Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Classics in Theory Series)

Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero offers a fundamental re-examination of the relation between truth and enjoyment as understood in the traditional confrontation between rhetoric and philosophy in Cicero.His simultaneous advocacy of classical rationality and continued emphasis on the importance of performativity and enjoyment in language-on ratio as a desire (cupiditas) and force (vis) in the real-situates him at the crossroads of reason and the unconscious.Where the modern concept of truth abstracts truth from the subjective experience of speaker and hearer, for Cicero truth is inseparable from our experience of it, and it is precisely the possibility of their separation that he criticizes in works like De Oratore and De Re Publica where he seeks an ideal reconciliation between rhetoric and philosophy, truth and enjoyment.This book looks at the problem of enjoyment (jouissance) as central to understanding the differend between rhetoric and philosophy.Paul Allen Miller distinguishes "pleasu