ABSTRACT With higher education in a state of flux, it’s time to more clearly understand what flux—mobility—means for the work of faculty at colleges and universities. With threats to shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom representing one sort of change, what would it mean for faculty to lean into the vulnerability that they are experiencing? Mobility has consequences: one of them is the risk of harm; another is the potential to destabilize concepts and entities. This article is an argument for faculty to lean into vulnerability, with all of the consequences attached to it, in order to change the trajectory of higher education in an era of flux, but recognizing that doing so will require courage and new forms of solidarity.

Michele Kennerly's ambitious book sends a gust of fresh air through the field of ancient rhetoric. But that figure doesn't really suit her metaphorics—such a central aspect of the project. To hone in on these (a better figure, as we'll see), we need to come down to earth—to the material substance of wax tablets and papyrus book rolls, and the bodies of text produced on them. Editorial Bodies is a study of the ways ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators engaged in working on and over texts in a process of “recursive composing” (3) with consequences exceeding any narrow considerations of grammatical niceties. As Kennerly explains at the outset through a careful etymological introduction, our English word “editing,” understood as a late-stage form of “textual tidying” (1), often done by someone other than the author, cannot capture the kinds of work with texts performed and extensively discussed by these ancient wordsmiths. Honing, smithing, polishing, filing—these are a few of the gritty figures for textual work Kennerly excavates, and their object of attention, the text, is very often presented as a body. And here we arrive at the idea of “corpus care” (15), Kennerly's richly polyvalent figure for the processes and vocabularies referring to work on a text, itself a material body, for the bodies of the writers, and for those who received their work: a complex and multidimensional concept.Kennerly tracks the analogy of the body with the written text through an impressive number of authors in the Greek and Roman traditions. She argues for a consistency of reference across many sources, demonstrating that writing about writing in terms of the body pervades these ancients' extensive and careful attention to the crafting of rhetorical texts. An adjunct to this claim is the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the relation between writing and oratory in the ancient periods. Editorial tendencies and terminologies, writes Kennerly, become absorbed into habits of writing, which, for orators, could “come to be absorbed into habits of extemporaneous speaking” (3). But Kennerly admits that delivery—the body of the orator on display—is not her concern here (172–73). Actual bodies appear from time to time. Aristotle warns that the bodily evidence of labor on a text should be hidden (9). Cicero in his dialogue Brutus relates his early experience of strain on voice and body, but after working with Molo in Rhodes, “both his body and speech [are] better defined for the unrelenting demands of public speaking” (90–91). We learn that Horace had a habit of debating with himself through shut lips (112) and that Ovid's body wasted away in exile (138–51). But Kennerly is far more interested in what bodies mean in Greek and Roman rhetorical culture, and in the textual analogy. Those signifying systems coalesce in the domain of gender, performing the normative work of “policing appropriate style and delivery” to secure “masculinity's approved cultural boundaries” (98).After an introduction setting up her terminology and claims, Kennerly begins with Athenian rhetoric in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), surveying a daunting array of figures: Herodotus, Agathon, Alcidamas, dramatists Cratinus and Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Aristotle, and Anaximenes. Accumulating evidence of the “somatic-graphic analogy” (23), Kennerly performs some quite targeted readings here. Plato scholars will look in vain for the philosophical investments of the Phaedrus and his layering of voices in the Menexenus. These are set aside in favor of a reading of “rhetorical management,” attributed to Socrates rather than Plato (38–39). But this book is cast clearly as a material, rather than intellectual, history, and the method becomes more successful when we move to comedians and their “play and polemic” about rhetorical training. The Alcidamas text, On Those Who Write, offers much pertinent commentary on editing, but it is with Isocrates that Kennerly finds the richest exponent so far of “corpus care.” In his late and highly self-reflective Panathenaicus, Isocrates offers a “harrowing composition narrative” including “a view of how extensive and collaborative an editorial process can be” (45). The “insult-dense” oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines provides Kennerly with colorful evidence of commentary on modes of composition, and of moving from written to oral performance, invested by these archenemies with “considerable invective energy” (46).The next chapter, on the Hellenistic period, is a welcome addition, given that there is less attention to these centuries than to others in the existing scholarship in rhetoric. Kennerly offers a counterpoint to the familiar narrative of rhetoric's decline, making the case here that polis life continued to rely on democratic practices and the rhetorics that they demand even after the triumphs of Philip of Macedon and Alexander at the end of the fourth century. I appreciate the way she works at the seam between Greece and Rome in this chapter, pairing two Greek writers, Demetrius of Phalerum and Callimachus, with two early Roman ones, orator Cato and poet Lucilius, who lived during the same period (roughly). Because we have no surviving work by Demetrius, Kennerly interprets his style through Cicero's extensive reception of his work in Brutus, a survey of Roman orators, and Orator, on style. Trained in the Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, Demetrius led Athens for ten years under the thumb of the Macedonians and in this role made deliberative speeches (59–65). According to Cicero, his philosophical learning “softened” his speech (64) without feminizing it. Her treatment of Cato gives us a more nuanced view of a rhetor in process than the familiar shorthand version of a gruff and taciturn moralist. Close etymological work with the treatment of figurae—understood broadly as forms or styles—in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium provides Kennerly with abundant material for body-based rhetorical advice. The picture of Hellenistic rhetoric emerging from this chapter supports the assertion that the period is more accretive than derivative (76) and offers historians of rhetoric ways of rethinking the Roman relation to Greek rhetoric as more collaborative and less strictly oppositional. Where Kennerly does address the notion of a Roman inferiority complex—an anxiety of influence where letters were concerned—she attaches it to the imperial project: “editorial polish [is seen] as a solution to the general failure of Roman writing to spread and stick” (7).In chapter 3, Kennerly takes up one of her favorite figures, Cicero, highlighting his participation in a mid-first-century BCE large-scale cultural contest over style in its broadest sense (79). The struggle had to do with Atticism versus Asianism—inherited from the Greeks—and in keeping with the theme of the book, Kennerly shows how the struggle is carried out through (gendered) corporeal language. She makes the case indisputably for Cicero's interest in the use of writing before and after the delivery of the speech. There is in his process, Kennerly shows, a mix of “memory and monument,” the latter being Cicero's term for the finished text. After his exile in the mid-fifties BCE, Cicero stepped back from the vigor and intensity of his public oratory and applied his brilliance to philosophical and stylistic works on eloquence itself. In line with the purposes of her project, Kennerly does not delve into Cicero's philosophical contributions but notes that, for this consummate stylist, philosophy provides “silva (raw material; literally a forest)” (104). Later, she notes that Cicero, in his philosophical treatise De Officiis, praised the collaborative editorial practices of poets as a model for virtuous action: one should submit plans “to the scrutiny of trusted friends so that all mistakes can be caught and corrected” (151). We are treated to a more thorough analysis of Brutus and Orator, along with the less completely realized De Optimo Genere Oratorum (On the Very Best Kind of Orator). Far from simple formulae or a rejection of the new Atticism, Cicero advises a more expansive and flexible sense of style, Kennerly observes, matching each of three genres or duties of an orator—to move, to convince, and to delight—with three styles: “the weighty moves, the thin proves, and the moderate delights” (95). As with the Greeks, for Cicero the stakes are high where stylistic expertise is concerned. When an orator fails, it is not only his art or himself that he fails: it is “a client, friend, or the Commonwealth” (100). Kennerly addresses this entanglement of text, culture, and community persuasively.The chapter on Horace is refreshing, given that we have few rhetorical treatments of this poet. Kennerly highlights his compromised position in relationship to the first emperor, Octavian/Augustus, and reviews the implications for his poetic stance. Some of the most charming language in this chapter comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he pays a good deal of attention to style. He proposes a “compositional ethics of the slow,” advising restraint, scraping and scrubbing with the metaphorical file (127). His care in editing, Kennerly notes, is compatible with his “philosophic bent”: writing correctly arises from wisdom (130). In chapter 5 on Ovid's writings in exile, we read of his many pleas for attention, for collaboration, for editing in its most comprehensive sense. Ovid, Kennerly writes, shows an “acute rhetorical sensitivity to a situation”: his sad legal status as exile and harsh location influence his talk about writing (141). The penultimate body chapter on Quintilian is a significant one, and in it Kennerly brings to light the diligence with which Quintilian treats care of the text. She writes that he “made the managerial magisterial” (161), encouraging time, labor, and care in mastering the rhetorical art. Another important aspect of this analysis is Kennerly's attention to the gendered critical language running throughout Quintilian. A good style is always a masculine style marked by “an attractive fertility.” Tacitus and Pliny receive unusual and welcome attention at the end as well. Pliny's letters offer an accessible and revealing view of the sociality involved in composing, editing, and performing written and spoken texts in first-century CE Rome. The final chapter brings to light Cicero's famous and beloved amanuensis, Tiro: one known provider of the often unrecognized and coerced labor that went into ancient eloquence produced by elites. Kennerly ends with a reminder of the “ancient belief in the cross-indexical quality of the way one writes and the way one lives” (205).This is a beautifully prepared book; it's original and useful. The chronological movement—tracing the consistency of corporeal language across several centuries—enables the reader to follow the complex interrelations among writers and orators across the two cultures over six centuries. The attention to the original languages across the volume is meticulous. Kennerly's bibliography is very current, spanning the fields of classics, rhetoric, and poetics. She is evenhanded in her work with sources. As with all of her publications, Kennerly is a master stylist, showing how she has “love-labored” (a term from Isocrates) over this work. Her wordplay often delights. An example comes in her discussion of Isocrates, whom she characterizes as “figure-loving”: “political discourse without polish is all bluster whereas polished discourse without political import is all luster” (39). For some readers, the relentless word play may become distracting, and at times the clever tips over into the merely flip. But overall the style leavens a project entered into a field that may feel dusty and distant to students and nonspecialists. Scholars in composition / writing studies will be especially interested in the focus on writing process. At many points, we can see possibilities for contemporary comparisons and applications.Significantly, Kennerly is not pursuing stylistic manners for their own sake. She attends to contestation over what sorts of words best sustain communal life. Where I find the text really gaining purchase are the places where Kennerly points out the stakes of editorial work, and often they concern the status of the state. For example, she points out that Horace's enthusiasm for the editorial file (lima) was not only a poetic stance but also a civic one (19). We are urged to understand that editing, in the specialized sense elaborated here, is about not only the quality of the work and the status of the author but also political health and personal ethics.I will end where Kennerly ends, with comments on the canon. She claims to have shifted the canon by placing traditional names in untraditional scenes (211), and I agree that this is a contribution of the book. She also helpfully quotes and endorses Robert Gaines's proposal for an expansive reconsideration of “canon” so as to include “‘all known texts, artifacts, and discourse venues’” in a wide range of genres in “‘the ancient European discourse community’” (Gaines 2005, 65, qtd. on 210). This is an appealing invitation, one that led me to imagine how Kennerly's interest in the materials of writing and discourses of textual body care might be applied to an even wider swath of rhetorical activity in antiquity. For papyrus book rolls and wax tablets, as Kennerly knows well, were not invented in fifth-century Athens. She specifies at the outset that she will leave aside earliest examples—those with “a small chain of reception”—and concentrate on works “that have been heard and read by many” (1). This a reasonable criterion of selection. I did wish, though, that Sappho (and with her all the archaic lyric poets?) had not been dismissed so summarily (23), given the importance of the (woman's) body in her work and a substantial literature of reception. But a book can be about only so many things, and this book is about quite a few.Looking further afield, both temporally and geographically, we find many writers and speakers grappling with the materials of textual production—clay tablets in Sumeria, bone and tortoise shell in China, string knots in the Americas. And, in fact, some texts from those preclassical sites have been saved from the papyrus garbage heap. Just to take one example from the very rich repertoire of writing (on papyrus) in ancient Egypt, consider the anonymous tale “The Eloquent Peasant,” composed around 1850 BCE (Lichtheim 1973). This didactic tale features embedded speeches in the forensic mode that a peasant was required to deliver to a king/judge and then convert to writing (with the aid of a scribe) in order to get justice for a wrong. Embodied negotiations by multiple actors in the production of written and spoken texts, the quality of bodies—fine textual and debased working bodies: these are elements Kennerly has drawn on in her study of “corpus care.” The point of applying her method to such a text would be not only to expand the canon or corpus of rhetoric but also to grant the possibility of meta-consciousness about textual production not only to well-known elites of Greece and Rome but also to figures from distant times and places for whom we have only incomplete records. I'm grateful to Kennerly for her fine study and for the potential it opens up for further work in this vein.

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe's famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to his Untimely Meditations: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (1982, 59). Another way of saying this is that the “personal” quality of this book indicates something quite different from one person's idiosyncratic attempt to expand their consciousness—whether through learning or smoking. Instead, it points toward a kind of impersonal singularity that is the conjunction of multiple affective/conceptual directions and speeds. It is, in short, a pedagogy in the strongest sense.So as not to be misleading, I should also say that I did know someone else named Doyle some fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student at Penn State. That other Doyle (not exactly “Richard”) was then an assistant professor who had only just published his first book exploring the “rhetorical software” that enabled the field of molecular biology and that drove the sequencing frenzy that was the Human Genome Project. I am indebted to that other Doyle for provoking in me an enthusiasm for thinking and for teaching me that if our scholarship is to be worth anything at all, it must be oriented toward learning how to live. Indeed, reading, writing, teaching, and all the practices of our industry are inextricably parts of life and therefore parts of a carbon- (and silicon-) based ecology that need to be taken seriously if we are going to claim to have been alive at all. But as Darwin's Pharmacy shows, learning how to live is often a brutal, painful, and even a literally nauseating process. Suffice to say that I did not like that Doyle then any more than I like this other one now. But I have learned from (and with) them both.This book is remarkable for several reasons. First, and most apparent, is because it manages to connect extraordinarily disparate discourses in ways that in retrospect look obvious. The chapter entitled “LSDNA” (about the multivalent links between midcentury research on DNA and the discovery of LSD, including the fact that Francis Crick was apparently under the influence of LSD when he first envisioned the double helical structure of the molecule) typifies the provocative quality of these conjunctions. But the more significant attribute that makes this book so important for rhetorical studies is that it depicts rhetoric as a deeply powerful adjunct to all the lines it follows. What this means is that rhetoric here is not merely the stylistic or persuasive adornment of a linguistic content (although it is also that) but is also a constitutive element of what we might very broadly call “experience.” Doyle is at pains to emphasize this point especially through the analysis of trip reports by those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. It would appear from the sheer quantity of these reports that the ingestion of psychotropic drugs produces an intense desire to generate language—a language that would somehow attempt (and fail) to capture the experience of the trip. But more than that, this language also provides a crucial element of the set and setting that are key elements of all encounters with hallucinogens. “To read trip reports for what they can teach us about psychedelic experience,” Doyle argues, “we must read them as if they are less failed signs of the ineffable than symptoms of, and subsequent frames for, psychedelic states” (54). Turning from a traditional emphasis on language to a contemporary thinking of information allows Doyle to foreground the active quality of rhetoric: “Information is less a phenomenon to be understood than … a potent mutagen of human experience.”The common element shared by the various sites that Doyle investigates—from global and medical imaging, to psychedelic drug use, to the love poetry of Cyrano de Bergerac—is that they all provoke an experience of connectedness, “suggesting that in some fashion human perception is indeed “wired” for a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment” (9). Now of course, this message isn't new or even especially noteworthy, but what Doyle is after here is less the content of the message of interconnection and more the practices and relations through which humans come to attune themselves to this event.What interests Doyle about each of these sites is that they are all involved in pragmatic experiments that explore the distributed quality of life. One of the many things that makes Doyle's itinerary deeply compelling is that he does not follow the theoretical line about the death of the subject or the overcoming of humanism but analyzes the actual practices of people involved in pursuing these projects. Thus, for instance, hallucinogenic drug users (“psychonauts”) are pioneers, “early adopters of a transitional, transhuman identity precipitated by our intensified and amplified ecologies of information in the context of an ecosystem in distress” (230). These psychonauts are not so much attempting to “expand” consciousness (as if consciousness were merely quantitative entities) but to turn it otherwise, to explore its alternate capacities by “troping” consciousness (hence the term “psychotropic” drugs).Interestingly enough, and contra the many so-called postmodern critiques of the value of consciousness, in Doyle's account, consciousness does not disappear. Nor is it merely an epiphenomenon masking certain underlying material practices. Indeed, consciousness plays an extremely crucial role in this newly configured biosphere as “the distributed capacity to manipulate and transform living systems” (252). That is, consciousness allows us (and not only us) to pay attention to certain things in certain ways and is thus deeply motivated by what we can only call “seduction.”This emphasis on seduction connects to what I think is the most powerful argument of the book, that Darwin's evolutionary engine of natural selection has unjustly overshadowed the other evolutionary motor that he discovered: sexual selection. Focusing primarily on The Descent of Man, Doyle shows that “Darwin introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but to the sexiest, those who are adepts at attention gathering” (139). From the plumage of the peacock, to the petals of the orchid, to the thought troping of peyote, this capacity to seduce and to fascinate may well be the most fundamental, rhetorical (and evolutionary) attribute of life. And this attribute is in marked contrast to some alleged demand that the individual organism exists in robust distinction against its environment. That is, “the experience of seduction … provokes not fitness but entanglement[;] sexual selection excels at the momentary breakdown of inside/outside topologies” (249).Now it is also the case that the psychonauts that Doyle investigates are not at all casual drug users and that they are involved in a very precise and care-ful relationship to psychotropic drugs. This book is not simply advocating for the mind-altering quality of hallucinogens themselves; you will not find anything like a mindless celebration of Burning Man here. When he speaks of those who have managed to “form a commons with ayhuasca” (246), as well as the fascinated (and fascinating) artisans of marijuana cultivation, Doyle is predominantly concerned with those who are dedicated to a connoisseur-like relation to these plants (and to consciousness). This is to say that such psychonauts seem to offer a privileged and perhaps altogether rare relation to “drugs” (and to the nooshpere more generally) in that they are “more than recreational” drug users; they demonstrate “a serious intent” in their relations to the exploration of consciousness (258). And indeed, this raises the essential question (for me) as to what styles of exclusions are necessary for any pedagogy and any rhetoric. But that may be a question for a different review. For the moment, it seems to me that the stakes of ingesting this other Doyle's pedagogy are well worth the risks.

The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political