This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.

ABSTRACT Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1974 chapter on dissociation in the comic furthers our understanding of the rhetorical possibilities of dissociation, revealing how the concept can dismantle old worldviews and create new ones through laughter. Thanks to issues with translation and the chapter's obscure examples, however, this text has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article grounds the chapter's theories in examples with more contemporary resonance as a necessary first step toward understanding the full scope of Olbrechts-Tyteca's contributions to the concept of dissociation. Considering Olbrechts-Tyteca's chapter in light of other texts from the New Rhetoric Project also calls attention to the ways that translation practices have shaped scholars' reception and use of the Project's concepts.

ABSTRACTThe sections devoted to dissociation in The New Rhetoric identify many verbal forms that can express this reconceptualizing line of argument. This article reviews the linguistic options offered in English for epitomizing dissociations, including tautologies and constructions that prompt diverging meanings, orthographical devices like capitalization or subscripts that produce variants of a single word, word schemes like agnominatio and polyptoton that alter core forms, and affixes or modifiers that are either available as antonyms or require forcing apart by subsequent antitheses. Paying attention to the verbal expression of dissociations highlights cases that may or may not qualify as the rich reconceptualizations Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca had in mind. Arguments that involve three distinguished terms may, for example, reach a limit where dissociations merge into arguments from division, a long recognized device in traditional rhetoric/dialectic.

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the way back to some of the earliest political philosophers of the Western tradition. The term's origin was decidedly neutral, as can be seen in the likes of Aristophanes and Thucydides. Donald Trump is, in the most neutral sense of the term, a demagogue. That is to say that Trump is a leader of a group of people, a fact that his 2016 election victory affirms. Trump may also be a demagogue in the more charged sense of the word. This more charged definition finds its roots in Plato and Aristotle, who began to complicate the term before Plutarch defined the term with a negative valence that has stuck. A critical aspect of defining demagoguery in the contemporary lexicon is a focus on how an individual's rhetorical moves, with unique personal motivations, drive a public toward us versus them binaries. Much of the scholarship on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler is an exemplar of this obsession with individualistic demagoguery, as it often elucidates personal motives for Hitler's demagogic rhetoric toward the Jews. Since Hitler is considered by many to be the demagogue par excellence and some of this understanding can be traced to Kenneth Burke, this conception of demagoguery as something enacted by a particular speaker has remained dominant in rhetorical study and political philosophy.Against such a backdrop, Patricia Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely intervention into how we define and think about demagoguery. In order to accomplish such a task, Roberts-Miller traces the way demagoguery is currently envisioned, explains the deficits of that conceptualization, provides a new working definition grounded in argumentation theory, and then uses a series of examples to support her argument. Roberts-Miller takes issue with defining demagoguery as the intentional use of scapegoating by a liberal autonomous subject. For many scholars, it is easier to explain rampant discrimination, fascism, and violence as something spurred by an individual speaker rather than addressing what allowed that message to take root.Roberts-Miller therefore criticizes this approach and provides a redefinition of demagoguery as “a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the out-group should be punished and scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group” (16). Further, she contends that public policy debate in a demagogic society tends to focus on only three things: group identity, need, and severity of punishment against the out-group. To elucidate the features that flow from this definition, Roberts-Miller draws on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of philosophical paired terms. This terminology, which she rephrases as binary paired terms, shows how societal demagoguery relies on binaries, which usually circle back to in-group versus out-group driven decision making. This allows rhetors to skip deliberation and sound argumentation and simply assert their position. Roberts-Miller further theorizes how these dynamics mean that political debate focuses on nonfalsifiable motivism rather than specific policy proposals. Roberts-Miller accomplishes much of this method and theory building in the introductory and concluding chapters, advancing specific case studies in the body chapters that help elucidate and nuance her redefinition.The first example Roberts-Miller turns to is the invasion of Iraq, explored in depth in chapter 1. Roberts-Miller explains that what made her write this book was the almost entirely absent policy debate prior to the invasion of Iraq. Roberts-Miller argues that policy debate must address both need and a plan. To be clear, there was plenty of ideological pseudo-debate about need in the lead-up to the invasion, but Roberts-Miller points out there was hardly any concrete policy discussion about what plans might be considered. Beginning with the necessary background information on the lead-up to this war, Roberts-Miller then pivots to an explanation of how identity was substituted for policy. President George W. Bush and his administration did all they could to avoid discussion of a particular plan for Iraq. Such deliberation, in their view, would have delayed and bogged down support for the war effort. Rather, they simply called out anyone who did not support going to war as unpatriotic, showing how identity trumped deliberation and the patriotic/unpatriotic binary flourished. The Bush administration also enacted a binary between the “Christian West” and “Muslim Middle East” as a way to further stake the war on identities rather than sound, policy debate. With these binaries, Roberts-Miller shows how the conditions for the disastrous Iraq War were achieved through demagogic rhetoric. Many in Congress and the public positioned debate itself as being anti-American, instead opting for naïve, patriotic support of the war. Without a strong policy debate, the American war strategy relied purely on best-case scenarios that did not happen. According to Roberts-Miller, relying on public debate, rather than demagoguery, may have prevented the invasion of Iraq or “at worst, have led to a better-planned war” with contingencies being considered (47).Chapter 2 builds on the binary paired terms of punishment and reward, using a number of case studies to exemplify how these terms are used in demagogic rhetoric. The first explored is Cleon from Ancient Athens. Cleon sets up the binary of everyone being either a friend or enemy and every act being either reward or punishment. Roberts-Miller works this pairing into a unique ratio of punish/enemy and reward/friend, which characterize demagoguery writ large. Cleon's “rational” assessment here shows the risks of defining demagoguery as primarily invested in leveraging emotional appeals. As Roberts-Miller pointedly observes, definitions of demagoguery as speech driven by mere strong affects is misguided since a speaker could provide good argumentation grounded in emotion, and, conversely, a speaker might be able to perform “emotionless” rationality without solid evidence. Instead, as Roberts-Miller explains through examples ranging from segregationists in the south to the Supreme Court decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, to illustrate how those claiming calm rationality, often through an invented middle ground, can actually perpetrate demagogic binaries and policies. In Hirabayashi, this worked its way back into a punishment/reward binary where Japanese Americans were falsely blamed (scapegoated) for sabotage during the attack on Pearl Harbor and were in need of punishment (internment).In chapter 3, Roberts-Miller elaborates further upon the features of her definition of demagoguery: scapegoating and rationality. Looking deeper into Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roberts-Miller expands beyond the Hirabayashi ruling to examine the Roberts Commission and California attorney general Earl Warren's supposedly emotionless arguments for imprisonment. A critical component of this appeal was Warren's surface-level reasonability and a supposed willingness to let the facts guide the debate surrounding internment. However, once one digs beneath the surface, it becomes clear that this rationality is merely a façade. Roberts-Miller points to a lack of evidence that there was any Japanese American involvement in Pearl Harbor and the difference in treatment between Japanese Americans and German and Italian Americans as proof of prejudice rather than deliberation guiding decision making. This is used to prove that rationality markers are often deployed to conflate the difference between a logical argument and an argument that is made by appealing to logic. Ultimately, the Japanese were interned not because of logic in and of itself but because demagoguery cast them as an entity Americans should fear through misleading appeals to a nonexistent logic.Chapter 4 moves from a discussion of demagoguery that appeals to logic that, while flawed, is easy to understand to demagoguery that relies on argumentation that claims rationality but intentionally obfuscates logic. The case study here is Madison Grant's racist book Passing of the Great Race, which is considered a historically significant white supremacist text because of its prevalence in America and its appreciation by Hitler himself. Roberts-Miller deftly dissects Grant's demagogic argument for the superiority of the white/Nordic race through the inconsistencies in logic. Some specific problems include Grant's lack of definition for his central term “race,” an evolutionary narrative that undercuts his claims to Nordic purity, and his practically nonexistent use of citations or appeals to authority. Roberts-Miller highlights how even those contemporary reviewers who assessed the book positively cited its poor quality of argument as a negative element. Thus, with his claims not clearly grounded in proper citations, Grant's authority comes from himself. Roberts-Miller's takedown of Grant works well to boost her claim that demagoguery can guise itself with pseudo-logic, while actually being logic's antithesis.Roberts-Miller's next move is to show how demagogic rhetoric can appeal to expert opinion and be seemingly intellectual, when it is actually anti-intellectual. Chapter 5 focuses on three case studies of nonscientists—E. S. Cox, Theodore Bilbo, and William Tam—who claimed appeals to authority and that science supported their positions (with Cox and Bilbo espousing white supremacy and Tam arguing homophobic viewpoints against gay marriage). Cox relies heavily on authorities whom he believes are right because they are good people (i.e., white). Bilbo's arguments often contradict his sources, and his sources often contradict each other. Further, the Bilbo case study works to show how demagoguery is not always a calculated maneuver, as Bilbo's political career would have been better served with a less overtly racist message. Finally, Tam shows how poor, demagogic citation practices can flourish in the digital age. Tam deflected numerous questions about his sources and the facticity of his homophobic claims as being found on the Internet, which he implicitly claimed must make them true. Here, Roberts-Miller advances more theoretical insights on the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery, bolstered most compellingly by her selection of cases that all relied on so-called expert appeals to science and, with Tam, the Internet as a whole.Roberts-Miller's conclusion again reiterates her redefinition of demagoguery and why this book has provided an important move to understanding the culture of demagoguery. Roberts-Miller then lists some topics that she could not explore in depth due to length restrictions, including gender, religion, charismatic leadership, reification, demagoguery's universality, and if demagoguery harms only in cases of an essentialized out-group identity. Indeed, I was surprised that Roberts-Miller's book largely declined to give issues of gender and other power differentials greater attention in order to present a more capacious account of demagoguery. One area in particular this book could have improved on is either providing significant cases of demagoguery on the left or explaining why this omission is necessary given her theoretical redefinition. Every major example in the body chapters of this book comes from right-leaning politicians and sympathizers. While these provide stark and compelling case examples, Roberts-Miller opens by saying, “Any project that is entirely about how badly they argue is going to be a self-congratulating exercise in saying the out-group is the out-group. Trying to identify the characteristics that help people climb up the latter [sic -ladder] of extermination shouldn't be in service of purifying our communities of demagogues—we are demagogues—but in service of reflecting on what is persuading us. That's the goal of this book” (8). As such, a case study of leftist demagoguery would have done well to illustrate her point across ideological and party lines. Or if leftist demagoguery does not exist, an explanation of why that is the case would be very insightful for future research. Nevertheless, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely and essential intervention into our conception of demagoguery in the present day. Readers of Philosophy & Rhetoric as well as those interested in political philosophy will find much practical and scholarly utility in this book.

ABSTRACTThis study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project (NRP). Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association (in the guise of analogy) and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP.

There is arguably no region of the world that has been the object of more intellectual contempt, intellectual derision, and intellectual disregard than Africa. Scholars have long documented the dark, dreary, pernicious, and primitive “Africanism” some argue has been a (if not the) defining pillar of philosophizing, literature, criticism, and historiography in the North Atlantic for a long time. Emerging along with intentionally misconstrued yet ubiquitous constructions of blackness as other than human—negative ideas about the continent of Africa and its supposed intellectual vacuity are part of a widely circulating discourse that Kurtis Keim dubbed “mistaking Africa.” In the United States, what Toni Morrison called “American Africanism” is so routine and mundane, it is hardly notable that very few courses on African philosophy and rhetoric are offered in American colleges and universities. To witness how the epistemic disregard of African rhetorics and philosophies plays out in these familiar confines, just peruse the volumes of Philosophy & Rhetoric since its inception in 1968. Such epistemic disregard is part of the “colonizer's model of the world,” to borrow a phrase from J. M. Blaut, a model that posits Western Europe and North America as the putative center of intellectual, historic, and cultural development of humankind. The upshot of this misperception has been that for too long Africa and Africa's relation to the global emergence and circulation of ideas has been severely undertheorized, particularly in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including in philosophy and rhetoric.At the same time, what it means to live (or try to live) the good life also remains a perennially vexing problem in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, and religious studies. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life attends to Africa's role in the intellectual world by rhetoricizing theories about the good life. Groundwork faults philosophical abstractionism for producing theories of both the good life and intellectual life in Africa that are too brittle, too idealistic, and too far removed from practical reality. The book's unstated goal, it seems, is to recommend rhetoric's penchant for particular contexts, contingency, and historicity to social theorists. In order to do that, Ochieng recovers the contingency and historicity specific to both the good life and sociopolitics in African societies. He convincingly demonstrates that the meanings of both are negotiated on an ongoing basis, and that both are shot through with contingency and interanimation. To wit, this is not a book about the good life alone nor about Africanism per se, but one whose central arguments about intellectual practice turn on the rhetorical nature both of ideas about Africa and of some of the best regarded theories of the good life. The argument in Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is that in order to extricate both the good life and Africa from misbegotten understandings, we must rethink intellectual work away from the orthodoxy of metaphysical thought and toward the recursivity and contingency of orthopraxy. In pressing his challenge, Ochieng is undaunted: many luminaries of both African (Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ajume Wingo, Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart) and Western (Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Žižek, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Nussbaum) thought are subject to his reproach. But the goal is not just a vain naming and shaming of these individuals. Ochieng seeks instead to refigure any polarities between African and North Atlantic thought as indications of the incompleteness and irreducible entanglement of both thought systems in the catalog of human thought and practice. For him, the telos of the good life is figured rhetorically; it emerges from conditions in particular contexts.Towards this end, Ochieng offers a program for doing philosophy that is grounded in the contingencies of everyday life. Groundwork develops this program in four chapters. Chapter 1 argues that an empirical social ontology is the best framework for investigating “the good society,” which is the ideal location for the experience of the good life. The good society, Ochieng argues, is an “emergent normativity” (57), an intransitive that develops in and at the confluence of performative particulars that comprise the ontological makeup of the social: subjectivity, power, agency, and normativity (12–58). Specifically, the good society emerges through an analysis of the “interanimation of historiography”; the activation and expansion of political imagination via the (re)articulation of the political; political practice that foregrounds lived experiences over the deus ex machina of transcendentalist and metaphysically imbued political theory; and the enactment of restructurative justice through the constant remaking of the political, social, and cultural. Of these, restructurative justice best demonstrates the turn away from the abstract and universal and toward the concrete and particular. Restructurative justice obligates members of the good society to observe “egalitarianism; democratic practices; and relationships of solidarity” (90). Anchored in the recognition that structural and historical violence have affected people differently, restructurative justice is, in the first position, concerned with unsettling the structural and historical “entrenchment of privilege and power” (91). Calls to explore financial and other compensation for American descendants of enslaved persons advocated in House Bill 40 of the U.S. Congress and by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrate this first commitment of restructurative justice. Additionally, restructurative justice upholds commitments to both democratic practices and solidarity, which Ochieng defines as a concern with enabling members of one's society who are otherwise unable to exert their political will to do so. This is how the terrain of the good life is cultivated.In chapter 2, Ochieng details his theory of the political in African societies, which borrows from and expands upon Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes. For Bakhtin, chronotope denotes the inextricable interwovenness of time and space. To apprehend the dynamic contingency of sociopolitics in Africa (and the good life), Ochieng infuses Bakhtin's chronotope with a “third dimension in the intersection of space and time: that of agency” (13). Adding agency to chronotope allows Ochieng to show “how structures are emergent from within history (time) as this is imbricated and bounded by horizons (space) of the possible (agency)” (13). Ochieng illustrates this argument in chapter 2, which works through an admittedly incomplete catalog of ten chronotopes in African politics. Through each theme, Ochieng returns to one point: politics in Africa is emergent from a diverse series of practices that are configured and constrained in history—they cannot be fully understood apart from ground contexts. He illustrates the chronotopics in African politics with examples from across the continent (Mali in the west, Kenya in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center, and South Africa and Zimbabwe in the south). This chronotopic account of politics in Africa highlights “the diversity of political formations” and foregrounds “the irreducibly plural and multi-dimensional task of the political imagination” (181) attendant to the good life.Chapters 3 and 4 pivot away from politics to ethics. In chapter 3, Ochieng argues that only a meta-ethics that grows out of the social ontology and chronotopics as developed in the preceding chapters is appropriate for the contemplation of the good life. His meta-ethics “is less that of an immovable and irresistible arché and more of a web of thick relationships; an emergent patchwork of interpretive practices and a cluster of gripping values that have come to be appreciated in light of history” (193). Chapter 4 returns at last to the motivating problem of how to theorize the good life from the standpoint of interanimation, social ontology, and articulation. On this point, Ochieng argues forcefully that the good life, if it is to square with the lived realities of humans everywhere, cannot be imbued in transcendence. He contends instead, and convincingly, that the best revered models of the good life that have echoed loudest across the centuries—the hero, the saint, and the citizen—are hollow and brittle because the authority each commands issues not from the mundaneness of everyday life but out of the abstractions of theistic, mythic, and political thinking. Thus, the good life appears in much of philosophical and religious discourse as an “ideal normativity” premised on hypostatic principles that inflect away from the practicality of social ontology. Whether it is framed as a quest for a metaphysical telos (hero) or defined by universalizing abstractionism (citizen), or as emanating from origins (saint) as nebulous as they are mythical and mystical, the good life—as it is figured in the saint, the hero, and the citizen—offers “no articulation of the social ontology from which ethical action is intelligible and is effectuated” (229). Rather than draw our ethical projects from these facile personae, Ochieng urges an ethics conditioned on ground projects, which themselves “are emergent from particular forms of social relationships” and in which “justice is instantiated in and through” (229).While its central argument—that the quest for the good life is best explained as emergent and that philosophers and rhetoricians should so orient their projects—is compelling, this case, as it is advanced in Groundwork, will strike some as familiar. Readers familiar with Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Comaroff and Comaroff's Theory from the South, Nathan Stormer's work on articulation and taxis, or Stuart Hall's work on articulation and race in The Fateful Triangle, for example, will hear familiar refrains in Groundwork. In addition, as strong a case as Groundwork makes for ground-based philosophy, it leaves a few questions unanswered. Take Ochieng's broadside against Western philosophy's proclivity for the transcendental and universal, for example. As he rightly observes, this “transcendalist delusion,” as Linda Martín Alcoff has labeled it, fails on two counts: for one, it often projects philosophers' perspectives as a “view from nowhere” (3), a neutral episteme, one that, by some ineluctable stroke of genius, is unsullied by the caprices of subjective and context-bound doxa. Second, perhaps as a consequence of the preference for transcendentalism in philosophy, it results in a willful inattention to the particularities of conditions on the ground, manifested in philosophy's preference for the abstract over the concrete (save for the cherry-picked anecdote proffered here and there). Thus, Ochieng intones in his introduction that “the very idea of rooting philosophical discourse in particular subjectivity and social context” constitutes “a betrayal of the transcendence and universality of philosophical questions” the field considers to be its purview. Yet following this line of reasoning leads to the twin challenges of delineating contexts (what to include and what to exclude in identifying a particular context), and of distinguishing different localities from each other (how to distinguish between interrelation and idiosyncrasy of contexts). In addition, recent contributions by African political theorists have moved beyond the weaknesses in Jean-François Bayart's “politics of the belly” documented in Groundwork and toward dynamic models constructed from multiple local contexts (e.g., the concepts of “pluri-politics and the politics of “ID-ology”), and in African historiography (here, one thinks of the challenges “patriotic” history in southern Africa raised by historians influenced by Terence Ranger). But these points need not dampen the appeal of the arguments laid out in Groundwork. They suggest instead a possible way of building on this project by exploring social philosophy through specific cases. This book invites us to vistas of possibility of philosophy and rhetoric's entanglements as we start our thinking by working from the ground up.

ABSTRACTThis essay tells the story of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “dissociation of concepts,” which they introduced in 1958 and is in use as a tool of criticism by many rhetorical critics. The story begins in England with John Locke's development of associative reasoning in 1770 and then moves to France, with Remy de Gourmont extending associative reasoning with the concept of dissociation in 1899. Gourmont's dissociation crosses the Atlantic and is then developed by Kenneth Burke in 1931. In turn, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca absorbed and expanded Locke, Gourmont, and Burke's theories of association and dissociation in 1958. They crafted a tool, the dissociation of concepts, that equips rhetorical reasoning with the capacity to navigate between the promise and perils of fission and fusion. Since 1958, many scholars have made productive use of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's innovation. The essay concludes with some possible futures for their dissociation of concepts.

ABSTRACTThis essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection (i.e., the condition of being affected) and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan (i.e., by accident). The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Dissociation is considered by many to be Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's most innovative and significant contribution to rhetorical theory. Currently on display in American debates over racial justice and public health, dissociation is a nuanced process of conceptual reconfiguration. After exploring how dissociation figures in these debates, the introduction summarizes how scholars over the years have extended and complicated the concept. The introduction then identifies key gaps in scholarship that are addressed by the articles included in this special section, including dissociation's philosophical genesis, its linguistic manifestations, its structural possibilities, and its role in comedic discourse.

In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Quentin Skinner argued, first, that Thomas Hobbes's philosophy is best understood when placed within the context of the study of rhetoric in Early Modern England and, second, that Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric changed in the course of his career: that he passed from a period in which he embraced civic humanism, with its emphasis on rhetoric (in the 1620s and early 1630s) to one of adamantly rejecting rhetoric in the late 1630s and 1640s, only to reembrace rhetoric in his Leviathan (1651). In his Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Timothy Raylor challenges Skinner's influential thesis, arguing for more continuity in Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric throughout his corpus.Raylor's biographical first chapter provides evidence of the kind of scrupulous scholarship characteristic of the book as a whole. Raylor leaves no question unanswered without the most thorough effort to address it, no assumption unexamined. When Hobbes undertook the tutelage of William Cavendish, Second Earl of Devonshire, in 1608, what curriculum did he design for his charge? To find out, Raylor surveys the books purchased by the Cavendish household in the years immediately following Hobbes's hiring, records that remain at Chatsworth House, the Cavendish family estate. As a result of his painstaking review of family accounts, Raylor finds nothing terribly surprising—mostly standard collections and dictionaries were purchased—but nonetheless, now we know what works Hobbes thought essential to education: the curriculum that Hobbes, as tutor, was creating for his young charge, while not neglecting the humanities, emphasized mathematics, logic, and the modern languages (Raylor 37–38).The heart of the book is Raylor's engagement with Skinner, whose work provides the skeletal architecture for Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes. In chapters 2 and 3 on Hobbes's early work, Raylor argues, contra Skinner, that Hobbes never embraced civic humanism or the place of rhetoric in it. He finds other motives than the humanistic ones assigned by Skinner for Hobbes's translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and for his poem De mirabilibus. That translation of a Greek or Latin work was a stage in the studia humanitatis was the basis for Skinner's claim that Hobbes was attempting to establish humanist bona fides in undertaking his translation of Thucydides (Skinner 238). Moreover, Cicero had praised history as “magistra vitae” (life's teacher) as a warrant for his translation that Hobbes sites in his prefatory “To the Reader.” Finally, Hobbes's defense of Thucydides against his critics in his introductory “Life and History of Thucydides” conforms in its organizational pattern to the prescriptions for the genus iudiciale in the Ad Herennium, with Hobbes taking the role of the defense against Thucydides's critics (Skinner 246–47). Taking issue with Skinner, Raylor emphasizes that Hobbes was likely attracted to Thucydides because his theory of history emphasized identifying the causal laws that explain events, a more scientific view of history that Bacon modeled in his History of Henry VII (Raylor 68–69). True, Hobbes may have praised history as teacher of moralisms, but that was in the preface where authors praise a subject to attract readers to its importance (Raylor 71). Hobbes's translation cannot stand as particularly humanist. In chapter 3, Raylor similarly finds in Hobbes's poem De Mirabilibus Pecci (On Marvelous Peaks) an emphasis on natural history and the influence, again, of Bacon, not an exercise in epideictic that checks off an achievement within the studia humanitatis (Raylor 105–9).Chapter 4's focus is on Hobbes's famous Briefe of Aristotle's Rhetoric (based on Theodore Goulston's Latin translation of 1619), which Hobbes published in 1637. By Skinner's reckoning the Briefe falls within Hobbes's second period, following what Leo Strauss called Hobbes's “Euclidian conversion” in a Genevan library in 1630, which resulted in his turning away from humanism and rhetoric and toward scientism (Raylor 127). Raylor notes that Hobbes scholars (J. T. Harwood and Pantelis Bassakos, as well as Skinner) “have scoured the [Briefe's] many omissions and its less frequent additions for signs of hostility to the enterprise of rhetoric, reading Hobbes's subsequent ‘rejection’ of eloquence back into it” (150). Skinner, laboring this antirhetoric thesis, maintained, for instance, that there “is nothing in Aristotle corresponding to Hobbes's contention in chapter 1 [of the Rhetoric] that judges are incapable of following scientific proofs, and that advocates are consequently obliged to take ‘the Rhetoricall, shorter way’” (Skinner 257). But Hobbes's rendering seems fair to what Aristotle writes at I.i.12.1355a: that rhetoric is useful because, while (in Freese's Loeb translation) “scientific discourse is concerned with instruction,” for the typical audience for rhetorical discourse such instruction “is impossible,” thus necessitating a rhetorical approach. Similarly, those who see in Hobbes's Briefe an antirhetoric bias point to Hobbes's translation of the first sentence in book II, chapter 1, that “‘rhetoric is that faculty, by which we understand what will serve our turn concerning any subject to win belief in the hearer.’” Skinner reads this as Hobbes's “sneering conclusion” that rhetoricians “are only interested in victory and not in truth” (257). In defense of Hobbes's neutrality, Raylor points out that in Aristotle's account of rhetoric, rhetorical discourse depends on doxa, not apodictic premises, and has persuasion, not the discovery of truth, as its end; furthermore, the claim that rhetoricians are interested only in victory is Skinner's interpolation, found in neither Aristotle nor Hobbes (Raylor 170). Raylor constantly refers to two facts about the Briefe to explain its character: it is a digest, and it was originally created as an aid for his tutoring of William Cavendish. “Streamlining” and “pedagogical value” can best explain Hobbes's rendering of Aristotle (155). If at particular points in the text Hobbes's version seems to make rhetoric more amoral than the original, it may be because Hobbes, in pursuit of economy, has combined attitudes Aristotle expressed elsewhere in summary fashion in the Rhetoric, a notoriously conflicted text.Chapter 5 is concerned with the view of rhetoric in Hobbes's Elements of Law, Natural and Positive, and in De Cive (On the Citizen), considered by Skinner as part of his middle period. Raylor maintains that Hobbes's works, early and late, reflect a basically Aristotelian view of rhetoric—rhetoric is a means to winning belief, is based on doxa (not the apodictic conclusions of demonstration), and, to be effective, must appeal to the passions of its nonexpert audience. He lines up descriptions of rhetoric and eloquence from Hobbes's Briefe of the Rhetoric, from Elements of Law, and from De Cive. On the face of it, the description in De Cive, later than the other two, seems decidedly more sophistic and lends support to Skinner's thesis that Hobbes lost respect for rhetoric in his middle period. In De Cive, the goal of rhetoric is said to be “‘to make the good and the bad … appear greater or less than they really are and to make the unjust appear just,’” that rhetoric does not begin “‘from true principles but from doxa … which are for the most part usually false’” (quoted in Raylor 178). Hobbes's description does not reflect the neutrality of Aristotle's approach. Raylor maintains that the description from De Cive is part of an argument against democratic assemblies and therefore should be taken not as a definitive for rhetoric generally but as a description of its typical deployment in this context (179). In support, he points out that later in De Cive, Hobbes identifies a second kind of eloquence that emphasizes perspicuity and elegance (182–83).Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Leviathan, addressing the question of whether here, in Hobbes's exemplary work of civil science, he makes room for rhetoric, either in theory or by his practice. Raylor points out that Skinner argued that with Leviathan Hobbes had “changed his mind about rhetoric since apparently rejecting it in the Elements of Law and De Cive, readmitting it as part of a reconstituted civil science” (246). Raylor disagrees: this conclusion depends “upon too strong a construction of what are, in context, rather more limited concessions, hedged about by restrictions” (246). On Raylor's analysis, before and in Leviathan, Hobbes is consistent: rhetoric and rhetorical thinking had no place in scientific discovery or mathematical demonstration, including a civil science that could be based on demonstration. Rhetorical invention fosters an uncritical acceptance of familiar conjectural patterns and associations and does not encourage original investigation (Raylor 220–23, 245), a criticism Bacon levied as well. Hobbes never wavered in his suspicion of rhetorical thinking. Raylor does grant that Hobbes allows a belated role for some aspects of elocutio in the presentational aspects of the genuine sciences, including civil science. While metaphor is verboten, simile, for example, is allowed not as a means of discovery or proof, but as a means for illustration (250; 262). This role for rhetoric, Raylor does concede, is more pronounced in Leviathan, but it was not, he insists, altogether absent earlier. Raylor grants too what Skinner and others also claim: a more pronounced polemical texture and tone in Leviathan, a greater presence of rhetorical figures, especially figures of abuse or ridicule, in the last two books (263–65). In these books, Hobbes acts not as the scientist but as the polemicist, denouncing what he regards as obfuscating abuses, especially of religionists.In my judgment, Raylor shows that Hobbes's take on rhetoric in the Leviathan is not, as Skinner claimed, “antithetical” (Skinner 12) to what Hobbes advanced in Elements of Law and De Cive. Hobbes's changed view is better characterized as Raylor has it—a restricted accommodation to allow rhetorical methods a limited role in the discourse of civil science. But in making political philosophers aware of the way the rhetorical culture of the early modern period shaped debates even into the seventeenth century, Skinner's was a genuine, original contribution. Perhaps we can allow innovators a degree of overstatement.The writer who noted that life in the absence of government would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan I.13) understood the way economy, climax (the figure auxesis), and wryness can make prose memorable. Hobbes clearly benefitted from a humanist education but had scarce respect for it. He had no regard for Ciceronian probabilism and would agree with Descartes that if two people hold opposing views, one or both of them is wrong. He preferred to pragmatic reasoning abstract ratiocination, a deductive method that generally “discovered” that “objective” reality was coterminous with his own thinking. Within the history of rhetoric, Hobbes is best seen as a transitional figure: the belated role he found for rhetoric anticipated what became in the Enlightenment the Campbell two-step: first convince, then persuade. For him, this formulation grudgingly allowed a role for rhetoric when dealing with imbeciles, but it hardly makes Hobbes a legitimate heir of the magnificent rhetorical culture of the early modern period.

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

ABSTRACT Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert in the White House's coronavirus task force, is challenged to offer responsible public communication of science despite working under a habitual liar who has no tolerance for criticism or dissent. Fauci manages this rhetorical exigence by using strategic ambiguity, the topos of the honest broker, dissociation, and a narrative that constrains executive decision making.

ABSTRACT This essay thinks through the relationship between dystopia and utopia, in particular, how the constellation of past and present in radical demands amid state and economic violence (what Weinbaum calls black feminism's philosophy of history) is that which creates “crisis”—an estrangement from the present, a reclaiming of past insurgency, and the possibilities for other worlds.

ABSTRACT The calls for us to find solace in our “together-apart-ness” obfuscate the calamity of Black lives being lost in numbers exponentially higher than white bodies. In the midst of a virus that “does not discriminate,” but is aided in its deadly spread by those systems that do, the concept of “wake work” demands our time and attention.

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

ABSTRACT Written in late March 2020 in the early days of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, this essay represents a contingent reflection on the American pandemic response, mourning in anticipation of what would soon surely unfold. I argue that the State's long-standing sacrificial economies have in this moment culminated in a suicidal State. The term is Foucault's, appearing in a controversial lecture on biopolitics, Nazism, and “biological racism.” Despite Foucault's problematic treatment of racism, I suggest that some aspects of this discourse might nevertheless be apropos in our context. The U.S. pandemic response is racism's suicidal State legacy writ large: an extension and retooling of historically racist infrastructures deployed (once again, again) in racialized domains (as more recent reports evidence), but in this moment also across biosocial inequities and vulnerabilities marked by differential fungibilities other than race.

ABSTRACT A reflection on the “mask,” as a question of response and responsibility in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACTToday, it is widely believed that humans have the ability to grasp the material world as it is, and that this grasp can be instrumentalized so as to progressively solve problems and maximize human flourishing. We call this idea “technopositivism.” Technopositivism seeks to give a comprehensive explanation of all that is, including the best possible social order. But, like all interpretive systems, technopositivism is incapable of providing such an explanation. Technopositivism is thus riddled with ironies and fragile. We argue that prevailing understandings of COVID-19 are instantiations of technopositivism and, as such, illuminate many of these ironies and fragilities.

ABSTRACT The names “COVID-19” and “Sars-CoV-2” signify an impoverished Symbolic Order attempting to come to terms with “a great disorder in the Real.” Our contemporary defense against the Real has proceeded by way of the insistence of the Imaginary, and at the same time, the Symbolic has become enslaved to this very same Imaginary. The article ends with a plea for a revitalized mode of signification—a correspondence—between the Real and the Symbolic.

ABSTRACTDuring the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing physical viruses infecting our bodies, virtual viruses infecting our computers, and symbolic viruses infecting our thinking. This essay takes up each of these interruptions in a collective attempt to better understand how we are rhetorically and where we might go politically from here.

ABSTRACT This essay walks through the ways the pandemic structures and limits our movement in cities. It suggests that our well-worn tropes for walking, in this moment, shore up the power of the state over individual bodies. To imagine the possibility of how bodily movement might resist this power, the essay turns to a rhetorical conception of scale.

ABSTRACT Unless a democratic citizenry, when it gets shaped at school, is asked to formulate complex answers to simple questions (as illustrated in this essay), there is no other avenue for their destiny than ressentiment against “the world,” which expresses itself in either a parading of culture or an inordinate sense of revolt.

ABSTRACT The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and rhetorics of witness, visibility, recognition, and violence in human rights discourse. This essay articulates the ways in which the current pandemic is being framed rhetorically as a spectacular war, using rhetoric that obfuscates the structural violations that leads to the virus disproportionately impacting the precarious. It argues for a reframing of traditional paradigms of representation, recognition, and resistance toward a notion of everyday violence that accounts for the accumulation of structural and material conditions of precarity as a human rights violation.

ABSTRACT The multiplicity of voices reflecting on the actual crisis shows that we are not looking at extreme dichotomies but are rather facing the coexistence of contradictory elements, or elements in tension, or a state of paradox. The essay tries to list these contradictory elements—newness or repetition? solidarity or egoism? local or global? private or public? democratic or autocratic outcome? nature or culture?—in an attempt to organize the current perplexity.

ABSTRACT I suggest in this essay that the responses to the coronavirus pandemic by the North Atlantic elite ought to be accounted in part to the circulation of nihilism as a structure of feeling under late capitalism. I then pose the question, how ought we think of meaning and meaning making under the shadow of ongoing extinction?

ABSTRACT Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic into lockdown during intercontinental travels, the author finds herself in limbo. With help from literary precedents such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Defoe supported by a brief interrogation of contemporary utterances surrounding the master trope “virus,” she claims a chiasmic relation between the concepts “consolation” and “control.”

ABSTRACT The circumstances of the pandemic, while inviting lessons from earlier reclusions, prompt reflection on what is lost when we are forced apart. The moral sense, as Darwin reminds us, is founded in communal bonds, the very things now brought into question. How then are values—and the dispositions that inform them—being challenged by a rhetoric of care?

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others.

ABSTRACTIn the midst of the 2020 pandemic produced by an invisible virus, words bring the world near. Words come in from a threatening outside, even as their use turns those who are inside outward. Speech practices reconfigure work and non-work, while politics, like language, turns inside-out.

As you well know, the milieu is a notion that only appears in biology with Lamarck. However, it is a notion that already existed in physics…. What is the milieu? It is what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another. It is therefore the medium of an action and element in which it circulates.—Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 11 January 1978It's really hard to feel like you're saving the world when you are watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right nothing happens. Yeah. A successful shelter in place means you're going to feel like it was all for nothing. And you'd be right, because nothing means nothing happened to your family.—Emily Landon, MD, University of Chicago, 20 March 2020The choice of the new word indicates that everybody knows that something new and decisive has happened, whereas its ensuing use, the identification of the new and specific phenomena with something familiar and rather general, indicated unwillingness to admit that anything out of the ordinary has happened at all.—Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics” In the midst of … what?In the midst of that which does not (yet) have a singular let alone accepted name (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, pathology, pandemic, crisis, lockdown, depression, emergency), and so in the midst of something that recalls a poignant 1918 letter from Madrid, published in JAMA, “telling our friends how we had the … the…. What should we call what we had been having?” What to call, how to refer, what to grasp—all open questions, in a milieu in which so very much is happening inside and outside what is and is not happening.In the midst of what is wholly and no longer new, whether in the change of name from 2019 novel coronavirus to COVID-19, long weeks of sheltering in place, anxious and ambiguous lockdown, or harrowing work on the floor of the ward, warehouse, and grocery. And yet what is not new is hardly familiar. There is not yet a shared vocabulary, let alone stable topoi or a reliable grammar. What's between us are pieces of discourse and discourses in pieces. What circulates are fragments, along with so many clichés peddled by PR firms (how many times can one hear, “In these [insert adjective here] times …”?), even as the truth of the cliché is a felt need to “reach for ways of thinking and speaking that are easily recognizable” (Düttmann 2020), not least in the name of thin solidarities that sound Orwellian notes (e.g., #AloneTogether) and fail to consider what the moment defies. There is no adequate account, meaningful response, or right word, all the more so as what must be said cannot be said in one breath, in that very expression that has become so uncertain, so explicit.In the midst of the contingent, as the commons are empty and fraught, as there are basic questions, perhaps the most basic questions, as to how to discern and decide, how to assess, blame, and respond, how to understand and judge, the line between necessity and possibility appears, blurs, reappears, blurs again. But contingency does not reign, at least for long. Finitude is being allocated—decisively and not infrequently by default. Consider the influential guidelines published by the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care on 16 March: “As an extension of the principle of proportionality of care, allocation in a context of serious shortage of healthcare resources, we must aim at guaranteeing intensive treatments to patients with greater chances of therapeutic success. Therefore it is a matter of favoring the ‘greatest life expectancy.’ … This means, not necessarily having to follow a criterion for access to intensive care like ‘first come, first serve’” (Vergano et al. 2020, 3). Of course, as a matter of course, this is but one of the rations, so many of which are covered by the façade of “the virus does not discriminate,” a podium-spoken truism that cannot hide the fact that the dice were already loaded. In the midst of disproportionate death, undue sacrifice, and the lived reality (e.g., three-mile-long food lines) of alphabet soup economic recovery (will the other curve be a U, V, W, or L?), who is to say who draws the lines, makes the cuts, and parcels relief (as one searches through Rawls looking for a meaningful word about words)? And as these actions take shape in words, when and how are they said? Under what conditions can they (not) be heard?In the midst of an exceptional onslaught, an emergency that leads some to speak of battle and others to speak of care, all in the swirl of political leaders demonstrating better and worse understandings of executive power (compare, for instance, Mr. Trump's bleach-drinking “sarcasm” with President Ramaphosa's thoughtful though certainly not uncontroversial concern), while packs of journalists pretend to be epidemiologists from their Zoom-readied “studies,” and pundits proclaim certainty in the name of folding every question back into their account of the culture war. If the “normality” of emergency has become perhaps too familiar, not least in the pages of “theory,” it may now admit to new scrutiny, as big tech enters into surveillance agreements with government, as lockdown is granted presumption, and as nations close borders (African Union 2020), all in the face of an invisible dispersion, a movement of contagion from cases to clusters to communities to states, a movement whose existence is denied (implausibly) at cost.This special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric took shape in the midst of what may well prove to be some of the COVID-19 pandemic's earlier and yet perhaps decisive days. Each of the issue's remarkable contributions grapples with this uneven, frantic, and wholly uncertain turn. Each essay poses fundamental questions and takes up multiple and often competing concerns. These are not then works that strive for the last word. In some distinction to the “plague tracts” of old, these essays compose and constitute a proper beginning, a set of provisional and experimental disclosures that forgo certain conclusions in favor of imaginative and critical insight. Indeed, the pages that follow are both chronicle and guiding light, an inquiry into key rhetorical-philosophical questions provoked by COVID-19 and close reflection on theoretical, conceptual, and practical problems that must be figured into—and which indeed work to figure—responses to the pandemic and its aftermath. Unfolding within a number of idioms and a variety of gestures, this work holds a number of crucial debates, not least whether the pandemic amounts to a common experience and how it troubles the commonplace and the exception(al), perhaps in ways that upset the very taking place of language. One can hear sadness across these pages, as well as anger. And one can hear a certain quietude, a notable reserve about the meaning of the pandemic for the future of higher education—this question is close by and pressing, in a way that may deserve separate and dedicated attention, perhaps sooner rather than later.To be sure, this issue of the journal was not planned, or at least it was not planned in any traditional way. From within and looking a bit beyond P&R's specific interdisciplinary concern, it began with the wager that this is not a moment for humanities-based inquiry to take its (given) time or demand (social, or social-scientific) distance. Such inquiry must appear and work in the midst, perhaps not as so much (often functionalist) “activism,” but as a dedicated and tireless concern for grasping and grappling with what is now (not) happening, its conditions, meanings, and values. Part of this task may be that we need to hear one of Hippocrates's aphorisms anew: “Life is short, the Art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” If so, this will be shared work, a portion of which begins here. And indeed, this issue of the journal is the product of a remarkable collaboration, a collective effort to write in the midst of distraction, difficulty, and pain and a commitment to break the schedule in the name of publishing at speed (we hope that you will excuse whatever typos slipped through in the push). I am sincerely grateful to all of the contributing authors, and to the staff at Penn State University Press, especially Diana Pesek, Jessica Karp, and Joseph Dahm. It is an honor to work with each of you.

ABSTRACT The essay dramatizes the strategic movement of thinking/writing through the question “What is human?” as a series of modulations in style.

ABSTRACT Philosophy combined with rhetoric offers a consolation in a time of crisis that politics cannot achieve. Political speech is guided by ideology. Philosophical speech is guided by ideas. It is the ideas that offer perspective that is so much needed in difficult and dangerous times.

ABSTRACT Confinement is an experiment in procrastination. It used to be a vice, close to acedia, but we now take it as irrational. But it's not clearly so. Procrastination is indeed vicious when a philosopher delays permanently explaining what his theses are. Derrida is a case in point.

ABSTRACTThis paper revisits the rhetorics of system and irony in Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel in order to theorize the utopic operation and standpoint that, I argue, system and irony share. Both system and irony transport the speculative speaker to the impossible zero point preceding and suspending the construction of any binary terms or the world itself—an immanent nonplace (of the in-itself, nothingness, or chaos) that cannot be inscribed into the world's regime of comprehensibility and possibility. It is because the philosopher and the ironist articulate their speech immanently from this standpoint that system and irony are positioned as incomprehensible to those framed rhetorically as incapable of occupying it. This standpoint is philosophically important, I maintain, because it allows one to think how the (comprehensibility of the) world is constructed without being bound to the necessity of this construction or having to absolutize the way things are or can be.

ABSTRACT While claiming to be a much-needed corrective to the dual disappointments of structuralism and post-structuralism, one is starting to get the sense that affect may have simply inverted, rather than resolved, the binary of form/feeling. Yet emerging within and against the affective turn is a re-turn to structure as the condition of possibility for affectivity. From this re-turn, which I'll term affective formalism, is culled the transdisciplinary exemplars reviewed here: Ruth Leys's The Ascent of Affect, Gary Genosko's Critical Semiotics, Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects, with a nod to Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. Far from caging affect, these new (and not so new) books suggest a return to form, once again, with feeling.

Other| May 22 2020 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy; Michael Kennedy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mark Schaukowitch Mark Schaukowitch Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2020) 53 (2): 199–205. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.2.0199 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy, Mark Schaukowitch; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 22 May 2020; 53 (2): 199–205. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.2.0199 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 You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.

ABSTRACTRhetoricians usually consider Plato's Republic as a work dedicated to political philosophy. As such, it is ostensibly antidemocratic and thus antirhetorical. But if we focus on the reason for the political allegory—the investigation of justice in the soul—it is clear that Plato is interested in Burke's question: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” Accordingly, this article employs the terms of Burke's pentad in order to articulate the rhetorical significance of Plato's own drama of psychic motivation. Ultimately, I read the degenerating constitutions of the Republic as a rhetorical typography that not only identifies audience types and how to influence them, but also offers a map of psychic transformation that addresses Socrates's famous challenge to rhetoric in the Phaedrus.

Other| February 21 2020 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy; Michael Kennedy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mark Schaukowitch Mark Schaukowitch Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2020) 53 (1): 104–110. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.1.0104 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy, Mark Schaukowitch; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 21 February 2020; 53 (1): 104–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.1.0104 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 You do not currently have access to this content.

The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that it persists in literary studies and under the quasi-philosophical heading “critical theory.” Meanwhile, if Brian Leiter offers any indication in his Avital Ronell-scandal quip about theory—what they call “bad philosophy in literature departments”1—then the very question “Why theory now?” would be challenged by professional philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, if not ignored altogether. How and to what extent has Theory consumed territory that was once occupied by philosophy per se? Is “Continental philosophy” now practically synonymous with Theory, and if so, how does that work from the two very different philosophical perspectives? From a global perspective, is professional philosophy small and getting smaller, while “theory”—until recently associated with Europeans and others who indeed consider themselves “philosophers”—large and getting larger? In what ways are theories like postcolonial, queer, and critical race related historically to philosophy? That is to say the question of philosophy/theory raised by the Frankfurt School and recently reiterated by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory speaks to people in rhetoric and to many others across the humanities and social sciences. In this forum I join Martin Jay, Nancy Struever, D'Angelo Bridges, Steven Mailloux, Peter Simonson, and Catherine Chaput as we address this question “Why theory now?” paying special attention to the relevant histories we need to untangle “theory” on the recent scene.One might imagine how a single question posed to seven scholars in a forum invites debate, with the answers pitched against one another. Since we can only buy one answer, it would seem the others can't be right—we are faced with an argumentative scheme of the mutually exclusive. And no doubt there are moments both within and among these essays that don't allow for easy agreement. My essay is set up polemically, so the reader is faced with a choice between a prevailing take on rhetorical theory that invokes classical antiquity, and my own contrary place and date: Ann Arbor, 1900. Bridges recalls for this P&R readership how in 1985 the literary critic Barbara Christian made us choose between Theory then consolidating in the elite practices and institutions where traditional forms of power—including most prominently white, male, and colonial—came at the expense of theory that has long been practiced elsewhere (formatively in Douglass's explicitly rhetorical My Bondage and My Freedom, Bridges will argue). And then there are familiar divides within the essays themselves, and into their presumed readership. At the end of this forum, for example, Catherine Chaput forces a question that has been percolating throughout: Isn't theory as we mean it now originally and essentially critical, running from Marx through Adorno et al., so that any other uptake like the new materialism must explain itself under pressure, or appear suspiciously uncritical and hence a quiet advocate for the powers that be?Ultimately, however, the argumentative scheme of the forum as a whole is not mutually exclusive as it might appear in a more systematic philosophical imaginary, but is rather genealogical. And we each try to be critical, while avoiding master narratives in their reductive forms—whether Marxist, colonial/decolonial, or epic as in the battle between rhetoric and philosophy—so that the essays surprise. The biggest problem with master narratives as a form of scholarship is that they can become predictable and render the scholarly work practically unnecessary: once the master narrative begins you know pretty much where it will end.Instead “Why theory now?” is purposefully polyvalent, and the answers given depend upon the scholarly uptake, which is itself an embedded practice. As the question is picked up distinctly by an intellectual historian Martin Jay, we are returned to the nineteenth-century critique of psychologism that would simultaneously produce philosophy in its most universal aspirations, along with its critique that would come by way of “theory.” Then understood through this formative moment, current conversations around post-critique, and Berkeley-style pragmatic philosophy, appear productively different. Nancy Struever, a very different type of intellectual historian, comes at the question characteristically askew by way of “not theory” and Collingwood/Noë. From the get-go according to Struever, theory has been hampered in its abstraction that is then, inevitably, subsumed into various dumb ideologies. Instead, by way of Collingwood's work on art, we see the possibilities of particular modes of inquiry that are practical all the way down. This is theory in another key, or perhaps not theory at all (just modes of inquiry). Then my piece, inspired in part by Struever's work on history and theory over the decades, hammers at an equivocation whereby we apply the term rhetorical theory indiscriminately to any systematic reflection upon language use or some other type of communication. Instead my goal is to gather inductively what we currently tend to mean when we use the term rhetorical theory, and then locate when exactly it took on its current scope that can include all sorts of things beyond such reflexive activity mentioned above. For the sake of argument, the answer I come up with is Gertrude Buck (Ann Arbor, 1900), and the Strueverite phrase I land on is “reality figured by way of its alternatives,” metaphor most prominently. D'Angelo Bridges, alternatively, foregrounds the “critical” in (critical) theory as a decolonial fact that isn't just a legacy of Hegel and Marx, but fundamentally a legacy of racialized slavery in the United States and its imperative for thought: hence Douglass and the dating 1855. Thus answering “Why theory now?” for Bridges is an account of a decolonial and antiracist imperative that works only when its history becomes legible. And in this reading it turns out that our theory is now and has always been more American than usually recognized, which would help explain much of the critical edge it has now in the book publications of Duke, Minnesota, Fordham, Routledge, now Ohio State, and so on. Then also on the genealogical front we have the piece by Steven Mailloux, which I understand this way: There is no premodern theory, in our more recent, critical sense of the term. Theory emerges out of secular modernity and its others, initiated most famously by Hegel and then worked out in various detail by midcentury German and French thinkers including Fessard, who is especially noteworthy because he makes this confrontation with modernity explicit postwar (hence the dating 1945 if we need one) and in ways indebted to but not politically aligned with Schmitt's political theology. For us beyond the historical argument, this means we would be wise to consider regularly how some version of our contemporary (critical) theory, including rhetorical, negotiates this challenge of secular modernity. Or in a formula: no secular modernity, no theory.Finally and differently we have the piece on rhetorical theory by Peter Simonson, which considers itself most prominently a “sociology of knowledge.” His work is thus historical in the sociological mode, insofar as it persistently asks the questions who is doing rhetorical theory and where exactly, and who is not doing rhetorical theory and why exactly. That said, sociology of knowledge is not indigenous to Simonson's field and those fields that name this journal—philosophy and rhetoric—so Simonson must experiment methodologically. In the end, a reductive sociological formula (e.g., knowledge = power, where power is understood, against Foucault, as unidirectional) cannot prevail. (That might give us, for example, a predictable narrative where rhetorical theory is the product of white privilege and hence can be read only as a tool of oppression.) Instead, the rhetorician that he is, Simonson offers a more circuitous story, which ultimately foregrounds the trope “irony” and the historical turn that has pitched theory, and rhetorical theory in particular, against the powers that be.So instead of systematic on the order of logical argumentation, what lies before you is in itself deeply rhetorical. We work from the places we are as only we can, while narrating for others what that work entails. In this case, we can only hope that you find that work worthwhile.

ABSTRACT Building on the argument of a 1996 piece called “For Theory,” which situated “theory” in a force field of its putative opposite terms, this essay explores the way “philosophy” has come to be considered an antonym of “theory” in much contemporary discourse. It argues that despite their often contrasting meanings and connotations, the two terms would benefit from a dialogue in which the strengths of each were acknowledged without their being either hierarchically positioned or turned into bland synonyms.

ABSTRACT This essay explores how a physiological notion of affect, one predicated on the transsubstantial circulation of micro-materiality, provides useful connectivity among old and new materialisms. First, it explores nascent theories of energetic matter in Marxism as potential sites for new materialist extensions. Second, it proposes affect as a theoretical shorthand for the circulating flows of matter central to the physiological production, orientation, and materialization of bodily capacities, including the ability to reinvent political economic habituation from the perspective of difference. Third, it illustrates the contributions of a Marxist new materialism through a brief discussion of contemporary race politics.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

ABSTRACTGoogle Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse (i.e., the long view)—general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives.

ABSTRACT This article explores the roots of (African American) rhetorical theory through an examination of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Rhetorical theory in this case is a forcible call for antislavery unity between races that at the same time rejects notions of the body as a racial essence. This essay attempts to make Douglass's rhetorical theory clear so that we can better understand how the key term functions today.

Early days, things fallen asleep, hidden things, possibilities, melodies of the past and the future, timeless plans, float by, one after the other, and I feel rich under a hoard of gifts and must have hope. Then the day wakes, the nearness, the sharpness, and I am disturbed. I close my eyes in order not to see it, fall asleep again, heavily, am assailed by dreams, and frequently awaken only in the course of the afternoon without feeling restored.—Paul Klee, Diary II, 1902 Now is never quite here, at least as we might hope, or as we might insist. Its inspiration is riddled with disappointment that provokes. And so on—never quite here, this now that both enlivens and restrains, an experience of chance and a moment of choice, a question of conditions and consequences that defies full reply. Perhaps this is one beginning of theory, one way that it begins again, for now.One way—a path then, not least the path that was held in antiquity to lead outside the city, past the wall, without the comfort of given topoi and taken for granted logos, beyond the reach of law and its exception. The theoros took leave, in uncertain direction, and with no assurance of comprehension let alone recognition. Theory thus struggles, not least to overcome the entrenched expectation of (its) utility and discover a question.Here, for now, theory appears with space. It appears with a certain indifference—its distinction from “method”—if not a commitment to resistance—a stance that provokes the banal claim that it is just so much “bad writing.” And yet, theory's own history betrays that its promise has often been reserved for those who were deemed to “properly” belong to the city in the first place, just as its power has frequently come at the expense of those whom it has “encountered” along its way. Theory is never far from the problem of (its) violence.The fifty-third volume of Philosophy & Rhetoric begins with an extended and wholly engaging forum—Why Theory Now? As forum editor Daniel Gross notes in the introduction, the essays that follow contain a number of crucial arguments. And they feature significant argumentation, rhetorical and philosophical clash that raises important questions about the contested power of theoretical expression and the potential of theory's contention. There is then, as Gross suggests, the beginning of a genealogy here, an inquiry that not only discloses but performs something of the uncertain ways in which theory unfolds, that is, how it is imagined, undertaken, articulated, and troubled, sometimes in the name (and sometimes against the name) of both rhetoric and philosophy—perhaps to the satisfaction of neither. Today, it is this how that may press, a call to grasp and give way to theory's ways of beginning again—for now.