Politische Rede

In his essays, the renowned linguist Uwe Pörksen explores the questions of what a good speech is and how it is used in decisions in current politics.The art of political rhetoric often threatens to degenerate into staging. On the media stage, politicians have to formulate as unassailably as possible, to show themselves as competent and innovative, assertive and yet approachable, without actually becoming tangible at the moment of speaking. Political rhetoric today therefore seems to be above all a trained, carefully calculated, demoscopically oriented routine. Pörksen explores this facet of political speech in his articles, but he also examines the programme and the poetics of decision-making speech, which, trusting in the maturity of the audience in debates, ventures the decisive thesis and the conceptual design. The art of political rhetoric, as Uwe Pörksen shows in his studies on the power of concepts and images, can be understood not only as a technique of overpowering, but also as the applied ethics of the public world. It is the theory and practice of an independent, original democratic search for what is socially reasonable and better.