iraqi soldiers enter the hospital with their weapons. They shot the babies in the incubators, they took the incubators and left the babies to die on the cold floor." Her moving story was quickly broadcast on television around the world. This testimony greatly moved international public opinion and led it to support the action of the Western powers against Saddam Hussein's armies during the first Gulf War .
This testimony was fabricated. The young woman was none other than the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. The Citizens for a Free Kuwait association , supported by the exiled Kuwaiti government, had commissioned this propaganda campaign from the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton , for the sum of 10 million dollars. Furthermore, the American government is said, according to several sources, to have paid 14 million dollars to this same firm for helping it publicize the Gulf War in a light favorable to Western intervention.
But this was a relatively, if not very, modest lie when compared to the wave of disinformation that flooded global networks after September 11, 2001. One information monitoring organization counted 935 such lies in the two years following the event. On 532 occasions, it was claimed that Iraq, in conjunction with Al-Qaeda [13] , possessed weapons of mass destruction. In 2001 and 2002, a majority of journalists, commentators, analysts, professors, and experts from around the world repeated the information without any verification, questioning, or counter-investigation, except for a few local or isolated speeches in cyberspace that could not challenge the single narrative.
This disinformation campaign was effective because by the end of 2003, as serious doubts began to surface in some media outlets and on the internet, half of Americans said they were convinced that the U.S. government had found solid evidence of a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. According to a report published at the time by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, a quarter of Americans said they were certain that global experts sent to the field had confirmed the presence of weapons of mass destruction, despite the denials that were beginning to abound to the contrary.
Even today, a certain percentage of Americans are convinced that "where there's smoke there's fire" even though the lie was officially acknowledged by Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense between 2001 and 2005. In an interview for Vanity Fair magazine , published on May 30, 2003, he admitted that the decision to highlight the threat of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) to justify a preventive war against Iraq had been adopted, in his own words, "for bureaucratic reasons": "We agreed on one point," he said, "weapons of mass destruction, because it was the only argument on which everyone could agree" [14] .
We are talking here about the crystallization of beliefs, a metaphor borrowed from Stendhal and which is not without virtue. Crystallization transforms the fleeting emotion into an idea adorned with an infinity of mobile and dazzling diamonds . In less poetic terms, let us say that the belief becomes rigid to the point where it is difficult if not impossible to modify it. What is more, the evidence provided to debunk the lie most of the time only reinforces the belief. How can we be surprised? Steven Sloman, professor at Brown University and Philip Fernbach, professor at the University of Colorado [15] have demonstrated that adherence to an idea does not depend on the relevance of the information but on the desire to belong to a group. The more one protests with supporting evidence to demonstrate the lie, the more the individual defends his group, the more the belief becomes embedded in the minds of those anxious and longing for belonging. We are above all the political animal , the one whose being-in-the-world passes through the group according to the famous phrase of Aristotle whose scope is not well understood (the word politics should not be taken in its modern sense).
We also do not want to take Pascal's famous phrase out of context (The heart has its reasons that reason does not know ), but it will help us to reintroduce the emotional aspect that is always present in all discourses that do not fall under the purest sciences. The human sciences in this sense are larded with emotion, the intensity of which sometimes borders on fanaticism.
If we want to understand politics, it is time to understand the emotional side of language because politics, so well defined by Lasswell as Who gets what, when and how [16], is neither more nor less than a peaceful organization of emotions.
Metaphor, the pivot of politics…
This will lead us to reflect on the metaphor which introduces, into political discourse, emotion at the level of rational discourse and thus becomes one of the pivots of rhetoric or...the art of seduction.
Metaphor in itself is not a lie strictly speaking, but if it is well chosen and repeated as a truth, it can contribute to the acceptance of any of the seven shades of lies . From the Greek μεταφορά , metaphorá literally means, first of all, "transport" or "transfer," that is, a transposition of meaning. It is not a comparison but a short formula for associating meanings. Here, through the image, we awaken the archetypes buried in the collective unconscious [17] , to such an extent that it has been said that "the formula of metaphor accounts for the condensation in the unconscious." In this sense, it is undoubtedly one of the most powerful forms of human verbal discourse, as demonstrated by the linguist George Lakoff, who devoted a book, The Political Mind [18] , to the new forms of language observable in political discourse. An entire chapter is devoted more specifically to the power of the metaphor associating the words "war" with "terror", an association which has been widely used in the conduct of the war in Iraq since 2003.
The War on Terror was not the fruit of the creative talent of the American president like Winston Churchill, a prolific author of famous metaphors. We know, for example, that the metaphor " War on Terror " was first proposed by a political analyst (David Frum) and then carefully chosen by a team of linguists who work in the shadows of institutional communication and public relations agencies. They "tested" several formulas but this one won out, its emotional charge having been judged adequate to respond to the trauma caused by September 11, 2001, events conducive to imposing strong images: "The synapses of the brain change dramatically and almost instantaneously in a traumatic situation" [19] , explains George Lakoff. Indeed, "neurology teaches us that ideas are literally inscribed in the brain and that their inscription occurs at the level of the synapses. These synaptic changes, which are called long-term potentiation processes, occur under two conditions: trauma (when there is a particularly intense firing of neuronal activity) and then in the presence of repetition (when the activity becomes iterative)… September 11 was a national trauma and the “war on terror” was introduced under traumatic conditions, then rehearsed and re-enacted for years. Consequently, the metaphorical idea has been literally imprinted on the brains of most Americans” [20] .
That being said, this metaphor, which, according to another metaphor, has moved mountains, is part of a mixture of genres which amounts to saying nothing. In the literal sense of the term, one cannot declare war on terror, that is to say on a common notion: "Real wars, which is not the case with metaphorical wars, wage war on armies and nations. They end when an army is defeated and a peace treaty is signed" [21] . From then on, where does a "war against terror" begin? When does it end? Because "terror" is not a nation, nor an army corps, nor a social group whose semantic limits are clear (one is either part of an army or one is not). "Terror" is a psychological state, internal to the human being, without "borders", because the human imagination is limitless; It has neither an official beginning nor a concrete end, and no peace treaty can ever be signed with "terror." Therefore, the "war on terror" is not intended to end fear but to continue the work of terror, that is, to instill fear .
For fear, maintained in this way, is a powerful political tool [22] , and from this point of view, there is nothing new under the sun. What is new is that, in the past, enemies were real groups, national or ethnic. Here, it is an invisible enemy who, with the help of human imagination, is perceived as more dangerous than a visible enemy: we go beyond fear and dread to enter the murky waters of anguish and anxiety which, according to Lakoff, "will engender a conservative fantasy, with a demand for a powerful leader, ready to use force to offer protection and security", to the infinite extent of the anguish aroused. We can therefore slide, without changing register, from the word "terror" to the word "terrorists", which seems more real but which, in these conditions, becomes almost totalitarian since it applies to any being designated as such.
It was a practical metaphor in the sense that it allowed immediate action, including very real war measures [23], to be proposed without resorting to long reflection. World leaders followed suit in enthusiasm to the point of making this metaphor a necessity in speeches along the way, in short, to become what linguists call a dead metaphor [24] . In this sense, the word is dead when it is no longer reflected upon.
All of this is part of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, which obeys certain laws of truth. The speaker must not seek to provide evidence or establish the truth; he must justify the best opinion, the reasonable opinion.
According to Aristotle, rhetoric, like dialectics, does not have the objective of science, namely the true objective (or interchangeability of observers), nor that of moral philosophy, namely the good. Since truth is not sufficient to convince the majority of people, the speaker must find other arguments or means to persuade them.
"...even if we possessed the most exact science, there are certain men whom it would not be easy for us to persuade by drawing our discourse from this source alone; discourse according to science belongs to teaching, and it is impossible to use it here, where proofs and discourses must necessarily pass through common notions" (Aristotle, Rhetoric I , 1355a , [1932], page 74, Les Belles Lettres)
Metaphor, which plays on the association of ideas, holds a privileged place in classical rhetoric. It allows a complex problem to be transformed into an intelligible and emotionally charged image. Aristotle even considered the ability to associate terms in this way to be a stroke of genius.
Let us pay a little attention to this because the metaphor is omnipresent. In particular, it has always been the flag of war speeches, which are used as a metaphor by the proponents of economic war. [25]
Until this last year, the use of metaphor was carefully controlled in the headquarters of political campaigns, which in this respect followed the rules of classical rhetoric, which were not sophist laws. It was not a matter of saying anything in order to stir up people for the sake of stirring up people, but of justifying reasonable opinion. Machiavelli, so misunderstood, only insisted on the importance of this principle in The Prince .
Aristotle, like Machiavelli, distrusts emotions and wants to organize them. It is the essence of politics that must understand and control the pathos, that is, what moves the soul.
Aristotle devotes the first half of Book II of his Rhetoric to pathetic proof . "Passions are the causes that make men vary in their judgments and have as consequences pain and pleasure, such as anger, pity, fear, and all other emotions of this kind, as well as their opposites." [26] (Aristotle, Rhetoric II , 1378 a , [1960], page 60, Les Belles Lettres)
Passions, the Stagirite specifies, must be handled with care by the speaker who must know what passion to arouse, how to succeed in arousing it.
"The developments relating to the passions must be divided into three heads: this is what I mean: for anger, for example, in what habitus one is inclined to it; against which persons one usually becomes angry and on what subjects. If, in fact, we possessed only one or two of these notions, without possessing all three, it would be impossible for us to inspire anger; and it is the same with the other passions." [27]
But let us never forget that pathetic proof is a tool at the service of the final cause which is…. Good. Same idea with Machiavelli who is in this an idealist of Realpolitik. For a Republic to function, a strong man is needed who masters political discourse. Which involves persuading the crowds to whom it is useless to explain survival strategies. The crowd does not want to know but to believe and it is necessary to appear, play, threaten, lie, amuse but without too much. Not only are there limits to the games of persuasion but the Prince must always keep in mind that he is working for the common good of the Republic ( Res publica ).
This does not make The Prince a risk-free treatise, because everything depends, of course, on the definition of the common good that The Prince gives. It is a treatise on techniques that was read by Churchill, De Gaulle, and Hitler alike. We simply want to say that Machiavelli is not Machiavellian in the sense that we give it (systematically doing evil), any more than Thomas More was utopian, but that is another story.
Let's get back to the present, to the lie and to Donald Trump.
The disappearance of pathetic evidence
Donald Trump probably hasn't read Machiavelli (reading doesn't seem to be his forte). But interpreters who have should refrain from explaining his rise using only classical schemata.
The arrival of Donald Trump has changed everything, if only because he appears totally incoherent. He says anything, at any time, violating (among other things) all the rules of thought, starting with the sacrosanct principle of non-contradiction. In this, the medium is the message since the tweet he uses constantly IS the vehicle of the opinion of the moment, contradictory or not, spelling mistakes included. Machiavelli, whose life has shown a Trumpesque respect for women, would sigh that we must be wary of them because opinion is... like women: la dona e mobile . Donald Trump, in this sense, would be a woman. To use a worn-out metaphor, Machiavelli would turn in his grave because, for him, it goes without saying that the leader cannot be a woman. Only the man who controls his own emotions can be a leader. Corneille, who transformed the virtue of the Prince into a myth, will also turn in his grave: I am , proclaims Augustus, master of myself as of the universe .
Because Trump debunks the myth: he is not master of himself but wants to be master of the universe. And the worst part is that it works. In a sense, this is the first time that, aside from his opinion on women, Machiavelli has been falsified, and in the process, the proper use of rhetoric. Because, it must be said and repeated, the republics of modernity owe to the extraordinary period of the Renaissance and its new reading of ancient texts. The principles on which they were built (secular common good introduced by More, citizen introduced by Bodin, reason of state introduced by Machiavelli, good governance of passions introduced by Hobbes, etc.).
And because the Trumpian method works, we should stop and think before thinking, as many do, that it is a hiccup in history that we always want to believe, according to a metaphor as worn out as worn shoes, that it is... moving towards reason. We want to think that with the help of the next elections, the sovereign (the people in a democracy) will wake up from its delirium and return to the constitutions and the charters of rights and freedoms that they shelter.
Although I would like to believe in the march of history, I am not certain of it on two counts.
First of all, Donald Trump is not an epiphenomenon but the tip of an iceberg that has amassed substantial mass over the course of a century. I tried to document some of this in Cold Hate [28] , which deconstructs the ideology that supports him based on Ayn Rand. I would add that this is not a strictly American phenomenon. We are at that moment in history that is seeing the old empires collapse. Power has passed elsewhere, namely into the private sphere, that of the market.
Then and above all, because the laws of rhetoric can no longer be applied in the digital world which is the world of the moment and of incoherence at least apparent.
Truth is authenticity…
Ironically (or dialectically) it is Trump's inconsistency that, according to Jennifer Sclafani of Georgetown University, makes him appear authentic and reliable, which are the qualities sought by the electorate [29] . The strategy, because there is one, works perfectly. It is about continuing to disqualify the entire public sphere (aka the final cause): politicians lie, public institutions lie, thinkers are incompetent, laws are harmful. It will emerge 1) that the market does not lie 2) that it obeys just laws (the best wins) and that political truth is the authenticity of the advertising conveyed by the businessman. And the authentic is the emotional, the rain of metaphors which are perfectly conveyed every second and everywhere by the new means of communication. Trump is the publicist in chief.
But that's not all. The laws of the market use algorithms, which are a fundamental mechanism for the functioning of the connected world [30] and therefore of the market. They are the ultimate logic of the logic of the market, stripped of a final cause that would not be quantified but also potentially stripped of individual free will. In his latest book, ironically titled Homo Deus [31] , anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari describes this handing over of power to numbers as a new religion: dataism, with its faith in a blind system of data processes, omniscient, omnipresent in human life that dictates all decisions... In numbers.
Which means that all languages will become dead. Certainly, English will probably be used, but a skeletal, functional English. From there to saying that it is not God who is dead, but man deprived of language, there is only one step.
I won't cross it, not out of optimism, but let's get back down to earth a bit, because we know that advertising efforts have limits when the product doesn't hold up. Let's add that the chief publicist is crazy, and extreme madness, whatever the Romantics want to think, is not creative. The danger, of course, is that the chief publicist isn't solely responsible for billboards. Suddenly, all my international online discussion contacts, generally talkative, have become strangely quiet. None of us dares to mention the disasters that Donald Trump's megalomania could unleash in the current technological context.
Let's say I try not to stay petrified in this silence and to think beyond it.
because I want to believe that all power is accompanied by counter-powers, all death by rebirth and that the verb (in the broad sense) will be reborn in multiple forms including figurative or mortal. In a future text we will talk about the moral importance of ideograms. In another we will analyze the texts of Al Qaeda by explaining why its slogan was: Give us poets .
The story of numbers and letters has only just begun.
Note
[1] Part of this text is taken from "Politics and Lies: The Impossible Translation", in Guidère M.,Translation and Multilingual Strategic Monitoring, Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, pp.189-208., 2008. It followed a presentationat an International Conference on Translation and Multilingual Strategic Monitoring. University of Geneva. May 28 and 29, 2008.
[2] Nicole Morgan, political philosopher, published her doctoral thesis on the genesis of the modern state in Vrin (The Sixth Continent. The Utopia of Thomas More or the Birth of a New Epistemological Space, 1996). Her last two works published by Seuil focus on the analysis of discourse and the construction of contemporary ideologies:The Recruitment Manual of El Qaidain collaboration with Mathieu Guidère, was published in 2007.Cold Hate. What the American Right Thinks About was published in 2012. She is currently working on two manuscripts:Tales for Children Who Don't Want to Grow Up, a history of modern political philosophy. The second deals with the transformations of the human body (with Aristotle's postulates):Fear in the Belly. Obesity and Globalization.
[3] Rhetoric(from the ancient Greekητορικ[τέχνη], "technique or the art of oratory"), literally means "the art of speaking well" or the technique of persuasion.
[4] NiccolòMachiavelli,The Prince, Chapter XVIII.
[5] Koyré, dès 1943, le déplore en ces termes : « On n’a jamais menti autant que de nos jours. Ni menti d’une manière aussi éhontée, systématique et constante. On nous dira peut-être qu’il n’en est rien, que le mensonge est aussi vieux que le monde, ou, du moins, que l’homme, mendax ab initio ; que le mensonge politique est né avec la cité elle-même, ainsi que, surabondamment, nous l’enseigne l’histoire ; enfin, sans remonter le cours des âges, que le bourrage de crâne de la Première Guerre mondiale et le mensonge électoral de l’époque qui l’a suivie ont atteint des niveaux et établi des records qu’il sera bien difficile de dépasser », Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge. Paris, Allia, 1996.
[6] « Tout le progrès technique est mis au service du mensonge » (Koyré, Ibid.).
[7] Ignacio Ramonet, « Le cinquième pouvoir », in Le Monde Diplomatique, octobre 2003.
[8] Le « quatrième pouvoir » qui a précédé était différent. Il « était en définitive, grâce au sens civique des médias et au courage de journalistes audacieux, celui dont disposaient les citoyens pour critiquer, repousser, contrecarrer, démocratiquement, des décisions illégales pouvant être iniques, injustes, et même criminelles, contre des personnes innocentes. C’était, on l’a souvent dit, la voix des sans-voix. » (Ibid.).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Steven Heller, Iron Fists. Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State, Phaidon Press. 2008.
[11] Les exemples sont nombreux et Ignacio Ramonet nous en donne quelques uns dans un autre article du Monde Diplomatique intitulé « Mensonges d’État » et publié en juillet 2003.
[12] Le « Spin doctor » est un conseiller en communication et marketing politique agissant pour le compte d’une personnalité politique, le plus souvent lors de campagnes électorales.
[13] Dans un discours radiodiffusé à la nation, le 8 février 2003, le Président allait jusqu’à apporter les faux détails suivants : « L’Irak a envoyé des experts en explosifs et en fabrication de faux papiers travailler avec Al-Qaïda. Il a aussi dispensé à Al-Qaïda un entraînement aux armes biologiques et chimiques. Un agent d’Al-Qaïda a été envoyé en Irak à plusieurs reprises à la fin des années 1990 pour aider Bagdad à acquérir des poisons et des gaz. »
[14] Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, Center For Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx
[15] “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead Books 2017)
[16] Harold D, Lasswell Who Gets What, When ,How New York, London, Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co. [©1936]
[17] Selon Jacques Lacan, « la formule de la métaphore rend compte de la condensation dans l’inconscient », in Conférence donnée à Milan le 12 mai 1972, intitulée : « Du discours psychanalytique ».
[18] George Lakoff. George Lakoff, The Political Mind. Why you Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, London:Viking, 2008
[19] Ibid., 125.
[20] Ibid., 128.
[21] Ibid., 125-126.
[22] Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[23] le mot « guerre » possède une signification univoque puisqu’il s’agit bien d’une guerre réelle avec du sang et des morts mais aussi un budget militaire conséquent, le président Bush a lancé la balle ayant fait largement usage des prérogatives octroyées par l’état de guerre. Il a pu demander des pouvoirs dits « extraordinaires », des « mesures de guerre », rejeter toute critique comme « non patriotique » puisque le pays est en guerre, envahir l’Irak présenté comme un pays « terroriste », solliciter des fonds spéciaux pour l’industrie d’armement, mettre en place un service de surveillance et de coercition légale et légaliser la torture
[24] First of all: what exactly is meant by adead metaphornbsp;? In hisTraité de stylistiquefrançaise(193 ssqq), Charles Bally gives as an example of what he calls a dead image the sentenceVous courez un grand danger, and he comments on it thus: there is no longer either image or feeling of image, except from the historical point of view; we are in pure abstraction. And indeed, most often we speak of adead metaphorwhen it is a question of the figurative meaning of a polysemous word (couririn Ballys example) and this figurative meaning has become completely lexicalized and detached from the so-called proper meaning. We then see that this figurative meaning may well be derived from a literal meaning, with which it in principle maintains a relationship of resemblance or analogy, but this link of resemblance has weakened so much that it no longer plays, or hardly plays, an active role either at the cognitive level or at the pragmatic or discursive level.Metaphor, a matter of life or death? RonaldLandheer: https://semen.revues.org/2368
[25] Metaphors are almost eternal. British MP Enoch Powell delivered his "rivers of blood" speech on 20 April 1968 in Birmingham, determined, in his own words, to "make it a kind of rocket, but one that would stay in orbit for a very long time." This speech abruptly ended the political consensus on immigration and placed Powell at the centre of political attention. He used Virgil's metaphorin the Aeneid about the Tiberfoaming with blood. This is just one example among thousands that punctuate military and political speeches.
[26] Aristotle,Rhetoric II,1378 a, [1960], page 60, Les Belles Lettres
[27] Aristotle,Rhetoric II,1378 a, [1960], page 60, Les Belles Lettres
[28] Nicole Morgan, Cold Hate. What the American Right is Thinking About, Paris Le Seuil 2012
[29] https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-chaotic-use-of-metaphor-is-a-crucial-part-of-his-appeal-61383 The Conversation August 2, 2016 4.26am EDT Joseph Sohm Donald Trump's chaotic use of metaphor is a crucial part of his appeal
[30] Pierre Trudel,Algorithms,Le Devoir, February 21, 2017
[31] Homo Deus, A brief History of Tomorrow Harvill Secker 2017 - Also read by the same author - Machiavelli confined, the doctor and the politician - During his relatively long life, Machiavelli experienced five plague epidemics
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