How to Blame in a Democracy ? VICTOR FERRY Groupe de recherche en Rhétorique et en Argumentation Linguistique (GRAL) Université Libre de Bruxelles Belgium vferry@ulb.ac.be ABSTRACT: This paper challenges the view according to which speeches of praise and speeches of blame perform a similar political function of gathering citizens (around a hero in the case of praise and against a scapegoat in the case of blame). It is argued that the idea, seldom challenged in the literature on epideictic rhetoric, that blame is merely a reverse mirror of praise, is due to an overemphasis on logos. KEYWORDS: artistic proofs, blame, catharsis, epideictic, homeostasis, homonoia, praise, rhetoric, violence 1. INTRODUCTION In his book Comparative Rhetoric (1998), George Kennedy argued that the primary function of rhetoric in human societies is the preservation of existing social order. As he puts it: “The major function of rhetoric throughout the most of human history has been to preserve things as they are or to try to recover an idealized happier past” (1998, p. 216). Most of the history of thinking on argumentation and reasoning can be described as a struggle against such a natural tendency to conservatism. This history began with sophistic exercises such as dissoi logoi (twofold arguments) and, later, with Aristotle’s studies on the various ways one can attack someone else’s arguments, the identification of fallacious arguments and the definition of rules for rational discussion. In this quest for tools to correct our reasoning biases, the status of epideictic rhetoric has always been disturbing. Epideictic speeches, with their depiction of a world clearly organized between the good people, ‘us’, and the bad people, ‘them’, appear as a revival of the naïve first steps of our humanity. One might thus understand why argumentation studies did not pay much attention to epideictic rhetoric: epideictic rhetoric is nothing but what all of us spontaneously do when we stop struggling against our natural tendency to conservatism. Some scholars, however, drew attention on the central role of epideictic rhetoric for the good functioning of any society, traditional and democratic alike (Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca: 1958; Hauser: 1999). More recently, Emmanuelle Danblon (2001) even argued that