Palavras, poderes e paixões

As emoções na Retórica e na Análise do discurso

Abstract

The article explores how emotions have (or have not) been considered within Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis. To contemplate the emotion, we examined i) the conditions of emergence of two rhetorical traditions in Antiquity, ii) some passages from classical treatises, mainly Aristotle's Rhetoric, and iii) certain passages from the nineteenth-century Portuguese-Brazilian compendium Lições elementares de eloquência nacional, by Francisco Freire de Carvalho. As for AD, we addressed i) the scant presence of emotions as an object of interest in most contemporary linguistic studies, ii) the developments that French discourse analysis has undergone and iii) how it can and should conceive and analyse emotions, using contributions from the history of sensibilities. We base our examination of this material on discourse analysis itself and on postulates from the history of linguistic ideas. It is on this basis that we advance the thesis that different discourses on the relationship between emotions and the uses of language condition the presence or absence of affections as a phenomenon in which these two fields of language studies are interested.