Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

This essay uses the Kansas reception of Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood to reflect on processes of regionalism and resistance. Noting that Capote and In Cold Blood were articulated quite differently in different portions of the state of Kansas, I explain how Kansans used a text that was imposed on them to craft for themselves regional identities of their own making. I call these “counter regions,” a term I coin to emphasize that region making is an important, if often overlooked, ingredient in practices of cultural resistance.

Book Review| September 01 2011 Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency. Antonio de Velasco. Dave Tell Dave Tell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (3): 581–584. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940564 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dave Tell; Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2011; 14 (3): 581–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940564 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 CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Rhetoric and Power:An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession Dave Tell Dave Tell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2010) 43 (2): 95–117. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.2.0095 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dave Tell; Rhetoric and Power:An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2010; 43 (2): 95–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.2.0095 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 © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2010The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart's performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine Dave Tell Dave Tell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (3): 233–253. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697155 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Dave Tell; Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (3): 233–253. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697155 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 © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2004. 245 + xvi pp. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, by Gregory Clark. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 181 pp. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, by Scott Consigny. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 242 pp.