Dialogue, dialogisme et polyphonie. Questions d’énonciation dans les textes rhétoriques et philosophiques de l’Antiquité

This volume gathers together twenty-three papers, presented at two conferences (Sorbonne Université, June 2017 and Université de Clermont-Auvergne, October 2018), and devoted to the question of enunciation in ancient rhetoric and philosophy. It offers a reading of ancient text informed by the Bakhtinian conception of language. Against the representation of speech as an isolated actualisation of a single and abstract linguistic system, Bakhtin postulates, on the one hand, a plurality of concrete linguistic systems – of “idioms” – with which the subject has to deal when he speaks, and on the second hand, the primacy of interaction over the utterance. Thus, every speech act responds to previous speech acts and anticipates the reaction of the interlocutor within a given – or constructed – situation. The reader of ancient texts, who can understand them only with the help of grammars and lexica, is very likely to consider them as the emanation of a fixed linguistic system: this volume proposes on the contrary to see them as a lively discourse, born within an interaction and taking its meaning from it. 

The collected studies address the issue of enunciation in two ways: 

• the ones analyse the representation of different situation of enunciation by ancient authors and show its importance for the interpretation; 
• the others are interested in the ancient theorisation of enunciation. Of course, the linguistic terms of “enunciation” and “interaction” have no strict equivalent in ancient literature: yet, the authors of treatises tried to define the effects – and sometimes the risks – resulting from the presence of many voices in a written text. 

The volume is divided in three parts, according to a twofold generic and chronological criterion: the first part is devoted to the rhetoric and its ancient theorisation; the second concerns the platonic dialogue; the third focuses on the imperial era, when the dialogue between philosophy and rhetoric is so intense, that the generic border vanishes.