The theme of this special issue is Post-truth. No doubt it was my exasperation with the terminological state of our collective situation that incited me in the spring of 2017 to settle upon it. What, exactly, does the hyphenated couplet mean or to what does it refer? What is its significance or sense? How is it being used, by whom, for what purpose, and with what consequences—for whom? And if, as was being asserted on nearly every side, we currently find ourselves in post-truth, how might we ever get out, presuming we may one day want as much? The original contributions by Sarah Burgess, James Crosswhite, Jason David Myres, Bradford Vivian, and Eric King Watts published herein go a long way toward answering these questions. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter five different takes on what post-truth is: a dangerously normative scene of address, a contemporary communicative environment and a series of historical philosophical movements, the discourse of the masculine hysteric, an insidious mode of governance, racism's latest word. Readers also will happen upon five different estimations of post-truth's (ab)uses and effects: the depoliticization of #MeToo, babble and echo chamber, the impotence of truth, the rationalization of authoritarian impulses and the death of democracy, and zombie relations and tribal war. As for an exodus, over the course of these pages readers will be gifted words that trace an open: kairos, apophasis, desire, pluralistic deliberation, and ideological critique.For all their significant differences—both substantive and stylistic—there is, however, at least one point on which all of the issue's contributions converge: today we do not suffer a shortfall of truth. Quite to the contrary, we are witness to its excess(es), enabled by a circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth. Indeed, few to none today openly profess a brazen and callous disregard of truth; instead, truth tellers all! In view of that fact, I will use the remaining pages of this introduction to briefly develop a thesis and deliver a wager. Thesis: post-truth is a distinct regime of truth singularly suited to late neoliberal governance. Wager: Derrida's deconstruction of the philosopheme truth offers invaluable instruction in the possible undoing of the post-truth regime.“Each society,” Michel Foucault famously noticed, “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth” (1994, 131). I submit that post-truth is the name for a distinct mutation in the “‘political economy’ of truth” in the United States that has been in the making at least since the 1980s, a crucial decade during which neoliberalism began to function as a normative order of reason in public, private, and personal life. Now with other modern regimes of truth, it seems to me, post-truth shares four of five “important traits” to which Foucault attributes their truth effects: “Truth” is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for [it], as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); finally, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (1984, 131) To wit, post-truth as cash cow for print and electronic media and fodder for year-around political campaigning and fund-raising; English Dictionary 2016 Word of the Year; interminable open- and closed-door House and Senate hearings on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the internet, Ken Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, Breitbart, and the presidential bully pulpit; the birther movement, deep state conspiracy theory, global warming and New Creationism debates, and free speech controversies on university campuses across the country.But there is, according to Foucault, a fifth feature of all modern truth regimes that is conspicuously missing from post-truth. Whereas in all the others “‘[t]ruth’ is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it” (1984, 130), in the post-truth regime, the form of scientific discourse is displaced by a discourse very different in form and in kind. Of course, what sets scientific discourse or truth claims formally apart from other modes of address is, above all else, the disappearance of the enunciative subject as well as the universalization of its audience. In other words, there is a clear correlation between the value of any scientific claim to truth and the erasure of any and all traces of the “I,” on both ends of the exchange. Not incidentally, that is not the case in the post-truth regime wherein truth value pivots on the degree to which any claim or utterance comports or resonates with individuals' affectively imbued investments, attachments, and identifications. Per the Cambridge English Dictionary, post-truth is “an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to the Economist, post-truths are “assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact” (2016). The point is amplified by C. G. Prado in the introduction to his edited collection of essays titled America's Post-truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence: Post-truth is the final step in the misguided move away from objective truth to relativization of truth. If truth is objective, assertions or propositions are true depending on how things are. If truth is relative, assertions or propositions are true depending on how people take things to be. Post-truth is an extreme form of relative truth because in being subjective, it makes assertions or propositions true depending only on how individuals take things to be. (2018, 2) For the time being I wish to defer the complicated issue of the “relativization of truth” in the declared interest of not being distracted from two others. That truth has been individualized or that individuals have become, to borrow a turn of phrase from Foucault, the primary and principal points of the production, application, and adjudication of truth is one important point. That emotion and personal belief are able now to outflank even objective facts and scientific knowledge is another (the claim that literature, for example, has truths to tell has long fallen on deaf ears). Their articulation is decisive: with the regime's inflection, even inflation, of the indefinitely pluralized and individualized enunciative I who, by virtue of strong feeling, is able at any moment not only to recognize or know but, also, to tell or speak the truth, truth is privatized and immanitized, its universal and transcendental dimensions nullified altogether. Hence, what is true for any one person need not be true for everyone or anyone else; what is true for anyone now need not necessarily be true later.This thinking about post-truth as a distinct and consequential mutation in the political economy of truth in the United States prepares one to appreciate an occurrence that easily could be dismissed as insignificant, not worthy of studied reflection. In June 2017 the Fox News network dropped its wildly successful marketing tagline “Fair and Balanced.” Now how is this anything more than a trivial change in—or, for consumers who never bought it, a long overdue giving up on—appearances? “A functional change in a sign-system is,” Gayatri Spivak explained some years ago, “a violent event. Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual,’ or ‘failed,’ or yet ‘reversing itself,’ the change itself can only be operated by the force of a crisis” (1987, 197). It is from this angle that the Fox News network's erasure of “Fair and Balanced” is grasped as indicative of a crisis that may be summarily described as the epistemic drift to post-truth. Telling, too, is the network's new motto, “Most Watched. Most Trusted.” The sequence of the two syntagms is curious in the least, as conventional wisdom would have them reversed for reason of causality: because Fox delivers trustworthy news, it is the most watched network. But that is not the case here: instead the motto reads, because Fox delivers the most watched news, it is (to be) trusted. Even more, conventional wisdom would suggest that when it comes to reporting the news, “most trusted [by its viewers]” (a verb) would be rephrased as “most trust-worthy [for any viewer]” (an adjective modifying the noun or the news content delivered). The movement from one marketing tagline, “Fair and Balanced” (even if only for the purpose of keeping up the appearance of disinterestedness), to the next, “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” intimates the usefulness of the post-truth regime to late neoliberal governance. It is to this relation that I now turn.Elsewhere and on more than one occasion I have written at relative length about late neoliberalism, aspiring to lend specificity to this overused and, all too often, undefined term that typically is asked to carry the considerable weight of an overdetermined context functioning as source, origin, or ground for some phenomenon in question. In the brief compass that is the special issue editor's introduction, a short and schematic summary of it will have to do.One, I follow Foucault's lead by using the term “neoliberalism” as the name for a distinct rationality and corresponding mode of governance that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. At its most basic, I understand any rationality to be something like a mind-set or habit of thought in accordance to which persons of every sort make sense out of and conduct their daily lives, and I understand governance as the “conduct of [that] conduct,” “at a distance” and carried out by more than juridical means (Gordon 1991, 2). Despite its actually being a complex construction, neoliberalism feels natural or given by nature to those groomed in it. Like other modes of governance, neoliberalism's (soft) power to shape human activity is secured by a whole host of institutions, apparatuses, and knowledges.Now as Foucault explains in his 1979 lectures published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, twentieth-century American neoliberalism as a rationality materializes as the effort “to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (2008, 240). Even more specifically, then, neoliberalism is to be understood as a rationality inaugurated by a migration of economic sense making (for example, the calculus of profit and loss and the principle of laissez-faire) from the private or corporate sphere to the public sphere, from consumer relations in the strict sense to social relations in the general sense. Foucault delivers an illustrative example: In their analysis of human capital … the neo-liberals tried to explain, for example, how the mother-child relationship, concretely characterized by the time spent by the mother with the child, the quality of the care she gives, the affection she shows, the vigilance with which she follows its development, its education, and not only its scholastic but also its physical progress, the way in which she not only gives it food but also imparts a particular style to eating patterns, and the relationship she has with its eating, all constitute for the neo-liberals an investment which can be measured in time. And what will this investment constitute? It will constitute a human capital, the child's human capital, which will produce an income. What will this income be? It will be the child's salary when he or she becomes an adult. And what will the income be for the mother who made the investment? Well, the neo-liberals say, it will be a psychical income. (2008, 243–44) Summarily put, neoliberalism is a rationality that lends market sense even to so-called interpersonal relations and the micro-practices of everyday life.It is crucial to notice, however, that with neoliberalism also comes a determined and determining critique of the state. That is to say, whereas in nineteenth-century classical liberalism laissez-faire functioned as “a principle of government's self-limitation,” in post–World War II America “it is a principle turned against it” (2008, 247). Foucault elaborates: Faced with excessive governmental action, and in opposition to it, the nineteenth century sought to establish a sort of administrative jurisdiction that would enable the action of public authorities to be assessed in terms of right, whereas here we have a sort of economic that claims to action in strictly economic and market (2008, The of market analysis to is the the and, to this demand that the social be and and the of to the of from the to the and or altogether. It also is the rationality by which the of the and primary care is able to make sense. In the of the neoliberal of the state at out the with which it the and, of course, of human and individuals and private as the United she education for public education, personal and interminable for social for public of all for public and knowledge, for use for public is neoliberal of a certain of subject that is my second point. I follow Foucault in to be neoliberal primary the of the during the century and the I also take a is to say, as the primary point of of neoliberal governance. The name Foucault gives to that point of of power is of and the (2008, with to neoliberal governance, Foucault The subject is only as which does not mean that the whole subject is as In other words, the subject as does not an of any with economic It means that economic is the of one will on the of a new It also means that the becomes that power a on to the and only to the that he is That is to say, the of between the and the power on and the principle of the of power over the will be only this of of is the of and the But this does not mean that every every subject is an economic (2008, As Foucault explains in the series of is a subject of interest for the state only to the extent that its conduct is in market and Foucault points out that conduct takes in what he terms “an of on the one in the form of to a series of and, on the in the form of production, to the of or which his to the production of the of (2008, on the one to over which neoliberal have no and on the other “to the of will in their activity a an That is to say, in the market of and to upon laissez-faire makes itself as the by which individuals their and, in the Indeed, what Foucault as of the relationships of the social to the that is, the of neoliberalism is the historical of for also to function to in the care for The of course, is that as is by a in a situation Foucault with to the which happen to and with to the he for (2008, it is not to the neoliberal as but to the that virtue one of the of the neoliberal of the I use the term to a relatively but in I certain that in other and for example, in of in I will be to call late neoliberal and have their to here I to late twentieth-century neoliberalism's to and of in and the this of neoliberal governance, has the his of me that of has a general in how human and conduct in the century. As he it, very of who we of the we are and the of we have this I mean that the of the a of the of our point is to that but human has to as a the sense of the in the political but human now as a new of of in the political what is and in with this but human has been a in neoliberal political the and its terms of analysis have been to the of the has emerged the of the that is grasped at the but … in terms of its are understood less in terms of their of carried on a more in terms of a global economy of and the is a and with yet from a to the body, to be and this gives a in what of the for has the of the is and the is less about of the than it is about Hence, by I mean to point to a rationality that the or or by which or are made to and to others and those and, no by the of any social order or historical the social is for this point I the post-truth regime's with and usefulness to late neoliberal and governance is to the regime of truth whose is on the and of the enunciative I and whose is the and of truth a mode of governance whose primary is but whose primary point of of (soft) power is Indeed, at this point I might it this post-truth is the of has been asserted by more than one and on that it is to the of Foucault and or the and that we find ourselves in this we call post-truth. I one example, have the form of truth most today have no time for or and are to claims about relative other than to its form of truth is of and is in the of Michel Foucault and their from of truth, like Foucault and objective truth and truth to of truth was the in the in historical from modern to I it could be from the In fact, I will my introduction to this special issue to a with a that as a deconstruction will have something important to about how to post-truth well in of its Indeed, the been there from the in the thinking on the trace and the of the the universal of truth is also these the is to on is the It is the of the which is to say, the the not as a an and an as as the of would have it” but, instead, as by the trace of another which never as then, that is not to be grasped in the sense as on a but in the general sense as a of and made the case for in the general sense in and I the of to the the one the the the that is would not as the or opposition which gives them is the most significance of the to as the of the and functioning of an not by any would be the a in the of a trace the other as other in the no would do its and no would as the force of Derrida's is not against and for as Prado and others would have a of the of that classical will not the effort is to at the of both and be it with to or truth. and there is no of or truth the of or truth, even if all of the of or of truth are will also have been the point of Derrida's with a on the of to has this to about the of the and the the transcendental and the is not only the and to a truth whose would with all The or of being in a is no and in with it is the of As long as is or can not be in the … is not The and in this not the of possible in as that is the also is subject to even As The whole point of Derrida's analysis is the being determined and universal in an sense and are and not because are not but because the very of the universal sphere can only be in through like of this the to itself the possible to turn its the and the of the universal to relation that between truth and its also to the relation of and the and the given state of our In this particular historical the at is to against the to to the occasion of the of the in the of (the then, are five very different on the state of our post-truth as a the call to that any in our post-truth our thinking about it both and I want to all of the for their contributions to this issue and my deep to for his and of the

ABSTRACT This article proposes a counterintuitive approach to the timely phenomenon of so-called post-truth politics. The article argues that the premise of a post-truth politics misdiagnoses the particular crisis of truth that now threatens to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Social and political appeals cited as prime examples of an allegedly proliferating “post-truth” mentality do not abandon truth; those appeals rationalize available forms of truth conducive to the legitimation of authoritarian power. They do so, the article maintains, by simultaneously undermining opportunities for pluralistic deliberation over conditions of truth itself and promoting extra-deliberative versions of truth (based on biological supremacy, historical destiny, or cultural heritage). In supporting these claims, the analysis shows how the spread of particular forms of truth (not the simple loss of it) can erode democracies from within and, concomitantly, how authoritarian regimes may be invested in a regime of truth as much as any other sociopolitical system.

ABSTRACT Our post-truth condition is both specifically contemporary and as old as philosophy and rhetoric themselves. The condition is exacerbated by instantaneous worldwide communication through rapidly multiplying forms by very large numbers of people and other entities. It is also exacerbated by the belief that contemporary philosophy and intellectual opinion support a recognition that we are in a post-truth condition. Addressing our condition requires acknowledging that truth is not a theoretical object, that it is best approached not positively but rather apophatically, and that this apophatic way is practical, not theoretical.

ABSTRACT This article examines the kairotic beginnings of the #MeToo movement in order to understand what we are to make of this moment. It shows that commentaries about #MeToo unfold as a debate over the desire for law and the law of desire, ceding the contingent kairotic moment in which we might remake our contemporary political landscapes. As such, I argue that movements dedicated to ending sexual violence must reimagine the scene of address in which demands for justice might be spoken and their speech recognized as the truth. This project is complicated, however, by a post-truth era in which telling the truth matters little because truth itself has been devalued. Through this lens, we can see that the cost of telling the truth in the terms of the established debate is the creation of a form of identity politics that reinforces post-truth logics rather than intervening in them.

Anyone who does not simply refuse to perceive decline will hasten to claim a special justification for his own personal existence, his activity and involvement in this chaos. There are as many exceptions for one's own sphere of action, place of residence, and moment of time as there are insights into the general failure. A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence—rather than, through impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion—is triumphing almost everywhere. That is why the air is so thick with life theories and world views, and why in this country they cut so presumptuous a figure, for almost always they finally serve to sanction some utterly trivial private situation. For just the same reason the air is teeming with phantoms, mirages of glorious cultural figures breaking upon us overnight in spite of it all, for everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his isolated standpoint.—Walter Benjamin, “Imperial Panorama, VIII,” One-Way Street It is difficult to see the question of truth. In the imperial panorama that so concerned Benjamin, the question of truth was disappeared by a war's seemingly endless violence. In this moment, now, it appears to disappear into the midst (though not the fog, not by the long shot—of our own inattention) of endless war, a violence that drones over Hannah Arendt's worry that it is “in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth in all of its forms” (1993, 239) and drowns out Alexandre Koyré's pressing warning that the assertion and experience of “essential enmity” renders the lie not simply a virtue but a “primary and fundamental rule of behavior” ([1943] 2017, 146).Without question, there is now (again) deep and ongoing concern for the deficient or excessive state (inside and outside the nation-state) of truth and what is to be said and done in the apparent aftermath of veracity. Post-truth has provoked—no doubt, but perhaps not always well. From the left, right, and center, it has so often led into the cul-de-sac of what Foucault called “commentary,” a proliferating reiteration that has relied on a prominent but question-begging pronouncement about the definitive meaning of a “word of the year” to foreclose if not deter inquiry into the question of truth. More than a bit of this common cause is articulated and enacted in works such as Michiko Kakutani's The Death of Truth (2018). Though nearly unreadable for the pretension that covers its conceptual confusion (including an astonishing indifference to the implications of the mythology that is explicitly claimed—perhaps incorrectly—to abide in its title), this book takes care to tick all of the “proper” boxes: consistent and unrelenting terminological conflation (for example, and with no apparent need to consider their order, post-truth = fake news = alt-facts = lying = propaganda = opinion = subjectivity = extreme relativism = denialism, etc., etc.)—check; a call to cling with unwavering faith to the banister of a monolithic “science” (the call's simplicity recalls the sole and quaint “Science Building” that adorns the campus of Bob Jones University)—check; a pronounced aversion to any inquiry that would reflect on forms of truth and how such variety may underpin and trouble the expression of truth (i.e., there is no time for either dawdling philosophy or indulgent rhetoric)—check; an incoherent and cherry-picking tirade against something named “postmodernism,” an attack that consistently conflates (and refuses to actually read) inter alia structuralism, poststructuralism, constructivism, deconstruction, and genealogy, all in order to foment (or just foam) against the specter of a deeply confused notion of “subjectivity” and then rally for a return to proper and unified reason, one that appears unable to hear anything of Arendt's claim in “Lying in Politics,” that “moral outrage” will not facilitate an interest in truth and that the nonaccidental arrival of lying into politics is indicative of the fact that much “deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts” (6; emphasis in original; it is telling that Kakutani excludes this idea from her own quotation of Arendt, see 12–13)—check, check, and check; the expressed wish to recover a pure and proper language for public life (and, on the down low, the unquestionable virtue of pragmatic prose, aka journalism), one that will somehow (remember—there can be no rhetoric and likely no speech-action) undo America's “deep division,” a divide that is itself never queried in terms of whether it amounts to stasis or a rather self-confirming (and defeating) conceit on the part of those who prefer not to hear anything but what they want to hear—check; shoot-from-the-hip warnings about the violent and totalitarian tendencies of a post-truth world, as if truth lacks any manner of coercion and as if there is not standing disagreement (not least among victims) as to what regimes make of truth claims and the various ways in which they do and do not make claims on truth—check.If the question of truth is too often hidden and overwritten by so much chatter, including the incoherent pronouncements of those who seem to believe that having character is the same thing as expression limited to 280 characters, the question reappears in the timely and challenging contributions that compose this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric. Indeed, the articles that follow shed different and crucial light on the emergence, dynamics, and stakes of life in the midst of post-truth—they also forge interesting connections with other recent work in the journal, including several of the contributions published in P&R's fiftieth anniversary issue (50:4, 2017). I want to express my sincere and full gratitude to Barbara Biesecker, who correctly insisted on the need for a special issue on post-truth, imagined its form and convened a distinguished group of contributors, and then tirelessly served as the issue's editor. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with Professor Biesecker, a genuine scholar and an ever so thoughtful colleague.

ABSTRACTThis article asserts that post-truth is the name we have assigned to a powerful repetitive mode of discourse that legitimizes conspiracies and anxieties regarding how blackened biothreat bodies will be unleashed upon society. Post-truth signifies a kind of excess and excessiveness wherein grammars of common sense making are overrun. Post-truth indexes a desire for gratuitous violence against norms of civil society—indeed, against civil society itself. Post-truth is not a set of lies. It is a precondition for tribal war. The article sets forth post-truth as a disorienting and frightening “dissemblage” that is driven by fantasies of sovereignty, rituals of militarization, and the colonization of expertise. I outline the formal features of post-truth by examining a docudrama produced by the Discovery Channel called Zombie Preppers. In the end I speculate about how post-truth metastasizes in the social body as “brain damage.”

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against “metapolitical” theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing.

The Enlightenment can be described as an attempt to make reason more worldly in order to make the world more reasonable, and the Enlightenment project is characterized by an unflagging confidence in reason's ability to ensure humanity's progress toward a more peaceful, civilized, and moral social and political order. However, the luminaries of the Enlightenment did not succumb to the naive belief that disembodied reason was capable of exercising an immediate influence on human history. To the contrary, these thinkers recognized that humanity always already mediates between reason and history and that reason only ever becomes efficacious in the world by being at work in and on human beings. Accordingly, they recognized that their attempt to promote human progress could succeed only in and through a program of universal education. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment not only thought deeply about the nature and purpose of education; they also saw their own intellectual efforts as contributions to the education of the human race. Indeed, the great Enlightenment thinkers were driven to serious reflection on their own practice of writing as the vehicle for their overarching attempt to engage, teach, and shape their readers. Though it is now common to describe the Enlightenment as a transition away from humanism's concern with speech, rhetoric, and community toward a one-sided emphasis on mathematics, method, and subjectivity, this characterization is a drastic oversimplification that fails to attend to the necessary and abiding connection between Enlightenment, education, and communication.Immanuel Kant is exemplary, in this context. For though he did not write an independent treatise on rhetoric, he emphasizes the vital role that rational discourse and effective communication play in promoting freedom and morality. Thus, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment itself as an attempt to educate the human race by cultivating in each individual the capacity and courage to employ their own understanding to make rational judgments without relying on the guidance of authoritative opinion or received custom, and he argues that this pedagogical project requires, as its necessary condition, the public use of reason, in which individuals communicate their own considered views to their community. Kant thereby indicates that the Enlightenment is inseparable from the modes of communication that make Enlightenment possible and a fortiori from an account of what modes of communication are conducive to the Enlightenment project.G. L. Ercolini's Kant's Philosophy of Communication takes Kant's account of the connection between Enlightenment and the public use of reason as its starting point. Noting that the public use of reason is nothing if not a way of speaking to and with others, Ercolini's principal thesis is that Kant not only offers “a complex philosophy of communication, but, as it turns out, rhetoric, debate, and exchange emerge as central to his enlightenment philosophy” (2). Ercolini begins by noting that historians of rhetoric have tended to overlook Kant completely or to emphasize his noteworthy criticisms of rhetoric (9). However, Ercolini avers that “a little digging” allows us “to get past Kant's curt dismissals” of rhetoric and reveals that there is, in fact, “much in his work that relies on an important role for speech, rhetoric, communication, and public discourse” (6). Accordingly, Ercolini undertakes the daunting but important task of drawing out the theory of communication underlying Kant's various “discussions of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, and style” (2).Ercolini begins her analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication by reviewing Kant's several explicit discussions of rhetoric (chapter 1). She rightly observes that Kant is often quite critical of the art of rhetoric, and she notes that “Kant's objection to rhetoric … is twofold: first, to its deceptive purpose and, second, to its violation of the audience's goodwill and autonomy” (33). That said, Ercolini emphasizes that Kant's criticisms of rhetoric do not prevent him from acknowledging the need to speak well, with practiced eloquence and measured style (40). Indeed, Kant appends an important footnote to his most famous and trenchant critique of rhetoric in which he praises the figure of the Ciceronian orator, who speaks “without art and full of vigor” (40). In the final analysis, then, Kant's explicit discussions of rhetoric are ambivalent. Kant is critical of rhetoric, to be sure, but he also points beyond rhetoric to a mode of speaking that is both praiseworthy and salutary. Thus, Ercolini concludes, “Kant's treatment of rhetoric, albeit confounding and requiring much patience, ends up opening possibilities for distinguishing good from bad rhetoric” (41). The remainder of Ercolini's book is devoted to exploring these possibilities in an attempt to develop “a Kantian account of what could be considered as a positive role for rhetoric” (34).Schematically, Ercolini's analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication seems to fall into three parts: one that deals with the practical significance of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 2–3), one that deals with the aesthetic characteristics of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 4–5), and one that begins to develop an account of what Ercolini calls “rhetorical judgment” (conclusion). In the realm of the practical, Ercolini first examines Kant's interest in and analysis of popularity (chapter 2) and then turns to a more direct examination of the moral significance of rhetoric (chapter 3). Ercolini's treatment of Kant's account of popularity is one of the strongest and most important sections of the book. Noting Kant's well-known criticism of popularity in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (77–79), Ercolini illuminates this criticism's place within Kant's broader critique of Popularphilosophie, on one hand (81–87), and his own attempt to clarify, popularize, and promote the Critique of Pure Reason by publishing the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, on the other (60–77). Ercolini's central claim is that Kant is critical of the pursuit of popularity for its own sake but that he also recognizes the need to popularize his own thought. Of course, Kant is well aware that it is difficult to navigate between the demand for rigor and well-groundedness and the demand for clarity and accessibility, but Ercolini concludes that he sees the attempt to meet both demands as one of the central tasks of philosophical communication.Chapter 3 turns from an examination of popularity to an investigation of the normative principles that ought to govern the quest for popularity. In taking up the relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and his philosophy of communication, however, Ercolini turns away from what she describes as the “strict and morally rigorous Kant,” who “is interested in determining the a priori principle of moral action divested of any particularities, experience, or other intervening factors”, to what she describes as “another ethics in Kant”—“an other-ethics,” “an ethics of the empirical,” “an improper ethics” (92, 106, 104). Ercolini's claim is that Kant's anthropological writings reveal an approach to ethics that is “anchored in the realm of the contingent, the situational, and the momentary” (93). On Ercolini's reading, this “improper ethics” corrects for “the radical interiority of the categorical imperative” by offering an account of the human as necessarily directed toward and obligated by the community in which he or she abides (110). And precisely because it orients one toward community, the “other side” of Kant's ethics both demands and describes forms of communication fitting for moral community, as Ercolini demonstrates through a fascinating analysis of Kant's concrete discussions of communal dining (115–20).After completing her examination of the “practical” side of Kant's philosophy of communication, Ercolini turns to the “aesthetic” side in order to consider the role of Kant's aesthetic theory (chapter 4) and his account of style and tone (chapter 5). Chapter 4's overarching goal is to explain why Kant ranks poetry above rhetoric in the hierarchy of the fine arts. Ercolini argues that a careful analysis of Kant's argument reveals that both poetry and rhetoric can provoke a lawless and disordered relation between the cognitive capacities but that both can also provoke a lawful and harmonious free play of the faculties (154–64). Accordingly, Ercolini once again concludes that Kant's aesthetic theory points toward a positive account of rhetoric, his explicit criticisms of rhetoric notwithstanding.Chapter 5 offers an important analysis of Kant's account of style and tone. Regarding style, Ercolini stresses Kant's recognition of the need to balance logical and aesthetic perfection in order to achieve a “perspicaciousness” that is conducive to true popularity (167–75), while avoiding a fashionable, enthusiastic, and affected style that undermines rational autonomy (175–81). Whereas style can and should engage the understanding, Ercolini argues that Kant thinks that tone necessarily engages the affects (186). Thus, Kant's account of tone is primarily negative in orientation—he emphasizes the need to avoid a “superior” tone that smacks of “elitism, where the philosopher is one of the few who uncovers the secret of philosophy and, as such, holds a superior position over the many who have no such direct access” (193). And yet this negative posture points beyond itself to Kant's commitment to a way of speaking that “facilitates understanding and encourages engagement and exchange” (197).In her conclusion, Ercolini seeks to draw the insights from the preceding chapters together in order to offer an account of Kant's Enlightenment legacy. She pays particular attention to Kant's popular essays. Drawing out their historical context, she characterizes these essays as “argumentative moments in dynamic and lively debates” that describe, theorize, and establish “the communicative space of a vision of politics focusing on public modes of engagement” (202, 200). Ercolini concludes that Kant's popular essays reveal an implicit theory of what she calls “rhetorical judgment,” that is, the “practices of submitting one's thought to the public realm, achieving balance between rigorous examination … and aesthetic perfection” in order to attain true popularity (215).Having offered an overview of Ercolini's argument, I conclude this review by developing three critical suggestions in hopes of inspiring further reflection on the nature, meaning, and significance of Kant's philosophy of communication. The first critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of Kant's ethical theory. As noted above, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's moral philosophy turns on her distinction between Kant's account of a pure and abstract ethical theory grounded in the categorical imperative and the “impure” and therefore “improper” ethics that Kant presents in his anthropological writings. Though Ercolini is right to claim that scholars have tended to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, she goes too far in her own attempt to correct for the scholarship's one-sidedness. For Ercolini goes so far as to claim that it is possible to read Kant as grounding morality in anthropology (106). However, the mature Kant consistently maintains that the categorical imperative is and must be the foundational principle of human morality. This observation is not intended to discredit Ercolini's claim that Kant's anthropological writings shed important light on his understanding of communication—they surely do—but it does call Ercolini's way of drawing a sharp distinction between two different “sides” of Kant's ethics into question. It would be productive to further develop Ercolini's careful examination of Kant's anthropological writings by exploring the important and vital connection between Kant's philosophy of communication and his account of the nature and significance of the fundamental principle of morality, that is, the categorical imperative.A second critical suggestion has to do with Ercolini's way of abstracting from Kant's account of reason as spontaneous, free, teleological, and moral. For Kant, the categorical imperative is grounded in reason. The moral law is always reason's moral law, and reason always already demands that morality be efficacious in the world of lived experience. This demand is root and fruit of Kant's account of the highest good, and it ultimately takes the form of an obligation to establish what Kant describes, variously, as a moral world, a kingdom of ends, and an ethical community. Attending to Kant's account of reason suggests that the categorical imperative, as reason's moral law, is always already bound up with concerns with and interests in the well-being of the community. Indeed, Kant emphasizes the importance of speech, communication, and the public use of reason at least in part because these activities are conducive to the realization of the highest good in the world. Accordingly, we do not need to turn away from Kant's “proper” ethics in order to explore the connection between morality, community, and communication. Ercolini's account of the role of communication in humanity's social and political life might benefit from further reflection on the central role that the highest good plays in Kant's moral theory.A final critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of the Critique of Judgment. For, though Ercolini offers a general summary of Kant's project in this work and a careful analysis of Kant's account of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric, she overlooks several other important and explicit discussions of communication that Kant offers in the third Critique. In particular, an account of Kant's philosophy of communication would benefit from a discussion of Kant's claim that judgments of taste are characterized by their universal communicability, of Kant's account of genius as an artist who is characterized by a special talent for a unique mode of communication, and especially of Kant's suggestion in CPJ §60 that beautiful art is capable of contributing to social and cultural progress by facilitating communication and sympathy between different social classes. Ercolini's discussion of the third Critique is helpful so far as it goes, but this work contains more resources for developing a complete account of Kant's philosophy of communication than Ercolini suggests.In the final analysis, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's philosophy of communication is clear, original, and provocative, and it pursues a number of important questions that are typically overlooked in the Kant scholarship. Kant's Philosophy of Communication makes an original and timely contribution to the scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars working on Kant's social and political theory, and it will be required reading for anyone interested in Kant's understanding of speech, rhetoric, and communication.

ABSTRACT This article asks if soundscapes are reasonable by inquiring if they can be designed to enhance the capacity for reasoned judgment. Using a normative pragmatic approach to argumentation theory, I demonstrate that soundscapes can be strategically designed to amplify or attenuate obligations, increase or weaken conviction, and create or mask argumentative context. I use the paradigm case of the 2012 casserole protests in Quebec to identify how arguers can use soundscapes to compel a response, increase the desire for advocacy, and create a public context. This expands the multimodal argumentation literature to incorporate sound. This article also intervenes into sound studies by supplying critical norms of reasonableness to assess soundscapes.

Other| August 31 2018 Books of Interest 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 Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2018) 51 (3): 321–326. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.3.0321 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Schaukowitch, Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 31 August 2018; 51 (3): 321–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.3.0321 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 © 2018 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2018The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACTBy way of generative critique, this article considers the premises, potential, and consequences of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and object-oriented rhetoric (OOR). To do this, it moves through four progressive and accumulative sections: first, the primacy and necessity of meaning-formation (signification) in any meaningful ontology, and thus the rhetorical exigency of any ontology in the first place; second, the potential and pitfalls of any specifically object-oriented rhetoric; third, the function of doxa (and episteme / logos) as means to recalibrate OOO and bridge it to a proper OOR; and fourth, extending from such a doxical approach, the ethical and political consequences of OOO/OOR, which we mark as a “dark politics” for two reasons—(1) the appropriately withdrawn, but nonetheless actual, politics of OOO/OOR, and (2) how such an ontological politics, whether intended or not, has “dark” (destructive) potential for bodies and lives.

ABSTRACTReading the Phaedrus through Levinas's ethics for the other, I argue that the dialogic rupture in the Phaedrus offers an ethical imperative for rhetoric to respect alterity. Following James Kastely, I suggest that attempts to create a unified understanding of the dialogues within the Phaedrus miss the way in which the thematic discontinuity of the text functions philosophically and performatively. This rupture, I posit, signifies an ethical stance toward alterity that forgoes the possibility of violence and respects plurality. Such an ethical stance offers an imperative for a rhetorical ethic of listening in dialogue and suggests that rhetorical scholars return to Plato as a valuable resource for theorizing rhetorical ethics.

ABSTRACT To address challenges to the primacy of the subject in speculative realism, we put Levi R. Bryant's object-oriented ontology in conversation with Jacques Lacan's register theory. In so doing, we recuperate an autonomous materiality for itself, providing a reading of the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau over the Lacanian Real and simultaneously providing a rich map of the being of subjectivity and modes of the rhetorical. We systematize Žižek's claim that each element of the register resonates with the others to produce an ontical cartography: a map of the different intersections of the materially autonomous Real with the Symbolic and Imaginary elements of the Lacanian subject. By delimiting the characteristics of these intersections, we can better understand the different valences in which rhetoric operates without foreclosing the agency of objects and the objectivity of subjects.

For Hannah Arendt, the promise serves as currency in a world where predictability of outcome in the realm of human action is impossible, where courage is required in order to submit oneself in word and deed in the public realm, and where forgiveness serves as recourse when things go differently than hoped. Each of these points in Arendt's political philosophy is indebted to Immanuel Kant, a thinker who is often characterized as rejecting rhetoric on aesthetic and moral grounds alike. In Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, Scott Stroud takes up the apparently straightforward but ultimately complicated question of Immanuel Kant's treatment of, and disposition toward, rhetoric.While Kant is typically characterized as both dismissive and antipathetical toward rhetoric (in contrast with philosophy), Stroud's thoughtful, well-informed, and nuanced examination of the communicative and rhetorical underpinnings of Kantian thought focuses on identifying a nonmanipulative, educative rhetoric underscoring Kant's ethical, aesthetic, pedagogical, religious, and critical writings. This is not Kant's promise, at least wittingly—Stroud does the work in outlining the promise of rhetoric in Kant, at least insofar as his philosophy implicitly relies on a repertoire of communicative, discursive, embodied, and even performative practices. If, as Jaspers noted, Kant is the philosopher of the Western tradition, then interrogating the relation between rhetoric and philosophy requires a sustained and thoughtful intervention into the question of Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric—not merely a passing consideration of esoteric or occasional interest but a fundamental and essential intervention. Stroud's work offers the first book-length direct examination of this question.Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric presents a compelling counterreading to a prevailing and predominant narrative from both philosophy and rhetoric, namely, that Kant dismissed rhetoric wholesale in favor of philosophy. While much attention is paid to the monuments of Western thought known as Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, the critical philosophy only represents part of the Kantian enterprise. In accordance with the recent turn to Kant's so-called occasional works and his anthropological writings (see Robert Louden, Kant's Impure Ethics [2000]), Stroud's investigation incorporates lesser-discussed works from Kant such as Religion Beyond the Bounds of Mere Reason, Metaphysics of Morals, and lectures on both anthropology and pedagogy and does so in order to suggest that Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric are far more complicated and nuanced than has been recognized in his critical philosophy.The central question of this project is “can we reclaim rhetoric as a part of Kant's project of moral improvement, of molding an individual into a caring and consistent community member?” (8). Stroud grounds his examination in the aesthetic and ethical works (and, importantly, the relation between them) in order to situate and trace the communicative and discursive dimensions that disclose different facets of Kant's educative rhetoric—not only in how Kant prioritized lively examples in teaching but in the function and practices of narrative, symbol, and ritual in constituting the ethical community of religion, as well as in how secular argumentation serves as a critical rhetoric for both rhetor and audience. Stroud identifies rhetorical experience as the core of Kantian educative rhetoric, defined as “the use of experience of a message receiver in the persuasion of that receiver” (8). He carries this perspective throughout the study in showing how rhetorical experience forms an understated, even assumed, yet central function in Kant's ethical project.The first chapter, “Tracing the Sources of Kant's Apparent Animosity to Rhetoric,” both provides an overview of the standard take that Kant dismissed rhetoric and embarks on some contextual sleuthing to determine the basis of that negative characterization. His attacks on rhetoric are aimed at particular and situated targets—the popular Ciceronian philosopher Christian Garve—while the criticism focuses on both methodological and ethical considerations—a particular instrumental and ends-oriented view of persuasion. This chapter distinguishes Garve's Ciceronian-inflected popular style that was designed to appeal to a general audience and emphasized the virtues of happiness and instrumental motives from Kant's investment in philosophical rigor, properly oriented by morality, intended for a more technical audience. We thus have two different paradigms of public enlightenment and two different attendant rhetorics.To open up the question of Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric before building a Kantian approach to rhetoric and communication, we also need to think in broader terms about what practices Kant recommends and condemns, to think beyond the restricted scope of what he inconstantly termed “rhetoric.” The second chapter, “Kant on Beauty, Art, and Rhetoric,” begins to identify myriad ways in which skilled speaking and language use can positively and significantly influence others while also respecting their autonomy. If one can use vivacity and liveliness to help instantiate and render the moral accessible and present, then cannot that very operation demonstrate a nonmanipulative concept of persuasion that encourages a particular path without evacuating and nullifying the audience's capacity for judgment? Since the distinction between poetry and rhetoric for Kant relates to the use of poetic images in the service of entertainment or serious business respectively, then contrast between rhetoric and poetics becomes less sharp once rhetoric also includes nonmanipulative positive moral influence.Stroud distinguishes manipulative persuasion (where the speaker holds an advantage over the audience and enacts a hidden agenda, which exerts a causal force on listeners, hence subverting their agency) from a nonmanipulative rhetoric (which amounts to an edifying influence realized through lively presentation of examples, euphony, and propriety and characterized by transparency, where public ends are known to all members of the audience, who assist the auditor in using their own faculty of judgment). The third chapter, “Freedom, Coercion, and the Search for the Ideal Community,” works from Kantian moral philosophy to establish a form of persuasion that reflects proper maxims for action, for “if moral philosophy amounts to anything of enduring value, it must be in positing an endpoint for our endeavors to become better individuals and better group members through freedom” (59). This process of moral cultivation and improvement of the individual and collective alike assumes a certain form of permissible influence that serves not as an external force but more as a catalyst stimulating an inner process of judgment.The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters lay out three different contexts and forms of educative rhetoric in Kant: the pedagogical function of the example, the use of symbol, narrative, and ritual in his religious writings to foster the constitution of community, and a critical rhetoric involving principles for both engaged speakers and auditors. These chapters together outline a range of different yet isomorphic practices that serve to cultivate and foster moral improvement without evacuating the auditor's autonomy and judgment. Accordingly, the fourth chapter “Pedagogical Educative Rhetoric: Education, Rhetoric, and the Use of the Example,” provides the broader warrant underlying the three forms of educative rhetoric—that for Kant, education serves as the paradigm for ethical influence that guides cultivation and self-discipline, while recognizing the capacities common to all and also preserving and respecting autonomy. Educative rhetoric is defined as “the use of speech and symbolic means to create or instantiate the sort of change desired in the pupil” (110). Examples, pedagogical tools favored by Kant, provide the proper orientation by creating moral dispositions that help promote the recognition of moral bases for action.Chapter 5, “Religious Educative Rhetoric: Religion and Ritual as Rhetorical Means of Moral Cultivation,” shows how religious symbol and narrative serve as a moral catechism, how myths operate as enargeia in making the moral present, and how practices like public prayer (not personal petitioning) performatively enact a self-persuasion that fosters the living church of ethical community by reorienting purpose away from self-love. With this, the final chapter circles back to the question of politics—although how we treat one another, how we orient ourselves, and how we constitute moral communities, I would submit, reflect a political commitment all the while. In this final chapter, Stroud draws his examination of Kant's educative rhetoric toward the implication that far from decrying rhetoric and abnegating the human realm of interaction, Kant not only provides fairly extensive guidelines for how to properly orient oneself to others, how to communicate in ways that preserve autonomy and freedom, and how to fashion a critical rhetoric that recommends ways of promoting ethical messages and interaction, but also for the development of an everyday critical capacity to receive and engage such messages from others.Although detailing a range of practices that constitute Kant's rhetorically inflected observations, Stroud repeatedly returns to the idiom of persuasion. Perhaps something broader like “influence” (just as one example) might better highlight some of the variety within the domain of educative rhetorical practices in Kant. A minor point, for sure—but one that invariably undersells the laborious work here in showing attitudinal, orientational, and (at points, even) affective dispositionality in a thinker like Kant, underserved by consistent recourse to the vocabulary of persuasion. While the promise is stated rather humbly, the payoff seems considerably larger than outlined in this book—particularly if educative rhetoric is more explicitly connected to Kant's notion of enlightenment. This connection is directly addressed in a few, brief places, but our understanding of Kant's thought shifts radically when we acknowledge that enlightenment (toward which his critical and noncritical writings alike build) is predicated on, occurs through, and leads toward communicative practices that serve to cultivate the capacities of humanity. This might require a different engagement with the Ciceronian Christian Garve and possibly call for reconsideration of whether Kant was primarily interested in targeting a technical philosophical audience or a more popular audience. Stroud's project changes the way in which we view Kant and the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, as well as the deeply rhetorical underpinnings of enlightenment.Stroud's book is an important, ground-breaking study on Kant's apparently confusing take on rhetoric. Although Kant's place in the pantheon of Western philosophy is secured by the difficult and laborious first Critique, Kant was, throughout his life, first and foremost an educator. He began lecturing before he secured his position at Königsberg and continued until he reached the point in his advanced age where he could teach no more. Stroud's project, in using experiential, educative rhetoric as the major thematic through which to reread Kant on the question of rhetoric, highlights and pays tribute to this often underacknowledged pedagogical orientation and dedication throughout Kant's writings. These strong, carefully documented chapters show a range of recommended practices for cultivating sufficient means of influence that do not carry persuasion so far (in grounds, style, method, and aim) as to overrun the auditor's free exercise of their faculties. Stroud's examination of the range within Kant's pedagogical, religious, and critical educative rhetoric greatly adds to our understanding of another side of Kant, the author of the first Critique—a pedagogically oriented theorist of communication.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Heidegger's rhetoric in his most famous political address, the Rektoratsrede, which he delivered at the University of Freiburg on 27 May 1933. After I set out the political and philosophical kairos of the Rektoratsrede by drawing on Heidegger's contemporary lectures, letters, and Ponderings, in part 2 I use classical rhetorical resources and Heidegger's philosophy of temporality in Sein und Zeit (1927) to analyze the arrangement of his speech. In part 3, I examine two key National Socialist terms in the speech's climax. In part 4, I consider Heidegger's elocutio—his artful use of charged figures of speech and thought in the Rektoratsrede—in more detail. Concluding remarks reflect on the value and limits of the analysis in the context of debates about Heidegger's politics and its imbrication with his thought.

“When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks,” or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly “translating” Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, “I'd better get busy, really busy.”With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: “Really? What to do?”When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of (mostly) previously published essays on the sophists, on philosophy's systematic repression of their thought, and on the pragmatic and political value of sophistic “relativism,” I was struck by the volume's lack of engagement with similar scholarship that has been undertaken in the United States. Except for two references, one to the work of John Poulakos and the other to that of Ed Schiappa, the collection of essays does not otherwise engage with rhetoric studies that “we,” and I use this collective pronoun with increasing discomfort as I write this, have published in English. My first impulse, thus, after reading, was to react: but why recuperate the sophists now? Didn't “we” vociferously and variously praise, resurrect, refigure, and bury them several decades ago?My subsequent impulse was to acknowledge the very antisophistic drive at work in my own reception of a foreign scholarship (Oh, how easy it is to feel “at home” in one's disciplinary comfort zone, to circle the wagons around a constitutive “we”). I recognized, clearly, that now, right now is precisely the right time to readdress the sophists. Irrepressible, the sophists haunt us, no matter how hard we try to bury them (see the work of Victor J. Vitanza and Jane Sutton, for example), and in times of rampant bigotry, xenophobia, and fundamentalism, the sophists return to remind us that now will always already be the right time to rethink, revisit, and retheorize the sophists. As scholars in rhetoric and as Cassin, here, argue, the sophists represent the power to challenge totalizing beliefs and their oppressive effects.I acknowledge the argument that it is a totalizing move itself to group all the various rhetors and philosophers under one homogenizing category of “the sophists” (see the work of Schiappa, for example). By doing so, we risk dehistoricizing them, anachronistically reviving them, and compelling them to speak from their ancient graves according to a contemporary script. Yet as John Poulakos, Victor J. Vitanza, and others have previously argued—and as Cassin does here—“the sophist” serves as a productive, as Vitanza would say, representative anecdote/antidote, a way both to explore “neglected and repressed traditions, of alternative paths” (1) and to counteract the philosophical demand for homology. Cassin writes: “Sophistic texts are the paradigm of what was not only left to one side but transformed and made unintelligible by their enemies” (2). These neglected, repressed, and alternative texts—these “others,” she further argues, “have in common another way of speaking, even another conception of logos” (2).Contrary to the ontologists, the philosophers, who worship at the altar of the law of noncontradiction, of homogenization and the “one,” the sophists, as “logologists,” inhabit the unholy space of the many, “outside of the regime of meaning as univocity” (4). The philosophical tradition has embraced this law, Aristotle's “principle of all principles,” and its attendant communicational presumption and demand and thus, by structural necessity (just as structurally necessary as the prohibition of incest, she notes), excluded sophists and their language games (4-5). Cassin's methodological interest—and the interest for our future methodological muscle, then—is to query how and why the philosopher demands such prohibitions and, further, needs or feels the “right to say that people need punishment” for violations of the “one” and is thus compelled to violence (4).In a world forged across simultaneous intimacy (where the proverbial “seven degrees of separation” appears mistaken: it is always One degree of separation) and strangeness (where the One appears forever separated from the one), Cassin invites us to see the sophist as the figure who acknowledges us—all of us; every one of us—as a stranger, fundamentally, essentially, even when we feel most “at home.” Cassin's essays thus press us to welcome the stranger, the foreign other, to theorize a political system and a way of being that recognizes the complexity of our world, in its strangeness, to encounter the powerful strangeness that characterizes language, and to attend to the untranslatable quality that is world, that is being, that is being in the world.This is the theoretical impulse of the book—the recognition of the sophist as the “stranger,” inhabiting the unreadable if not inhabitable characteristics of the other—which comprises seventeen chapters, again mostly of previously published work, sectioned in five emphases: “Unusual Presocratics”; “Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics”; “Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy”; “Performance and Performative”; and “Enough of the Truth For….” The volume's emphasis is, thus, on the political implications for sophistical theories of language, as performative, of not describing a preexistent reality but of bringing worlds into being. Cassin's engagement with political philosophy leads her to propose what she calls a “consistent” relativism as a certain response to criticisms of “contingent” relativism as advanced by Richard Rorty, for example, as perpetuating opinions as the wind favors.I'll leave Cassin to argue with Rorty and others, as she does in a variety of chapters on the value(s) of political relativism (and I'll leave Steven Mailloux to meditate on sophistic pragmatism); I want to direct my brief comments here to the complicated relation between the impossibility of possibly living with others (consistently or contingently) possibly or impossibly.I want to focus on chapter 13, which is titled: “Philosophizing in Tongues,” which could be retitled as “How to Live Hospitably in an Inhospitable World When There is No One Language” (a mouthful of tongues to be sure), or more simply “Living Rhetorically in/with Tongues.” Obviously, the author nor the editors sought my opinion before selecting the chapter's title. But my point: we're “translating” Cassin's philosophical disciplinary focus/home into a more rhetorical one and hopefully a more unhomely one. She writes: “It is from the basis of the deeply nonviolent premise of this sentence—‘a language is not something that belongs’—that I would like to lay out what we attempted to achieve with the Dictionary of Untranslatables” (247). What I want to suggest is that the work of Cassin presses us—as a discipline—to think of the rhetorical as outside the simplistic hail of the “triangle,” of the presumption that a rhetorical agent “knows what he knows and knows what he speaks” and that audiences and messages are uncomplicated and dissociable entities. I further want to suggest that the work of Cassin presses rhetorical studies to think of communication as an “untranslatable” event.In service of this provocation is Cassin's edited, masterful Dictionary of Untranslatables, published by Princeton University Press in 2014. This hefty volume of approximately thirteen hundred pages celebrates the “cartography of language” (vii), of the various journeys of the word—and the singularity of each journey. The dictionary is a rich resource, reminding me of an expansive version of Michel Foucault's description of Borges's “certain Chinese encyclopedia” that instantiated The Order of Things. Do yourself the favor: buy this dictionary.In a world that trades in “untranslatable” values from continent to continent and in “untranslatable” words, such as “covfefe,” and when consequences, politically and ethically and mortally, are so dear, the field of rhetoric studies needs to take very seriously the “play of signification,” to refigure its theorization and praxis of attending to the “untranslatable.” Cassin invokes this refiguration, this revisitation of sophistry, not “as a destinal challenge to Babel but as an obviously deceptive and ironic commitment. The Dictionary of Untranslatables does not pretend to offer ‘the’ perfect translation to any untranslatable; rather, it clarifies the contradictions and places them face to face and in reflection; it is a pluralist and comparative work in its nonenclosing gesture” (247, emphasis mine). What a beautiful way to describe a sophistic enterprise: to work without destination and with some shot of irony in the face of the impossible, to reflect on contradictions face to face, in a “nonenclosing gesture.”Cassin historicizes this early acknowledgment of the plurality of languages and the impossibility of rendering the same—between the divide of “hellenizein” (“to speak Greek”; “to speak correctly”; “to think and act as a civilized man” [248]) and “barbarizein” (“which violently conflates the stranger, the unintelligible, and the inhuman” [248]). Not much has changed, it appears, from the first sophistic to our current rhetorical landscape, as Cassin acknowledges that this tension between what can be said “correctly” by the “civilized” and what can be said “otherwise” by the Other is indicative of the performative characteristic of language. Rhetoric is not governed by an “onto-logy” or a “phenomeno-logy,” “which must tell us what is and how it is” (249): the world is created by words (and by the relations that such words solidify, politically) that have no trans-signification guarantor. Cassin's deep scrutiny of the political and ethical ramifications of an impossible rhetoric hails what she calls a sophistic understanding of rhetoric studies as an impossible yet absolutely ethical endeavor that acknowledges that “different languages produce different worlds” (249) and that further acknowledges that any attempt to make “these worlds communicate” is a rhetorical process that “enabl[es] languages to trouble each other in such a way that the reader's language reaches out to the writer's language.” For “our common world is at most a regulating principle, an aim, and not a starting point” (249).That is, we cannot begin to realize justice or peace, for example, with any expectation of a “common” or translatable language. Yet it is this precise recognition (of the impossibility) that allows for the possibility of justice or peace. Citing Walter Benjamin—who describes the unsettling in every language due to the aftershocks of the “tremor of other languages”—Cassin writes: “This ‘wavering equivocity of the world,’ linked to the plurality of languages inasmuch as it is possible for us to learn them, seems to me to be the least violent of human conditions. A plurality of languages of culture that astound each other, this is what I wish for Europe. To be uncertain of the essence of things, uncertain of the essence of Europe, would be the best outcome for Europe and for us all” (258).Uncertainty is, granted, not a comforting political or ethical state of being. Yet we are here; we are always already here, neck deep in the “wavering equivocity of the world”—and word. The sophists (with all the scholarly caveats acknowledged) invite us to work with the impossibility presented by the plurality of languages—to embrace uncertainty and to view it precisely as our way forward. I acknowledge that this provides no satisfactory answer to uncertain times, but certainty is surely (I say with irony) the problem. It is time, the kairotic time, to start making bricks to build a less violent future.

ABSTRACTThe question of non-Western difference has come to feature prominently across the field of comparative rhetoric, where it is often presupposed that an irreducible difference separates Western from non-Western rhetorical and cultural production. It is on the basis of this presupposition that critics have established a politics of comparative inquiry, whereby restituting the pure consciousness of a non-Western subaltern subject is understood to subvert the hegemony of Western thought. But what exactly is the nature of this difference? In this article I examine the recent turn toward Latin America in the field of comparative rhetoric to argue that this presupposition serves as a constitutive topos—that the object of Latin America is invented rhetorically in the very act of comparative inquiry—and that this presupposition yields a political impasse that the field has yet to think through. Drawing on recent work in Latin American studies, I argue for a rearticulated notion of subalternity as a methodological approach for dealing with this impasse.

ABSTRACTIn this article I propose to interpret Austin's conception of perlocution in light of Peirce's philosophy of signs, through the lens of his notions of thirdness and speculative rhetoric in particular. I suggest that the traditional notion of speech genre, examined within the context of Peirce's semiotic framework, can make sense of the regularities and predictability that are characteristic of a large part of our discursive practices. More specifically, I argue that crystallized “habits of interpretation,” correlated to purposeful speech genres instantiated in given circumstances of enunciation, could be construed as predetermining the range of future interpretive conduct. In that perspective, this process of determination could be thus conceived as relatively predictable, at least for communication situations activating well-defined speech genres. In the end, I suggest that Peirce's conception of rhetoric draws attention to the necessarily constrained interpretive habits of our discursive life, yielding an original perspective on the notion of perlocution.

Other| May 31 2018 Books of Interest 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 Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2018) 51 (2): 212–216. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.2.0212 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Schaukowitch, Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 31 May 2018; 51 (2): 212–216. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.2.0212 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 © 2018 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2018The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACTDemanding is a fundamental rhetorical strategy for marginalized groups, but recent rhetorical theories of demanding have not explained how speakers can design demands that influence addressees to accede. Although psychoanalytic and decolonial theories have identified constitutive functions, they have not explained how speakers can design demands that pressure addressees to accede, and while speech act theories have explained specific kinds of demands, they have not synthesized insights into a model of demanding generally. We draw on normative pragmatic theory to argue that speakers design demands that generate persuasive force by openly making visible their intent to influence addressees to accede and bringing to bear a reciprocal obligation for themselves and addressees to live up to the norm of “right makes might.”

ABSTRACTThe enthymeme is well known in rhetorical theory as a three-part syllogism from which one premise has been elided. The enthymeme works because the listener supplies the “missing piece,” thereby participating in the very argument by which she is persuaded. This enthymeme is widely believed to derive from Aristotle, but previous scholars have shown that the “truncated syllogism” view of the enthymeme is both un-Aristotelian and impracticable. In this article, I review problems with the syllogistic enthymeme and reasons for its improbable longevity before proposing a view of the enthymeme that derives not from the syllogism but from the legal narratives produced by early Greek orators. The enthymeme is best understood not through its deductive structure, but its emplotment. This model makes sense of Aristotle's comments without relying on a discredited syllogistic frame to explain how ancient orators argued.

Other| February 21 2018 Books of Interest 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 Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2018) 51 (1): 98–104. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0098 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Schaukowitch, Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 21 February 2018; 51 (1): 98–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0098 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 © 2018 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2018The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to “what is rhetoric(al)?,” it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other (in language) moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to “have and to hold,” our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of scholarship that attempts to wed or to divorce rhetoric from a definitive purpose, from its technē, we must now let the lids of our eyes fold into a softer gaze. What do we want of rhetoric? At last, it spills over: “I want you to be.”1We are invited into this vulnerability, to voice such a confession, in Mari Lee Mifsud's Rhetoric of the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. This book—itself a living form of rhetorical gift/giving—in some way revisits very traditional themes of the ethics and sociality of communication and does so within the canonically sanctioned context of classical antiquity. That said, it possesses a far more adventurous spirit than do missionary readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric. For Mifsud, the possibilities of gift/giving in communication spread beyond exchange and art; she explores rhetoric's gift/giving as “prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development, but as some thing, some event, some movement, other than art, other than technē, incommensurable even, meaning outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (3–4). In these first pages, Mifsud gently loosens rhetoric from the grip of its application. Should we not want it for our own desired ends, should we let it move, rhetoric in/as/through gift/giving gives back to us new ways of thinking about communication as in and outside of word exchange, both stirring inside and brimming over technē.Among the multiple gifts/givens that “rhetoric of and as gift” offers is that it frees us to openly explore the relationship between language and love, two creatures who have long been twisted together in the corner. Love in/for/through rhetoric is spoken just above a whisper by Mifsud (such secrecy may be well matched to the ethereal relationship she draws between rhetoric and the gift). “What Aristotle himself called happiness, Cixous, jouissance, Schrag, love, Spivak, care, and Johnstone, freedom” is draped by her more explicit elaboration of “giving rhetoric” as poiesis, creative and generative practice (11). In this vein, Mifsud gathers her chapters around three interlaced topics: 1) creative rather than technical critical orientation; 2) the gift's sacrifice for/by communication; and 3) gift/giving rhetoric as relationality that makes way for the polis. She takes up these topics through an examination of Homeric gift/givens in Aristotle's Rhetoric that have up to this point been a hushed dimension of the field's work. In so doing, Mifsud both explains (in excess) and performs (poetic) rhetoric of and as gift, giving way to a “creative consciousness, capable of what Cixous calls “Other-love” (148). In short, Mifsud's articulations of the “and” that dwells between “rhetoric and the gift” allows us as critics and citizens to imagine and practice love in language by letting whatever is other be.An aside dedicated to (the technē of) exorida, the (art of) beginning, and a moment for reaching shared understanding: it would both betray and misrepresent Mifsud's insights to here tidily align each chapter with creative historiography, sacrifice, and givens in the polis. As she is committed to letting the poetic emerge and exhibit, Mifsud's footing in her project is not steady, and the reader swerves behind her shifts. Therefore, this review wanders more thematically than chronologically. It slides amid subjects, and it invites further wandering. Yes, the task of “review” remains at hand, however the occasion calls, too, for embracing logos as “a gathering,” an “invitation to you to see what you might see, to be free, … to imagine all the more to be imagined” (55). Echoing what is familiar but doing so in a way that allows what is being said to nonetheless be experienced as new is, after all, the function of Homeric poiesis.2Mifsud continuously pronounces distinctions between creative and technical orientations, between Homeric and technical rhetoric, and so tempts her readers to believe that there must be some contest between rhetoric that is contained and rhetoric that is allowed to be in excess; however, she is very clear throughout her book that poiesis is not anti-technē. That is, poetic gifts/givens pulsate in carefully composed expressions and, at the same time, exceed them. Her traversing of these planes, as she all the while welcomes any surprise that comes from their movements, indicates a creative rather than technical orientation toward thought, language, and other, fully appreciating the gift rather than reflexively tucking it behind organization and argumentation. This is not to say that operating from a technical orientation erases the poetic; it simply emphasizes a means-to-an-end approach at the expense of letting the poetic come into view. As Mifsud puts it, technical thinking/writing/acting entails “an exacting efficiency to achieve the end of reason” without yielding to its excess (19).Mifsud articulates this difference in the first chapter through a focused comparison of how Homer and Aristotle have been historicized as rhetorical figures. Here she takes issue with technical historiographical interpretations of Homer, which depict him as “being a poet with a run-on style” and lacking rationality. Technical language reveals “a complex mind capable of abstract and critical thinking,” and thus Homer is seen as “primitive” (20). The technical historiographic interpretations of Homer are not just considered “technical” because of their emphasis on technē (for Homer's so-called failure to contribute a technē of rhetoric may be attributed to the mistake of counting him among rhetoricians to begin with) but because they measure Homer against Aristotle's view of rhetoric, certain defined preconditions for the rhetorical, and the particular demands of the polis. That is, evaluations of Homer on these grounds affirm the authority of Rhetoric and position Homer as the negative, the other whose form can only be traced recognized when aligned with what forms of rhetoric are presumed proper (21–22). Mifsud asks what an affirmative attitude toward Homer would offer to rhetoric: reconsidering Homeric gifts/giving and their relationship to language and being blends and blurs the borders of rhetoric solidified by technē, fixations on the logical, the figurative, and the representative (25–26). She spends the remaining chapters of the book performing a “creative historiographic” approach for the purposes of exploring how Homer contributes otherwise to our understanding of rhetoric. Put differently (here she borrows from Deleuze), Mifsud seeks to “deterritorialize” what we know of rhetoric, all the while appreciating that ultimately rhetoric will be “reterritorialized” by way of technē (28). “Such a creative orientation toward history and theory writing allows for rhetoric, in acknowledgment and performance of the gift, to offer a return to itself to and in excess of exchange” (30).Commitment to a creative orientation to the rhetorical calls for giving (in)to the excess of language and yielding to the multiple experiences a poetic rhetorical act makes possible; such an orientation immediately transforms the relationship the rhetor has with words, who is no longer bound up by purpose or utilization but allowed to roam. It also transforms the rhetor's relationship with the addressee for whom the words were uttered. Poiesis puts to bed any expectations that a message or meaning is transmitted or even merely “understood;” instead, language (and the other sharing in it) enjoys the loving liberty that comes from being let to be. Mifsud describes this “hospitable” rhetor in Deleuzian terms as no longer an author but a production studio undergoing wholly creative labor without method or rules (146). And, for hospitality's sake, the giving rhetor/rhetoric as gift must demand some sacrifice. Sacrifice “informs the gift and is an effect of the gift. To give requires sacrifice of some sort, for to give is to give away, to let go” (95). A creative relationship to rhetoric requires a radical openness to/with language, as it requires letting the other pull from our words whatever he or she sees in the expression without the rhetor burdening him or her with what it really means, and thus Homer is the personification of this giving.Specifically, Homer plays host to Aristotle. Homer is referred to and relied on throughout the Rhetoric, but he is not exactly paid homage (95, 100). Sacrifice explicitly requires the giving away of goods hard to come by and a giving away of self—Aristotle sacrifices Homer by “circulat[ing] only the thinnest slivers of Homeric doxa,” compressing vivid scenes from his epics into “sound bites” that fit the defined purpose of rhetorical technē (96), and by sacrificing the “poet” himself to “the new signification of rhetor, more in line with the norms and needs of classical technē” (100). Mifsud is very clear that Aristotle's sacrifice of Homer, Homeric givens, and poiesis “should not be considered an abuse of Homer. Homeric hospitality is unconcerned with exploitation by the one in receipt of its gift, and by virtue of poiesis, even though the poetic is reduced by Aristotle to prose more fitting for the technical, “we have no ‘true’ Homer' … to recover” (96). Homer, agnostic toward himself and his creation, makes his offerings without acknowledgment as such or obligation to reciprocate or to receive in any so-called appropriate manner (the sort of offering Aristotle names kharis in his Rhetoric). Aristotle's appropriation of Homer marks the taking place of giving rhetoric, and just as Homer's epics inhabit Aristotle's Rhetoric (however subtly), just as poiesis sighs between technē's articulations, the gift/giving gives rise to and nurtures the rhetorical.Nonetheless Mifsud remarks that our memory of rhetoric's foundations in the gift/giving has faded. Its appearance has been stamped over repeatedly by “procedural operation” and “technical knowledge,” even in the polis, the place where men supposedly show themselves for who they truly are (103). At this point, after insisting for over one hundred pages that poiesis has never really abandoned rhetoric, even if it just faintly glows in the face of technē, Mifsud mourns poiesis as if it has been lost, given away to the “service of technē.” Its dissolution in our interactions with others is tragic: “Things and people in a polis culture are related through distant, abstract mechanisms of power rather than personal relations, through technical proceduralism and utility more so than through hospitality and honor.” The forfeiting of the poetic to the technical not only restrains creativity capacity and limits our access to worlds yet known through language but also transforms communication from a medium through which we come to know and love the other into a barrier wedged between the self and other (103).With the erosion of rhetoric as gift/giving by “end-driven goals,” the other does not appear at all except as a commodity, one whom the rhetor seeks to win over, to persuade, to possess as a means to securing the rhetor's own ambitions and aims. In sum, rhetoric drained of the poetic, rhetoric made into merely “a technical apparatus to secure judgment,” is rhetoric drained of its ethical and genuinely political dimension (104). This dramatic warning against forgetting Homer raises some crucial questions about the polis in the midst of the field's ongoing romanticization of civic discourse, democracy, and justice. Mifsud grants that these matters are indeed worthy of attention but maintains that they neither can nor should dictate rhetoric's expanse (104). It would be fair to say that Mifsud does not ask that we abandon our idealistic vision of the polis but to embrace it more tightly, and forging such intimacy, she suggests, is possible only by recognizing the limits of technē and reaching into its excess, where the poetic lies in waiting.In the latter portion of her book, Mifsud is most lucid about the stakes of her appeals to recover rhetorical gift/giving. When the rhetorical is curbed by a sought-after result, when the other is not to be seen or acknowledged through rhetoric but possessed by it for the purpose of policy, allegiance, lawfulness, equality, and so forth, the ethical and political relations made possible in and through language are compromised. It is beside the point that these purposes may be valuable or good; “possession” is the operative phrase: renouncing Homeric poiesis directs our visions and capacities only toward a “particular order of things” at the expense of recognition of the other qua other and at the expense of recognizing language as such.3 It feels as though Mifsud is calling for rhetoricians to reclaim the poetic in order to remember rhetoric's origins in the gift, thereby radically rethinking what sort of inquiry rhetoric should take up and how we engage in our questions together through the written and spoken word. Do we revitalize the subject of style? Are we now obliged to open our understanding of publics in a way that intimates rhetoric gift/giving? Maybe. Whatever instruction Mifsud leaves to her reader is confused by her compulsory bow to Derrida's critique of gift giving (127, 139–43, 161). “The archaic Homeric gift economy is not our savior,” she assures (143).But if the rhetorical is concerned with the question of language and (love of) the other, why not heed Homer's example as host? Mifsud's most compelling contribution is a critique of the ways we indefinitely affix argument, persuasion, policy, and democracy to rhetoric's art; or, put differently, the ways in which we have only asked after how language can serve our self-determined appearances or preconceived designs and purposes. The gift/giving rhetoric requests at last (as it always has) to let the question of language—language as a question—surface, to let it shimmer in the expression of the other, to let it ring in the other's voice. True, this is a matter of love. Never mind that gifts may implicate language or the other in a reciprocal exchange. Should we be wary to let language in turn give voice? Through this thesis we approach a Levinasian dream, whereby the other finds himself in (the other's) expression, and the other is recognized in an intimate state, already giving of herself. This is not obligation so much as a joining, a touching and being touched. Mifsud is thus too humble in her final appeals: the spectacular transformation of our relationship to language that Rhetoric and the Gift performs—throwing back into question what we know/that we have ever actually known/whether we can ever know rhetoric's potential—is the necessary beginning of loving an other and of loving the world.

ABSTRACTI examine the role that Descartes's theory of optics plays in Cartesian methodology. After explaining the importance of methodology in Descartes's project, I outline his method in terms of the three dimensions of time. I put this method to work by describing Descartes's search for the elusive hyperbolic lens, a lens that would offer the type of perfect vision that is necessary for the Cartesian scientific process. It soon becomes clear that this lens is the mind itself. The task of this project is thus to sculpt the mind so as to achieve the highest clarity and distinctness of scientific vision. Thus, by focusing on how the eye works and how seeing can be improved, the subject and the objects it sees both radically transform in structure, content, and kind. The Cartesian corpus thus initiates a sort of specular regime that produces a new subjectivity and a new world.

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric begins its fifty-first year. It is an honor to play a role in this turn and a privilege to serve the journal as editor.Looking back for a moment, I remember my first encounter with P&R as a young graduate student at Northwestern—Tom Farrell gave me the galleys of a forthcoming article, a gift that led me into the journal's archive and left me to hope that my first piece of scholarship would appear in its pages (almost, but not quite). Since then, P&R has been a constant source of inspiration, provocation, and understanding. In 2005, I was quick to accept Gerard Hauser's invitation to serve as the journal's book review editor, all the more so as it offered a chance to work closely with a scholar that I had long admired. The opportunity exceeded every expectation. Over the course of a twelve-year collaboration, I benefited so very much from Hauser's sharp insight, intellectual generosity, and friendship. Jerry is a cherished colleague and a good friend.This is a moment to underscore the importance of the inquiry that has defined and distinguished Philosophy & Rhetoric from its very first issue—with respect to this remarkable history, I strongly recommend reading Hauser's introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue (50.4). Whether one looks inside or outside the academy, there is an evident if not urgent need for original scholarship that addresses the intersection of philosophy and rhetoric. This is a moment to extend and deepen P&R's longstanding mission, not least in light of emerging lines of inquiry, shifting disciplinary constellations, new forms of writing and reading, and popular skepticism about the value of the humanities.The work ahead is a joint effort. From the beginning, I want to express my thanks to each member of the journal's editorial board, including several individuals who agreed to serve after the print deadline for this issue. In the same breath, it is my pleasure to announce Daniel M. Gross as the journal's new essay and forum editor and Kelly Happe as the P&R book review editor. I am grateful for their willingness to serve the journal. All editors should be so lucky as to have the chance to work with such talented and thoughtful colleagues.Perhaps transition is the norm, not least for philosophical-rhetorical and rhetorical-philosophical inquiry. But transition is neither uninterrupted continuity nor unhinged change. With its fifty-first volume, the journal publishes articles that exemplify its best traditions. They are an original and important mix, a set of jointly-edited inquiries that ask after our most important questions, afford theoretical and practice insight, and open space for debate. With them appear select book reviews and a variety of forums and critical essays, along with a new “books of interest” list. The volume's fourth issue will be a guest-edited special issue.There will be time to speak more about what's to come. Here, in this moment, there is a more pressing call, a need to pause and reflect on a truly remarkable record of intellectual leadership and scholarly service.Gerard Hauser edited Philosophy & Rhetoric for fourteen years, assuming the position in 2003. Fourteen years! Before that, between 1976 and 2002, he served variously as the journal's coeditor, associate editor, and consulting editor. And before that, from 1970 to 1976, he held the post of book review editor. One of Hauser's many articles appeared in the journal's second issue.This record is not simply commendable, though it is that. It is astounding, a truly extraordinary accomplishment, one that testifies to Hauser's sustained intellectual vision, tireless leadership, and steadfast commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, all of which have served the interests of multiple fields, supported groundbreaking scholarship, and promoted crucial intellectual exchange. For the vast majority of the last fifty years, Hauser has served if not led Philosophy & Rhetoric. He has broadened the journal's audience and deepened its reach. His patient and visionary work has distinguished the journal—nationally and internationally. Hauser's contribution to Philosophy & Rhetoric is not simply self-evident—it is indelible, properly so.In this light, and on behalf of the journal and the Pennsylvania State University Press, it is my utmost pleasure to name Gerard Hauser as Philosophy & Rhetoric's editor emeritus. I do so with abiding gratitude and in the hope that there will be moments in the future when I have the good fortune to work closely with Jerry.Last but by no means least, I want to express my deepest thanks to Jean Hauser, who has served as P&R's managing editor for the last ten years. This extraordinary service demands the fullest possible recognition. As so many well know, Jean's work has made a crucial difference—to the journal's editorial group, its contributing authors, and its readers. I have personally relied very much on her skill, insight, dedication, and wit. On more than a few occasions, she has kept me out of the tall grass. In the last months, she has taken the time to introduce me to some of the more hidden ways and means of the journal—I am very grateful for this help.In the coming weeks, I hope that Philosophy & Rhetoric's readers will take a moment to reach out and express their appreciation to both Gerard Hauser and Jean Hauser. Individually and together, they have served—and indeed built—Philosophy & Rhetoric with grace and with the greatest distinction.

ABSTRACTThis article presents the outline of a rhetorical theory that allows us to take Nietzsche's statements that “all language is rhetorical” and that “language is entirely the product of the rhetorical art” literally, not as a hyperbole or metaphor. Nietzsche argues that the normativity of the human world canonized by scientific and philosophical taxonomy and logic is but a makeshift edifice of metaphors—habituated prejudices that humans take to be norms by suppressing the fact that they are but the residue of a primordial rhetorical activity. In this sense, scientists speak metaphorically, overlooking their own axiomatic bias, while poets speak literally, drawing on unbiased and defamiliarized “first impressions.” Human cognition, rigged by the homogenizing abstractions of metaphors, can thus be rebooted by the rhetorical art and thereby reconnected with the shared physiological roots of empathy and language. The newly empowered competence for achieving bias-free, unprejudiced, free thinking is rhetorical heuristics.

ABSTRACTZōon logon ekhon echoes. Across the terrain of philosophy and rhetoric, it echoes as an echo, an expression that does not come from where it is alleged to come and which these two fields may not have in the way that they have so long claimed to have it. In the midst of zōon logon ekhon there abides an unasked and pressing question of possession, a question of how to bring the (dis)possession of language to recognizability.

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin's warning against unphilosophical “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible” has new urgency in the face of real estate developer and reality-show host Donald Trump's surprise victory in the presidential election of 2016. Philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist Georg Simmel's 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, provides valuable orientation at a moment when the expectation that public discourse must be oriented by norms of truth and accuracy is under siege—not least by those who ascended to power openly denigrating the value of expertise and the specialized knowledge long regarded as essential to modern government. Trump has an instinctive grasp of Simmel's decisive insight that “money is the strongest and most immediate symbol” of the cynical truism that “the only absolute is the relativity of things.” Situating philosophy at the limits of disciplinary ways of knowing, the Philosophy of Money develops a modernist, performative strategy of thought that turns relativity into a philosophical resource. It can help us to counter the dissolution of the ideal of veracity in an era of absolutized marketing by disentangling thought from narratives of rational progress that obscure its opposite and interrogating the limitations of the professionalized ordering of knowledge practices in which expertise continues to be produced and maintained. Simmel's strategy for embracing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty of human experience may thereby help us address the complexity and ambiguity of a historical situation growing increasingly surreal as techno-scientific progress goes hand in hand with post-truth politics.

I begin with an anecdote. While a senior at a small liberal arts college, I participated in a year-long senior seminar on evolution. The central questions were how we come to be human and, more basically, what it means to be human. Units were taught from the perspectives of biology, various traditions of philosophy, theology, education, history, and world literature. Faculty were drawn from across the curriculum, each taking units and assigning readings from their discipline that addressed our central questions from an evolutionary perspective. Importantly, the faculty leading seminar discussions also attended each session, so that every meeting possessed the possibility of full-scale intellectual battle not only with and among the students but (oh joy!) among the esteemed faculty. The first unit was led by two biologists who assigned Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species (1845) and Theodosius Dobzhansky's Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955). Ours being a Jesuit institution, we were required to enroll in eighteen credits of philosophy, twelve of which had to center on Thomism or related topics, along with sixteen hours of theology. We students were curious as to how the priests, especially, would respond to an evolutionary perspective that did not begin with a creator and had humans crawling out of the genetic swamp's primordial ooze, so to speak.We were not disappointed. In fact, when we detected that norms of civility and decorum were keeping pointed disputation in check, we asked sniggling questions, having learned from our Jesuitical training how to be provocateurs. Although there is nothing remarkable to recount from their disagreements, because we had been educated by Jesuits we understood perspective meant everything, and the seminar's jousts were nothing if not contests waged from divergent starting points. What does linger is a question born of the way the biologists were appropriating Darwin and Dobzhansky, pushing them beyond scientific inquiry to address existential considerations. The dissonance between what we assumed motivated a scientist's disciplinary curiosity and the way these scientists were thinking prompted a humanist in our class to query one of our professors as to why he studied biology. His answer was that he thought it gave him his best shot at understanding what it means to be a human being. We had not anticipated that. Pursuing science to answer ontological and metaphysical questions about being seemed at odds with our curriculum's foundational appropriation of the ratio studorum to achieve a specific (moral) perspective on the world and on human existence most particularly through theology, philosophy, and literary subjects. Our professor's answer accepted the humanistic values of a Jesuit education while affirming there were many roads to Rome. To oversimplify, it reinforced the search for productive perspectives, such that when considering multiple paths to understanding (more on this later), the question was not which road you took, but a) whether the road led to your destination, and b) what you discovered along the way.Ever since Greek antiquity, rhetoric has been understood as an art of influencing audiences through arguments, emotions, and character; through persuasion (movere), instruction (docere), or delight (delectare). Moreover, that art has been understood as both a regime of instruction (docens) and use (utens). Without passing into the sociology of knowledge, it is worth spending a moment to remind ourselves of rhetoric's complex history. I focus on rhetoric because, as the journal's founding statement suggests, Philosophy and Rhetoric is concerned with rhetoric as a philosophical category. We are led to ask, therefore, what it means to be a “philosophical category.” In its most basic sense, it is a domain of speculation about philosophy's first principles, about its relationship to how we come to understand our world (epistemology) and experience (ethics), and possibly it is related to our being in the world (ontology). But it also can mean to be under the rule of a superordinate system of thought, of philosophy itself—whatever that might be, whatever that might mean.In 1949, P. Albert Duhamel published his important essay “The Function of Rhetoric as Effective Expression.” Duhamel followed the intellectual fashion of the day, which emphasized interpreting historical texts in terms of their antecedent influences. He argued that a milieu of metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological assumptions gives each theory of rhetoric its unique character and distinguishes it from relatives distant and near. No single idea of rhetoric embraces all others; they share only a concern for effective expression. Although written nearly 70 years ago, Duhamel's position remains an important interpretive stance. His theses that individual rhetorics must be read in terms of their presuppositions and that all rhetorics share an abiding concern for effective expression are particularly relevant to the challenge that was first undertaken by this journal fifty years ago to explore the intersections of philosophy and rhetoric and that it continues to emphasize today.There is much to admire in Duhamel's argument, especially its resistance to a certain type of reductionism in his reasoned defense of plural rhetorics and the methodological rigor his analysis advances for distinguishing among rhetorics. Still, Duhamel's argument carries problematic implications. Reading a theory in terms of its metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological presuppositions implies that we can read a text “correctly.” Whether there can be a single, “correct” interpretation of a rich rhetorical treatise is doubtful, given the inherent polysemy of such texts and the gap between original and historically distant interpretations of context that distorts our efforts to recover what lies beneath time's erasure. In addition, Duhamel's suggested approach to rhetorical treatises strongly implies that rhetorics are derived from antecedent philosophical positions. This begs a still hotly contested question that dates from rhetoric's original theoretical formulations by the elder Sophists. Finally, even though Duhamel's argument construes rhetorical theory as deriving from philosophy, it implies deep philosophical ambivalence toward rhetoric because the practices it theorizes are not entirely trustworthy. Rhetorical discourse aims at effectiveness, not eternal truth. Consequently, most philosophical stances have difficulty accommodating a theoretical treatise on rhetoric without reference to their own philosophic positions, which valorize the eternally true, or at least an orientation toward truth, and its discursive prerequisite of trustworthy speech.The historical benchmark for these problems is found in the quarrel between Gorgias and Plato. Gorgias celebrated the psychagogic powers of language, while Plato lamented the consequences of an abandoned quest for truth. Plato regarded philosophy to be a quest for eternal truth through reasoned arguments, while Sophists and rhetors sought mere probabilities through sensory engagement structured by phantasia and mimesis (Plato, Gorgias 464a–466a). Consequently, Plato regarded the only acceptable rhetoric to be one brought to heel by submitting first to dialectic in order to secure its claims (Plato, Phaedrus 262c, 266b, 269c–274b, 277b–c).The Gorgias-Plato quarrel highlights lingering issues for establishing an intellectual stance between philosophy and rhetoric: How are we to understand the power of words? 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ABSTRACT This article begins by revisiting the Greek origins of the terms “rhetoric” and “philosophy” from a nominalist and antiessentialist perspective. Though both terms were given early shape by Plato, Isocrates offered a different take on philosophia that arguably is equally legitimate, even if largely neglected historically. In contemporary scholarship, the question is not what is rhetoric or what is philosophy, but what can be gained by deploying rhetorical and philosophical vocabularies to describe and understand the world. Given the problems facing us today, philosophers and rhetoric scholars should engage each other to address challenges where our interests converge.

ABSTRACT This article aspires to explain how it is possible that “white lives matter,” “blue lives matter,” and, ultimately, “all lives matter,” can sound, feel like and act as responses to the claim that “black lives matter” for so many Americans by approaching the political sequence as both a historical (situated, epistemological, and ideological) problem and a philosophical (metaphysical and ontological) question. By way of general history, the first part of the article specifies how a statement (vital but otherwise unqualified human life), a political rationality (molecularization), and a rhetoric of democratic indifference (whose master trope is the metonym) lend to our political present its common sense. The second part pushes against it, first by advocating on behalf of the usefulness of spectralization in antiracist struggle and, second, by recommending a dramatic transformation of the common sense—from molecularization to singularization or bios as “singularly plural coexistence,” founded on a rhetoric of democratic copossibility whose master trope is the exemplar.

ABSTRACTOnly recently have we begun to realize how Martin Heidegger's 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric permanently altered the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. This article explains how it did so, outlining what exactly Heidegger reclaimed in Aristotle's Rhetoric just as he was radically reformulating the history of Western metaphysics against his contemporaries in philosophy. Key are a couple of scholarly moves. Heidegger places Aristotle's Rhetoric in the Corpus Aristotelicum next to the Physics, away from the logical works and the Poetics. And he defines rhetoric as the hermeneutic of Dasein itself only after working out what he calls the “Greco-Christian interpretation of life.” Finally, this article explains how and why Heidegger left rhetoric behind soon after 1924, as he actively took up Weimar politics and consequently lost faith in the analysis of factical life Aristotle made possible.

ABSTRACT This article addresses the contentious philosophical claim that rhetoric is merely a “philosophy without tears.” Mindful of the institutional and disciplinary stakes of this claim today, it offers a genealogy of “philosophy without tears” across the past century, from the popular “no more tears” genre to midcentury debates between ordinary language philosophers and logical atomists. What emerges is an ethical argument concerning the materiality and transitivity of language, fleshed out through a rhetoric of tears and as an ontology of pain and suffering. Drawing on a rhetorical reading of Wittgenstein's “form-of-life,” I argue that both pain and its expression should be understood as transitive rather than as epistemological or private phenomena. Transitivity helps us to better understand the perlocutionary power of pain and suffering in the politics of war and terrorism, in the “man-philosopher,” who disavows such transitivity, and, finally, in the necessary risk of responsibility toward the “other” of philosophy (and of rhetoric).

This edition is the two-hundredth issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric and marks its golden jubilee as a quarterly publication. It also marks my last issue as editor of the journal. In an earlier number, I noted that after forty-eight years of service in various editorial capacities, it was time to move on and let fresh eyes and minds chart its course.Editing the journal has been a privilege and honor. I have had a deep sense of responsibility to uphold the quality of its founders and my mentors, Henry Johnstone Jr. and Carroll Arnold. I have also been the beneficiary of their accomplished successors, Donald Verene and Stephen Browne, who maintained Philosophy and Rhetoric's high status. I am certain of its continuing good fortune as I hand it off to the most capable hands in Erik Doxtader, its new editor.I wish to thank the members of the editorial board, who have been generous with their time and counsel to submitters and to me. I wish to thank all those who have reviewed submissions to the journal. Its scope is extraordinary, and we have been fortunate to have had excellent reviewers. Their comments to authors have exhibited scholarly accomplishment and intellectual generosity without fail. I wish to thank all who submitted their work for the journal's consideration. I appreciate the opportunity you gave the journal to consider and publish your work. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the work of Jean Hauser, who has served as managing editor for the past decade. She has kept authors, the press, and the editor in sync. Thank you.—Ed.

ABSTRACTThe putative dichotomy between meaning and matter is mostly resolved in rhetorical studies through a negative deconstruction in which “world” is covered by an all-encompassing discursive field. In response to this radical linguisticism, I return to Derrida, who is often cited as one of its mouthpieces, to pick up his elaborations of the textual structuring of life “itself,” both genetic and psychic, the ontologizing force of which I'll describe as a prelusive and anahuman rhetoricity.

ABSTRACTContemporary debates over the future of critique, feminist or otherwise, tend to neglect if not perpetuate a reliance on the philosophical tradition, with its disdain for the contingent and indifference to local audiences. If critique is to be realistic, as distinguished from realist or antirealist as the philosophical tradition has defined those terms, it must begin by clarifying the nature and extent of this reliance and begin to develop alternatives. Such an idea of critique would begin by questioning received notions of the relationship between theory and practice, which I argue are unduly inflected by philosophical prejudices. Theory should not be understood as a primarily epistemological or methodological enterprise whose task is to justify the basis of critique. Instead, theory should be conceived, with the rhetorical tradition, as a world-creating, first-order practice that gives meaning and significance to the human commons.

ABSTRACT This fiftieth anniversary reflection begins by recalling a debate on its pages about the origins of rhetoric, which queried the relationship between Plato and the Sophists. I argue that contrary to the shared assumption of the scholars in this debate, Plato and the Sophists differed less over what counts as good philosophical/rhetorical practice than over whether its access should be free or restricted. An implication of this proposed shift in interpretation is that Plato and the Sophists are both reasonably seen as “post-truth” thinkers, concerned more with the mix of chance and skill in the construction of truth than with the truth as such. Focusing on Plato's hostility to playwrights, I argue that at stake is control over “modal power,” which is ultimately about defining the sphere of what is possible in society. I end with a brief discussion of the problematic of public relations as an ongoing contemporary version of much the same story.

ABSTRACTSome arguments that are delivered in a dialectical exchange are never again recalled. Others are repeated again and again across argumentative situations and settle in a community's shared cognitive environment, thus demonstrating a memetic quality along lines that have become popular with several cultural theorists as a way of describing the evolution of culture. Moreover, some arguments may themselves act as memes. If memes “are replicators and tend to increase in number whenever they have the chance” (Blackmore 1999, 37), then they should be of interest to rhetoricians and argumentation theorists. I explore the relationship between arguments and memes, considering the nature of the meme and its argumentative potential. While controversial, meme theory promises to shed new light on how persuasion works in our mutual cognitive environments, and the attention it gives to how reasons move from mind to mind encourages the effort of the exploration.

ABSTRACT Politics counts on secrets and prediction: it depends on a visio imaginativa whereby doxa unravels itself into beliefs and holds fast onto the illusion of secrets that in reality do not exist, and fabricates the objects of its parlêtre by casting illusions of Time in order to formulate predictions and “ways forward.” The sorry state of democracy partly arises from the illusion that free citizens are made to believe in politics as a discourse of predictions and secrets.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

This article asks that we take seriously (and suggests that we have not yet taken seriously enough) Steven B. Katz's point that nonhuman rhetoric is “supplanting and replacing the physical human body” as the main site for rhetorical agency. Discussing Ian Bogost's carpentry and James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers's adaptation of it as rhetorical carpentry as an example of nonhuman rhetoric that does not go far enough, I suggest that Joanna Zylinska's concept of “scalar derangement”—the pathological need to put all things on a human scale—is a major impasse for a nonhuman rhetoric founded on representational methods. Instead, I offer a model of rhetorical invocation and suggest that skotison, Richard Lanham's term for deliberately obfuscatory style, provides a rhetorical practice for addressing the nonhuman at nonhuman scales. Instead of a nonhuman rhetoric of things, I maintain that in the age of climate change we should begin to consider an inhuman rhetoric.

In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

This article explores the epideictic nature of online discourse, or what might be considered a digital version of social knowledge. In particular, it draws from Vilém Flusser's concept of the technical image, the image projected as singular but that is, in fact, layered with many other meanings. Working from two primary examples—the resignation of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe and the reporting of Israeli flooding of a Gazan valley—the article theorizes how a consensus is constructed as a technical image and thus problematizes the nature of consensus in specific rhetorical moments.

This article uses a lengthy critique of Kenneth Burke's Attitudes Toward History found in the Kenneth Burke Papers as well as Kenneth Burke's published writing to argue for a more expansive view of his comic theory, one that sees Burke's comic theory as a basis for ethical rhetorical engagement. Rather than defining the comic as a Burkean rhetorical device that is relevant to only a select number of texts and situations, this account of Burke's comic theory suggests it has broad applicability. Engaging Burke's comic theory as an ethic allows for active, generous, exigent, and self-reflective scholarship.