WORD AS AN IDEA

Abstract

The present work proposes to analyze the rhetorical status that Walter Benjamin finds in the speech of traditions, in the context of the objective exposition (Darstellung) of ideas. Based on this, through a way of expository interpretation, we will address how, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the historiographic problem of philosophical terminology linked to reading´s field, to the elaboration of the eidetic understood in the passage from a logical-gnoseological critique to a rhetorical critique and to the constitutive incompatibility between knowledge and truth are articulated. After the exposition of these moments, we will arrive at some final considerations: in opposition to the idealist assumptions, the rhetorical conception of the word as an idea interrupts the metaphysical representation of the truth of the systematic philosophical discourse as the instrumental-linguistic perspective about the sign reduced to epistemic rationality.