ABSTRACT
This study proceeds upon the assumption that the rhetorical treatise as a genre is a cultural stock exchange, where the discourse on language is contaminated by and leaks into concurrent discourses on sexuality and gender, love and desire, money and property, and also nationalism and colonization. Its guiding premise is that the forms of language produced within this discourse-elocutionary forms such as metaphor, metonymy, simile, blazon, inventory or repetition and also larger categories such as figure and trope or invention and disposition-are not neutrally descriptive categories but anasemic1 symptoms of cultural desires and anxieties, including the libidinal pulsions for territorial possession and the turning of an economic profit such as characterized the European powers of the colonial era.2
