Gossip as fictional narrative. Rhetorical, political and cognitive potentialities from the “New Philosophy of History”

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate that gossip is a phenomenon of the narrative-fictional horizon of the “New Philosophy of History”. The theoretical advantage of this proposal is that it circumvents the drawbacks of theories on gossip in order to apprehend its characteristics. Understood as fictional narrative, gossip is not a distortion or an insular practice of language and social practices, but is inherent to the modes of signification through processes of fictionalization. Thus, an opportunity is enabled to consider in a rhetorically situated way objects such as gossip, previously marginalized, within discursive practices as an important means of cognitive elaboration and political articulation.