In chapters on the Gorgias and the Meno in his 1997From Plato to Postmodernism, James Kasterly argues that an important point made in the Gorgias is that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles. Its lesson is that philosophers will never succeed in persuading nonphilosophers if they rely on dialectic, with its premises grounded in epistemology (32, 34), and in the Meno, he finds a type of dialectic that functions rhetorically (67). In this new book, The Rhetoric of Plato's “Republic”: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, Kastely builds on his earlier work. He reads the Republic as Plato's effort to address the implicit challenge posed by Socrates' defeat in the Gorgias. Plato's purpose in the Republic, he claims, is to set forth and enact an alternative to dialectic, an alternative that he identifies as a philosophical rhetoric (that is, a rhetoric for philosophers), that would enable philosophers to persuade nonphilosophers to value justice and morality above all else. The Republic, on his reading, not only (if obliquely) argues for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic but also practices it and thus attempts to constitute interlocutors and engaged readers as the moral, justice-loving subjects of a new republic.The crucial passage that generates Kastely's reading occurs at the beginning of book 2, when Glaucon enters the conversation after Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus in book 1 has stalled. Thrasymachus, exhausted and frustrated by Socrates' dialectic interrogation and by Socrates' refusal to allow him to state his opinion directly (350e), has withdrawn from genuine engagement; instead, he placidly agrees with whatever Socrates proposes (351c). Glaucon challenges Socrates: does he want really to persuade them or just give the appearance of having persuaded them (357a–b)? Kastely argues that here Glaucon is referring to the kind of “persuasion” that Socrates has practiced on Thrasymachus—a nit-picking (from Thrasymachus's point of view) dialectic that wins on technical points but that changes few people's minds and hearts. Yet there is a potential problem with Kastely's interpretation, namely, that Glaucon does not state that the distinction he intends is between two types of persuasion (artificial and real); rather he states that the distinction is between two types of arguments on behalf of justice—arguments that propose behaving justly as prudent for the benefits that treating others well confers and arguments for living justly for its own sake, without reference to benefits. However, Glaucon may indeed mean both, as Kastely maintains. And in support of Kastely's interpretation, there are other references in the Republic to dialectic as a problematic way of convincing nonphilosophers: most noteworthy (among several) is Adeimantus's insistence that although philosophers can as a result of their training often defeat nonphilosophers in dialectical argument, this “victory” does not mean they have really persuaded their opponent or anyone (487b–d).For Kastely, the development and enactment of a rhetoric for philosophers is at the heart of the Republic: “Is it possible, then, for a philosopher to discover a rhetoric that would permit philosophy to have some sort of purchase on public opinion and persuade an audience of the truths philosophy has discovered? The Republic is aware of the importance of this question and has chosen to foreground it dramatically. It understands that, as a dialogue, it must provide an answer to that question, if philosophy is to be anything other than a deeply limited and esoteric activity. … For this dialogue simply not to self-destruct, Socrates has to make the case for a viable philosophical rhetoric” (122).The title of chapter 4, “Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion,” captures the major theme in much of the rest of Kastely's argument. The most formidable obstacle that the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers confronts is ideology, though Kastely does not use this term, perhaps regarding its usage in this context as ahistorical. In Kastely's words, it is the problem of our failure to recognize that “the desires of the soul have been shaped by a culture and are never encountered in innocent form” (66) or that “the work of political culture is masked, and it is mistakenly read as if current values and desires are the product of nature” (206). With regard to justice, in the view of most people we are just out of fear of punishment or of retaliation if we are unjust; if we could practice injustice to our advantage with impunity (the myth of Gyges's ring), we would, and, moreover, it would be natural for us to do so. Thus, the first challenge to the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers that it is in our interest to be just even if it means losing an advantage is to bring them to understand that all knowledge is “rhetorically mediated” (66). Rhetoric is not the problem but the means of cure: its duty is to make citizens aware of the rhetorical character of what they experience as natural.In chapters 5, 6 and 7, Kastely explores the particular obstacles Socrates faces if his aim is to persuade Athenians of what they may regard as ideologically counterintuitive and unnatural, namely, that a life grounded in justice is the best life. For instance, Socrates' advocacy of women serving as guardians (452a) is, on Kastely's reading, motivated not only by Socrates' belief that there is inherent value in women serving as guardians but also and primarily by his desire to illustrate how a reigning ideology blinds his interlocutors to alternative possibilities (101). While Socrates' interlocutors regard the proposal as unnatural, Socrates argues that thinking of women as guardians is only unconventional but nevertheless thoroughly reasonable.The greatest challenge Socrates faces in the Republic is persuading his listeners that philosophers should be kings. On hearing the proposal, Glaucon warns Socrates that were he to issue the proposal publicly he would be greeted with not only disbelief but also violent resistance (473e). Kastely observes that “Socrates is fully aware of the general population's low estimation of philosophy [and philosophers],” and his discussion of philosophy is a “self conscious rhetorical act designed to mollify an angry audience and to transform that anger into calmness” (109–10). If the response to the proposal were to be as extreme as Glaucon envisions, it is surely unlikely that the crowd would be prepared to engage in dialectic. The foremost rhetorical means Socrates uses to overcome these ideological prejudices are the famous images and analogies of books 6 and 7: the sun, the divided line, and the parable of the cave. Kastely reads these tropes as rhetorical versions of Platonic philosophy that can persuade nonphilosophers, treating them as evidence for his thesis that the Republic argues for and practices a rhetorical presentation of philosophy that is superior to dialectic, at least when it comes to discussing philosophy with nonphilosophers.But there is at least one problem with this interpretation of books 6 and 7 of the Republic. The argument that underpins Kastely's reading—that the Republic is about a search for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic—seems to me to rest on the assumption that Socrates could have presented a more technical and accurate description of these truths but instead took into consideration the limitations of his audience. He chose images because they were more effective than dialectic's definitions and divisions. But Socrates claims that the nature of the subject requires use of images. In a subsequent chapter, Kastely concedes that “even Socrates himself cannot claim with certainty that he has achieved a full philosophical vision” of goodness (157). At least through the period of the Republic, Socrates notoriously relies on analogies and images to describe the good. Socrates resorts to images because he has no choice, not because rhetorically images are the preferred means for a particular audience. In Kastely's defense, it is true that these images have an affective dimension that makes them appealing, and the fact that there are no alternative ways to express this vision does not make the images less rhetorical. They function rhetorically, neither dialectically as argument nor as the simplification of teaching.That a specific philosophical rhetoric is not thematized as such in the Republic leads Kastely almost necessarily to argue that Plato and Socrates enact their program through mimesis rather than overtly arguing for it. Socrates in effect says do as I do here rather than do what I say, since I don't say much about rhetoric. For Kastely, Socrates' criticism of the mimesis of epic poetry and drama is tacit admission of its effectiveness (210), and he would in fact employ it to a good end to advance his own program: “While the Republic ostensibly argues for a certain kind of rhetorical constitution through a specifically prescribed curriculum, what it offers its readers is in fact a different kind of education embodied in the mimetic presentation of an extended act of persuasion. Presumably, Plato intends this kind of education or rhetorical constitution for the actual readers of the dialogue—the readers who have already been subjected to the cultural influences that Socrates would undo or minimize” (79). At the heart of this mimetic theory is “an act of constitution or identification” (217). On Kastely's reading, the rhetoric Socrates enacts in the Republic is obviously not the rhetoric that Socrates criticizes in the Gorgias. The rhetoric that Kastely sees in the Republic is to be “understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). This Burkean description is not one that Plato would associate with rhetoric, though it is not impossible (given the way he envisions dialectic functioning) that Plato could imagine a type of dialectic that is similarly transformative. There are many varieties of dialectic in Plato, including less rule-driven varieties that resemble the semidisciplined conversation of the Republic. Kastely has appropriated for rhetoric what others (including Plato) might see as a version of dialectic. But perhaps this objection reduces to a quibble about names.Socrates' famous admission in book 9 that only divine intervention could bring about the rule of philosopher-kings would seem to announce the failure of the philosophical rhetoric that Socrates (on Kastely's reading) had hoped would mimetically persuade interlocutors and readers. Kastely's response to the challenge that book 9 presents is twofold. With most other commentators, he argues that Plato never intended to present an ideal polis in the Republic: the description of the guardians, the philosopher king, and so forth was never to be taken literally. The Republic is not about the formation of an ideal state; the description of the kallipolis that dominates is in fact a trope to show the formation of the properly ordered soul. If this is the case, then Socrates' admission does not thwart his purpose. Secondly, Kastely argues that Socrates' withdrawal from politics can be read as a rejection of the imposition of the philosophical life by a philosopher, who is, after all, a king, in favor of the transformation of individual citizens through the rhetorical means that he sees Socrates' enacting (181).Kastely's is a bold thesis. It asks us to accept not only that Plato came to accept a socially responsible role for rhetoric in the polis but also that in the Republic Plato acknowledges epistemologically that there is no escape from culture, that all “knowledge” is rhetorically mediated. It is also an honest book, as Kastely raises and addresses objections to his reading. Because it is an honest, rigorous book, I benefited immensely from the encounter with it, though I was ultimately not persuaded by its thesis.

ABSTRACTThis article explores Thomas Aquinas's interrelated views of rhetoric and deliberation, particularly through his commentaries on Aristotle and his Summa theologiae. It argues that while articulating a largely Boethian understanding of rhetoric as consideration of uncertain matters, Aquinas also advances a theory of deliberation indebted to Aristotelian theories of sensation and phantasia. Building from previous work on phantasia in Aristotle's works, I argue that, in Aquinas's view, rhetorical deliberation is dependent on sensory information experienced through phantasia. Gathered through time and experience, sensory information serves as the foundational material for other forms of reasoning, such as deliberation and practical wisdom. In articulating Aquinas's views of rhetoric and deliberation, I suggest that the relationship between rhetoric and logic within Aquinas's system of thought be reconsidered, with rhetoric playing a prominent role in the consideration of variable and human phenomena.

ABSTRACTTranshumanism that is centered on artificial intelligence shares core features with large-scale data collection and surveillance that commercial and governmental entities pursue: the idea that knowledge is informational in nature, that technologies are value neutral, and that ethical challenges can be framed in technical-procedural terms. In this article, I am mainly concerned with the latter, society-wide, manifestations of these features. Here, criticisms leading to technical-procedural changes in data practices are of limited use because they foster an illusion of foundational headway while leaving questionable assumptions about knowledge and values intact. Because what is closest is hardest to glean, we may more readily discern these assumptions if we see them operating in a milieu that is at once quite different and strikingly familiar. Ancient rhetoric manifests versions of our three factors. Plato's critique of rhetoric, along with aspects of his philosophical methodology, helps us see why we should contest increasingly prevalent views of knowledge and values—and do so before other constructions become unfathomable.

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke's blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke's works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke's rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.Clark models his book on a jazz performance. The book offers neither a linear argument nor a dialectical movement from antitheses to synthesis. Rather, Clark weaves an account where theory, the rhetoric of jazz advocacy, and jazz performances themselves resonate harmoniously. Jazz becomes a representative anecdote for unpacking the details of Burke's political aesthetics, even while this developing theory provides a means to understand jazz's aesthetic workings and civic significance.In “Setting Up,” his first and introductory chapter, Clark advances the thesis/theme that jazz calls forth an identity and a form of living that manifest e pluribus unum. He introduces Burke's work, its cultural critique of America, and its call for a redemptive art of living. Aligning Burke with critics ranging from Walt Whitman to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Clark explains how Burke looked at America and how when he saw division, turned to rhetoric and its capacity to overcome it by fostering identification through form. Clark then takes up the difficult task of extending rhetorical theory and criticism to jazz as a historically situated and significant art form and looks to jazz writers and musicians who describe such rhetorical processes in their music. Clark establishes his bona fides by citing broadly: he revisits Aristotle's and Suzanne Langer's reflections on music, gestures toward Ingrid Monson's recent jazz musicology, and takes up the African American reflections on jazz of Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis. These provide the means for him to develop the idea that jazz is constitutional and that its workings can be explained in terms of the rhetoric of form.Each chapter returns to, explores, and augments this initial theme, much as each chorus of a well-crafted jazz solo extends and develops those musical ideas that have preceded it and just as Burke notoriously returned, revised, and augmented own his prior efforts. In his second chapter, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark doubles down on Burke. While Burke never wrote on jazz, Clark finds in his work the means to capture jazz's civic function. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives describes the aesthetic experience of identification as “swinging along with the form” (58). In Clark's account, this link to jazz is more than fortuitous. Jazz was known as “swing” during its commercial heyday as America's main popular dance music, a reference to its pulsing, danceable rhythm and its contagious attitude, intensity, and energy. Furthermore, Burke was a young man during the “jazz age,” and was aware of African American musical styles, having favorably reviewed both a 1928 concert by the African American Jubilee Hall Singers and the 1933 African American Broadway musical Run, Little Chillun! Burke also corresponded regularly with African American intellectuals, notably Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and Albert Murray, Ellison's friend and author of both Stompin' the Blues and The Omni-Americans, canonical texts on jazz and race in America.Clark considers “swinging along” to be an apt term to describe the activity of both musicians and audiences, who are guided by a faith that the musical work in progress will continue to cohere as it unfolds. Burke presented swinging along as a needed corrective to the American civic sphere, where cooperation is difficult. For Clark, jazz offers a model for such cooperation. This is because “jazz is an act of hopeful defiance of the alienation and fear that makes us hold ourselves back to avoid judgment or rejection” (26). Throughout the book, Clark describes singularly eloquent jazz performances, including an impromptu restaurant performance of “Route 66” by his thirteen-year-old daughter with noted jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, to illustrate the process and form of life that jazz offers. He selects Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley's rendition of “Autumn Leaves” to illustrate swinging cooperation and hopeful defiance. The reader can easily find the track online and follow Clark's commentary, which offers a sensitive analysis of how Miles and Cannonball swing along: in their improvisation, they depart from this standard's original form to explore, extend, and deepen its melancholy, using it as a resource for moving beyond, for crafting an aesthetic pathē of upward transcendence.Paradoxically Clark's third chapter, “What Jazz Is,” does not begin with a discussion of jazz, but with Burke's preoccupation with identity and his turn from literary self-expression to rhetoric. Clark retells the story of Burke's response to the turmoil and conflicts of the twentieth century. Originally a writer of poetry and fiction, Burke became a theorist and critic who, seeing America as in need of some type of transcendence, spent a career exploring how understanding, common feeling, identification, and consummation might be fostered through form. The problem in America, and indeed in any democracy, is that individual will and aspiration are in many ways antagonistic to identification and the consummatory experience of community. America's founding sides with the existential truth that our pains, our goals, and our lives are ultimately our own. In all cultures, ritual and civic arts mediate the tension between individual and community. In America, such arts are faced with a particular challenge. They cannot demand the full subordination of individual voices to an idealized unity, as does a church choir. Clark counterpoises a performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO) to the unity of his church choir to illustrate how jazz negotiates this tension successfully. His choir follows a fixed arrangement and is guided by a choir master. In contrast, JALCO coordinates a complex of individual voices. JALCO is like a complex organism, where the written musical arrangements provide a basis for skilled jazz artists to make their own music, even as each artist and part coordinate with the whole.JALCO is for Clark exemplary of the art that Burke sought. Clark explains the jazz aesthetic by turning to jazz pedagogy, which encourages students to develop their own musical style, approaches, and voice, even though jazz is based in collective improvised performances. For Clark, jazz is singularly American in the way that it integrates the one in the many and also is forward looking, directed toward redemption. Clark turns to the blues to illustrate this American trait. Blues lyrics paint a bleak picture of pain and loss, even while the music's form and propulsive energy offer emotional coherence and hope. Robert Johnson may be standing at the crossroads and sinking down, but the music carries him and those who listen forward. As Albert Murray observed, borrowing from Burke, the blues are equipment for living, transforming desperation into defiance and joy.America's singular character is the theme of Clark's fourth chapter, “Where Jazz Comes From.” Clark focuses neither on New Orleans nor New York, neither on Chicago nor Kansas City, but on the conflict that Tocqueville saw at the center of the American spirit, where radical individualism leaves each person uprooted and solitary. This insight, first stated in his introduction, is Clark's original contribution to jazz studies. Jazz's origin is far more psychic than geographical or musicological. Jazz does not emerge from the mere musical encounter of African and European forms as much as from a reaction to American alienation, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Louis L'Amour's cowboy pulp function, and Burke's search for a redemptive civic art. Curiously, race is not central to Clark's account. He acknowledges the racial fact of jazz but does not reflect pointedly on slavery's legacy or on the link between American alienation and its original sin. His account, consistent with Wynton Marsalis's narrative, presents jazz as pointing to a world without racial division. Clark insists that jazz is concerned with transcendence and gives new meaning to jazz pianist Bill Evans's observation that “‘jazz is not a what, it is a how’” (14). Clark presents jazz as a form of collective problem solving. Jazz transcends difference by casting new modes of experience and forms of being, by relying on improvised augmentation and complexification rather than the imposition of static melodies and harmonies. Paraphrasing Whitman, we could say that Clark tells us that jazz is large and contains multitudes.While Clark offers a redemptive vision of jazz, he also reminds us that none of this is painless. He recounts the troubled 1963 recording session of Money Jungle by jazz greats Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Musical styles, professional egos, and creative visions clashed. Neither the session nor resultant tracks were marked by harmonious identifications. Nevertheless, the conflict was productive. Clark refers to the music as “eloquent” as it strains to keep it together. Just as the purpose of the session was to produce an album, so the art of democracy is directed toward enabling a life in common, not a common life. Putting a happy face on an at times agonistic and tortured process, Clark describes jazz as another occasion for ad bellum purificandum, “a war waged with an attitude of goodwill … in the bright hope that something better for everyone will follow” (75).A great deal of jazz writing is descriptive and anecdotal, with stories of great bands and singular recordings sessions, battles with drug addiction, brilliant creators, and visionary promoters. Critical and theoretical work in jazz is relatively recent, having emerged in the last two or three decades, but as in rhetorical studies, description and historical anecdote play a crucial role and remain necessary. One of the pleasures of this book is Clark's strategic use of anecdotes as he returns to and elaborates on its main theme. One might find Clark redundant, but only if one fails to grasp his strategy of augmentation and his rhetorical celebration of jazz. Each chapter continues the process of explaining the formal theory of rhetorical aesthetics that underpins Burke's oeuvre even as they clarify the demands and workings of jazz as a civic art. Thus, in his fifth chapter “What Jazz Does,” Clark returns to Tocqueville's pessimism regarding America, to which he counterpoises jazz's possibilities and potential: jazz offers an image of what America would look like if America's three “taboo” divisive issues—race, freedom, and religion—were faced openly and worked through collectively (90). Clark turns to Billy Holiday's signature performance of “Strange Fruit,” Louis Armstrong's rendition of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” and Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige suite as eloquent expressions of the African American experience. Clark devotes particular attention to Ellington's explicit attempt to reflect on “his people” as within the American people.Clark's account is compelling, although he does not fully resolve the underlying tension within rhetoric between identification and division. At one moment he praises jazz for offering a common aesthetic experience that offers, if only briefly, the upward transcendence that America requires to fulfill its democratic promise. Subsequently, however, he emphasizes the role of jazz in racial politics, in its lyrics of protest and in the musical expression of the pain of racism in the dissonance and wailing of free jazz. Clark attempts to resolve this tension by equating jazz with freedom, since each jazz performance raises the question of where to go next. Each soloist in part answers this question in tandem with the ensemble, and for Clark the American answer – and the jazz musician answer – is “to freedom, of course” (97). To many, jazz sounds free, which accounts for its appeal to dissidents in the USSR and Nazi Germany and for the American government's use of jazz in the Cold War. Clark notes the irony that black musicians were displayed as representatives of American freedom even while they suffered Jim Crow at home and offers free jazz and its challenge to conventional forms of expression as their rhetorical response.Of singular importance in Clark's fifth chapter is the idea that jazz is political and ethical not only because of its democratic performative pragmatics but because of its content, in both its musical forms and particular compositions. Jazz can be spiritual, in religious or secular terms, even as it is rhetorical, as in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Clark highlights the significance of the avant-garde and its embrace of self-expression as the best way to communicate. While spiritual experience is personal, familiarity with jazz, its traditions, and its musical figures makes shared experience possible. This is for Clark what John Dewey sought when he called on Americans collectively to search for the truth. Jazz can prompt reverence, civic humility, and awe. Jazz requires intense individualism and intense cooperation. Optimistically, Clark does not address the deeply competitive spirit at the heart of jazz and its “cutting contests,” jam sessions where each soloist seeks to best and at times show up the other. For Clark, the jazz situation is much like the rhetorical situation, but less agonistic, because each performance is a collective endeavor that ultimately requires cooperation. For Clark, jazz favors congregation over segregation. In America, the latter dominates and requires the corrective jazz offers.This book is about jazz, of course, but it is also concerned with extending Burke's rhetorical sensibility beyond the verbal arts. In his penultimate chapter, “How Jazz Works,” Clark turns to Burke's 1930s novel Towards a Better Life in order to work out the trajectory of his thought. In that early effort, a walk in the New England countryside summoned Burke's alienated protagonist to find happiness through living beyond himself. Burke revisited this path to happiness in his later critical and theoretical writings, working out the nature of being summoned or called. The summons has two related moments: One is summoned to summon others. For Clark, this is how music works. Clark follows Burke's constitutive turn in the Grammar of Motives. Clark incorporates Stanley Crouch's analogy of jazz to the Constitution as an “exercise of the ‘freedom to constantly reinterpret the meanings’” (20) that it provides, offering a way to perfect the American form of life. Resolutely American in his analysis, Clark cites Dewey, who argued that art provides immediate feeling through its structure and coherence. Clark suggests that for Burke, art's aim is not experience in itself but the organization of experience through form to create common sentiments and sensibilities. Art provides resources for better encountering and living with others. In other words, art offers the possibility of civic transcendence.Jazz is constitutive of democracy, as each in turn improvises over a given form, all the while responding to others and expanding the range of what is possible. Jazz musicians share a stock of knowledge and set of skills that enable them, without sheet music or a prior plan, to meet as strangers and play something new. The pragmatics or aesthetic constitution of jazz lets musicians call the tune in a way unheard of in the classical repertoire, just as the Constitution lets citizens call the tune.This insight is not new to Clark. Wynton Marsalis has said much the same thing, What Clark brings to the mix is a more sophisticated account of how jazz both is structured democratically and manifests a democratic aesthetic sensibility. To this end, Clark offers an innovative and well-developed account of Burke's project that links aesthetic form to attitude and identity. Indeed, Clark cites Burke's observation that music far more than speech adheres to the psychology of form. The power of music and other nonrepresentational arts arises not from cognitions but from the experience of form in the moment. Furthermore, jazz as an improvised music is always performed against the possibility of failure: its movement does not always produce the consummation that it seeks. Music opens onto changing the ways that people think. To illustrate, Clark turns to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane's rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” which offers a remarkable, and yet for jazz, everyday call to transcendence.Even though jazz is no longer a popular musical form, Clark insists that it offers precisely the form of interaction that Burke called for. He works this out again in his concluding chapter, entitled “So What,” after one of the most memorable tracks on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. With no rehearsals and no sheet music, that session produced brilliant and innovative music because each in his ensemble was supremely conscious of the others. In this, Clark's insight and optimism shine through. Clark is driven by an appreciation of possibility. At the same time, however, he does not consider the difficulty of the art. Jazz is less democratic than it is aristocratic and republican. As with all arts, it is practiced by the bold, whose eloquence make their work look easy. Its “citizenry” is not enfranchised by birth but earns a place on the stand through displays of which requires of and Jazz is American and and indeed can offer transcendence and new but like rhetoric requires a life to the art.

ABSTRACTWith the publication in 2002 of Martin Heidegger's summer semester 1924 lectures, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy,” a major new star appeared in the constellation that is twentieth-century rhetoric. Since then, a growing secondary literature has emerged. This article organizes that literature as a series of specifications closing in on Heidegger's critical conception of rhetoric as potentially a hermeneutic of the everydayness of being with others, and it claims that our understanding of this everydayness will remain flat or partial until we situate the concept in the sequence of Heidegger's thought in the 1920s. If we work through pre-1924, 1924, and post-1924 periods, it becomes clear that there are religious, modal, and sophistic contexts for Heidegger's evolving conceptualization of everydayness. The concept of everydayness that emerges is disheveled but rich. The article concludes by suggesting that only faint echoes of these potent rhetorical trajectories can be discerned in the late Heidegger.

Lloyd Bitzer's passing came as deeply sad news. He was an exceptional person in all respects. I was fortunate to have been his student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and to have experienced Lloyd in my life as a mentor, a colleague in the discipline, a confidant, a friend, and a role model. The discipline of rhetoric was fortunate to have had him among its ranks as a leading theorist. He was among those most responsible for pushing rhetorical studies into new territory during the latter part of the twentieth century. Lloyd was the principle investigator on and driving force behind the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric, which involved forty scholars from philosophy, rhetoric, communication, English, and sociology at the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences at the beginning of the 1970s and which culminated in The Prospect of Rhetoric, the volume he coedited with his colleague Edwin Black. And Philosophy and Rhetoric was fortunate to have him grace its pages with his scholarship and editorial advice. His iconic essay “The Rhetorical Situation” inaugurated the journal in 1968 as the lead article. It set the stage for reconsidering rhetoric in terms of its philosophical commitments.Lloyd was not a prolific publisher, but each of his articles were gems of careful scholarship and tight reasoning, and they demonstrate an unfailing sense for ideas that matter and an understanding of the impact those ideas could have on future work. His 1959 Quarterly Journal of Speech article “Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited” broke new ground by decoupling the form of pisteis Aristotle regarded as the heart of persuasion from its logical form. His 1960 QJS article “A Re-evaluation Campbell's Doctrine of Evidence” argued that Campbell, in following Hume, had inverted the two-millennial-old Western tradition that established reason as the capital of right action and instead located it in the passions. His subsequent editor's introduction to the edited republication of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and his 1969 Philosophy and Rhetoric article “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric” meticulously made the case for Hume's role in introducing rhetoric into the new country wherein its study led to understanding human nature. In 1978, when consideration of the public sphere was just beginning to emerge as a scholarly topic in the literature on rhetoric, Lloyd published his award- winning essay “Rhetoric and Public Knowledge,” in which he considered the necessary conditions for distinguishing between audiences and publics. It was not a coincidence that two years earlier he broke form with the practice of association presidents in the then Speech Communication Association of offering as their presidential address reflections on the discipline when he presented a version of this paper as his presidential address. His choice was an expression of his belief that presidents of scholarly societies should lead by example of their scholarship.Lloyd's presidential address, as much as anything, captured his sense of himself as a scholar and teacher and spoke to what he considered the nobility of his and our work. Studying with him was at once exhilarating, fearsome, calming, and affirming. He was demanding of his students, excited by ideas, not given to tolerating sloppy thinking or unsupported argument, quick to affirm student insights and progress, able to express and inspire confidence in his students' work, and generous with his time and counsel, always willing to assist his students' growth and prosperity. My friend Tom Farrell, another of Lloyd's doctoral students, captured well how lasting an impact our mentor had when, in the prime of our careers, he commented “I still write for Lloyd.” So did I; so do I still.In May 2015, the Rhetoric Society of America held its biennial summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was filled with anticipation for the event, which is unique in its format and impact on its participants, for being once more in Madison where I had done my doctoral studies, and for the opportunity to spend time with colleagues, former students, and dear friends in the discipline. At the center of my excitement was the dinner date Lloyd and I had arranged. That evening was vintage Lloyd: he and his incomparable spouse Jo Ann arriving precisely on time, dinner at a favorite restaurant, lively and wide-ranging conversation covering shop talk, politics, the university, mutual friends, our children, and grandchildren. Too soon the evening ended, but Lloyd insisted that we should drive to his home outside Madison to drop off Jo Ann and have a nightcap before he took me back to my hotel on campus. He made certain we extended the evening so our conversation might continue. His characteristic care for how our time was spent conveyed more than words the intimacy of personal regard.Lloyd was not comfortable with warm expressions (he edited my dissertation acknowledgment of him, insisting I delete comments on what he meant to me—he meant the world—as something I might find embarrassing for their warmth in later years). But he knew how to convey his warmth and how to acknowledge it in return. He brought me to believe in myself as a young scholar, he filled me with admiration and trust, he inspired delight in intellectual work, and more than anyone he awakened my sense of its essential dignity. He touched the profession and this journal as a scholar. He touched me as a person. I shall remember Lloyd always with affection and gratitude. He enriched my life and I shall miss him dearly.

AbstractThis paper explores the role of examples (paradeigmata) as propaedeutic to philosophical inquiry, in light of a methodological digression in Plato's Statesman. Consistent with scholarship on Aristotle's view of example, scholars of Plato's work have privileged the logic of examples over their rhetorical appeal. Following a small but significant trend in recent rhetorical scholarship that emphasizes the affective nature of examples, this article assesses the psychagogic potential of paradeigmata, following the discussion of example in Plato's Statesman. I argue that by creating an expectation in the learner that he or she will find similarities, the use of examples in philosophical pedagogy engages his or her desire to discern the intelligible principles that ground experiential knowledge. Thus, examples not only serve as practice at the dialectician's method of abstraction but also cultivate a dialectical ēthos, characterized by the desire to know the logoi of all things.

Abstract This article pursues an antihermeneutic conception of Socratic irony that troubles the borders between pedagogical authority and humility. One of the most tenacious ways of troping the teacher-student relation, Socratic irony is often figured as a way for a masterful teacher to exercise authority over a student. Drawing on the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Avital Ronell, this article repositions such irony as an uncontrollability in language itself—one that can humble and humiliate teacher and student alike. Via divergent readings of Plato's Gorgias and Aristophanes' Clouds, as well as Bruno Latour's interpretation of the former, I question how this approach to Socratic irony might re- and unwork rhetoricians' positions of mastery with regard to both students and systematized bodies of knowledge.

Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

AbstractThe earliest record of the term “kommōtikē,” commonly translated as “cosmetics” or “self-adornment,” occurs in the “most famous passage” of Plato's dialogue Gorgias (Kennedy 1994, 37). There, Socrates compares rhetoric to cookery and sophistry to “kommōtikē” (464b–66a). This marks a decisive moment in the Platonic corpus, a moment when rhetoric and sophistry are associated with seeming and appearance and therefore distanced from being and reality. I outline the reasons why this translation is incomplete if not misleading. I propose an adjustment that pulls both the analogy and the dialogue away from a Platonist distinction between seeming and being and toward a distinction between foreign profligacy and domestic austerity. This transformation discharges the vulgarization of appearance as mere appearance and mere seeming that has long infected and hampered both our understanding of Plato's thought and of early rhetoric.

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari's quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there is no other book on earth that would have produced this mistake. And that is high praise: we are rightfully pleased when academic commonplaces are foiled for a good cause. More on that later.First, in Lipari's book we do also, thankfully, encounter some of the expectations that her title creates. We run into the philosophers of hearing and listening—Murray Schafer, Walter Ong, Don Ihde, David Michael Levin, and especially Gemma Corradi Fiumara—who theorize what happens when “the listening interlocutor actually becomes a participant in the nascent thought of the person who is listening” (199). Hence one contribution: Lipari draws together such philosophy and communication psychology to make a case for what she calls “constitutive listening” (133–35), which frames some interesting laboratory research on the ways in which attentive listeners make us remember things and talk more (sometimes a dubious gift!).As expected, we also encounter Martin Heidegger on being, especially the late Heidegger working around Heraclitus toward noninstrumental language, as it calls, “Being's poem, just begun, is man” (101). And Lipari is right: Heidegger sees language neither as an ideally transparent means of communication between minds nor as an arbitrary system of differences, à la Saussure. Instead, language is understood discursively; now stretching Lipari in a pragmatic direction I would say rooted in shared moods, human institutions and the nonchronological history these institutions compose. Here I emphasize an important relationship between Heidegger's early work on language—its use and abuse, its emergence and silence—and his later work on this topic in Unterwegs zur Sprache. In his earlier 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger describes rhetoric as the art of listening, not as the art of speaking. It is the rhetor who has “genuine power over being-there” (“ῥητορική πειθοῦς δημιουργός”) (2009, 74, referencing Plato, Republic 453a), which for Heidegger doesn't mean the ability to manipulate others by way of the voice. Instead he gives us a being who, insofar as that being can hear, is constituted as someone among others, Mitsein, someone in a particular situation who demands action or who goes conspicuously unheard (2009, 72). In other words I think the ethical attunement Lipari finds beyond Heidegger in a figure like Levinas actually does appear in its nascent form circa 1924, only to be abandoned by Heidegger soon thereafter. But that's another story.We also encounter, as we might expect, Nel Noddings (181) on feminist care ethics, and as I just mentioned, Levinas, along with his proximate reader Michael Hyde on response as responsibility (178). This is to say an “ethics of attunement,” as we read it in the title of Lipari's book, figures the ear centrally as a genuinely engaged response (178) that can hear what she calls the otherness of the other.But as you start to see by way of my introductory confusion, Lipari's book is not just this recap of listening philosophy in its largely Continental, twentieth-century incarnation. Quantum physics gives way to music smoothly enough, where metaphors of vibration and resonance and also dissonance become concrete. It is a virtue of Lipari's book that she works through material registers like the physicality of music without losing track of the phenomenology typically missing from sound studies and from the sciences of audiology (as Heidegger insisted, we don't hear a sound but a motorcycle, for example). Then, also importantly, Indian music with its twenty microtones (38), Indian cosmology, including holistic theories of sound in language (27), then in some depth ancient Eastern language philosophy (fifth/sixth-century Sanskrit grammarians and then others) as it developed through competing schools that can now provide some rich resources for listening projects designed, like Lipari's, to foreground holistic, not atomistic, perspective on language (78).So emergent patterns, including particles and plants, musical resonance, ancient Eastern and Western language philosophies, being/becoming—all mobilized against atomism as an apparatus of capture (not her term) — my liberties there at the end should remind you of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which is similarly designed to upset the linear expectations of academics. And like A Thousand Plateaus, which, incidentally, Lipari doesn't cite, this listening book is hugely ambitious but in a different way, as it gestures toward world peace: “By changing our thinking about listening, we may be freed to dismantle the linguistic prison house that confine us to misconceptions of our own making about who we are, what we do, and how we might live peacefully together with others on this planet” (3). Indeed phrases regularly appear like those I fondly remember from Grateful Dead shows during the 1980s: “Space infuses all things” (17), and we are guided into the “elusive mysteries of listening” (101). When everything is connected, Lipari's project becomes ambitious to the point of courageous impossibility: “So what would a holistic paradigm of listening include?,” Lipari asks. “In short, everything” she answers (99).At that point I do get overwhelmed, and I retreat to critical pragmatism. It is not untrue that everything is connected, but at the same time footholds suggest themselves strongly, or, to shift the modality, we are subject to earworms not of our choosing, as Lipari explains well enough. Perhaps our difference as listening theorists ultimately lies in the ethics I see emerging out of these impositions—how we are hailed, who is rigorously unheard—whereas Lipari looks for a listening ethics that precedes or exceeds such worldly imposition. I can only hope she is right.

ABSTRACTGerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

Recognition demands our attention. As a “keyword,” its significance is measured in part simply by the number of times it appears across the pages of the works that occupy our desks. Claimed by political theorists, moral philosophers, cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, activists, historians, and rhetoricians (certainly there are others), recognition has become a workhorse for theorizing the ontological, epistemological, political, and ethical conditions and practices of intersubjectivity. Political theorists in the early 1990s popularized the term as a way to grasp how liberal democratic societies might negotiate, regulate, and promote multiculturalism. Reviving Hegel's account of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, they argued that individuals who fail to find themselves reflected in social norms and values, those who are silenced, erased, or illegible in the places they live, may become full members of a political community through the recognition of the value and worth of their identities. As Charles Taylor compellingly argues in his seminal article on the subject, “Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (1994, 25). Given that its absence can cause injury, Taylor reasons that recognition therefore “is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need” (26). Articulated in this way, recognition's appeal is undeniable: “It expresses an attractive ideal, envisioning a world in which people could all find their own identities accurately and respectfully reflected in the mirror of their shared social and political life” (Markell 2003, 3).Despite recognition's promise, critiques of multiculturalism expose the untenable foundations on which recognition is built. On Taylor's account of the politics of recognition, group rights, institutionalized in law, afford the respect and dignity demanded by those in need of recognition. Taylor himself toward the end of his article wonders whether rights should serve as the binding force for what might, in the end, be a moral problem: “Perhaps we don't need to ask whether it's something that others can demand from us as a right. We might simply ask whether this is the way we ought to approach others” (1994, 72). For political theorists and philosophers, the more immediate issue is how recognition might be institutionalized in a system of rights—how rights might serve as the mark of successful recognition. They demonstrate that within a liberal democratic framework grounded in individual rights, the politics of recognition requires law to accommodate what are essentially illiberal demands based on group identities. For some, the task is to show how group demands can be met within a system of rights—how demands for recognition of group identities are not in fact inconsistent with individual rights (see Kymlicka 1995). For theorists working within the paradigm of deliberative democracy, the task is to show how legal rights do not and cannot grant recognition once and for all. In these works, imagining the politics of recognition means refiguring it as both a continuing practice of public debate and a public norm rather than as an end in itself: “Recognition in theory and practice should not be seen as a telos or end state, but as a partial, provisional, mutual, and human-all-too-human part of continuous processes of democratic activity in which citizens struggle to change their rules of mutual recognition as they change themselves” (Tully 2000, 477). As a process that relies on contestation and the productive frenzy of debate, recognition does not signal for these theorists a singular act or event but rather an ongoing process, a deliberation over (the rules regulating) the terms of recognizability (see Habermas 1994). For Nancy Fraser in particular, recognition is best understood as a “folk paradigm”—a set of “linked assumptions about the causes of and remedies for injustice” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 11)—that provides reasons for why demands for recognition bind “all who agree to abide by fair terms of interaction under conditions of value pluralism” (31). What this reframing in critical scholarship exposes is that the multiculturalist ideal of a politics of recognition does not account for the conditions in which demands for recognition are met.Although this critique was prominent in early engagements with multiculturalism, much of the scholarship since has seized on the seemingly unbreakable bond of recognition and identity logics. Recognition, we learn, “rests on a simplified understanding of subject formation, identity and agency in the context of social hierarchy” (McNay 2008, 2). To detail the complexities lost in the presumptions of the politics of recognition, a virtual industry of scholarship has emerged. For some, the difficulty of such a politics is that it collapses individual and collective identities. K. Anthony Appiah argues, for instance, that recognition of group identities risks reproducing the violent, “tyrannical” relationship between dominant society and underrepresented groups in the relationship between an individual and the group with whom she identifies. Group identities produce “scripts”—“proper ways of being”—that suppress individual autonomy and difference in the name of earning and maintaining recognition (Appiah 1994, 162–63). For others, it is not the normative force of collective identities that renders recognition problematic but its attachment to identity in the first place. Patchen Markell shows that because identity appears as a “coherent self-description that can serve as the ground of agency, guiding or determining what we are to do” (2003, 36), the pursuit of recognition becomes synonymous with the pursuit of sovereignty. The result is that a politics of recognition invokes and fixes identity as a stable expression of who we are, misrecognizing the ways we exist in the middle of a politics that betrays the vulnerability of our autonomy and the instability of our becoming. Still others find recognition unworkable because it reinforces or bolsters existing structures of power, concealing the violence and oppression that play out in recognition's practice. Scholars locate this violence in different dimensions of recognition: in the way that it produces symbolic change rather than economic redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 12); in the way that it “diverts attention from the role of the powerful, of the misrecognizers, in these interactions, focusing on the consequences of suffering misrecognition rather than on the more fundamental question of what it means to commit it” (Markell 2003, 18); in the way it constitutes the colonial subject's consciousness (Fanon 1967); in the way that it, à la Hegel, entails a life-and-death struggle that is then somehow supposed to give way to “compassionate personal relations, ethical social relations, or democratic political relations” (Oliver 2001, 4).In the wake of these critiques, visions of a politics of recognition grounded in identity have given way to critical accounts that seek to recuperate or reimagine the foundations of our shared political or ethical life in other terms. Some scholars heuristically remove recognition from the political scene in an effort to think its possibilities and limits in different registers (see Butler 2005). Instead of being deployed as a norm intended to shape the landscape and relations of politics, the concept is employed as an analytic that might foster insight into the conditions in which subjectivity and ethical life emerge—reading for recognition's ontological and ethical implications. Other scholars, having seen what props up recognition, abandon the ideal altogether. Preferring to use concepts such as acknowledgment (Markell 2003; Hyde 2006), witnessing (Oliver 2001), or agency as embodied practice (McNay 2008), they investigate the possibility of an ethical intersubjectivity that can serve as a corrective to the violence or pathology of recognition.If the first critical body of literature attempts to determine a proper place for recognition—one we might anticipate and welcome—the second body of scholarship that seeks other normative ideals renders a judgment on recognition's significance and efficacy for understanding and intervening in the world. Given this vast body of scholarship, we begin to understand how the proliferation of work on recognition threatens to become, like a well-fed gremlin after midnight, monstrous. As Ricoeur remarks, “There must be a reason that no widely recognized philosophical work of high reputation has been published with the title Recognition” (2005, 1). Recognition appears across a variety of works as both the instrument of a more democratic and ethical life and as the ruse that allows us to believe we are free and equal—even as we become further subjected to structures of power that render us complicit with injustice. It is accorded “dual significance … as both a descriptive tool and a regulative idea” (McNay 2008, 2). It is both solution and problem. While the multiplicity of recognition's meanings, uses, and registers is itself not problematic, it does pose a problem of referentiality that threatens to make recognition into everything and nothing all at once. To study recognition, to read for its potential or its limits, is to pose the inevitable question: to what does recognition refer?This special issue does not set out to answer this question by fixing recognition's referent. Instead, it wagers that this question becomes a question for us, in part, because we have not yet fully understood how recognition entails or is imbricated with referentiality, meaning making, place making. In short, we have not yet fully understood the rhetorical conditions in which this question might be raised. The articles that follow set out to do this work. Authors were invited to critically examine recognition in its different forms and to define its rhetorical contours. Articulated in this way, the invitation asked authors to do more than offer thoughts on how rhetorical perspectives and acts of criticism might illuminate recognition—assuming that we might indeed be able to locate recognition and bring it to light. If we understand a contour as an outline—or, more precisely, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it, as “an outline especially of a curving or irregular figure”—the task set out was to examine how the figuration of recognition (how its taking place as a commonplace) operates or is given form or shape in and through rhetoric. An investigation of the rhetorical contours of recognition encourages a consideration of how rhetoric acts to constitute, perform, represent, flesh out, and trouble forms of recognition, and so this issue suspends, if only for a short time, a judgment about the value of recognition in the context of legal, political, ethical, or theoretical controversies in order to probe its rhetorical conditions, practices, and power.Admittedly, this collection of articles might defy the expectations of its audience. For too long, the terms in and through which recognition has been addressed, theorized, and critiqued have been set in such a way that to raise the question of the rhetorical contours of recognition, to ask after the implications of its (theoretical) histories and deployments, and to question how these very terms have taken up a place in the narratives we tell about recognition means that what follows might be unfamiliar, even unrecognizable, as a “rhetoric of recognition.” Authors were invited, encouraged even, to invoke diverse definitions, traditions, and theorists of the term. As a result, the articles do not settle on or begin from a single definition of recognition, nor do they even all accept the commonplace treatment of recognition as a practice of intersubjectivity through which individuals are validated by those around them. Alongside the Fichtean and Hegelian concept of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) that drives discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics, the contributors also draw on the concept in both its Aristotelian form (anagnôrisis) and in the derivatives of its French form (reconnaître). In Aristotle's Poetics, anagnôrisis is the element of a plot structure that enables a shift from ignorance to knowledge. While lesser known than Aristotle's concept of reversal (peripeteia), anagnôrisis represents a recognition scene in which the author—somewhat artificially or shoddily, Terence Cave tells us—resolves the plot (as, for example, when Sophocles has Oedipus discover who he is). Importantly, though, the passage from ignorance to knowledge is “different from rational cognition. It operates surreptitiously, randomly, elliptically and often perversely, seizing on precisely those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial” (Cave 1990, 10). The French reconnaître, according to Ricoeur, has “three major senses”: to grasp something in thought; to accept something as true; and to “bear witness through gratitude that one is indebted to someone for” (2005, 12). Introducing these different forms of recognition into the collection unsettles the presumptions—about knowledge or recognition's scene, for example—that underwrite its well-known accounts, holding open the possibility of reflecting on the value of rhetoric for larger discourses on recognition.Read together, these articles then redefine what it means for recognition to be a “keyword.” Setting aside the question of the term's significance, they invite us to consider how recognition's word(s) permit(s) passage. That is, they allow us to explore how an understanding of the rhetorical conditions and practices of recognition move subjects, objects, scenes, and speech or transform them into something they were not already. They signal the need and desire to think about how recognition's practices are authorized in the constitution of its word(s). They imagine the various shapes recognition might take in order to open a view onto our shared life. They give us pause to ask onto what or through what recognition passes, illuminating the ways that the place of recognition has so very much to do with how recognition takes place.There is a conceptual movement, a shape, in the way these articles are organized; they themselves move and transform. One opens a set of questions that the next addresses or affirms or troubles—not in a seamless way, of course, but in a way that allows us to see how the contours of recognition appear in the (various) words about its words. Conceptually, the articles move us from a question of the language of recognition to its ethical implications for life, passing us onto its political scene and opening to a question of aesthetic experience. In the article that begins this collection, Erik Doxtader comments that “one irony of the ongoing debate over the relative merits of recognition is that it frequently turns (to) language only when it can be mustered and used as evidence for how competing positions unduly rely on the shifting and contingent—mere—nature of words.” Noting that contemporary discourses of recognition falter when they approach the question of language—even as recognition is staked out in terms of voice and speakability—he poses a question that several articles in the collection take up: “Does recognition assume language in a way that precludes the recognition of language?” For Doxtader, this question occasions a turn to Walter Benjamin's “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which he draws on to explore in both content and form how Benjamin “grasps that the language of recognition may awaken in the recognizability of language.” Philippe-Joseph question to ask not about the recognizability of language but the recognizability of a on a of in the of the and of what it might to recognition to what shapes the of in the of to show that a into a the into a the into a the into a and is the of the concept For the of this and the of the turns on the way in which of the and are themselves articles that follow explore the ways insight into the rhetorical contours of recognition are by and the terms of life. questions whether the form of power that our attention and its of for understanding the of power in change political that the foundations of have to she the concept of as a way to think about how power operates in through the of the between life and in how more are being she argues that the for the recognition of the if it is to the of the for recognition of of the must the of rather than simply to into too with contemporary forms of the of life, to Hegel's life-and-death struggle in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that this struggle for recognition is … precisely because it the of a that can be staked and in a the of through To grasp how life in Hegel's work conditions recognition, between and we might and in Hegel's of and that for by and that appear to in the from to a life that is human and In a of life in Hegel's a form of recognition as a of knowledge that might be able to account ways that produces its own as the conditions of witnessing and to an grounded on our shared bond to our singular as a way to to of recognition that ground their ethical in the vulnerability of human life. are problematic for because they that the recognition of vulnerability to ethical relations that vulnerability a human subjectivity or Noting that is shared with she for a form of as ongoing and between and their cannot be to recognition, mutual or consideration of the of life opens onto an of the politics of recognition's scene and how it might bring about the and rhetorical implications of a concept he defines as of of in which an “an and of at with a to the work of and his details the way the to it as if were the one for whom it was able to the and social norms within the of and The value of then is that it a potential … to the and power of and as as to the that such and and examine the of the scene of in order to understand the possibilities for critique in political practices of recognition. theoretical accounts of legal recognition and outline the of that law is the or of the scene of recognition. an account of rhetorical is what is lost in political theoretical to a form of violence and injustice. that if we the relationship between law and recognition's scene, we are able to see how scene of recognition is set not by the law itself but by a demand for recognition in and through which both and law take details the rhetorical conditions of different of recognition, as to and of and to violence and point toward the that recognition is to article is to how as an politics, and in the are to recognition and how these critiques of and The possibility of this critique for in the to the dimensions of recognition in political and the between the of power within and across groups who are and liberal and of and takes on a scene of political recognition, the debate, it to the political potential of he various used to for rights in order to of as for recognition as that is as much an act of as it is of he that an understanding of the of might forms of knowledge and foster political across the article of the collection, how a language of recognition might to make of aesthetic the on and he a of aesthetic through which we to see that expresses a fundamental element of human and in so in the world to that significance of and of the to the politics of recognition the or the of in that it of over on the and aesthetic recognition point toward the need to the relationship between rhetoric and terms that a and yet If we accept that is the of the of in the world in and through and in then we are with and to the question of the of language in recognition in which the collection to all the authors who articles to this special to the in ways shape and life to the especially for the with and to by Erik Doxtader, and and for the work of who of their to offer to the like to for the to this collection and the he the

A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

ABSTRACTThe problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions.

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais (1588–1595) and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis.

Arabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, and nature of to the conversation surrounding rights discourse is in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially a subject of rights. In the Lyon to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is and are seen as relationships through speech acts and with the of being and situated they are as of in conversations among and out in or which them as and as through based and deliberation, and in However, seems to be a tension throughout the book on the one an of rights in their or discursive as an by a set of normative conventions and that and constantly on the an of them as political and by the critique are U.S. and the of rights are whom they have never seen” particularly in her that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of people visible to one of the it have understand recognition as a of being and rather than one of and or However, on recognition rather than persuasion and hegemonic discursive structures through “a agency in the present moment of seems to that all are at the and that all are as and studies has it is those who are not recognized as who rights the In other the is only human when she or is as a the Lyon this problem in chapter when she articulates the paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg of what citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to the citizen as such. In Lyon's in chapter that al-Obeidi's to the of the violation from the individual to from the to the of the is also an analysis of the rhetoric of rights However, it could be interesting to on Lyon's by more deeply if this the norms of testimony the that the reason al-Obeidi was able to her claim and her testimony as a of rape was because she has a and had an audience the Western who both and that testimony and of it as a If the Western media had not been to the al-Obeidi's rape, and have as In other it is more through which normative cultural Libyan or al-Obeidi's speech is 4, does a account of the and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her of lies for political within the normative discourse of her useful critique of a an titled “The and many media in chapter Lyon out the ways in which the popular media representations of women not facilitate an space where may and initiate This chapter's critique of the popular representation across of missing women is to further Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific it the media for missing women and a rather view of the of U.S. Additionally, how Lyon's critique of the and other U.S. media as to a of engaged who can then in deliberation are by the on in China the one-child to to that will then to including the U.S. and the Chinese in the world of media and or what she of the recent turn to literature by human rights her that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” tension between the notion of normative rights as subject and the notion of rights as a set of that to be by a Western “we” lies at the of Lyon's but does not from her theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars at the of human rights discourse and rhetorical particularly those scholars interested in of global transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are and made normative by narratives, whether or Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a for the of reading across reading that is potentially subject Although the first of the book is theoretical and can across as from the of rights discourse and from the of rights claims example, what does it of of rights violations to suggest that they the possibility of a relationship with their or of Lyon's critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her of performative deliberation across difference is within more practical discourses in the second of the Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her from identification as a in persuasion across is and should be a foundational one for those of in rights discourse because it to the very on which rights claims, particularly within like the have been In one of the more of the in chapter 4, Lyon Judith in claiming that one does not as a subject of recognition, to the and to be one must or the of that telling the is also problematic if it does not recognize as For scholars in human rights discourse to expand the notions of what is this is useful as we and critique that may or may or may not or may not be recognized as or existing normative of what human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and of rights.

Abstract This article revisits stasis theory, the rhetorical tool that outlines the strategic options of a defendant in a moral or legal accusation. By analyzing the burden of proof of an accuser and deducing a comprehensive model for a modern theory of stasis from the resulting obligations, it develops a system of ten vital staseis (key issues), each of which is by itself sufficient for a defense in front of a reasonable audience. The resulting modern theory of stasis can be a useful heuristic tool for the rhetorical defense against moral and legal accusations as well as for the systematic analysis of judicial speeches and debates.

In his first book, Christian Lundberg takes on the formidable challenge of rescuing Lacan for rhetorical studies. As he demonstrates in his first chapter, scholars in other disciplines have mostly neglected Lacan's profound reliance on the rhetorical idiom, while rhetoricians have deployed his theory for critical purposes without fully appreciating the thoroughgoing transformation of rhetoric it effects. Lundberg's intervention is the first sustained effort to treat Lacan's expansive, dense, and often opaque oeuvre as a fully formed theory of rhetoric. In fact, the book persuasively advances the provocative claim that Lacan pushes rhetoric in far more promising directions than the academic disciplines of rhetorical and composition studies have managed to date.A pervasive concern linking assorted Lacanianisms is the subject's knotty relationship to the social world. Even the leading exponent of Lacanian political critique, Slavoj Žižek, returns incessantly to subjectivity as the privileged locus of ideological fantasy on which political orders rely. Among the considerable virtues of Lundberg's book is that it facilitates a much-needed departure from the problematic of subjectivity by shifting the focus to what he calls the “economy of trope.” Yet this departure is also a return: Lundberg contends that Lacan's theory is deeply faithful to rhetoric's rich tradition, painstakingly recovering within its letter and spirit a cogent, systematic account of the tropological processes on which both subjectivity and social ontology depend. As a result, the book skillfully and forcefully opens productive avenues for future scholarship in rhetoric.Lundberg's argument hinges on the claim that Lacan's theory—indeed, science—of rhetoric presumes that communication, understood as the achievement of shared meaning, inevitably fails. In this, Lacan diverges sharply from both various structuralisms on the one hand and Foucauldian discourse theory on the other, since for Lacan the inherent failure of communication is not an obstacle or limit but both a prerequisite for and an effect of the psychic, social, and political efficiency of discourse. In a series of close encounters with prevailing currents in rhetorical studies, Lundberg argues convincingly that the appropriations of so-called poststructuralist, discursive and neomaterialist theories by rhetoricians err in continuing to stake themselves on the communication model.Each of these approaches in its own way presumes that the production of shared meaning is the aim of communicative practices; the differences among them lie in the way this presumption is deployed to explain rhetoric's role. In Lundberg's view, such work misses the way the impossibility of shared meaning is the generative matrix of rhetorical action. Rhetoric is essential not to achieve the fact or semblance of shared meaning but to organize an economy in which the circulation of signs conscripts subjects through affective investment whose condition of possibility is precisely the absence of shared meaning. Thus, “rhetoric is both signifying in a condition of failed unicity and a way of feigning unicity in the context of failed unicity…. Rhetorical artifice—tropes, modes of address, imaginary commitments, and the labor of investment—underwrites these practices, feigning unicity in the context of its failure” (3).Chapter 2 takes up the long-standing difficulty of defining rhetoric as a symptom of the chronic misapprehension of rhetoric as a practice of communication. Against the persistent indecision concerning rhetoric's scope and object domain, Lundberg proposes a Lacanian reformulation of the problem that sees rhetoric as neither the confluence of strategic, ornamental, and constitutive capacities of language (and other modes of signification), nor the disciplinary production of knowledge about a genus of objects defined as “rhetorical,” but as the “transcontextual logic of discourse, situated in an economy of tropes and affects that underwrites both the sign and the concrete modes of its employment” (23). This in turn means that, while the American tradition of rhetorical studies has privileged the Imaginary register, focus must shift to the Lacanian Symbolic “because … the sign is the result of artificial … of tropological connection—and … as a result, the sign is a site of affective investment” (28). Whereas “the Imaginary … houses the specific contents … that fill in symbolic forms” (30), the formal, autonomous operation of “trope is logically prior to all the operations that stem from the Imaginary” (39).Consequently, in chapter 3, Lundberg urges rhetorical critics to forego their investment in the Imaginary as the site of “the agential capacities of the orator, the audience and … the critic” (41) and focus on a conception of “speech” orthogonal to the fantasy of communication. To delineate this conception, Lundberg painstakingly works through Lacan's “schema L,” which formalizes the radically extrasubjective production of the unconscious, or “the whole field of tropological connections that is the condition of possibility for a sign to have an intelligible meaning” (52). Rather than a manageable process and medium for the production and circulation of meaning, here “speech is the site where language moves through a subject, and where the economy of signs takes up a specific material position, mode of address, and social context” (56). So understood, speech both relies on and disrupts the Imaginary register, replacing “a bilateral … reciprocally constitutive direct relation between subjects with a tripartite, asymmetrical relation of indirection,” marked by gaps within subjects as well as between them and the Imaginary objects and Symbolic processes on which they rely (62).If communication succeeds, it is not in establishing an intersubjective domain of meaning but in generating a volatile yet systematic array of meaning-effects. In view of this, Lundberg argues that Lacan rehabilitates rhetoric as a “symbolic science of forms” (71) committed to accounting for the operation of the “symbolic machine” in social life (72). What makes this machine both unpredictable and orderly is what, in chapter 4, Lundberg calls the “economy of the trope” comprising it. The figure of economy serves to differentiate the Lacanian theory of trope from those prevailing in American communication studies. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy denote infrastructural logics of signification as such, rendering the latter fundamentally fortuitous and depriving it of the unicity it ostensibly promises. In short, the operation of trope both forecloses continuity and intentionality in signification and operationalizes this foreclosure itself as rhetorical agency “distributed across the whole economy of discourse … the subject's affective investments [and] the movement of tropes themselves” (87). Hence “An economically figured practice for reading trope can … account [for] the force of individual texts … by attending to the intertextual tropological exchanges that animate and exceed them” (87).Extending the figure of rhetorical economy, chapter 5 responds to “materialist” concerns that the expansion of rhetoric entails a reduction of reality to an effect of discourse. Lundberg points out that Lacan stipulates the existence of a world outside signification and stresses the materiality of signification itself. Among the senses of the Lacanian Real is a physical objectivity to which humans have only indirect access and which constitutes a limit on meaningful experience. Moreover, insofar as Lacanian reality is the field of experience produced by the embodiment of the signifier, it is the domain of metaxy, or the mediating function of desire that sustains the relation of nonrelation misperceived by the distinction between the material and the discursive. Understood “as studied (im)mediation, as a site of enjoyment that flows from the gap between discourse and the world,” metaxy engenders this distinction itself (105).A recursive structure of affective investment and circuitry of somatic enjoyment is thus both a cause and an effect of the gap within signification and between sign and world. Hence the general economy of trope is resolutely material, accounting for “the conditions of possibility for a specific emotion to be manifest given the specific economy of tropes that organizes [its] experience” (109). Indeed, for Lacan “affect … is itself organized for the subject by the function of the signifier,” which is in turn repressed as the former's “absent cause” (110). The body is a body insofar as its affects are captured within the signifying network, which requires affective investment to function, so that enjoyment is less about signs and their meanings than “the ways that the object or practice serves the subject in negotiating a relationship to the general economy of exchange” (114). This is a material form of labor “that underwrites signification by ‘sliding’ the signified under the signifier” (115). The science of rhetoric, then, is concerned not with the exchange, coproduction or contestation of meanings in designated contexts but with the demands imposed by the material operations of language itself. The challenge for rhetoricians is to forego the premise of the rhetorical relationship and to develop methods of analysis adequate to the task of explicating these operations and their effects in public life.With this in mind, chapter 6 shifts attention to the public as both the name of practical spaces of discursive performance and the implicit horizon of the rhetorical processes at stake in the book. For Lundberg, Lacan radicalizes the ontic experience of publicness into an ontological condition “where the subject is articulated … in relation to the whole economy of discourse” (130). Accordingly, the Lacanian gaze instantiates the subject's irreducibly “ambivalent relationship to the speech of the Other” (131), since “the signifier is both a site for the articulation of the individual subject and its passions and a kind of ‘public property’” (132). The public character of speech thus involves subjects in a tropological relation of prosopopoeia that organizes an economy of address suspended between the subject's imaginary relation to others and its relation to the abstract, autonomous logics of discourse in general. Against the premise of a complementarity between logos and pathos, Lacan draws attention to stasis, or the circuitous relation between sociopolitical commitments and affective investments that maintain social links by violating, circumventing, or eroticizing these commitments. The critical question now concerns the productive capacities inherent in the discontinuities among pragmatic, rational, affective, ethical, and formal dimensions of public discourse. To illustrate the practical consequences of reconfiguring rhetorical criticism in this way, chapter 7 undertakes two paradigmatic readings: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ illustrates the way attention to the tropological economy of identitarian public-making reconciles the apparent contradictions of evangelical discourse practices; while antiglobalization protest movements illustrate the limits of demand-driven politics that fail to register in critical accounts organized around the strategic politics of democratic resistance.Among other difficulties, The Passion raises the question of how a film that submits its audience to a sustained experience of visceral revulsion can mobilize identification, since its symbolic construction would seem undercut by its affective impact. In Lundberg's view, focusing on the film's narrative construction in the context of evangelical ideology renders its central metaphor of scourging enigmatic, not least because evangelicalism rests on a paradoxical image of a community of unconditional love secured by vehement exclusion. The solution to this interpretive conundrum lies in tracking the function of enjoyment through the economy of tropological exchange established between the film's aesthetic strategy and evangelical publicness. Accordingly, Lundberg's reading shows how “the experience of revulsion both conceals and makes acceptable the evangelical community's cathectic investment in the grotesque violence” by routing enjoyment through “a reading of secular powers as agents of evil who conspire against … the body of Christ as a whole” (163).If prevailing critical protocols underestimate this dimension of Christian evangelicalism, they overestimate the democratic potential of radical resistance movements for precisely the same reason. Focusing on the discursive logic of demands lodged against powerful elites occludes the cathectic investments in existing relations of power that such demands enact. Put simply, in their symbolic guise as address to the Other, such demands actually desire their own failure as the mechanism for cementing their position of enunciation within the symbolic order. In effect, radical antiglobalization movements evince a tropological economy designed to preserve the status quo in a way that continues to produce enjoyment for the protestors. Aiming at their own failure, they succeed at generating surplus enjoyment, buttressing the conditions they ostensibly target.Both readings succeed admirably in demonstrating both Lundberg's critical acumen and the productivity of the rhetorical vocabulary he extracts from Lacan. What remains less certain is whether this vocabulary is exceptionally suited to the interpretive challenges the objects of analysis pose, or indeed whether an interpretation that succeeds so well in reconciling their internal contradictions is fully faithful to the principle of failed unicity on which it relies. To be sure, the latter is hardly a shortcoming of the book but a question for Lacanian theory writ large; still, it remains a question rhetorical theory should entertain before staking itself on the Lacanian science of rhetoric.The postscript that concludes the book returns to the continuity between Lacanian theory and the rhetorical tradition, figuring the former as the latter's faithful heir. In particular, Lundberg considers the unexpected convergence between Lacan and Ernesto Grassi around the ontological priority of trope, as well Lacan's affinity with Aristotle's Protrepticus, which enlists enjoyment as the mechanism that makes intellection possible. The result is a “protreptic rhetoric,” figured as a science “rooted in the enjoyment of signs [that] requires rejecting both an arid structuralism and the banal reduction of rhetoric to its imaginary coordinates” (192).Lundberg's argument that Lacan offers a potentially transformative theory of rhetoric is thoroughly convincing, as is his adroit reconstruction of this theory. No doubt reframing rhetorical inquiry along the lines proposed by the book promises to yield vital new insights and to spur rewarding new interpretive strategies and research trajectories. Certainly the stress Lacan lays on the consequences of failed unicity and the irreducibility of miscommunication augurs a wholesale renovation of rhetorical scholarship. Such a project will entail confronting a crucial question: how far can the implications of Lacanian rhetoric bear to be pressed? If there is no unicity to be had, is the only alternative the feigned unicity generated through tropological exchange? Are all modes of sociality predicated on the forms of misrecognition this economy entails? Must the failure of unicity be recuperated, or can social life proceed without feigning it—and if so, how must rhetoric be rethought to account for this possibility? More radically, does the failure of unicity precede—logically or temporally—the supplements that compensate for it, or does this failure appear as a problem in need of a solution retrospectively, as a consequence of supplementary processes themselves? While such questions exceed the book's scope, it brings them helpfully into focus and will surely prove invaluable for future efforts to address them.

Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together, Eugene Garver's third book on key texts of the Aristotelian corpus, charts the relationship between politics and philosophy through careful detailing of Aristotle's text. In other words, Garver reads the Politics for us. This is an achievement in itself given the gravity of both Garver's and Aristotle's thinking. Garver's reading elaborates the arguments of the Politics in order to establish a claim for what he calls “political philosophy.” His reading offers a methodological defense for a form of thinking that is itself not necessarily either “practical” or “political,” at least as scholars of rhetoric would tend to understand these terms. But Garver gives us a clue to his understanding of political philosophy when he describes Aristotle's “most impressive achievement” in the following way: The Politics “shows how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state” (3). Garver thus reads the paradoxes of politics and philosophy as generative rather than aporetic, seeking in the Politics something more than the mere realization of the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that the regime (politeia) is the container in which the bare life of the individual is transformed into the life of a citizen.Garver situates political philosophy through a logic of praxis that implicates statesman and citizen in starkly different registers. Politics is not just about the one but also the many. While this statement may be a truism of the Rhetoric, Garver takes up the Politics in order to articulate the question of the many in a way distinct from a certain rhetorical conception of politics and political practice. Garver brings to bear a political philosophical vocabulary that is guided by the statesman (politikos) rather than the citizen (politeis) or judge (kriteis). The statesman will utilize rhetoric as a practice, as Garver notes, but it is far from clear that the statesman is meant to approach political philosophy from a rhetorical perspective. Garver marshals a series of distinctions highlighting Aristotle's unique conceptualization of the polis, a structure straddling the disjunct between artificial and natural forms of being. This conceptualization figures the polis as both artificial and natural but will come to be understood by Aristotle, according to Garver, through the terms of political philosophy. Chapter 1 deals with the “natural” relationship between master and slave memorably defined in the first book of the Politics. Taking up this “most notorious feature” of the Politics, Garver argues that the concept of natural slavery is not so much a prescription but a description: it is a way to delineate the features of politics and to distinguish them from other forms of relation, such as the family (oikos). In contrast to those modern commentators who focus on Aristotle's references to “natural” slaves, Garver argues that Aristotle's primary concern is actually with the master (despotes), who is unique in that his capacity (dynamis) extends into two tasks rather than being confined to one: first, the administration of inferiors (slave ownership) and second, participation with equals (politics): “The same person is both master and citizen,” Garver notes, and “the principal problems of politics… come from that fact” (26). For Aristotle, Greeks are both uniquely suited for political life and uniquely susceptible to the desire for domination and tyranny (27–28; 33). The drive toward mastery characteristic of the despotes also characterizes the Greek citizen more generally.If the Greeks, whom Aristotle celebrates as the only ethnos capable of meaningful citizenship, are also the only ‘natural despots,’ then politics calls for a structural response to this excess (pleonexia): “Slaves have the wrong nature…. Despots have the right nature, and yet still degenerate without… proper political circumstances” (33). This claim's double-sidedness positions politics not just as a possibility but also as a deep and persistent problem that political philosophy is enlisted to solve. Both sophistical rhetoric (Rhetoric 1354a10–30) as well as the individual and social forms of the polis, then, have a capacity for misrecognizing the sources of political legitimacy. Political philosophy, rather than rhetoric as an “art of character,” as Garver's previous book on the Rhetoric describes it, becomes the response to this problem of politics.Aristotle's Politics relies on the interplay between the search for proper political circumstances and a certain conception of the human. Thus the Politics appeals to a variety of characteristics of the human being, including philia (friendship) and thumos (spiritedness). But these human characteristics become a call for a mode of cognizing and organizing the forms of life that exist within the polis (34–37). The polis, it seems, does not constitute but rather only expresses the relationship of spirit, knowledge, desire, and virtue. Aristotle describes, taxonomizes, and interweaves these concepts. For example, as Garver notes, “You need both thumos and intelligence to be guided to virtue. The conclusion, but nothing leading up to it, talks about virtue. They are connected through citizenship. Without thumos and intelligence, one cannot be political. Without being a political animal, one cannot be guided to virtue. And conversely, only people who can be guided to virtue are fully political animals” (36).These distinctions are crucial to Garver's emphasis on the relation between Aristotelian politics and the logic of political philosophy, which calls for a politics structurally irreducible to economic contract, instrumental rationality, or individual liberty (37–41). Making political societies coincide with the nature of its individuals is not Aristotle's task, as it was for Plato. Such a task is incoherent for Aristotle's polis—a community made up of different elements linked only by constitution and citizenship. Garver notes Aristotle's recognition of the community's inherent diversity, both in its definition (i.e., that a polis is made up of different parts rather than single essences) and its composition (the a polis contains good and bad, strong and weak, few and many).Garver takes up the Politics' discussions of property and education to distinguish Aristotelian politics from its Platonic and modern variants. The moderns and Plato take opposing sides on property: for moderns, private property is the sine qua non of the well-ordered community; for Plato, it signals its absolute disunity. Aristotle takes up the space between the two, arguing that each side commits a political category error. Aristotle, Garver reminds us, “sees no right to private property”; its virtue lies in its use, not its possession (50). Against Plato, Aristotle sees public use of private property as a method for bringing people of different kinds together under the name of the political community, which imbues them with common purpose (49–50). This common purpose leads to a discussion of education: temperance, generosity, and “the virtue of liberality” (51–52). Education is crucially communal; it highlights “what people must share” (53). It reframes self-sufficiency, changing greed to generosity, arrogance to humility, and selfishness to sharing: “Self-sufficiency is redefined when we add liberality to temperance, transforming it from economic to ethical and political self-sufficiency” (57). This type of self-sufficiency is misrecognized; it is a basis for Aristotle's critique of Plato—“even Plato neglected education,” Garver says—and his description of the constitutions (55–56).But education is not a comprehensive good. For Aristotle, it is a quality that follows from constitutional design and the more narrow education of political philosophy. Garver's argument is predicated on a turn to the philosophical understanding of the political constitution. The shift brings us to the ground of praxis, wherein rhetorical scholarship might find itself more—for Garver, too—confident. This ground is the move from politics as techne—whose paradigm is the externalizing viewpoint of the Republic—to politics as phronesis (56; 58–63). Garver describes this shift in political understanding as “from making to doing…. The state cannot be a work of art” (45). The state's—particularly the ruler's—task is not to make the relation between ruler and ruled by “form and matter” (i.e., to posit political equality irrespective of practice) but to instill “self-replicating” virtue, whereby “we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions” (56). Here, the form of the polis–especially its constitution—tends toward a theory of right rather than toward a theory of the good. Garver insists that this recognition of right over good in politics is not due to the modern “fact of pluralism,” á la Rawls. Instead, it has to do with the aims of the polis, which are distinct from (though related to) the aspirations of a virtuous man, who aims toward individual good (57).Hostile to the modern division between the public and the private, Garver argues that for Aristotle, “civic participation never means casting aside and bracketing one's particularity. We never leave behind life in pursuit of the good life” (57). The modern argument views the good life as unencumbered, starting with Locke and Mill through to Rawls's justice as fairness. In contrast, Garver argues Aristotle offers us a different wager: it “encumbers” us with an aim toward the good life, while “unencumbering” us by refusing the “alienation” internal to distinctions of public and private (57–58). What emerges, for Garver, is a “comprehensive” view of political action affirming the relevance of “self-regarding”—private—activity.Arguing for the polis as a complex yet common conceptual form, Garver pins the “comprehensiveness” of an Aristotelian politics to a set of “incomplete” definitions that often appear circular, such as “citizen,” “constitution,” and “state.” In calling the normative basis of politics “incomplete,” Garver's intention is not so much to reconcile Aristotle's thinking with the basic problem of multiplicity as to affirm that the Politics can be seen as part of the political philosophical project of living well. For Garver the incomplete character of the polis is not a damning indictment of the relationship between ethics and the commons (koinon). Unlike in the Ethics, where a single good life is defined (and all others dismissed), in the Politics, Aristotle presupposes plural constitutional arrangements: These “disagreements and errors generate the variety of constitutions, including good constitutions…. There is no ambiguity for Aristotle in the question of… the good life,… but from book 3 on, the Politics exploits the ambiguity in how good a good constitution must be” (70).From here out, Garver's text largely oscillates between varied forms of description: political, philosophical, and even at times rhetorical. But these descriptions imagine only a certain kind of statesman as their audience—perhaps even a certain kind of esoteric thinker. In chapter 3, Garver runs into the problem of political definition—or put differently, what he calls the basic “incompleteness of the normative” in the reading of Politics 3 (66–106). It is Aristotle's unique genius that he is able to smooth the discrepancies in form and function between constitutions, highlighted in Politics 3 and 4, into a justification for political philosophy (69–70; 73–76; 92). A certain form of thinking on political deliberation follows once the analysis of constitutions is wrested from the singular focus of the good ethical life (70). “Political philosophy can occur in the rest of the Politics once Book III has freed space for deliberation by showing how constitutional form has no natural or inevitable ties” to the other causes or ends of poleis (73). Such a statement allows Garver to retroactively intervene into the debate over what constitutes good constitutions in the plural. “The three true constitutions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity,’ have the same end, the good life. Yet they are different constitutions” (74; see 73–76). But it does not allow us to intervene into the question of the good life—and it only obliquely allows us access to a discussion of the good polis. The discussion of good constitutions thus thinks “a different kind of incompleteness,” namely, “the indeterminacy within each formula” of constitutions (91; see also 83–97). For Aristotle, both good and bad constitutions share a similar principle or “formula of justice.” They do so because Aristotle separates “two independent variables, who rules and for whom, while in the Republic those two were tied together” (85; see also 79–83). In the case of political communities, then, form (of the constitution) does not immediately line up with function (the good life of citizens); they are defined by cross-reference, not through a single or ultimate reference (77, 93). Crucially, it is both possible and necessary that the polis achieve a dignity that is separate from and that ranks above the dignity of its citizens.There is some slippage occurring here between polis, citizen, and constitution, and Garver highlights this slippage to guide us toward political philosophy (92–97). These slippages begin with the comparison of political and despotic natures and continue in the movement from the citizen to the constitution. The effect of such slippages is perennial problems for understanding the relation of rhetoric to politics. For Garver, political philosophy appears a preferable substitute to trying to sort out this relationship, satisfying the need for judgment (phronesis) while providing a way to think about the practical distinctions between good and bad constitutions in conditions where we live with “the impossibility of directly enacting the good” (97). What Garver calls the “politicization” of politics in book 3 turns out to be the study not of citizens and their virtues (or vices) but of poleis and their limited principles of justice. This is because it is the relationship between rule and principle that defines a polis rather than the relative virtue or vice of citizens (77–80). Indeed, citizenship is not, in the final examination, a question of virtue: “The purpose of citizenship surprisingly has nothing to do with the purpose of man and of the state, to live well. The function of citizens is to preserve the constitution” (80). Garver thus ties political theory to political philosophy by highlighting politics' artificial rather than natural means: it is “primarily aporetic and formal. It clears space for deliberation and makes politics autonomous” (105).To wit: “Politics III is political philosophy, carefully keeping to what political philosophy can achieve, and leaving to statesmen what is appropriate for statesmen” (103). The autonomy of politics seems prestructured by Garver's conception of political philosophy as “deliberation over the forms and functions of government” (70). Political philosophy also prefigures the rhetorical praxis of the statesmen, which Garver sees as the practical usage of reflections leading statesmen to both formulate actions and engage in persuasion. “The Politics presents dialectical arguments; in particular circumstances they become rhetorical arguments that require political, not philosophical, judgment” (104). This judgment will call for repackaging the framework of rhetorical persuasion. Garver's framing highlights for readers the obvious difficulty of reconciling philosophical with political being in many the aim of Aristotle's Politics. Garver's reading a between three forms of first, second, persuasion. in these is how Garver the relationship between political philosophy understood as a only the of the statesman and rhetoric understood as a not just the but also the judgment of the practical becomes the method by which the of phronesis in the with the inherent in the nature of politics. Politics the of or but of these those are the proper toward which the statesman and in that they are of constitutions see also Garver reads Aristotle as those constitutions that elements of and this allows the statesman to the basic of the political made by and becomes good not because of the of its which are constitutions, but because of the practical of the the Here, the of political constitutions becomes the of the statesman in political philosophy rather than the of the citizen or judge discussion of Politics the from the to the There is a between the practical of the and the practical of the Garver thus argues that political philosophy, and not rhetoric nothing of or the modern critique of Garver this framing of phronesis as it still citizens to be rather than This framing the need for a of the citizen in the phronesis is a justification for only to has nothing to to the no about they as a nothing to about the under which they to the constitution” see also Politics The that politics takes in the between and from the Politics' of Garver's discussions only this the on and the of the constitutional form and of the statesman rather than the of the of this be given Garver's description of the aims of the Politics. Yet a framing of the polis focus on the natures of those who live in its name is to as rhetorical. But Garver's emphasis on political than a from philosophy to á la the for the of by political philosophy, the statesman in the project of the constitution in a way to the of from which the Platonic critique of the ground Here, Garver the Rhetoric and argues for a relation of between the statesman and But the statesman is as he has a of the behind constitutions that Garver argues the does is for the of rhetoric is only the for a of The that his but cannot more he cannot do to the between the of the means of and seems to have by political philosophy rather than of political life. Garver notes that in book of the Rhetoric, here the statesman to understand constitutional occur and they do to Garver, has no in the but see is a way to imagine through Garver's reading a between the actions of the statesman guided by political philosophy and those of a guided by rhetorical while the is and the seems even This is made by But in 3 through political philosophy is by in such a way as to make it that to it political tied to internal Political philosophy seems a then, for the ruler to become as as But it is as distinct from rhetorical become when fully their nature as political animals” is not to that Garver the nature of the ruled But the political and ethical nature of the citizens is in to be of the of a statesman guided by political philosophy. Indeed, the of the polis to be a relative for the This is in by the to the political virtue for Garver makes this claim the of the must master the of statesman must make it appear the he in the constitution is a of and rather than In chapter Garver notes the of the statesman of the of and These are in the definition of political virtue, which over and above constitutional form of its and that is a political virtue and that the of the of particular constitution” becomes the a education in political philosophy to the to preserve and the political For Garver, political virtue for the state rather than Such an turns on the of the statesman to his citizens that politics is to and not to the of or final chapter that what constitutes the regime will be the of the question political philosophy, in be This is in the Politics as the life of and not the life of the or the life of this the philosophical life, of its of see becomes the of through the common life Yet it must be that is of rhetorical Political philosophy virtuous with that political philosophy, can at their common the virtue of those virtues are the common life appears in a different than the of the rhetorical by the discussion of forms of Here, phronesis becomes from it is a form of in which Aristotle bare the structure of political as it the absolute reading from and constitutional form in order to at a of what as the These discussions will be into ethical arguments by the statesman and made through rhetorical forms of Such forms will be by nature, both in their appeals to constitutional and in their definition of political virtue. The Politics the of on the who has in and through political philosophy. Garver thus reads a impressive theory of political structure an satisfying theory of political desire or political In what then, do political philosophy and rhetoric in Garver's reading of The and is that they to not they exist here in a seems to become and and Garver's reading Political philosophy thus not just as a concept but a internal to Garver's it possible rhetorical by which politics may be within the framework of This seems to have something to do with the Politics' for the statesman over the citizen, for the over the and the over the Garver's discussion of and expresses the different conceptual aims of political philosophy and The of in Garver's analysis of the Politics thus appears as a by the of political philosophy that Garver's impressive reading

In 1988, one of those scenes at which a student of philosophy would yearn to be present took place in a Heidelberg pub. Hans-Georg Gadamer met with Jean Grondin, who was already at work on his brilliant biography of the philosopher, for some conversation and, one trusts, a glass or two of that Rhenish Gadamer greatly loved. The encounter may put us in mind of those brilliant anecdotes that introduce and frame many of the dialogues of Gadamer's beloved Plato. But there is also a touch of the way James Boswell so artfully provoked Samuel Johnson into some of his most telling and memorable utterances. Many philosophers have difficulty appreciating such moments. They prefer clear ideas articulated in coherent arguments. But for a literary critic or anyone with a feel for drama, such moments not only express ideas but situate them in their human context in a way that bare argument can rarely do.The scene itself—dialogue embedded in social conviviality (in vino veritas)—incarnates Gadamer's philosophy perfectly. Grondin reports that he asked Gadamer a question—not “small talk,” but a very philosophic question indeed, as deep as those questions that arise in the most everyday circumstances among Socrates and his young friends. It may not be going too far to suggest that for Gadamer, real thinking is only possible between friends—those “friends for truth's sake” that Plato speaks of. Gadamer himself refers to Aristotle's syngnome and remarks that “only friends can advise each other” (1989, 323). Grondin's question was, on what does the universality of hermeneutics rest? Gadamer did not reply immediately. Instead, he paused to think for a moment. Gadamer was not simply answering but answering for his philosophy, and the pause for thought shows that a real dialectic was taking place, a mutual opening to a truth that never shows itself as merely received or repeated.In contrast to a politician who sticks to his talking points, Gadamer did not, as we might have expected, respond by referring to one of the key concepts from his writings—speaking, say, of dialogue or question and answer or “consciousness effected by history” (“wirkungeschichtliches Bewusstsein”), or tradition. Rather, he responded by saying that the universality of hermeneutics lay in “the interior word.” In his biography, Grondin registers his own surprise at this answer. He certainly knew that Gadamer had spoken of this concept in a few dense and important pages toward the end of Truth and Method and not infrequently in later essays, but presumably he had not realized that it was so central in Gadamer's thinking. And indeed every really good answer to a question is at once familiar and surprising and at the same time “right” in a very precise way (Johnson famously defined “wit” as saying something no one had quite thought before but in so clear and striking a way that its correctness seems self-evident). This is an answer's power to provoke fresh thinking and put things in a new light.Having put the clue into our hands, Gadamer did not elaborate but left it to his interlocutor (and through him us) to take up this provocative remark. All the more welcome, therefore, is John Arthos's important book The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics. Arthos provides as comprehensive and detailed an account as one might hope for. After setting the stage with a brief introduction, Arthos examines the texts and thinkers Gadamer draws on in his discussion of language: chapters on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman reflections on language and the key doctrines of immanence and transcendence in the Trinity are followed by chapters on Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, and Heidegger. Arthos is not simply documenting Gadamer's sources. Certainly, he is guided by the specific issue Gadamer centers on. But provoked by Gadamer, he reopens the very dialogue with tradition that constitutes Gadamer's path to his own insights. This is methodologically correct—profoundly so. It not only illuminates the thinking behind Gadamer's very condensed discussion but also opens our ears to whatever more tradition may say to us in this fruitfully circular interchange that now includes Arthos and through him ourselves.To my mind, the most productive of these rethinkings is the chapter on Aquinas, which turns out to be just as much about Augustine. An invaluable bonus is that Arthos includes as appendices the Latin text and his own English translation of Aquinas's two short treatises De natura verbi intellectus and De differentia, which Gadamer follows closely and which have previously been inaccessible to readers with little or no Latin. In these appendices, Arthos for his reader's convenience even underlines the words in the Latin text that Gadamer directly quotes. Scholars question whether these treatises are by Aquinas, though Gadamer thought them authentic. In any case, the conversation with Aquinas supports Gadamer's pursuit of his insight that “the formation of the word is not reflexive. For the word does not at all express the mind, but rather, the thing meant” (1989, 426). Thinking about language is thus liberated from the framework of the subject-object dichotomy that makes possible the achievements of modern philosophy but also persists as an insoluble problem. Language is not an instrument created by subjectivity to express its ideas in signifiers that have only an arbitrary relation to signifieds. I think there is a convergence here with Wittgenstein's critique of private language. The ontological status of the word and its relation both to mind and world need to be understood in a new way.Arthos goes beyond Gadamer's specific focus on Aquinas's thought by working out more fully and very subtly a special kind of reflexivity, which he terms “inherent reflexivity,” that keeps the word related to the self but not subordinated to it. He introduces Augustine's use of the mirror to suggest this peculiar reflexivity in which the human being is object (“image”), reflecting surface (“mirror”), and subject (“viewer”) in its own trinity. Even though the mind is not grasping itself in a self-conscious way, it “never does not understand itself, never does not love itself” (1991, 386). Aquinas goes further when he argues that human beings “reflect” God by being like him: according to Arthos, “This means that the image cannot be understood statically or as an object, but as an active imitation” (149). There is a “mutual transformation of being” in the relation of mind and object (150). St. Paul speaks of a mirror but of seeing in a mirror darkly. Thus, Arthos argues, “the Thomist reflexivity of intellect is not a perception or insight of a fixed and whole subject, but an active, transformative process” (153). Instead of a second-order activity of “looking at ourselves thinking,” this inherent reflexivity is “our very being in the world, the circuitous way that we understand” (155). Self and world achieve a correlative perfection through the word, but the word is never subsumed in a Hegelian absolute self-consciousness. Gadamer wants to do justice to the inwardness that Augustine brought into Western thought but also, as Arthos notes, to “thinking with the other, a membership in the civic community” (158). As Arthos puts it, “Being lives in the rich accretions of meaning out in the world, in the particular manifestations of culture and history which communities innovate” (158). Beyond “the inner life of the individual” stands “the shared world of community and history” (158). The word does not rebound “back upon itself or the speaker,” but emanates into the world and “works to constitute that world” (160). In its reflection, it returns with an addition, an increase from the response of another (another person and indeed the whole of tradition).At the same time, Arthos registers very well the difference between Thomas and Gadamer. For Thomas, intellect is ordered toward God, who is perfect intellect, perfect understanding. But for Gadamer, the self lacks “control of experience and the world” (160). Our relation to the world is not simply the path to God, but rather we are caught up in and serve “the unfolding of being in a co-implication that does not ultimately privilege our separated soul” (161). The process of knowing inaugurated in language culminates in “the priority of the question,” not the vision of being (161).I offer this overview as a good example of Arthos's approach. He begins with Gadamer and from there proceeds to engage afresh the texts and writers Gadamer has most directly in view in a particular section of his book. But Arthos is not simply expounding Gadamer or summarizing a previous text Gadamer's readers may not be familiar with. Still pursuing the point at issue, he opens out the earlier thinker's argument and goes well beyond Gadamer's account to find further resources for thinking about language and the relation of self, word, and world. The additional insights he gains in the end return to Gadamer with a wider perspective that connects with other parts of Gadamer's hermeneutics. And those added insights do not simply lie ready to hand in the earlier text but represent Arthos's own penetrating interpretation that claims its own autonomous philosophical interest. He is not just thinking about Gadamer but thinking about the subject (Sache) alongside Gadamer in a way Gadamer would heartily approve of.Each of Arthos's chapters on the tradition is thus worthy of close attention and extended reflection, but I do not try to summarize each here. I would only add that his well-informed examination of the intertwined doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity show how relevant the thinking of the church fathers and above all Augustine are to an understanding of language that escapes the limits and impasses of most modern philosophical accounts. Christianity is many things, but among them it is a serious intellectual tradition that was built up by some of the most acute minds in human history. These thinkers were not simply dogmatically juggling symbols and doctrines backed by scriptural or hierarchical authority. They were thinking through every aspect of human existence in ways that remain instructive. Without question, the thinking in that tradition that remains important for philosophy (in the Greek and modern sense) needs to be separated from the portion that belongs only to committed faith. No bright line divides these two, yet it would not be simply a mistake but also foolish for philosophers, even of the most rigorously secular convictions, to close their ears to this tradition out of a distaste for anything that has the aroma of piety for them or out of a misguided offense at what they take as proselytizing. The work of philosophers from Jacques Derrida's late books to Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben stands as an exemplary demonstration of a readiness to confront this tradition with no intent (or risk) of reclaiming for Christian faith a central, still less authoritative, position in contemporary culture.Following his rereading of the tradition Gadamer converses with, Arthos spends over 140 pages closely examining the 10-page section of Truth and Method entitled “Language and Verbum” (1989, 418–28). His commentary proceeds paragraph by paragraph, preserving the structure and sequence of Gadamer's argument. He usefully provides the German text with his own English translation in double columns side-by-side. He registers both what Gadamer is saying and what he is not saying or when he is saying something unexpected, thus revealing what is going on between the lines or behind the text (Gadamer remarked that every utterance is a union of the said and not-said in a specific way). Gadamer's hermeneutics is, of course, insistent that there can be no “exhaustive” commentary or “final word” on any significant text, and certainly not on a text that packs every page with the fruit of forty years of reading and thinking, as Gadamer's great book does. For all its intensive detail, Arthos's commentary does not silence his (and Gadamer's) readers by handing them the meaning of a difficult text on a silver platter, as it were, but rather invites them to engage with him in a close, mutual scrutiny aimed not at the verbal details of the text but ultimately at the subject matter (Sache) that comes to light through it, namely, the nature of language itself.It is worth repeating that Gadamer's indispensable achievement here is to liberate thinking about language from subjectivism, mentalism, instrumentalism, and linguistic structuralism (including the “communication model”). Those may make useful contributions within their sphere of legitimacy. But without rejecting the notion of consciousness or the theory of judgment, Gadamer makes clear that, as Arthos notes, language carries along with it “the community of persons that speak through that language, their achievements, discoveries, and failures” (359). As Arthos puts it, for Gadamer, “The passage of the word down through human history is … a procession, an increase of being arising out of the very finitude of our contingent being” (360). This new understanding of language has far-reaching implications that we have barely begun to explore. Indeed, I hope that the next book on this subject will survey dominant current views of language and present a critique from a Gadamerian perspective. Arthos's invaluable book sends us forth well equipped for exactly that exploration.

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a definition of rhetorical argumentation based on the theme of the argumentation, that is, the issue in dispute, rather than its aim (e.g., to “win”) or its means (e.g., emotional appeals). It claims that the principal thinkers in the rhetorical tradition, from Aristotle onward, saw rhetoric as practical reasoning, that is, reasoning on action or choice, not on propositions that may be either true or false. Citing several contemporary philosophers, the article argues that this definition highlights certain distinctive properties of rhetorical argumentation that tend to be overlooked or undertheorized in argumentation theory.

ABSTRACT This article examines Jürgen Habermas's argumentation theory for an answer to the question of the role of rhetoric in cogent argument-making practices. At first glance, Habermas's triadic synthesis of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric appears conventionally neo-Aristotelian and logocentric. However, in aligning rhetoric with a formal, idealized understanding of argument as a process, Habermas gives rhetorical evaluation an authoritative role in certifying nonrelativistic public knowledge. Further elaboration of the implications of his model reveals a radically social view of rational persuasion and of reasonable opinion formation that makes intellectual humility a central virtue. Humility heavily restricts the scope for reasonable disagreement and dissent, particularly in polarized controversies. Examination of such a controversy shows the limits of the Habermasian conception of rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Theories of argumentation that give serious attention to rhetorical features, such as those of Aristotle and Chaïm Perelman, assign an important role to the audience when considering how argumentation should be constructed and evaluated. But neither of these theorists provides ways of thinking about audience that is adequate to the range of questions raised by this central concept. In this article, I explore one of these questions—that of audience identity—and consider the degree to which this issue has been recognized by the theorists in question and how we might move from their conceptions of it to a better understanding of the importance of identity in argumentation and how it should be treated.

The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

ABSTRACTIn her 2006 article “The Task of the Bow” Carol Poster shows through an analysis of the fragment “For the bow, its name is life but its task is death” that for Heraclitus the instability of the material world also infects language and that investigating the unstable logos—its hidden, double, oblique meanings—discloses this extralinguistic world instability. This article conducts similar analysis of the wordplay in Heraclitus's opening lines, challenging the long-standing debate over the meaning of logos in the first fragment. Through reconsidering the context of Aristotle's references to Heraclitus's paradoxes, this article develops a set of hermeneutic criteria that may be applied to contemporary interpretations of the first fragment. Understood as a paradox, the hidden meaning of this logos must be sought through its primary meaning (speech or discourse), and its fuller interpretation requires an expansion (not contraction) of its possible signification. By such an interpretation, the logos as speech of the first fragment is concomitant with the volatile flux of the material world itself.

ἔστω δὴ ἡ ῥητορικὴ δύναμις περὶ ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν.(Estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.)Let us define rhetoric to be “A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject.” (Hobbes translation)Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. (Freese translation)Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. (Rhys Roberts translation)Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. (Kennedy translation) The question of rhetoric's potential continues to provoke. What appears in Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric—and to name it as a dunamis? What appearances do such a name endeavor to keep? Infused with a contingency that seems to double and perhaps even double again, the opening line of the Rhetoric's second chapter seems to defy understanding, let alone explanation. Form and substance blur. Is this a definition? A proposition? An article of faith? A prayer? Questions of translation circle and then spiral. Questions of context loom and fade away, and then loom again. As Aristotle pronounced it, rhetoric's (im)potentiality seems to promise and thwart (its own) recognizability. It remains otherwise—a suspicion of thought's necessary corruption, an opening to a discovery without grounds, an aporia with protreptic power. Whatever it might become, however becoming it might be, rhetoric's art is not (yet) altogether here. This may signal a deficit. It may sound a shared calling. In the name of letting rhetoric be, Aristotle bequeaths us a question that, perhaps tragically, we cannot let alone.The subtle and thoughtful essays that compose this forum require little introduction, not least as they thematize and reflect variously on the multifaceted question of beginning that inheres in Aristotle's famous pronouncement at 1355b. Concerned that dunamis is far from a “neutral human capacity,” Ekatrina Haskins considers the impracticality of Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric and how this founding gesture “erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy” that supports a teleology, a vision of progress in which rhetoric—as civic discourse—disciplines if not deters its performance. Starting with the insistent desire to understand the source of rhetoric, Megan Foley turns the table on Socrates—rhetoric emerges, for Aristotle, not from “some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible.” Existing potentially, existing as potentiality, rhetoric begins before its first (practical) move, a beginning that begins with the question of its contingent ground. In his meditation on the “rhetoricity” that may abide in Aristotle's concern to “let rhetoric be,” Christian Lundberg reflects carefully on this question of ground as a problem of context, that is, the ways in which rhetoric—as a discourse—operates “in advance of any context” and how the understandable need to define rhetoric does not relieve us of the need to think the movement between trope and persuasion, a movement in which rhetoric's potentiality begins—and perhaps ends—in a nomadic existence.These nuanced inquiries are timely. Individually and together, they show how the city—whether Aristotle's or our own—cannot contain rhetoric. Rhetoric's potential sets it in motion and moves it beyond the walls, beyond the law, beyond the law of (its) language. In this way, very quietly but very firmly, the essays here trouble and expand the tradition of rhetorical theory as such. They do so from a beginning, from Aristotle's naming of rhetoric as an (im)potentiality, that marks a tear between the apophantic and nonapophantic modes of expression. As it refuses to disavow its own antiphasis—and here, it is well worth recalling Aristotle's dedicated interest in the ways in which self-unraveling assertion participates in the work of coming to be and passing away—rhetoric's “defining” (im)potentiality testifies to an unsettling experience of (its) language, a moment of letting go, of letting a controlling interest in language give way to letting the word be. As Walter Benjamin saw it, this gesture is an ethical hinge. It is a moment to hear the lament of language in the wake of its overnaming, a human impulse that submits speech to the fate of tragedy at the cost of recognizing its power—for now. Such a gesture may also be urgent, at least in a moment when the need to advocate (for rhetoric) feels nothing less than pressing.

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.

You, who call yourself a rhetorician, what is your art? With what particular thing is your skill concerned? Weaving is concerned with fabricating fabrics, music with making melodies; rhetorician, with what is your know-how concerned? This is the question that Socrates poses to Gorgias in Plato's notorious refutation of rhetoric: “Peri tēs rhētorikēs, peri ti tōn ontōn estin epistēmē?” (1925, 268). Socrates' question frames rhetoric in the genitive case—which, in this case, specifies the source or origin of one thing from another. To ask of rhetoric “peri ti tōn ontōn?” is to ask from whence rhetoric comes, from where rhetoric originates, from what rhetoric is generated. So Socrates' question—“peri ti tōn ontōn?”—asks about rhetoric's domain.Gorgias—or, to be fair, Plato's ventriloquized version of Gorgias—answers that rhetoric is concerned with speech: “Peri logous” (1925, 268). Gorgias reframes Socrates' genitive question, responding in the accusative case. While the genitive case identifies one thing as generated from another, the accusative case identifies something that is being acted on by another. The genitive case specifies a species of some genus; the accusative case addresses the direct object of some action. So Gorgias explains rhetoric's origin by pointing to its object. Gorgias' answer supplies the source of rhetoric's generation by delineating its object domain: “peri logous.” Rhetoric is about, is composed of, and comes from speech.But, Socrates responds, the same is true of many other technai: medicine, gymnastics, arithmetic, and geometry, for example. These, too, are concerned with speech: speech about bodily condition or speech about numbers. Pressed, Gorgias clarifies that rhetoric is the power to speak and also to persuade: “Legein kai peithein” (Plato 1925, 278). But, Socrates still asks, to speak and to persuade about what? He presses on, parroting, “Peri ti? Peri ti?” (Plato 1925, 272–274). What is rhetoric about? “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” What is rhetoric's ontic domain? To what class of objects does it belong? From what category of existing things does it emerge?While Plato's Gorgias plays along with this ontogenetic question, Aristotle's response to the Gorgias in the opening book of his Rhetoric questions the terms of that question. Plato's repeated question—“Peri ti, peri ti?”—contains a categorical error. Or, to be more precise, Plato's error is categorization itself. Plato's question, Aristotle suggests, mistakenly attempts to contain rhetoric within a particular genus. Instead, Aristotle argues that rhetoric is “ou peri ti genos idion” (1926, 14). It is not concerned with any particular genus; it is not proper to any genus; it has no genus of its own. Aristotle writes that “ouk estin oute henos tinos genous aphōrismenou hē rhētorikē” (1926, 12). Rhetoric does not come from one definite kind of stuff; its horizon is not delimited to a single genus of somethings.This, Aristotle explains, differentiates rhetoric from all those other technai like medicine, geometry, and arithmetic. Each of them are indeed able to persuade about their own particular area of study: “peri to autē hypokeimenon” (Aristotle 1926, 14). These technai are about what they lie underneath: “hypo-,” meaning “below,” and “-keimenon,” meaning “positioned.” They come from and are subordinate to a specific genus, category, or class of things: arithmetic about numbers (peri arithmōn) or medicine about health (peri hugieinōn) (Aristotle 1926, 14). While these other arts are “to hypokeimenon”—set underneath their specific domains, as a species to a genus—rhetoric is instead “tōn prokeimenōn”—set before, set forward, set forth (Aristotle 1926, 14). And rhetoric is set forth in advance—what it is set before is generation or beginning itself.Rather than hypokeimenon, rhetoric is hyparchonta (1926, 12)—not lying underneath some genus but below the archē: underneath a beginning, a prime mover, or a first principle. So ironically, Aristotle's archē-definition of rhetoric undermines rhetoric's archē. Rhetoric's domain is the hyparchonta: beneath the first principle, before the beginning, in advance of the first move. Its genus is not speech and persuasion, legein kai peithein, as Plato has Gorgias say. No, Aristotle writes, the function of rhetoric is not persuasion itself—ou to peisai ergon autēs—but rather to see the hyparchonta pithana—the probabilities, plausibilities, or persuadabilities that exist before the work of persuasion begins (1926, 12). Paradoxically, the hyparchonta pithana have a mode of existence before their existence. The hyparchonta is caught between the already and the not-yet. This paradox is reflected in the two seemingly incompatible definitions of the term “hyparchonta”: “preexisting, taken-for-granted,” on one hand, and “allowable, possible,” on the other. To see the hyparchonta pithana is to see preexisting possibilities.A few lines later, Aristotle restates this definition of rhetoric as the ability to see the hyparchonta pithana but replaces the word “hyparchonta” with the term “endechomenon,” instead calling rhetoric the ability to see the “endechomenon pithanon” (1926, 14). This substitution of “hyparchonta” with “endechomenon” fittingly highlights the parallelism between the terms: like “hyparchonta,” the term “endechomenon” points to possibilities. Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, is “peri tōn phainomenōn endechesthai amphoterōs exein” (1926, 22). That is, rhetoric emerges from phenomena capable of carrying more than one possibility. The phrase “endechomenon pithanon,” most commonly rendered in English as “the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37), thus defines persuasion's availability in a very precise sense: not available in the sense of an extant substantive object that is already there to use but instead as an imminent and immanent possibility of which rhetoric may avail itself. Explaining rhetoric's availability as possibility, Aristotle returns to the genitive case: rhetoric emerges not peri tōn ontōn, as Plato would have it, but “peri tōn endechomenōn” (Aristotle 1926, 24).Aristotle resists the Platonic gambit by refusing to collapse rhetoric's genitive genus with an ontic object. Recognizing that rhetoric is ou peri ti genos idion, without any genus of its own, Aristotle sidesteps Plato's trick question, “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” Aristotle stipulates that rhetoric comes not from some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible. He thus refuses the ruse of defining rhetoric's becoming through “qualified genesis,” the genesis of one thing out of another (ek tinos kai ti) (1955, 184). Rather than emerging out of some genus of ontically existing objects (ek tinos), rhetoric comes-to-be ek mē ontos, from that which has no ontic status (Aristotle 1955, 184, 198). The mode of becoming that Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric thus corresponds to what he elsewhere calls “genesis haplē,” or “unqualified becoming” (1955, 184).This mode of becoming is unqualified in two senses. First, it is unqualified in the sense that it is without qualification. It is not delimited by or limited to any specific class of objects with any specific characteristics. Unqualified becoming is thus thoroughgoing and absolute, not partial or particular. Rhetoric, as unqualified becoming, does not come to be from something in particular; rather, it comes to be from nothing in particular. Although it is common to read Aristotle's famous definition of rhetoric as a statement of rhetoric's particularity—“an ability in each case [peri hekaston] to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37)—“peri hekaston” may instead be read as an assertion of rhetoric's indefinite genitive source. “Peri hekaston” translates not merely as “in each” but moreover as “about each and every.” In this definitive but indefinite definition, rhetoric does not just come out of a given case but can emerge from any given case whatsoever. As John Henry Freese puts it in his translation, the art of rhetoric is “not applied to any particular definite class of things” (Aristotle 1926, 15). Rhetoric, as peri hekaston, is not particular but imparticular.But here appears the second sense in which rhetoric's mode of becoming seems unqualified: arising out of nothing in particular, it may seem to come from nothing at all. This seemingly ex nihilo emergence may appear “unqualified” in the sense that it does not meet some prerequisite qualification or condition. Indeed, Aristotle writes that the unqualified mode of becoming is not just a transformation of one thing into another; it is a transubstantiation from the immaterial to the material. It is more than an alteration of qualities; it is a conversion of substance. This genesis haplē is absolute genesis in the sense that it is not a mere change from something else; it is the radical appearance of something new. This genesis “out of non-existence” (“ek mē ontos”) is a possibility's passage out of the imperceptible or anaesthetic (ek anaisthētou) (Aristotle 1955, 198). More than just seeing what already exists out there, rhetoric envisions possibilities that have not yet materialized. It does not follow from a previous generation; it is generation itself—genesis without an archē in any genus.Yet this unqualified genesis does not simply come out of nowhere. It does not spring from complete nonexistence. Rather, Aristotle explains, it emerges from “dunamei on entelecheiai mē on,” from that which exists potentially (dunamei) but not actually (entelechiai) (1955, 186). Unlike an actuality that simply exists, potentiality (to dunaton) is simultaneously capable of both existing and not existing: “kai einai kai mē einai” (Aristotle 1933, 460). Paradoxically, potentiality is a mode of being that can either be or not be. That is, its existence is possible rather than certain. Aristotle writes: “To ara dunaton einai endechetai” (1933, 460). Here, Aristotle links potentiality and possibility, dunaton and endechomenon, that which can be and that which may be. This is how rhetoric can have a mode of existence before its existence: it already exists as a potentiality but does not yet exist as an actuality. Aristotle emphasizes that rhetoric exists as a potentiality, or dunamis: “Estō dē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston” (1926, 14). That is: “Let rhetoric be an ability in each case.” Rhetoric exists (estō) potentially (dunamis)—but not actually—in any given case whatsoever. Rhetoric's being is a potentiality inherent in each and every particularity. Let rhetoric be an imparticular potentiality.But if rhetoric exists as an imparticular potentiality, does that mean that its domain is all-encompassing? If rhetoric's genesis is absolute, does that mean its domain is universal? If rhetoric can come from anywhere and everywhere, does that mean that rhetoric is anything and everything? Not actually—rhetoric's “object” is not actually a thing at all. That is, although rhetoric addresses an accusative object in the grammatical sense—the endechomenon pithanon—that domain of rhetorical possibility is not an ontic object in the material sense. Yet while rhetoric is not limited to any genus of actual things, rhetoric's domain does have a limit. Aristotle writes that the domain of rhetoric is not all-encompassing—“ou peri hapanta”—but only includes that which may possibly come to be or not—“all' hosa endechetai kai genesthai kai mē.” (1926, 38). Rhetoric's domain, that space of possible becoming, is bounded by necessity on one side and impossibility on the other. That which either must or must not be is none of rhetoric's concern. Impossibility and necessity are beyond rhetoric's scope. So what is rhetoric about? It is about generative potentialities.Against Plato's attempt to show that rhetoric lacks a definition because it does not belong to any domain of ontically existing things, Aristotle defines rhetoric's domain as precisely that which has no ontic existence but which nevertheless has the potential to appear. Aristotle thus subverts Plato's question, “Peri ti?,” “What is rhetoric about?” He refuses to objectify rhetoric's domain with that insidious little pronoun “ti.” Rhetoric, he counters, comes not from a “ti,” not a thing or a what, but rather a maybe, an indefinite domain that is less than something yet more than nothing (1933, 430). Instead of being generated from some ontically given genus of objects, rhetoric generates the appearance of actualities out of the underdetermined, not-yet-actualized domain of an immaterial potentiality that can be or not be.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Abstract The Stoic is often seen as the forerunner of Adam Smith's market man of morals, but others have suggested that the sophist played a role in the formation of market morality and political economy. This article traces Smith's treatment of ancient sophists and his use of the term sophistry in the Wealth of Nations. Smith praised ancient sophists for their effective didactic oratory and their ability to make money through teaching. Smith criticized arguments as sophistic when they promoted monetary advantage for a few over and above the principle of competition. This varied reception of sophists and sophistry suggests a keen understanding of the rhetorical tradition and its capacity to influence the development of the discourse of political economy. Smith's use of sophistry and reference to the sophists invites a deeper awareness of the essential vitality of effective argumentation for Smith's “system of natural liberty.”

AbstractTo the ancient mind, magic was a powerful force to be subjected to or to control. Egypt, more than any other early culture, stressed the importance of intellectual agency as the antidote to the imperfection perceived between foundational thinking and anti-foundational speaking. Just as rhetoric seeks to express the conceptual ideal pursued by philosophical inquiry, these earlier thinkers stressed magical language as the key to unlocking the power of the cosmos. This article will explore the Ancient Egyptian concept of rhetorical magic as a practical wisdom that allows an individual to function fully within the boundaries established by a perceived cosmic order. The Ancient Egyptians applied rhetorical magic to ease the dissonance felt between intellectual engagement and the semiotically saturated cosmology in which they dwelt. These same ancient rhetorical practices hold promise in assisting our own attempts to navigate a world inundated with information.

Research Article| January 01 2009 Rhetoric as a Balancing of Ends: Cicero and Machiavelli Gary Remer Gary Remer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655336 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Remer; Rhetoric as a Balancing of Ends: Cicero and Machiavelli. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (1): 1–28. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655336 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2009 Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and EmotionSokolon, Marlene K. Jason Ingram Jason Ingram Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (1): 92–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655340 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jason Ingram; Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (1): 92–95. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655340 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2008 Confronting Aristotle's Ethics Confronting Aristotle's EthicsGarver, Eugene David Depew David Depew Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (2): 184–189. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655308 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Depew; Confronting Aristotle's Ethics. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (2): 184–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655308 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2008 Shame and Ambiguity in Plato's Gorgias R. Bensen Cain R. Bensen Cain Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (3): 212–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655314 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation R. Bensen Cain; Shame and Ambiguity in Plato's Gorgias. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (3): 212–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655314 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2008 Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture Carol Poster Carol Poster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (4): 375–401. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655328 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Carol Poster; Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (4): 375–401. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655328 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2007 The Oldest Extant Rhetorical Contribution to the Study of Fallacies (Cicero On invention, 1.78–96, and Rhetoric to Herennius, 2.31–46: Reducible to Hermagoras?) Antoine Braet Antoine Braet Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2007) 40 (4): 416–433. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655290 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Antoine Braet; The Oldest Extant Rhetorical Contribution to the Study of Fallacies (Cicero On invention, 1.78–96, and Rhetoric to Herennius, 2.31–46: Reducible to Hermagoras?). Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2007; 40 (4): 416–433. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655290 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University2007The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2007 The Sounds of Silence: Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Refutation of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias Rod Jenks Rod Jenks Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2007) 40 (2): 201–215. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655268 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rod Jenks; The Sounds of Silence: Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Refutation of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2007; 40 (2): 201–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655268 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University2007The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2007 The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' to Modern Brain Science The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' to Modern Brain ScienceGross, Daniel M. Michael J. Hyde Michael J. Hyde Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2007) 40 (3): 326–329. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655280 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael J. Hyde; The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' to Modern Brain Science. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2007; 40 (3): 326–329. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655280 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University2007The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2007 Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory Ancient Rhetoric and OratoryHabinek, Thomas Raymond Oenbring Raymond Oenbring Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2007) 40 (4): 441–444. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655293 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Raymond Oenbring; Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2007; 40 (4): 441–444. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655293 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University2007The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2006 Isocrates and Civic Education Isocrates and Civic EducationPoulakis, Takis; Depew, David Robert G. Sullivan Robert G. Sullivan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (2): 174–177. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697148 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert G. Sullivan; Isocrates and Civic Education. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (2): 174–177. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697148 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.