The Rhetorical Foundations

of Russian Politics

Putin as a Metaphor of Russia

Friday, September 8, 2023

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

in-person

Veosar Conference Room (Room 412Q)

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E St. NW | Washington, D.C. 20052

The question of political rhetoric, as a rule, is addressed to a specific area of application of rhetorical devices, considering the definition of “political” as a simple indication of the subject – the rhetorical devices of a particular political discourse. However, the connection between the political and the rhetorical can be found at a more fundamental level, allowing us to consider them as two ways of managing the difference or distance between the ruler and the ruled, between the state and society, between language and reality, between sign and thing, between direct and figurative meanings. Kalinin will consider political rhetoric not so much as a symbolic superstructure determined by the nature of the political basis (specific political order), but as an organizational structure of the political order itself. Thanks to these analytical optics, it is possible not only to describe the rhetoric of political discourse that uses a particular regime of power, but also to diagnose the rhetorical dominant or, as the Russian formalists would say, the “constructive principle” that determines the political order as such, its symbolic and functional core. Thus, the subject of these optics is not so much political rhetoric as it is the rhetoric of politics.