On 13 July 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a speech memorializing five police officers slain during a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, Texas. Obama’s speech came on the heels of many other mass shootings, some associated with acts of racialized violence, during his administration. We argue that by deploying aporia, Obama addressed the conflicting constraints and exigencies exposed by the Dallas shooting and opened inventional possibilities that included virtuous behavior, commemorative speech, and dialogic-reciprocal encounters that also reappraised the concept of double consciousness. We conclude by exploring how aporia enables and undercuts discussions of complex social problems during epideictic encounters.

In Ancient times and in the contemporary moment, kairos has operated as a keyword for theorizing rhetoric and its potential. Aligning ourselves with these endeavors we take stock of varying iterations of the kairotic not to artificially force a singular conception of the term, but to hold such resolutions at bay. We assess efforts to realign kairos with challenges to the ontological priority of rhetorical actors and trace recent theoretical articulations that further decenter human agency by relocating the kairotic in ecological/contextual forces. We assert the need to maintain invention and eventfulness as crucial elements of the kairotic so as to insist that rhetoric be understood as a practice that exceeds socio-anthropological “adaptation” to those conditions. Through a series of propositions we hold hope for an inventive and evental kairotic stance that likewise avoids naïve conceptions of sovereign subjectivity.