ABSTRACTJoining the New Rhetoric project's conversation about argumentation as justice, this article aims to add an expanded version of the psychological to the just resources of argumentation. After examining how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric justifies attention to—yet ultimately swerves from—contingencies of psycho-physical sensation, I turn to Burke's highly elaborated concept of identification, which adds to the New Rhetoric project by articulating the relations of physiological sensation, attitude and emotion, and persuasion. Linking ethics and form, identification provides a means by which one may grow increasingly aware of the sensation-driven defensiveness that can undermine dialogic exchange. After making this case that Burke's rhetoric can help develop what is not in the New Rhetoric project but should be—the resource of constitutive, affective identification—I end with what should be in Burke but is not—a universality that a “we” of substantially different constitutions would agree on.

James Arnt Aune, who served on the editorial board of Philosophy and Rhetoric, died on 8 January 2013. Jim was an accomplished scholar of the first rank, whose articles, books, and papers reflected broad knowledge and deep insight. He left his mark on the journal through frequent and reliably rigorous reviews that were distinctive for their careful attention to arguments and extensive historical and bibliographic references aimed at improving work, even when he had profound intellectual differences with the author. His comments to the editor often included his own concerns that he may have been too harsh or that his criticisms might be defeating to the author. I seldom felt the need to edit them, however, because his exemplary scholarship that made demands on a manuscript was matched by the constructiveness of his marvelous intellectual generosity. For those who knew Jim, his own work expressed erudition and, dare I say, academic bravery of the rarest sort. He gave expression to ideas, figures, and events on a historical arc in a way that enriched their meaning and energized his comments with trenchant force. His passing is a significant loss to the scholarly community and a profound sadness for those who knew him and had grown accustomed to his inimitable voice. —GAH

ABSTRACT This article focuses on attunement as a concept that intervenes in the question of how we learn to act ethically in the face of radical alterity. I use Jacques Derrida's concept of a “contraband” tonality and Gilles Deleuze's discussion of “haptic” tone to argue that tonality resonates with dimensions of affect and desire that cannot be accommodated through familiar interpretive acts of listening, hearing, and seeing. Because we are unable to fully understand and account for the tonality of others, the article suggests, we need to approach attunement as a disposition or ethos that prolongs our engagement with the alterity of others' marks and noises. Repositioned as living practice, attunement can redefine ethical action by drawing attention to the material, physical, and emotional challenges of preserving what Diane Davis calls a “radically hospitable opening to alterity.”

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard's first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard's work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure's goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. Within its argument, I focus on its central chapter in order to signify the uniqueness of Discourse, Figure. Finally, I offer some thoughts on what this event may signify for us now.Discourse, Figure signifies an event in Lyotard's career. It is tempting to think of his oeuvre as discontinuous: the early phenomenological work breaks off in a flurry of political writings and activism; the psychoanalytic work coalesces into Libidinal Economy, a positively derivative book that makes a radical break with Marxism; language games yield incredulity toward metanarratives; and his later preoccupation with Kant becomes a critique of the third critique in both The Differend and his work on the sublime.Situated between his phenomenological work and Libidinal Economy, before the break with Marxism yet already politically ambivalent, Discourse, Figure signifies schism—from its title to its organization. Its first half deals with phenomenology and the second half with psychoanalysis. Between these is only the trompe-l'oeil of a veduta, the section on which I focus in a moment. The temptation to take a discontinuous view of Lyotard's career now runs up against the temptation to see a continuity in which Discourse, Figure looks back at his first book, Phenomenology, and forward toward his next, Libidinal Economy. To look for such a continuity might be to attempt a narrative of which Lyotard himself would be incredulous. Nevertheless, there can be continuity without mastery: “To link is necessary; how to link is contingent”(Lyotard 1988, 29).Lyotard only considered three of his books “real” books: Discourse, Figure, Libidinal Economy, and The Differend (Bennington 1988, 2). He regarded his other books as preparations for these major works. That it took forty years for the first of these “real” books to be translated is as remarkable as it is unfortunate. The translation had originally been undertaken by Mary Lydon, who published translations of two of its chapters in the early eighties. Her “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” a version of which was originally meant to serve as the introduction to her translation, opens by calling Discourse, Figure, “a notoriously difficult book” (2001, 10).1 Sadly, Lydon's untimely death later in 2001 ended her role in the work. The translation, already delayed in 2001, had to wait another ten years. Antony Hudek took on what I can only assume seemed an impossible task.The length of time Lydon spent translating Discourse, Figure, along with her awareness of its delay recalls a third event: the length of time Lyotard spent writing the book and his awareness of that time: “If I had to wait as long as I did to see my own resistance to writing it fall, it was (among other reasons) without a doubt out of fear of being seduced, distracted from this goal, mesmerized by language” (2011, 14). Seventeen years passed between Lyotard's first book, Phenomenology, and his first “real” book, Discourse, Figure. During those intervening years he drifted, the collected essays of that period appearing as Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. The drifting return to those two figures eventually became Discourse, Figure, his attempt to signify the other of signification without being mesmerized by signification.Lydon's statement that Lyotard's book is difficult serves as an understatement. Discourse, Figure could be read almost as a novel or epic poem, replete with philosophical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, religious, and political allusions. His discourse is figurative. His opening salvo, “This book protests: the given is not a text” (2011, 3), aims not just at its immediate interlocutor, Paul Claudel, and his statement that the sensible world is legible. It also takes aim at Jacques Derrida's text-centered claim that “there is no outside-text” (1976, 158). The book's lengthy engagements with Hegel, Mallarmé, Merleau-Ponty, Frege, Klee, Cezanné, and Freud, hide sidelong references to Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Kandinsky, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. All of this to say that for Lyotard, the stakes are high. He grapples with Jacques Lacan by returning ever more rigorously to Freud.2 He performs Derrida's (anti)method of deconstruction without being mesmerized by language. He follows Deleuze's anti-Hegelian critique of representational difference while subtly chiding Deleuze for his neglect of the visual and his rejection of the psychoanalytic. Lyotard is in a Burkean parlor in which he has spent seventeen years listening.The first chapter, “The Bias of the Figural,” serves as an introduction, and signifies at least two more events: the book's aim and the book's arc, each of which entails its own failure. Discourse, Figure's aim, as noted, is the signification of the other of signification. Throughout the first half, phenomenology and structuralist linguistics are relied on, or rather stretched to their limits, in an attempt to represent what Lyotard will ultimately call unrepresentable: “Phenomenology … remains a reflection on knowledge, and the purpose of such a reflection is to absorb the event, to recuperate the Other into the Same” (2011, 17, emphasis his). The failure of the aim leads us to its arc.Lyotard tells us that the arc of the book is an event in which the visual comes to play less and less of a role. While its opening pages concern themselves with the very pragmatic distinction between seeing and reading, by the end of this first chapter it is clear that there will be a shift throughout the course of the book. The shift is from phenomenology to psychoanalysis but also away from figure as visuality and toward figure as rhetoric and as unconscious. In a sense, Lyotard must become dissatisfied with the answers phenomenology offers and move on to psychoanalysis.Why include the first half then? Why not just move on? “I would answer,” Lyotard explains, “that this displacement is precisely what constitutes the event for me in this book. By virtue of what order, of what assumed function of the book, of what prestige of discourse, should one attempt to erase it?” (2011, 19). In this sense the book signifies the event of phenomenology's failure to signify the event and Lyotard's move away from it. That failure creates a clear structure, one that parallels its title. After the initial chapter, the book takes shape in two halves: “Signification and Designation,” concerned with phenomenology and linguistics, and “The Other Space,” devoted to a return to Freud. And in between, Lyotard offers a crucial chapter entitled “Veduta on a Fragment of the ‘History’ of Desire.”The text proceeds through a series of ninety-degree rotations, each of which can be traced and each of which offers a way into Lyotard's complex argument. In the first half of the book, Lyotard begins by distinguishing between the negation of the sensory and the negation of language. The negation of the sensory consists in the distance between the seer and the seen, a distance that becomes confused with the distinction between subject and object. Language's negation consists not only in the gaps between signifiers but also in the distance between signifier and signified, and, most importantly, in the “no” of psychoanalysis, the “no” that says “yes.” For Lyotard, negation provides an elementary link between the seen and the said.Lyotard's first rotation is thus a move from signification to designation. Saussurian signification consists in a chain of signifiers. Between these signifiers are invariable gaps. The distance between cat and car is no greater or smaller than between cat and epistemology, structurally speaking. Thus Lyotard sees a flatness in signification that does not parallel the variable gaps of designation, the distance between me and my hand and the moon and my office. In Saussure, there is a rotation such that designation becomes confused with signification. The moon becomes another word. Flatness asserts itself over thickness. Lyotard understands this turn as representation.The title Discourse, Figure refers us to the movement from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, another event of the book, one in which Lyotard slowly moves toward taking the side of the figural. But Discourse, Figure is a deliberate book, not a spontaneous event, and there is a bit of secondary revision occurring. Freud and Lacan lurk throughout the first half, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly. It is clear that Lyotard has this larger rotation from discourse to figure in mind throughout the early chapters, and this foreshadowing creates depth and tension.So it is unsurprising that after moving from Saussure to Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard finds Freudian negation underlying structuralist linguistics and phenomenology. Lyotard ends the first half by distinguishing between opposition and difference in a chapter that perhaps owes the most to Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze sat on the habilitation committee to which Lyotard submitted Discours, Figure, and Lyotard's concept of difference is decidedly Deleuzian). Opposition corresponds to the negative difference of representation that Deleuze critiques in Difference and Repetition. In an important section of book entitled “Nonhuman Sex,” Lyotard explains that the castration complex which inaugurates difference does not primarily hinge on the opposition between the two sexes (i.e., women are not castrated men, or rather, women are not not men) but on the difference between human and nonhuman sex. Lateral to distinctions between man/woman, pure/impure, black/white, or good/evil, we find the difference of difference: “Sex is foremost nonhuman, non-opposite, transgressive with regard to oppositions” (2011, 147). The entry into representation is built on the castration complex, which owes to the death drive. It is the “yes” of the death drive that appears alongside all of these “no”s with which we have been concerned.This lateral move allows Lyotard to move toward visual phenomena. He outlines theories of curvilinear perspective (to be opposed to linear perspective via the coming veduta) as well as of peripheral vision. Linear perspective depends on an immobile focus of the eye that duplicates the false mobility of the eye. By immobilizing the eye and paying attention to the periphery we begin to understand curvilinear perspective and the death drive lurking at the corners of our eyes. These two elements, representation and perspective, frame Lyotard's veduta.The section on the veduta constitutes an abrupt rupture that sutures the book together. He offers a short history of images in the West, focusing on medieval illuminated manuscripts and the paintings of the early Renaissance, specifically those of Masaccio. Lyotard wants to move us from the sacred to the secular, through two types of thickness and through two rotations. It is a complex move, or rather two moves, each of which is worth dwelling on.Lyotard attempts to demonstrate the imbrication of discourse and figure within medieval illuminated manuscripts. The images may be read and the letters seen just as often as the reverse. Their signification is working opposite to our own. While we might represent the designated (the “real” world), the signifier for the medieval mind always signifies divine discourse. Because there is only one signified, image and text alike are infused with figure. The thickness to which Lyotard has referred throughout occupies—during the medieval period—the space between God and man: true difference.At the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see a rotation. Masaccio's perspectival paintings reveal a new thickness, one between designation and signification. Difference is no longer vertical (God-human) but horizontal (human-vase-sheep-human); transcendence is replaced with immanence. It is this rotation that opens up the possibility of nonsacred art, that is, depictions of peasants and everyday objects. Masaccio's perspective is complex, not yet strictly linear. He employs aerial perspective as well (which offers the illusion of atmospheric depth), but the two types of perspective appear within the same painting without any kind of framing device separating them.Lyotard compares this to Leonardo's use of aerial perspective, where it is carefully restricted. Leonardo has already moved to a linear perspective that is based on a rotation from picture plane to viewer: “The distance from the ‘eye-point’ to the screen is transferred onto the latter so as to establish the oblique from which the objects' foreshortening will be determined” (2011, 197). This second rotation, geometrical foreshortening, may be directly opposed to Masaccio's perspective. In Masaccio, we see naught but plastic space, ready to be invested with figural, libidinal energy. In Leonardo, each aspect of the painting must be kept separate. In Masaccio, the viewer is immanent to the world of the painting. In Leonardo, she or he is transcendent: “This rotation of meaning is directly opposed to that which I described to convey the importance of the Masaccian revolution: rather than the exteriorization of what was scripted, it is the scripting of exteriority” (2011, 197). These two rotations—first from creator to creation, then from immanence to transcendence—occur in the first few years of the fifteenth century and separate the sacred, mythopoetic world from our current secular, scientific world.Lyotard uses the term “veduta” to refer to a particular kind of painting within a painting. A window is painted on the wall, like the one placed behind Mona Lisa. This window achieves a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect. We see “through” the painting at another level. In a sense, Lyotard's veduta offers us a chance to see “through” the history of representation. The first half of the book frames this history. The second half signifies what we might see on the other side of the veduta.In the face of the failure of signification outlined in the first half and the history of its subordination of desire outlined in the veduta, Lyotard attempts to signify the other of signification by more psychoanalytic means. Here, in the second half of the book, he performs this work through a rotation from discourse to figure, exploring the unrepresentable in the paintings of Paul Klee and in the dream work that does not think. The dream- work of course cannot think, cannot perform discourse, as it operates under the sign of desire, that is, through the unconscious. Language depends on negation, and the unconscious, Freud reminds us, knows no negation. Lyotard's argument reaches its crescendo in his tripartite model of figurality: figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix: The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote's regulating line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of original repression, instantly laced with discourse: “originary” phantasy. Nonetheless the figure-matrix is figure, not structure, because it is, from the outset, violation of the discursive order—violence against the transformations authorized by this order. (2011, 268, emphasis his) The unconscious is not a language at all. These three parts of figurality braid themselves throughout discourse via desire. Desire's complicity with the figural operates through three transgressions that parallel the three elements of figurality: transgression of the object, transgression of form, and transgression of space. Lyotard argues that these transgressions are manifestations of the death drive and drives his point home by returning to Freud in repeated interpretations of the case study “A Child Is Being Beaten.” These readings allow us to see that the death drive acts as a baffle that moves the spool from fort to da. It is only against this movement that repetition, repression, regression, occurs. Thanatos provides the “re-” that makes possible the return. Death drives deconstruction.While we may have expected figurality to be dangerous only to structuralists, we are surprised by the truth (and it is in its surprise that we recognize its truth): figurality is not eros but thanatos. The relationship of figure to discourse cannot be spoken or drawn, for discourse is within figure and vice versa. Rather than painting a mise-en-scène, Lyotard stages for us a mise en abyme. In the final paragraphs of the book, Lyotard signifies a final rotation: between mother and spouse. Mousetrap, the play within the play in Hamlet, provides Hamlet an opportunity to meditate on his mother as “mobbled” queen. Lyotard reads “mobbled” through an associational chain that leads to “mobilized.” The mobile mother rotates her relationship from variable gap between mother and son to the invariant gap between lovers: Hamlet's “Oedipal truth” (Lyotard 2011, 388). In this final scene we may see how Lyotard prefigures Anti-Oedipus.Discourse, Figure finds us in the shadow of a recent return to Lyotard in the work of philosophers like Alain Baidou, Ray Brassier, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler and that of rhetoricians like Diane Davis, and Lyotard was more than most to at this of rhetoric and to not only study the but to be A rotation of the book's title reminds us of the and often between discourse and as figure in discourse, so rhetoric not from without but from of visual rhetoric of Jacques psychoanalytic theories of the or on the between image and Lyotard offers a cannot only be must be space for us to on and on our Finally, images cannot be from text as as we might and image are as as discourse and have to Discourse, Figure's to and on Deleuze for have an in Deleuze's theories of While Deleuze has to say to our he that is psychoanalytic in Lyotard. we are returning to Lyotard can offer to the the of or of this us to a final event: my own failure at Discourse, Figure. It is a book that must be read and a book that up its only after That it took this long to to us is perhaps In an with Lyotard on its was with a of on my to that a book like Discourse, was at the time because it was explicitly against … I was against this way of and I that now have this book. I was (Lyotard We

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is arguing that Dewey's problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either or for inherently malleable and a quality of that Dewey clearly Rather, like the Dewey remained as a and to the political agency of even if that not maximizing his Yet, the that the Dewey had on and I think we can say he also did well for he refused to the antagonism that academic desire did not way on it.

ABSTRACTThis article explores Contra Celsum as the extant text most representative of the homiletician, philosopher, and scholar Origen's thoughts on rhetoric, which have been underexplored. The Contra Celsum addresses several practical problems facing third-century Christianity, among them the conversion of mixed audiences, the usefulness of pagan rhetoric, and the protection and delivery of the newly canonized New Testament and its divine proofs. Origen's conception of a separate Christian rhetoric that attempts to solve these problems predates and possibly informs the union of Christian and pagan rhetoric in Augustine's De doctrina christiana.

ABSTRACTThis article reads John L. Austin rhetorically and achieves two things thereby. First, it grasps the tensions subtending Austin's speech-act theory. These tensions arguably stem from Austin's distinct engagements with his brief to consider how saying something is to do something. Second, this article assesses the usefulness of Austin's notion of perlocution to the description of discursive events. I take such description to be a concern of the interpretive humanities in general and of rhetoric in particular. To gauge perlocution's utility, I compare its descriptive purchase with that of illocution, signaling some productive affinities between Austin and the purposive, processual conception of semiosis developed by Charles S. Peirce.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the rhetoric of the famous opening sections of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, drawing on his understanding of sympathy as developed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the theory of rhetoric developed in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. It shows how Smith uses rhetorical means for sketching a vision of an egalitarian society, united by sympathetic ties, that includes not only author and reader but also the characters that appear in the first scenes of the Wealth of Nations. Yet Smith's vision is deceptively one-sided and “rhetorical” in a problematic sense, departing from the impartiality Smith usually recommends. This one-sidedness points to a systematic problem of commercial society in Smith's time as well as today: the unequal ability of its members to use rhetoric and thereby to attract sympathy from others.

ABSTRACTThe rhetorical tradition has long been concerned with how to negotiate the discursive juncture between mass and elite audiences. Such a concern has contributed to what might be characterized as the rhetorical tradition's anxiety with regard to its own status. In this article I suggest that this anxiety parallels an ontological conception of the elite as second-order in relation to the first-order mass. I use the standoff between novelist Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey in 2001 as a running example of status tensions in the public sphere, arguing for a theory of vernacular as language that talks and of specialized language as language that talks about. Finally, I suggest that the separate claims to status of vernacular and specialized language might be resolved by thinking further about Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia.

AbstractHyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness of hyperbole elicits a constructive, transformative ambiguity that can reveal alternative epistemological and ontological insights. Indeed, hyperbole is often the most effective way of trying to express seemingly impossible and inexpressible positions. I argue for the reexploration and critical examination of hyperbole, and I offer a theoretical framework from which to view texts and discourse from a hyperbolic perspective. I identify the metafunction of hyperbole, and I offer two specific functions of hyperbole. Hyperbole is more than simply an obvious and intentional exaggeration and thus can benefit from an exploration that considers it beyond its traditional tropological limits. It can be engaged as a mode of inquiry in order to delve into the complexities and paradoxes of theo-philosophical discourse, and it can also be appropriated as a critical position from which one might, for example, propose interpretations of various textual expressions that differ from their more normative interpretations.

Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

AbstractThe disconnection between the idea of nation-based citizenship and the current practices of migrants presents the opportunity to reconceptualize and redefine the idea of citizenship and thereby grasp the realities of movement. I employ Giambattista Vico's theories of universal rights and his history of civilizations to interrogate rhetorically national origins and expand on what I call a renovation of citizenship. This is a process that embraces daily practices of nation-based citizenship and encourages us to imagine new ways to express citizenship, ways that comport with the realities of a mobile world, specifically the human right of freedom of movement. In formulating this renovation of citizenship based on mobility, I introduce the metaphor of stochastic citizenship to resolve the tension between the legal structures governing citizenship and the promotion of mobility as a human right. The Roma people in Europe serve as a test for stochastic citizenship.

AbstractOratorical practice may be viewed as the material enactment of a philosophy of class struggle. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I propose “orator-machine” as a concept-term to describe speech making in the context of the open exterior of interconnected human and nonhuman machinic assemblages in capitalist modernity. My argument is based on a reconsideration of a single address, delivered by William D. “Big Bill” Haywood in 1911 at the Cooper Union in New York City. Reading Haywood against the grain—as a conceptual innovator—allows me to demonstrate a mode of analysis that affirms the philosophical quality and ontological politics of oratorical performance.

AbstractDewey emphasizes the perception of “indirect consequences” of transactions as the basis of responsible public identity and organization. These consequences are external; they appear in the scientifically observable world and are susceptible to technical control. But transactions may have indirect affective consequences that are part of a culturally influenced inner reality, pose obstacles to speech and communication, and fund an irresponsible public identity-cum-organization. Rhetorical theory that builds on Dewey's “public” ignores these consequences at considerable cost. This claim is supported by a social psychoanalytic conception of affects and by an interpretive-analysis of public speech-acts that moved from opposition to the largely unauthorized immigration of Latin Americans to Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee, to reactionary endorsement and legislative passage of an “English-first” ordinance.

Abstract In Aristotle's biological treatise, On the Parts of Animals, one finds a rare and unexpected burst of rhetorical eloquence. While justifying the study of “less valued animals,” he erupts into praise for the study of all natural phenomena and condemns the small-mindedness of those who trivialize its worth. Without equal in Aristotle's remaining works for its rhetorical quality, it reveals the otherwise coolheaded researcher as a passionate seeker of truth and an unabashed lover of natural beauty. For Aristotle, rhetoric not only discloses the truth (aletheia) of appearances by refuting counterarguments and defending one's claims within agonistic forums; rhetoric also defends and advances whole fields of study on the promise on wonder (thaumazein). By examining Aristotle's example in practice, this article seeks to elucidate a notion of the rhetoric for inquiry that calls lovers of wisdom to the empirical study of nature.

AbstractThis article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze's cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly's critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of manipulation. Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly's politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere.

Abstract The relationship between William James and the stoics remains an enigma. He was clearly influenced by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus throughout his career. Some work has been done on the thematic convergences between Jamesian pragmatism and stoic thought, but this study takes a different path. I argue that the rhetorical style that James uses in arguing for his moral claims in front of popular audiences can be better understood if we see it in light of the stoic style of argumentation. I look at a text James read closely and recommended to close acquaintances—Marcus Aurelius's Meditations—to extract a sense of stoic rhetorical style. James's use of the stoic's tactics of vivid examples and rhetorical questions to shape the rhetorical experience of his audience and to thereby make his points becomes understandable as a possible extension of the stoic style of persuasion.

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)'s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don't] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don't loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school).Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won't. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills. So, after a while I let the victims go, yet not without providing them, for the road, with one striking example of “rhetoric” applied to current news, so that no doubt be left in their mind that they are not dealing with something they can reduce to what they think they know but with something actually “admirable,” in sum “novel” and “powerful.” Life need not be frustrating.For some time now I have been testing publicly the impact of this uncompromising proselytizing, and I have learned a great deal about perceptions of rhetoric among an educated public, which in France we call the “honest public” (the assumption being that uneducated folks are dishonest by mistake, while educated ones should know better). I write a regular column for a leading French online, public intellectual magazine, Les influences (www.lesinfluences.fr). My blog is called Le rhéteur cosmopolite (The Cosmopolitan Rhetor). During the recent French elections, Le nouvel observateur plus asked for my collaboration—which caused some stupor among readers but created somewhat of a fleeting sensation. I call a spade a spade. I am a rhetor and I am cosmopolitan. I refuse to take a leaf from Stanley Fish's acribic blog in the New York Times, The Opinionator: I do rhetoric, not opinion. I am still hoping the Onion will run a spoof of Fish and call it “The Onionator.” Professor Fish is very smart indeed at peeling off onion layers of opinions, until what is usually left are the bitter tears of his contrite liberalism defeated by illiberal public arguments. In my own blog I never let my political opinions color my analysis: I also peel onions, but I do not expect anything in return (except fans, like a mysterious “Corinne,” who followed me from my previous blog on Mediapart, Les oies du Capitol [The Capitoline Geese], to Les influences when I got contracted). My own opinions are private; they are long-standing prejudices that have hardly changed since I reached the age of reason, and they are unlikely ever to alter. Like ancient, imperious Gods they command me when I cast my ballot or get involved in politics. Otherwise I keep them in check. It makes for uneasiness, but that is the destiny of those who keep Sextus Empiricus on their bedroom pedestal. A commentator, on another site, chastised me on account of my “pessimism.”Be that as it may, “Le rhéteur cosmopolite” led to a book (Paroles de Leaders, [2011]) and then to another (De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis [2012]), as I watched the word “rhétorique” pass through phases of public “admiration” and become implanted, as it were, in current parlance. I say “current” because here again Descartes is right on the money when he describes who is more likely to be struck by admiration: “In any event, although the intellectually challenged are not by nature inclined toward admiration, it does not follow that clever people are always prone to it, unlike those who in general have enough common sense but not a very high opinion of their own capacities” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxxvii, my translation).Descartes, having lived in Holland where weighing gold was akin to weighing thoughts to the smallest ounce, offers a fine observation of life and of public life. The last part of his definition is, in my view, a rather neat description of commentators on social networks and, to be frank, the rank and file of journalists. So, I have been observing how professional media persons or social media interjectors “admire” rhetoric, how they awake out of the opiate slumber of “information” and confess “admiration.”It all began early in 2010 when Sciences humaines, a respected monthly mainly read by the teacherly professions, ran a two-page-long eulogy of my Hyperpolitique (2009) titled “Un grand discours vaut mieux qu'une petite phrase”; it carried a catchy center-page insert that read “Rhetoric was a Jesuits' diabolical invention of persuasion.” An advance copy of the article (richly illustrated by orators at full throttle in the old Third Republic chambers) triggered commentary on prime-time radio (France-Inter [“Revue de presse,” 26 Jan. 2010]) by an anchor who dedicated his program to “political talk.” He addressed three ideas that he claimed came out of my book: that in Britain public speaking is a like a tennis match, that in the United States it is “soft and hypocritical” (!), and that in France it is a “theaterocracy.” My telephone started to ring. Everyone listens to that program: it gives the chattering classes something to sound smart about, for a day. I hardly recognized the arguments of the first chapter of Hyperpolitique but was keen to see how the journalist (who attended a top school and is a philosophy major) managed to summarize it against the grain of public opinion: Gallic stereotypes are that British are underhanded, Americans pugnacious, and the French clear thinking. Clearly, my argument about rhetorical cultures, however bent by him to create controversy, had led him to revise his opinions about universals of public speaking in democratic cultures (oddly, he left out what I wrote about the German rhetorical world).Then something unexpected happened, as the press awoke from its information-induced opiate sleep—management journals and financial magazines began taking an interest in my book. Le nouvel économiste (25 Mar. 2010), a leading, salmon-pulped, financial weekly, interviewed me and ran an article titled “Le goût de l'éloquence” misspelling “rhétorique” as “réthorique” (as did the French C-Span, LCP, in a ticker during a broadcast in which I was invited to comment on the Socialist Party's primaries). It gained momentum. “Rhetoric” was being adopted by business people who, had they read analyses in Hyperpolitique about the “delirium” of “labor talk” and the rhetoric of trust or contract management, may have realized I was on their case and not on their side. It was my turn to be struck with “admiration.”What made the surprise all the more novel and forceful was the fact Le nouvel économiste article, uniformly laudatory and actually well written (except for the displaced “h,” but copy editors are no longer what they used to be), appeared in its “Leadership and Management” section and placed the emphasis on “eloquence” in its title. It highlighted three key points or catchphrases set in inserts that, read in sequence, produced the following syllogism: rhetoric teaches that social life is a transaction of arguments, transaction is good, and thus rhetoric should be taught at school. I was stunned by the boldness of the enthymeme. Soon after, a professional newsletter for senior staff at state agencies, hailed “rhetoric” as a new tool for labor relations (“Rhétorique à la rescousse,” Lettre du cadre territorial, 1 June 2010). Rhetoric had reentered public awareness where I did not expect it, in that very audience who, we are so often told, controls and understands “the real world”: the world of finance, of demand and supply, of accumulation of capital and return on investment. Yet, not under the guise of rhetoric as such but still draped in the quaint nobility of “eloquence.” Striking such a pose is rather typical, I often find, of the conservative dowdiness of financiers who entertain obsolescent images of high culture, even when they collect cows dipped in formaldehyde solution—to them “eloquence” spoke of artful elevation and of cultural capital.The grafting of “rhetoric” onto public idiom was taking and, to size up the change over the years, I simply needed to look back at what Les Échos, France's main daily financial paper, read by stock-exchange people, had written back in 2006 (in its supplement “Les enjeux,” Apr. 2006). A columnist had asked a rhetorical question, “How does a HR manager tell workers they are being laid off?” Her answer was a laundry-list of self-help tips in public address, appended with a substantial list of secondary reading—a motley of manuals, ancient and modern, among them my Art de parler (2003). However, my book is not a manual of persuasive writing. It is nothing like the unrivaled Hodges' Harbrace Handbook (2009). It is not even a primer for public address—both are the sort of books French elite professionals, trained in grandes écoles, dislike and distrust and despise and abandon to the college-educated crowd. L'art de parler is a historical anthology of rare and, to the noninitiate, complex manuals of rhetoric. “Eloquence” does fit in Les Échos' readers' idea of high culture and social codes of distinction, but it is actually an unpractical notion if the purpose is sweet-talking workers unions. As Les Échos declared Art de parler “illuminating,” I wondered, “Of what?” Not of “rhetoric” for the word “rhetoric,” let alone the concept, was absent in that self-help article. I got an answer after the publication, that same year, of my Mahomet (a history of narrative topoi about the founder of Islam): two leading Arab philosophers, Malek Chebel and Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of The Malady of Islam), reviewed it who acknowledged its belletristic and cultural value but stopped hesitatingly at the doors of the ivory tower, as it were—Meddeb just hinted at the possible, hermeneutic value of “rhetoric” in public affairs (in this case, the debate about Islam in France). Later on he and I had a lively public exchange. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became clear to me that it all evinced a desire and a lack, that is, a lack of knowledge as to what the lack actually is or was.By the time in mid-2011 that my blog had become a regular feature, its essays were being taken up by other online magazines (often lifted without even my knowing, always a good sign), and invitations to contribute elsewhere had become routine. Paroles de Leaders was out. Mentions in the press acknowledged “admiration,” spoke now of “rhetoric” in curious, somewhat inquisitive tones—gone was pejoration. They responded to the novelty and force of the surprise in two ways.On the one hand, notably feminist or women writers wrote of “manipulation,” describing me as “cantankerous” and as “filling [my] fountain pen with Pastis” (Le Monde, 18 Aug. 2011) or (in an otherwise level-headed and well-intentioned interview) as a master at explaining “wondrous jugglery” (Terrafemina, 14 Oct. 2011): they played out stereotypes commonplace in some feminist circles that men exert persuasive power through hectoring or dazzling display or self-inebriation of speaking, while women's rhetoric is irenic and conversational and coactive (see my Gender Rhetoric [2009] for contrasting views on the subject). On the other hand, leading magazines mostly read by the financial professions spoke of “rhetoric” as a novel, surprising, forceful, and desirable management tool (which, I guess, would reinforce the just-mentioned stereotype). Here is a florilegium: for Les Échos (7 Oct. 2011) Paroles de Leaders is “ruffling and lifts the veil on the mystery of leadership”; in L'express (16 Nov. 2011) the star column “Tendançologie” (“Trendology”) hailed this new approach on “how to become a leader.” The September 2011 L'expansion Management Review, a quarterly of reference only sold by subscription, judged the book “indispensable.” The lesson easily drawn, with hindsight, from these punchy reviews is clear: the medias and their audiences no longer shunned the word and the idea of rhetoric and gave rhetoric, properly spelled, a prime spot. I asked the marketing department at one of my publishers (Bourin) if they had a hand in it. “No, the financial press just likes what you write; it is new, and they see its usefulness.” Descartes was possibly correct in judging who is more prone to “admiration.” I have taken part in a number of national television and radio broadcasts in which the word “rhétorique” was cast about generously, like aspersions at mass, yet not without an ever-so-slight hesitation, the sort one has when tasting a new dish, and I even discerned a twinkle of daring in the eye of the show host. It amuses me always to see the word rising on the horizon and popping up, not in derision or pejoration but as an intellectual evidence, a lack-filler.If I have retraced this short history, a surrogate confession of information opium eaters and their discovery of rhetoric as a management and public affairs (ephemeral) panacea, the reason is not vanity. Rather, it has to do with identifying our place in the lack, with how, as rhetor(ician)s, we interact with public affairs, how we are placed.The bracketed “-ician” is an indication of our unstable place, of an instability that should be, for us, a matter to ponder. Say “rhetor” and one risks confusion with “orator”—the risk is that popular perceptions will infer from the denomination itself our purported ability to persuade, as if specialists of rhetoric ought to be better shod than when it to our public And the same perceptions will also in of being and smart to be if it that, we are persuasive in of public say and it in a that is, as professional as the French it The will but we will be at to explain what we actually Here is an it has to me over and over again when a to a that I have to tell the at that I am not a professor at the and rhetoric is not a I get a as if I were to something about my On another getting a at my I had this in is as it on my and what I had never a what rhetoric, think came a smile of followed by this from the I and I was not as I had just a on the rhetoric of on at and was my thoughts on rhetoric as the de The “-ician” because it to a and in a as in de a has two main to create a of and to is what the and the were me, me. I am a be that as it rhetoric is not a it is a and a that the as it is the lesson at the very of the lesson of the and the rhetoric is but in need of and (a is to in a by in the of under the “Rhetoric or a and Rhetoric Rhetoric is also a to the world as because it is the of the fact that is as I to call it. may explain management is so in for all its on that are and in to if not the is usually to explain this which one have possibly are indeed they were would be and and would not to those who to that are or as they are of it, in the of is to In my I to rhetorical idiom to in public affairs, a I also to show that on the of rhetorical can be I do so without any for the of I where the lack is at the word and the of to that which one has without its idea by in his as a key notion for is no I in or our idiom to to that is to what be of to The public out of “admiration,” some of our idiom and some of it. The of course, is to see our idiom to what in an culture like the French this is than in a culture where self-help is over The risk however is to be in public as who may become to and commentators on I believe that, to being eaters of our own we ought to size up the value of the to the and to attention to the of life.

Abstract It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening (Fiumara 1990). And the problem with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”

AbstractThe term “boring” is pervasive in contemporary popular evaluations of speakers and speeches. Although familiar today, the term is curiously absent from foundational Greek accounts of the art of rhetoric, raising a question about what, if anything, ancient Greeks thought about the subject. In this article, I aim to clarify Greek ways of thinking about boredom and rhetoric through an examination of the texts of Isocrates, focusing in particular on his Panathenaicus. As the evidence in Isocrates suggests, ancient Greek listeners did experience something akin to boredom, namely ochlos, or annoyance. The Greeks were also delighted (and hence not bored) by certain forms of rhetoric; some forms were delightful to crowds, and others, like the texts of Isocrates, were delightful to cultivated minds. Although Isocrates addresses antecedents of boredom, he makes only a handful of references of this sort, suggesting that boredom has afflicted some rhetorical cultures far less than others.

AbstractMost of the medieval arts of poetry and prose were written before the middle of the thirteenth century, but their dissemination was not uniform in all parts of Europe. In England, the surviving copies of a work such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova taper off notably toward the end of the thirteenth century, and the numbers do not begin to pick up again until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. This pattern is no accident of preservation but reflects a significant revival of interest in Latin rhetoric and literature, centered at Oxford in the late fourteenth century. The characteristic literary materials and rhetorical methods of this renaissance resonated beyond the university environment and are reflected with striking precision in the references to rhetoric scattered throughout the vernacular poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.

AbstractThis article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future.

AbstractBooker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights.

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

AbstractThis article challenges the view that rhetoric, dialectic and logic are three perspectives on argument, relating respectively to its process, its procedure, and its product. It also questions the view that rhetorical arguments represent a distinctive type. It suggests that, as related to argument, rhetoric is the theory of arguments in speeches, dialectics the theory of arguments in conversations, and logic the theory of good reasoning in each.

AbstractLincoln's First Inaugural Address was not designed to coax the seceded states back into the Union, because he never conceded that they had left. Rather, he sought to define the situation so that, if war broke out, the seceders would be cast as the aggressors and the federal government as acting in self-defense. To this end, he presented a principled case against the legitimacy or even possibility of secession while applying the arguments to the exigence at hand. He identifies the cause of the trouble as “unwarranted apprehension” among the southern states, announces his policy as a minimalist assertion of national sovereignty, and urges that disaffected southerners not act in haste to threaten that sovereignty further. Not only does he explicitly call for slowing down the push to war but the speech itself enacts a slowing of time. In sum, the First Inaugural illustrates both Lincoln's philosophical grounding and his rhetorical dexterity.

AbstractPlato's confrontation with Dionysius I, the so-called “tyrant of Sicily,” became famous as a cautionary tale of the perils of offering unwelcome advice to a powerful prince. Within early modern England, this tale took on added currency in the context of humanists' ambitions to serve as counselors in the court of Henry VIII. The humanist scholar Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), who briefly and unsuccessfully served at Henry's court, re-created Plato's exchange with Dionysius I in his dramatic dialogue The Knowledge Whiche Maketh a Wise Man (1533). In his dialogue, Elyot imagines Plato returning to Athens after his brief period of enslavement, where he meets the philosopher/rhetorician Aristippus. Aristippus challenges Plato by positing that Plato's dangerous words to Dionysius violated rhetorical tenets of propriety and timing. In the course of their extended exchange, two different versions of the rhetoric of counsel surface—one based on principles of philosophy and one based on strategic rhetoric.

AbstractIn this article the author offers a reading of mimetic style (lexis) as it is presented in book 3 of Plato's Republic with the aim of disclosing the importance of style in the acquisition and employment of knowledge—whether scientific or ethical. In fact, the author argues that a careful reading of Socrates' words in the text occasions the idea that reflection on the way that we imitate our inherited content—the ethos, the comportment, in which we exhibit that content—makes visible a potential to appropriate received content and imitated knowledge in original and wakeful ways. In consequence, the author argues that it might be style, not content, that harbors the capacity for us to take a genuine, critical responsibility for our inherited concepts.

AbstractWhat does it mean to say rhetoric scholarship should be relevant to democratic practice? A prevailing answer to this question insists that rhetoric scholars are participants in the democratic contest for power just like all other citizens, no more and no less. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the argument of this essay is that reducing scholarship to a mode of political agency not only produces an increasingly uninhabitable academic identity but also draws our attention away from producing results of rhetorical inquiry designed to be useful to citizens in democracy. Clinging to the idea that academic practice is a mode of political action produces a fantastic blindness to the antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency that structures academic purpose. While empirical barriers to the production of rhetorical resources suitable for democratic appropriation undoubtedly exist, ignoring the self-frustrating character of academic desire is no less of an impediment to the production of democratically consequential rhetoric scholarship.

AbstractThis article uses the fractal as a device for explicating the narrative strategies of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “Experience.” Each of the seven “lords of life” of “Experience” incorporates aspects of its six complementary “lords,” so this article argues that each “lord”—and its corresponding section of “Experience”—represents a fractal recapitulation of the whole course of “Experience.” Applying a fractal narrative to “Experience” casts further light on the process of recursion within Emerson's prose and on the way in which Emerson's writing can seek to perform the methods of consciousness; the recursion of the fractal offers a lens for viewing the self-referential qualities of consciousness. Using the initial “lord” of “Illusion” as a microcosm for viewing the fractal qualities of the other “lords,” this article then examines the implications of this fractal dynamic for the themes of “Experience” as a whole, including the relationship of part and whole, the role of human partiality, and the intricacies of self-awareness.

The concurrent publication of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History—a collection of essays published over the span of three decades (1980–2005)—and Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity makes available and defines Nancy Struever's ongoing revision of the history of rhetoric and pioneering understanding of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. In Struever's own idiom, the all-inclusive “thickness” of rhetorical inquiry—as opposed to the discriminating “thinness” of philosophy—requires some concern for a thinker's intellectual career. Indeed, taken together, the two books allow for a useful, incremental gloss of the later Struever by the earlier and vice versa. Struever authorizes this continuity in her introduction to History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, linking the last essay in her collection, on Hobbes and Vico, to the more sustained analysis of the two thinkers provided in her most recent monograph. As a whole, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity aims at illustrating “rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, xix). Despite this adversarial claim—and her firm awareness of the perennial quality of the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy—Struever calls for an inside job: a rescue mission intended to liberate rhetoric by authentic rhetorical means. Among them, certainly, is a renewed intimacy between theory and practice, the “theory as practice” that Struever has called for in another work.1Struever's commitment to rhetoric as inquiry makes her wary of the academic “culture wars” that defined the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, ix). One of the most fascinating aspects of Struever's career, as it emerges from these pages, is her ability to distinguish herself or, as she would prefer, to “secede” from an intellectual world whose proclivity for language hardly translated into a historical and thus profound understanding and practice of rhetoric as an investigative mode. “It is one thing to take a ‘linguistic turn’ and proclaim language as the core of politics,” Struever claims, but “it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 91).In her quest for appropriate boundaries, Struever argues against the “dysfunctional colonization of rhetoric by literary criticism,” whose adherence to Cartesian philosophy compels us to interpret metaphor “as primarily cognitive; that is, as an introspective act of a Cartesian consciousness in an isolate realm of concepts” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 1:73).2 This approach is particularly detrimental to the field of intellectual history, where the reduction of rhetoric to poetics, or worse, to a “poetic epistemology” (Paul De Man, Hayden White, etc.), leads to a self-referential focus “on texts, on products, not the events of process” (2:67). Even a “philosopher's rhetoric” such as Ernesto Grassi's, in Struever's view, remains bogged down by external “definitions” and “judgments” that often turn rhetoric into just “a techne, with some epistemic pretensions and an easy relation to theoretical axioms” (1:70). Rhetorical pragmatism should forbid “professional interference,” appeals to “empty formal relations” or to “the essentialist premises of the logical categories.” According to Struever, rather, what we need is a “rhetorician's rhetoric” devoted to restoring the discipline to its civil domain through an “account of the rhetorical premises and procedures investing specific historical initiatives and their reception” (75).So much for the pars destruens of this venture. One could argue that Struever emerges unscathed from what she views as the “fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory” by paying heed to Vico's educational ideal. Struever's inclusive humanistic education gives her scholarship a fine edge: an equal mastery of the tools and concerns of Renaissance scholarship, intellectual history, political theory, and ancient as well as modern philosophy. More to the point, Struever shows that actual knowledge of Renaissance thought and practices can revise our fascination for Continental philosophy and protect against the pitfalls of contemporary theory's misplaced prejudice against the beginnings of modernity. A sympathetic reader of her work is bound to view the Renaissance and early modernity with the same new eyes Heidegger's unique approach to Greek antiquity afforded his students in the study of Plato and Aristotle. However, it would barely suffice to claim that Struever allows for an uncommon experience of the postmodern moment. Rather, her work thoroughly and successfully rewrites the future agenda of intellectual history and rhetorical inquiry.Struever fondly acknowledges the intellectual debts incurred to C. S. Pierce and Heidegger, from whose works she extrapolates insights that form her notions of “inquiry” and “rhetoric.” Pierce's antinecessitarian pragmatism defines the communal and temporal “constraints” of the logic of inquiry for our epoch: thought creates communal beliefs, which in turn tend to the establishment of “habits of action,” including inquiry. These premises “resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's belief, shared opinions (endoxa) and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion, as practice and goal” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 2–3). Working at a “supraindividualist” level, Pierce restores epistemology's dependence on community, the too often forsaken “locus of investigative action.” Inquiry is pragmatic: its subtilitas applicandi prevails over the correlated subtleties in knowing and interpreting (see History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 3:217–20).As for Heidegger, rhetoricians may yet learn how much they owe him. The neglected summer semester lectures of 1924 (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie) remain, “arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 6:127). These lectures offer an “extraordinary opportunity” for those willing to share in Heidegger's recovery of the unity of “discourse” (Miteinanderreden) and “political life” (Miteinandersein) according to the originary Hellenic initiative: the “authentic life” as “political life” (106). Among the moderns, only the early Heidegger allows rhetoric to reside squarely “inside politics.” The consequences of this recovery are momentous: Heidegger aids in bypassing the “inauthentic” Platonic definition of rhetoric as a trivial art and rescues this mode of inquiry from its own “bookish retreat” as an academic discipline divested of a “precise sense of duty to action” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 133). In hindsight, one cannot but regret that Heidegger's interest in rhetoric was short lived and gave way to poetic concerns akin to those of the literary critics (to say nothing, of course, of his nefarious political allegiance).By endorsing Heidegger's prominence in “modern revivals of rhetoric” and assimilating his interpretation, Struever takes pride of place in the now long and crowded history of his reception. Yet she sits askew with respect to many other like-minded students. Like those of, for example, Gadamer or Grassi, her reading of Heidegger resonates with Vico, rhetoric, humanism, and the Italian Renaissance and early modernity. Unlike them, however, Struever does not ground her sought-for reconciliation of Heideggerianism and Romanitas in a refutation of Heidegger's anti-Platonism. Indeed, Plato seems to hold no interest for Struever.Confident of Heidegger's restoration of rhetoric to its proper domain (in the civil operations of political life), Struever embarks on an actualization of its nature as inquiry. Despite its co-originality with philosophy (for some, like Heidegger, rhetoric even takes chronological precedence) and Struever's internalist ambitions, rhetoric's vital fear of solitude asks that this discipline be defined, at least preliminarily, in confrontation. In other words, rhetoric's quarrel with philosophy is both inescapable and generative, if only the true nature of such opposition is revealed as neither a “contest of faculties” nor as an “academic rivalry” but rather as a vivifying “confrontation of two major investigative initiatives,” each characterized by its own modal allegiance: “necessity” for philosophy and “possibility” for rhetoric. Struever promotes rhetorical inquiry's kairotic infiltration and colonization of that breathing space left open by Aristotle “between partial and complete actualization,” the space of “unrealized possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 6).Released into its element, rhetoric's “modal proclivity” and “revisionary capacities” are given full rein to create “counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy” (125). While this task may seem daunting, Struever's point is that it should not appear impossible. The rhetorical inquirer is not asked to rewrite history from scratch but rather to reveal “what might have been otherwise,” to indulge in exploring the “possible worlds” that open up by placing “actuality in a range of possibilities” (6). If we persist, past, present, and future may look different though strangely familiar: “The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture” (127).In conclusion to Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever poses a pertinent question: “Where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing?” As a matter of fact, once a three-dimensional view of “possibility” is conquered and inhabited, the “where” and “when”—temporal and spatial coordinates—matter less than the “how”: that is, the appropriate attitude and strategy. In this context, the formation of strong alliances becomes of paramount importance. Thus Struever's admiration for Hobbes and Vico, who, although rarely as officially and tightly allied as in her reading, team up against political theory's dependence on the universal moral truths generated in timeless solitude by Greek philosophy. As both “topics” and “practitioners” of rhetorical inquiry, Hobbes and Vico have a lesson to teach in academic disobedience that could promote the overhaul of a political philosophy that to this day remains “fraught with fashion” and “susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 19:80). “Politics demands novelty,” and Hobbes and Vico put their rhetorical “inventiveness” to the service of a “life science” that contests the “philosophical confections of ‘oughts’” (76). In this reading, the “early modernity” of Hobbes and Vico comes closer than some of these pages would suggest to the “Renaissance” of their best humanist predecessors: creative imitation, congenial alliances, and strategies of secession remain salient features of this subsequent alternative project.At the outset, the “case for the modernity of Early Modernity” rests on Hobbes's subtle appropriation of Aristotle, an appropriation that, in Struever's view, certainly glosses Heidegger's own. In this case, too, Struever's reading draws heavily on selected sources, including, the “generous frame for Renaissance inquiry” proffered by Wilhelm Dilthey's neglected Weltanschauung und Analyse. His merit is twofold. First, Dilthey manages to keep the “issues and tactics” proper to the history of rhetoric apart from those of the history of philosophy. Coming from Dilthey, the approach could only be sympathetic: humanists “are to be read as pyschologues and anthropologues” rather than as (failed) epistemologists and metaphysicians (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 4:2). Moreover, it is to Dilthey's credit to have emphasized the Renaissance revival of Romanitas—that is, the mutually constraining relationship of individual and sovereign will (imperium).Hobbes's “roman orientation” and concern for the res publica endows his Ciceronian reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric with a pragmatic slant (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 12). Hobbes secedes by reaching over Cartesian dualism and appropriating the “Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions” and “definition of the soul as principle (archē) of life”: “Soul is life” (13). The interaction and continuum of faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, passion, memory, and reason) inhibit a misguided distinction between “sensitive” and “cognitive” elements and “accommodate biology” in political life. “Nature as motion, as alteration,” restlessly seeks what it lacks: “If life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics” (22). The goal of rhetoric as “life science” should be to guarantee movement and endlessly postpone the end products of the “rational will.” The “therapeutic” freedom of open-ended deliberation, Struever claims, has greater value than the hit-or-miss liberty of action. This is how “Hobbes follows Aristotle … in the total politicisation of rhetoric” (17). In this frame, “rhetorical pessimism”—its concern for “process” not “end”—turns into a “competence” apt to produce “not so much a list of solutions” as “an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunctions.” On this point, Struever is perhaps too unflustered in admitting that “the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus” are bound to be a casualty of this new rhetorical campaign (124).Struever's sophisticated reading of Hobbes cannot be fully recounted here. It is clear, however, that the author enjoys partaking in the rowdy liberation of rhetoric her work promotes. Rhetoric's liberation in politics focuses on the motus animi that “fuels political behavior” and “drives political action” in a creatio continua insisting on “complication” (24) and “fluidity” (33). Struever's decision to read early modernity under the rubric of Dilthey's “impetuous subjectivity”—as opposed, for example, to Burckhardt's stiff “individualism”—is a productive one. But should one allow things to spin out of control? Hobbes and Vico offer a solution not by transcending the political but by extending its purview to the community and its sensus communis. A more precise sense of civil “wholeness”—not to be mistaken for philosophical “plenitude”—can be recovered in Vico's commitment to the “impersonal.” In Struever's narrative, Vico delivers what Hobbes promises: “If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercritical of the moralistic initiative” (49).Struever notes that Vico declares his secession at the outset of the New Science with an emphasis on “civil things” (cose civili) rather than “moral” (morali). At once, the private moral inquiry of political philosophy is forsaken together with “narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions” (42). Vico's historiography opts for an “impersonal agency”—“Achilles,” for example, “is not a proper name but a possibility of role”—that “tempers, corrects individualism as our sense of Struever's reading of and its to as a gesture” may be her in community as the place where knowledge is and Moreover, emphasis on community corrects the and of philosophy and its political At a closer if “necessity” is our only we might our will to be tightly emphasis on on the and on up to but to the of beliefs, that the range of civil actions” However, if to and it by which to that same that rhetoric or In other words, space is to the that political philosophy out of be Hobbes in Vico and still it of their for they as unrealized possibilities in Modernity” establishment and of rhetoric's true nature as inquiry the recovery of an authentic However, Struever is that her has its a author with so much of rhetoric and politics with her Struever this in her of the “academic or investigative of the most rhetorical of (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, Vico's well as those of thinkers such as and and thus interest in inquiry only its practice” In other words, comes up against as the is to own possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever may be these are not as or for yet how much should a like-minded reader from a creative of and practices of Struever would an of rhetorical initiatives as opposed to of a Struever's own she is more on this If her work is a to critical the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, a early modernity is with late modernity and the At this a of rhetorical in Hobbes and Struever on of and some affinities with Vico however, as as the of Indeed, is the only unrealized possibility in Struever's a casualty of a agenda that is a with on the of or, its of and the of rhetoric's “political the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, as a with to Struever in a fine of intended to up the emphasis on in inquiry and the nature of the philosophy a point that the of the and as and a shared a of Heidegger's is now closer at Struever her of “possibility” in contemporary inquiry with a of the best and most recent rhetorical initiatives in and much the is that a rhetoric in in our of and our solitude of and of like those of Hobbes and Vico, of their A revision is bound to an of its This is even if such a as in the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, is as a point in the of a and career. One that History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History is not more inclusive not of Struever's past As it is, it for how Struever's could be to of its as inquiry” is critical of or persuasion, and the The of an reader can be for of its with Struever's rhetoric study or in which to be are that her work will like a literary to those to the of what Struever calls a more defined concerns as a Renaissance still this of The Renaissance early she has been a in One would not to Struever's as a to that of the her work that the is to this its Yet we a are the Renaissance and early modernity or This is a in Struever's work her in of be Struever's recent for “early modernity” less to Hobbes's and Vico's historical than to her to place herself in res and historical The of early modernity certainly more unrealized than the of the In case, a less of the should be an those who, including Struever in her own are still in the of the to this point is Struever's in Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity with respect to another Yet the she calls for one can of that to which she her The continuity and of between the humanism, and Vico's early modernity to that Struever would be on a reader of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity has not read of her other many essays in History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History the “Renaissance” of and some may Struever's to up to the to rhetoric's to It is true that this approach has more often than not to a and definition of rhetoric as a rather than different of be clear, it is not the of that one but rather the that is in the a that, with Struever's and Gadamer to this vital in from which Struever is as she is from by her of of rhetoric as inquiry shows what our discipline would look like if from matter how this may its and are bound to appear just as “therapeutic” as Struever to be in to the moral from the civil rather than the other way The of by Struever to one of the most contemporary in of both its civil and Struever shows that we can the past more lesson for the

ABSTRACTThis article examines the motif of eternal life in Walter Benjamin’s work. Whereas myth understands natality and sexuality as characterized by guilt and deserving of death, this article argues that Benjamin seeks to develop an alternative conception of life that is no longer caught up in guilt and thus no longer fated to die—this is the idea of eternal life. By offering a reading of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, the article maintains that for Benjamin the possibility of eternal life was always linked to a sexual politics that turns around the problematization of heterosexual, patriarchal conceptions of married life. The outlines of this sexual politics are then further traced in his later work on Baudelaire and compared with Foucault’s reading of Baudelaire in the context of working out an idea of life as a work of art.

ABSTRACTIn this article Julia Ng addresses the question of material agency. Drawing on an idea that emerges from Marx’s reading of Shakespeare’s Timon to the effect that humanity’s relationship to objects is characterized by “cannibalism,” a usurious relationship based on exploitation and thievery, Ng argues that Benjamin’s unique mixing of materialism and the theological serves as an answer to the dilemma of cannibalism and human nature. Looking in particular at Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus—which also discusses Timon—Ng shows that for Benjamin, there is a redemption for this cannibalism, one that is found through recourse to the idea of letting “justice befall the object as such” and, by extension, through the development of a positive determination of life as such as well.

ABSTRACTThe aftermath brings a rush of words, a silencing onslaught of pious accusations and diagnostic promises, a host of conflicting remedies that profess to combat the tragedy of dangerous expression. In Walter Benjamin’s estimation, this storm of self-proclaimed progress was self-defeating. For now, for a moment that defies fate’s necessity and refuses mythic redemption, the critique of violence hinges on the question of language as such, an experience of the word’s lament as it falls into our grasp at the cost of discovery.

ABSTRACTFew concepts in the work of Walter Benjamin have inspired more theoretical reflections and fewer concrete examples than his notion of “the dialectical image.” As a partial corrective, this essay attempts to anchor the dialectical image—along with several related terms, notably “dialectics at a standstill,” “temporal differential,” “historical index,” and the “now of recognizability”—in a communicative practice characteristic of ordinary civic life: the introduction sequence. More than a simple rhetorical act, allowing local speakers to introduce themselves to assembled audiences, the introduction sequence is a complex sociopolitical event in which speakers divide themselves into neighbors and citizens—embodied social beings bound by webs of personal association and disembodied political actors empowered by the rule of law. Understanding this constellation of social and political agency is the basic task of this article.

Introduction| December 01 2011 Taking Benjamin Seriously as a Political Thinker James Martel James Martel Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2011) 44 (4): 297–308. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.4.0297 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James Martel; Taking Benjamin Seriously as a Political Thinker. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 December 2011; 44 (4): 297–308. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.4.0297 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the critical dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, to which a letter and several references in their work testify. It shows how affinities and differences between their respective positions can be explained from a shared theologico-political approach. Both authors believe that, in spite of secularization, political phenomena can only be adequately understood in light of certain theological concepts, images, and metaphors. However, they explain these theologico-political analogies differently. Whereas Schmitt advocates the authoritarian state, which he compares to God’s omnipotence, Benjamin endorses the proletarian revolution, in which he recognizes traces of a divine law-destroying violence. Challenging existing interpretations, this article shows how the political theologies of Benjamin and Schmitt are not static but developed in the course of their dialogue, in which both authors respond to each other’s criticism by changing and correcting their own positions in significant ways.