| In the wake of Foucault's work, there have been attempts to redefine the episteme. Gerard Simon thus suggested that the episteme is historically bound with optics. To test this assumption I have chosen to examine the link between optics and rhetoric in the seventeenth century. By describing this link, which exists mainly in the context of religious eloquence, I argue against Simon that optics do not determine epistemic changes. There is an optical paradigm at work in rhetoric that can only exist after the advent of Ciceronian rhetoric in the Renaissance. Rhetoric becomes visual when conceptual categories that preside over discourse evolve (judgment, prudence, dispositio, memoria, ingenium). By studying the many comparisons between rhetoric and optics in treatises, prefaces and other theoretical texts, I define the value of specific rhetorical devices such as the period and the emblem in order to assess the philosophical and religious meaning of asianism in rhetoric. Asianist discourse is a vanitas, an image that brings forward the limits of thought and language. This in turn leads to a new understanding of the baroque subject itself. These findings are extremely useful to understand the rhetorical ideas of Pascal. In texts like L'Espirit de geometrie and Les Pensees, we can observe that Pascal was aware of radically new ideas in optics and projective geometry through Desargues's work on conic sections. When Pascal uses optical images to define his own rhetoric, there is a correlation between optical discoveries, his definition of the esprit de finesse and his thoughts on order. In the conclusion, I suggest that the question of Eucharist, in the multiple meanings it received, can be considered as an index of the various rhetorical aspects of the baroque/classicism debate. |
