La figuration de la prostituée comme rhétorique du pratico-inerte dans Salammbô

This article suggests interpretating the prostitute in Flaubert’s novel
Salammbô from a double angle, using both Sartre’s political philosophy and
Alain Rabatel’s enunciative and rhetorical analysis. Understanding that
discursive devices reveal an ideological and moral dimension, this approach
intends to highlight the constitutive ambivalence of the prostitute by
considering this figure in the social ensemble that determines and
constrains human relations and that Sartre named “pratico-inerte”. Far from
reducing the figure to a pure reification, we propose to understand it as
what the philosopher called “matière ouvrée”, namely the result of a
collective work, which tends to be defined as fetishized merchandise. As
Sartre’s philosophy suggests, the prostitute is then given a power of
subjectivation that transforms the men behind the prostitution in objects
subjected to this fetishism, becoming in return a “matière ouvrée” according
to a dialectical reversal which is translated in the enunciative and
rhetorical structures of the novel.