Fragments, splinters and sawdust: Aristophanes' view of the Sophistic rhetoric

Abstract

In some epochs of the history of Western philosophy, language comes to be seen as a communication and knowledge instrument that is affected by some serious predicaments. In some versions of postmodernism, for instance, an incurable ‘difference' attains the ability of language to evoke a presence, a whole, and, as a consequence, ‘the fragment is the form of writing'. In the Sophistic age, language appeared as unable to produce an exact correspondence to things (Protagoras' criticism of Homer's imperative in the first line of the Iliad), and simultaneously as able to elaborate two opposite arguments on every notion or events. As a consequence, the polemical critics of the Sophists interpreted these features, the language's distance from things and its extreme liability to be subtly manipulated and abused as what transformed the sophistic discourse into a total fragmentation, into a sort of mere assemblage of sounds signifying nothing. A ruin. This paper traces the evidences for this negative and polemical meaning of ‘fragment' and ‘ruin' in Aristophanes and in a rarely cited, but very instructive, passage of Plato.