Recent attempts to brand US President Donald J. Trump as a psychotic or fascist have failed because such labels do not capture the double character of his appeal. In this essay, I argue Jacques Lacan’s understanding of perversion better captures Trump’s peculiar brand of political rhetoric.

Teaching delivers signs. The teaching body produces … signs, or more precisely, signifiers supposing the knowledge of a prior signified. … Every university puts language in a position of belatednes...

In the spirit of apologia, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be better understood when set in relation to the black vernacular tradition of Signification or signifyin(g), the Racial Contract, and Whiteness. A sustained contextualization of Wright’s “controversial statements” reveals a complex performative rhetoric that is highly dependent on elements of delivery, especially tone. We argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright’s rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.

Abstract This article argues that the example of (canned) laughter continues to trouble the human/machine binary that so many have troubled, from Descartes to Zupančič. Sounding various objects of “recorded” laughter through psychoanalytic tweeters, deconstructive warps, and object-oriented woofers implicates ontology as so much noise for the projection of certainty. Derivatively speaking, I argue for the primacy of a rhetorical ethics.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This essay is an outcome of a workshop on the topic of "Sound Studies and Rhetoric" at the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, created at the behest of Ph.D. candidate and workshop participant Jon Stone, held in Lawrence, Kansas, last June. The authors thank Jon for his advice and keen insights, as well as workshop "sounders": Katie Fargo Ahern, Gina L. Ercolini, Lisa Foster, Andrew Hansen, Jamie Landau, Martin Law, Amy Patterson, and Anne Shea. This essay is better read as a "report" collaboratively authored by the workshoppers.

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment The authors thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Notes 1There are quibbles, however, as there are ample passages in Agrippa's work to suggest that words let us "hack" reality, as it were, when we understand they are symbolic articulations of the virtues/essences of things. For example, see Agrippa 208–213. For a more nuanced, book-length reading of Agrippa's understanding of language, see Lehrich. 2See Leff and Sachs. 3It is instructive to underscore how Vickers opens the essay that Miles argues outlines the "assumptions" Burke, Covino, and Gunn apparently also share: "It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods, and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather, in many instances, especially the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points…" (Vickers 95). Such remarks are hardly an index of a vulgar, "binary opposition" that Miles argues is common to all the authors he critiques. Owing to the fact that each author critiques different eras of the occult tradition toward very different ends, it also seems to us rather uncharitable to assert Vickers's "assumptions" are channeling Burke, Covino, and Gunn (Miles, "Occult Retraction" 449). 4The critique, of course, is Derrida's. See especially pages 1–73. 5This is a common reading of Derrida's view. See, for example, Howells (128). Derrida says "as much"—or if you prefer, "as little" (18–26). Covino and Gunn's books begin and conclude with similar observations, respectively. See Covino (9) and Gunn (229). 6Miles has argued similarly elsewhere. In Modern Occult Rhetoric, Gunn argues that the rhetorical dynamics of occultism changed dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a consequence of mass media technologies. In a book review, however, Miles indicts Gunn for failing to examine Agrippa's philosophy—a system developed three centuries before Gunn's period of study. See Miles, "Rev. of." 7Miles's conclusion, for example, first appears in Lehrich's study in the context of a discussion of Derrida's philosophy: "…it is not intrinsically odd that the sixteenth century philosophical movement which was almost entirely destroyed by modern philosophy and science—I refer of course to magic—still haunts the margins of philosophical memory…. It is worth considering the periodic surfacing of magical thought in philosophy after Descartes…, which might provoke us to wonder whether magic has always played the role of modernism's ghostly other" (Lehrich 222). 8For example, Miles argues that Agrippa's rhetoric is better characterized as employing "instructional paradox" rather than Gunn's discussion of a "generative paradox" (which do not seem mutually exclusive), and he concludes drawing on Burke's discussion of paradox. 9See Stark. 10As Burke clearly was. See Burke, Rhetoric of Religion. 11For a recent, exemplary work investigating the occult stranger within, see Lehrich, Citation2009. The authors would like to thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Morgan Reitmeyer Morgan Reitmeyer is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University David Blakesley David Blakesley is a Professor of English at Purdue University William A. Covino William A. Covino is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the California State University, Stanislaus.

Book Review| January 01 2009 Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectRickert, Thomas James J. Brown,, Jr.; James J. Brown,, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Joshua Gunn Joshua Gunn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (2): 183–190. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655349 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James J. Brown,, Joshua Gunn; Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (2): 183–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655349 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 © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In a previous discussion in the Burkean Parlor, I argued that Mark Smith's book, The Right Talk (2007), was boring and largely unhelpful to rhetorical scholars because it explained the contemporary...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Bob Scott, my PhD adviser, uses this phrase to describe relatively uninteresting, scientistic, or cookie-cutter modes of rhetorical criticism. 2Ronald Walter Greene, for example, has been critiquing the neoliberal rhetoric that concerns Smith for some years (see “Rhetorical Capital”; “Rhetoric and Capitalism”). 3I think we could even argue that in the twentieth century, rhetorical studies adopted such a one-sided approach until Burke was taken up and rhetoric-as-seduction eclipsed argumentation, the supplication of good reasons, and so forth. Even so, attempts to more directly engage emotional appeals and affect have been met with some derision (for example, Brockriede; Corder). For a recent, excellent attempt to engage the affect of rhetoric, see Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment.

Abstract Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, this article argues that the fixation of some scholars on the status, size, and identity of rhetorical studies is symptomatic of an apocalyptic perversion. An attention to the apocalyptic tone of recent discussions about "Big Rhetoric" in conference papers and journal articles bespeaks a characteristically phallogocentric ideology of discrimination between insiders and outsiders. An examination of the ubiquity and character of this tone, I suggest, forever precludes a united rhetorical studies for two reasons: (1) we enjoy our apocalyptic too much; and (2) apocalyptic is central to the identity of rhetorical studies because it is central to disciplinarity as such. Insofar as the urgency of the apocalyptic tone is sometimes a pragmatic and political necessity, an argument is made in favor of a more playful, polytonal apocalypticism that can help us better reckon with—and sometimes avoid—rhetoric that excludes. Acknowledgments The author thanks Carole Blair, Diane Davis, Debbie Hawhee, and the blind reviewers for their helpful suggestions and wise counsel. Notes 1Arguably, the first love object is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice; the implications of this article of faith will be detailed in my later remarks on the apocalyptic (see Silverman; and Schwarz). 2I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny (also see Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double" 341–366). 3That is, he is both celebrated and cursed for establishing order in the idiom of the negative. I should indicate that by "Big Rhetoric" I refer not only to the globalization of rhetoric (or what is sometimes termed the rhetoric of inquiry), but all the related issues that are collected under that name via anxiety about disciplinary identity, including: (1) how ought we define "rhetoric"? (2) how should we define rhetorical studies as a field? by object or recourse to method, or by pedagogical mission? (3) who "owns" rhetoric or where is rhetoric better situated, in departments of English or Communication Studies? (4) is there such a thing as a "rhetorical tradition?" if so, what constitutes that tradition? (5) who does or does not have the authority to define rhetoric and rhetorical studies? (6) is rhetoric inclusive or mutually exclusive of cultural studies? and so on. These many questions all speak to the fundamental anxiety about what rhetoric is and who we are as rhetoricians, and I am focused on the whole of this anxiety vis-à-vis discipline, not any one question in particular. 4The primal horde refers to a mythic scenario developed by Darwin and elaborated by Freud to explain the emergence of the social contract and incest taboo: the idealized and primal father seizes all the women for himself, driving the sons away when they reach maturity. The sons, resentful of the father's despotism but desiring his love, agree to band together, kill the father, and eat him. They do so, however, only at the price of indigestion, for they find that their ideal leader is dead and are haunted by him; consequently, they agree to live as equals and to dispossess "the women" and practice exogamy (See Freud, Totem 201–204). 5This article is the most accessible and, in my view, most accurate description of the debate surrounding rhetoric and discipliniarity. I will nevertheless take issue later with what I think is a misreading of Dilip Gaonkar's positions. 6Of course, "criticism in crisis" is a tired hat, about which more shortly, but for the moment, we can trace it to Paul de Man's "Criticism and Crisis" (in Blindness 3–19). 7For the different ways in which a more interdisciplinary yet coherent, text- or practice-centered and historically mindful rhetorical studies has been called for, see Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies" 69–76; Fuller, "Globalization"; Keith, "Identity, Rhetoric, and Myth" 106; Leff, "Rhetorical Disciplines" 83–93; Mailloux, "Disciplinary Identities" 5–29 (also see his Disciplinary Histories for a revised version); Mailloux, "Practices, Theories, and Traditions" 129–138; and Mailloux, "Places in Time" 53–68. For arguments in favor of "Big Rhetoric" or globalization, see Simons, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics" 86–109; and Simons, "Globalization" 260–274. For a diversity of views on the issue of disciplinarity, see Herbert W. Simons' edited collection, The Rhetorical Turn, as well as the edited collection by Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Finally, one consequence of this decade-long discussion was the formation of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies—initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and many others associated with the Rhetoric Society of America—which brought together a diverse group of rhetoricians for three days in Evanston, Illinois in the fall of 2003. Descriptions of the discussions at the conference are printed in the third issue of volume 24 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). 8For a rumination on the "death" of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellberry, The Ends of Rhetoric, especially the introductory essay by the editors, which argues that in modernity "rhetoric" has given way to the delightfully more-syllabic "rhetoricality." 9My argument, however, is deliberately elliptical, as it attempts to underscore the performative dynamics of the debate over "Big Rhetoric" performatively. By "performative" I mean to suggest that the frequent masturbatory, petulant tone and prose of the present essay is both "fun and games" as well as argumentative, a point that will become clearer as the essay progresses toward the analysis of "tone" as a rhetorical device. From time to time I use the word "playful" to denote this approach. As an aside, an important if sadly over-critiqued element of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis is their playful tone and wildly associative writing techniques, which are deliberately employed to accompany the more traditional, syllogistic argument (and sometimes in Derrida's case, against the syllogistic argument). Slavoj Žižek's work is perhaps the most accessible example of performative writing in this sense, but for a full-throttle example of this "style" of performance, see Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume One: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). "All you consumer fascist types, you know who you are," opens Rickels on the topic of his style of writing, "cannot be stopped from policing the middlebrow beat to which intellectual discourse was condemned a long time ago" (xv). Although Rickels insists that his "obscurity" is less a "style of writing or argument" than the juxtapositional demand of the objects of his analysis, his rhetoric is unquestionably strategic. 10Most breaks with Freud among psychoanalysts were a consequence of disagreements about drive theory. Some thinkers believed that the drives were not sexual but something else; for example, Jung believed the drives were spiritual in nature, whereas Adler eventually argued humans are driven by self-esteem. Others advocated a complete abandonment of the drive model in favor of more "relational" model, which generally goes under the name of "object relations theory." For the classical textbook on the latter, see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations. 11The better explanation here, however, is that he does not seem to give a shit, when he understands his obstinacy and petulance to be precisely what the Other wants! He very much gives a shit (by hoarding his stuff, as it were) and wants to be disciplined! See Karl Abraham, "Contributions" 370–392. 12Initially Freud believed that the drives always aimed toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain in accord with "the pleasure principle." Eventually, however, Freud changed his mind to suggest there is a "death drive," or a pursuit of something beyond pleasure and life (see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's thinking in this respect would lead Jacques Lacan to suggest that, in the end, all drives are death drives. I will discuss this later in terms of "jouissance" or "enjoyment." 13The late James P. McDaniel's recent article, "Speaking Like a State," identifies "political enjoyment" as the problematic jouissance of our time. He argues that only by owning up to satisfactions of sadism, cruelty, and pain that all of us harbor through the processes of self-knowledge and "ironic self-suspension" can we start to counter and avoid the terrible political events (and the destructive, local responses to those events) in these "times of terror" (346). In a certain sense, the critique I advance here shows how the same "psychosocial economy of enjoyment" is in play in our discussions of disciplinarity as well. 14I acknowledge that such a shift from the psychoanalytic theory of the individual psyche to the "group behavior" of rhetoricians is controversial to some readers. In his understudied monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud links the two levels via the function of the "object" (understood as another person) in the individual psyche: "In the individual's life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology…is at the same time social psychology as well" (3). My approach is similarly informed (that is, that groups behave in an analogous manner to individuals; e.g., class behavior often reflects Oedipal arrangements). For a more thoroughgoing discussion of this important theoretical tangle, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic" 338–395. 15I would be remiss not to point out that this some who enjoy tend to be gendered male, a point well made by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter at the same disciplinary moment that Big Rhetoric became a concern. I will return to their essay later (see Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 383–409). 16For more on this evangelical riff, see Lundberg and Gunn, "'Ouija.'" 17The most recent are Steven Mailloux ("Places in Time") and James Arnt Aune's ("The Politics of Rhetorical Studies") essays in the February 2006 Quarterly Journal of Speech, which are revised versions of papers each delivered at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetorical Societies meeting in Evanston, Illinois in 2003. As the present essay attests, the theme of the 2006 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America guarantees there are yet more and more to come. 18The keynote address by Steven Mailloux, "One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Contingent Universality of Rhetoric," revisits the Big Rhetoric debate, as did a number of papers on the 2006 RSA Convention Program. 19For the bottom feeders such as me, the suggestion here is that tone marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a rhetorical quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 20 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Dolar, "The Object Voice" 19–20. 21"Voice" is a mediating, sister concept to tone, and has received closer scrutiny in rhetorical studies (see Vivian, Being Made Strange; and Watts, "'Voice'" 179–796). 22If "mourning" is "a feeling-tone perhaps unique in the modern university," as James Arnt Aune has suggested ("Politics" 71), then apocalypticism is what the discourse of the modern university shares with the current administration of George W. Bush. The difference between the academic and federal apocalyptic, suggests Ellen Messer-Davidow, is that conservatism truly mourns and moves on, whereas the academic Left seems stuck in its nostalgic weeping. Space limits expanding the argument I offer later beyond the local, however, I would suggest inability of rhetorical studies to "get over itself" or "its death" is the same problem of the academic humanities as well; we simply cannot reckon with our dehabilitating and discriminatory perversity (see Messer-Davidow 1–35). 23For context, the complete comment from the blind reviewer was as follows: "Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." 24For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Graff, Walzer, and Atwill's The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. 25James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see Darsey 199–210). 26Once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion, then we are led to a renewed responsibility to re-read our written work and be ever wary of tone. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her perversion to stop hurting the self and others. Owning up to one's role in the continuance of oppressive ideological norms is difficult, but as many of those who critique ideology have argued, the systemic character of ideology requires a degree of reflexivity. 27That the latter is the founding motto of any academic department was an argument often told by Robert Lee Scott to his students during many of his rhetoric seminars. My thanks to Dr. Scott for this humorous truism. 28In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone—one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other—may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean, and so on). 29Stylistically, Nietzsche famously yoked the feminine to tonal hollows (wombs), water, and the oceanic (see Derrida, Spurs; and Irigaray, Marine Lover). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Abstract Drawing from a number of “New Age” or occult texts, the essay characterizes the rhetorical functions of the deliberate use of difficult language in occult discourse as the outworking of an “occult poetics.” The essay suggests that most contemporary New Age discourse tends to follow a pattern illustrated in the Platonic dialogues: 1) it emphasizes the limits of language; and 2) it tends to stress the necessity of new vocabularies or novel expressions for intuiting ineffable, spiritual truths. The essay concludes by comparing occultism to the contemporary academic debate over obscure theoretical terminology.

Lucifer Rising (Yet Again) American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty by Michael W. Cuneo. New York: Doubleday, 2001. 301 + xvpp. Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth J. Medway. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 465 + ix pp. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media by Bill Ellis. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 332 + xix pp. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition by Jacqueline. Bacon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 291 + xiv pp. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric by Thomas O. Sloane, Editor in Chief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. xii 837 pp. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres by Rosa A. Eberly. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 + xvii pp.