悖论修辞与悖论式思维

Rhetoric of Paradox and Paradoxical Thinking

悖论修辞或悖论式思维不仅是英美新批评派倡导的诗歌结构原则,也是重要的现代美学思维方式,它通过推演知识体制中的"虚无"来证明唯一的真相是能指的狂欢这一后现代表达形式。悖论开放性地吸收他者话语,颠覆了文本与现实稳定的内部结构,为后现代主义理论的生成与发展建立了形式上的基础,对解构启蒙以来的主体论功不可没。当代批评理论的先驱及其继承者一再声称真理和知识体系实质上是由悖论式反讽的修辞语言架构起来的,相对于这些体系,在当代语境下展开的叙事性、修辞性研究,有助于将全社会范围内的各层级话语打通,并让我们充分意识到悖论修辞与悖论式思维的功用。

Rhetoric of paradox or paradoxical thinking is, in the first place, regarded as a structuring principle of poetry by critics engaged in Anglo-American New Criticism. It is then further understood and adopted as a significant thinking mode of modern aesthetics. This rhetoric of paradox or paradoxical thinking is a way of expressing post-modern condition that the only truth valid is the carnival of signifiers as a result of the affirmed evidence that there is in essence the existence of ＂nothingness＂ in our knowledge system. Subverting the stable textual and contextual structures, rhetoric of paradox embraces the writing of ＂the other＂ and establishes a possible formalistic base for the formation and development of post-modern theories, contributing in no small way to the deconstruction of subjectivity theory since the Enlightenment Movement. Along the course, generations of contemporary critics reiterate the idea that the system of truth and knowledge depends on the rhetorical language of paradoxical irony. In such a contemporary post-theory context, as against those institutionalized systems, the study of narrative and rhetoric devices of literary language would prove to be of assistance in allowing the free transportations among all levels of discourses in society as a whole and enable us to come to a full recognition of the functions played by rhetoric of paradox and paradoxical thinking.