The dialectics of Fürsprache

In order to understand the stakes and approach of Rüdiger Campe's work on Fürsprache, it is illuminating to observe how, across his career, Campe brings together deconstructive, dialectical, and historicizing operations. Affekt und Ausdruck ( Affect and Expression, 1990) deconstructs traditional periodizing categories and literary‐historical conventions; and Game of Probability (2002, trans. 2012) depicts a historical shift in which a scale of probability supplanted an earlier dichotomy of actuality and possibility. An earlier review (1994) of mid‐twentieth‐century rhetoric scholarship presents Campe's dialectical twist on the seeming opposition between Klaus Dockhorn's Gadamerian approach to rhetoric, emphasizing historicizing‐anthropological approaches, and Heinrich Lausberg's monumental, structuralist‐influenced, logical‐analytic handbook of rhetoric. Campe's work on Fürsprache, finally, reflects a dialectical synthesis of these two approaches to rhetoric. The strategic speech to an audience and an empathic relationship entail the deconstruction of a dominant “intersubjective” model of speech situations, evoking numerous dialectical complications introduced by the institutional context and the multiplication of roles within the constellation of advocate, client, and judge.