Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has been a tremendously influential thinker in the history and theory of art. Parts of his project have implications for the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric. For the most part, however, rhetoricians have not engaged with his work. This article seeks to persuade rhetoricians to engage with Warburg’s thought and legacy. In particular, it seeks to articulate his Mnemosyne image atlas as a theory and practice of visual topics. Discovered as part of a historical investigation and expressed in a theoretical register, Warburg’s account of visual topics is then exemplified in reference to the gestural politics of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in the twin contexts of contemporary media ecology and contemporary racial politics in the United States.

ABSTRACTWith the publication in 2002 of Martin Heidegger's summer semester 1924 lectures, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy,” a major new star appeared in the constellation that is twentieth-century rhetoric. Since then, a growing secondary literature has emerged. This article organizes that literature as a series of specifications closing in on Heidegger's critical conception of rhetoric as potentially a hermeneutic of the everydayness of being with others, and it claims that our understanding of this everydayness will remain flat or partial until we situate the concept in the sequence of Heidegger's thought in the 1920s. If we work through pre-1924, 1924, and post-1924 periods, it becomes clear that there are religious, modal, and sophistic contexts for Heidegger's evolving conceptualization of everydayness. The concept of everydayness that emerges is disheveled but rich. The article concludes by suggesting that only faint echoes of these potent rhetorical trajectories can be discerned in the late Heidegger.