The World Has Ended, Long Live Worlds: Rhetoric at the Limit of Humanness

Nathan Stormer Schlumberger (Ireland)

Abstract

The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis)continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2024-01-01
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2023.2268849
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (82) · 7 in this index

  1. The Open: Man and Animal
  2. 10.2307/j.ctv11316tz.8
  3. 10.2307/j.ctv36zpfc
  4. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
  5. 10.2307/j.ctv12101zq
Show all 82 →
  1. 10.26818/9780814213803
  2. Knowledge of Life
  3. Discourse on Colonialism
  4. X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought
  5. College English
  6. 10.1353/aiq.2008.0009
  7. 10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001
  8. Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West
  9. College English
  10. da Silva Denise Ferreira. “Invisible/Obliterating.” Pass 2020 https://passjournal.org/denise-ferreira-da-silv…
  11. 10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690
  12. Toward a Global Idea of Race
  13. Unpayable Debt
  14. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  15. Difference and Repetition
  16. Nietzsche & Philosophy
  17. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
  18. The Beast and the Sovereign
  19. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation
  20. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International
  21. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  22. 10.1057/9781137001184
  23. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Is Object
  24. Black Skin, White Masks
  25. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
  26. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  27. The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century
  28. 10.2307/j.ctv12pntsm
  29. 10.3998/mpub.10257
  30. 10.2307/j.ctv12pntqk
  31. Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Idenities, Cultures and the Challenges of Globalization
  32. The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals
  33. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
  34. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition
  35. Cultural Studies
  36. All Incomplete
  37. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude
  38. 10.18574/nyu/9781479890040.001.0001
  39. The Portable Nietzsche
  40. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  41. 10.5749/9781452958460
  42. We Have Never Been Modern
  43. 10.1080/14791420.2020.1829659
  44. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
  45. 10.1515/9781478021445-002
  46. 10.1215/10642684-2843215
  47. 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x
  48. For Space
  49. 10.1080/13688790.2020.1751436
  50. 10.1215/9780822371779
  51. 10.1353/mln.2006.0099
  52. 10.1215/9780822371977
  53. 10.1080/14791420.2020.1723802
  54. The Fragile Skin of the World
  55. What’s These Worlds Coming to?
  56. Ecce Homo
  57. The Will to Power
  58. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  59. 10.1080/09502380601164353
  60. 10.26818/9780814214305
  61. Methodology of the Oppressed
  62. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States
  63. 10.1080/00335630.2012.714901
  64. 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.572
  65. 10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801
  66. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor
    Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society
  67. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Practice
  68. 10.1215/9780822376491
  69. Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered at Trinity College, November 1919
  70. Process and Reality, Corrected Edition
  71. Afropessimism
  72. 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687268.001.0001
  73. 10.2307/302808
  74. Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology
  75. 10.1353/ncr.2004.0015
  76. 10.5749/9781452962054
  77. Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future