ABSTRACT Despite the common understanding of kairos as a temporal concept, it also harbors a spatial notion that holds particular significance in relation to Greek visual arts. The inquiry into its primary role in the formation of aesthetic beauty requires a phenomenological reading of the Lysippan personification of the concept, as it resonates with its counterparts in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Andrew Stewart’s suggestion as a starting point—that the Lysippan Kairos may serve as the artist’s manifesto, consciously constructed in response to the earlier Polykleitan Canon—the evidence for kairos as the sire of beauty is shown to reside not only in its principal role in characterizing the perfect proportion and harmony, but also in its relationship to somatic intuition and sensory understanding, implicating the viewer as a key participant in the process.

Abstract This article problematizes the question of ontology—and specifically embodiment—in the work of Jacques Rancière, focusing on his writing on dance in Aisthesis. I argue that dance offers an ontology in becoming, understood through the concept of inscription; this ontological position enables a reconciliation between the contingency celebrated in Rancière's writing and the emphasis on space derived from dance. I draw on the work of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan to show that the category of dancing woman, rather than Rancière's disembodied, unsexed subject, operates as the redistributor of the sensible within modern dance.

AbstractThis response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in the first place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address.

Abstract Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism provide an implicit critique of the contemporary theoretical emphasis on antirepresentational, immanent theories of discourse, subjectivity, and power. From this standpoint, such immanentism can be understood as a distinct effect of a neoliberal governmental practice directed at the suppression of the idea of totality. To address Foucault's critique, this article argues for a reinterpretation of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of “situation” to recover a working notion of totality that would be useful for critical and material rhetorical inquiry. Historicizing the immanent turn in the critical humanities can open the way for a critical social theory of communication.