The “Tech-Industrial Complex” and the “Oligarchy” Warning: Neologism, Intertextuality, and Prophetic Rhetoric in Biden’s 2025 Farewell Address

Аннотация

This article examines the stylistic architecture of President Joseph R. Biden’s January 15, 2025, farewell address through the lenses of intertextual analysis, Bakhtinian dialogism, and critical discourse analysis. Biden’s coinage of “tech-industrial complex”—a direct lexical parallel to Eisenhower’s 1961 “military-industrial complex”—represents a paradigmatic case of intertextual neologism designed to inherit the rhetorical authority of a canonical prior text. His unprecedented deployment of the term “oligarchy” to describe domestic American power dynamics marked a deliberate register shift, importing critical vocabulary previously reserved for post-Soviet states into domestic political discourse. Employing Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the “word as half someone else’s,” Kristeva’s (1980) theory of textual absorption and transformation, and Fairclough’s (1992) framework of manifest intertextuality, the study demonstrates how Biden constructed a “farewell as warning” through systematic stylistic borrowing from Eisenhower while adapting the prophetic frame for the age of technology monopolies and social media. The analysis reveals a speech structured around ring composition, double-voiced discourse, and a productive neologism pattern that positions the address within a lineage extending from Washington (1796) through Eisenhower (1961) to the present. The findings contribute to scholarship on presidential rhetoric, political neologism, and the application of dialogic theory to contemporary political discourse.