Abstract:
The political rhetoric mobilized by the British Prime Minister on the occasion
of the Brexit referendum has revealed a discursive operation based on epidictic
stylistics.Threatened by the rise of Eurosceptics within his Conservative party,
Cameron deployed an argumentative machine aimed at defending a personal, wellestablished conviction, that of keeping the UK within the EU.
The combined resources of discursive argumentation and hermeneutics have
made it possible to show that the argument for maintaining membership is inscribed
in the discourse in an explicit epidictic scenography where the audience's doxic
baggage is constantly solicited by the various stylistic effects summoned by the
speaker.
However, Cameron's persuasive strategies may contain inferential utopian
ingredients that work to inflect the initial position, thereby making the present
reality, that of Brexit, a contingency open to the game of the possible.
