Book Review| September 01 2018 Points of Difference in the Study of More-than-Human Rhetorical Ontologies How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. By Eduardo Kohn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013; pp. viii + 267. $85.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; pp. i + 336. $104.95 cloth; $27.95 paper.Rhetoric, through Everyday Things. Edited by Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016; pp. ix + 270. $29.95 paper.Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015; pp. vii + 345. $45.00 paper. Joshua P. Ewalt Joshua P. Ewalt Joshua P. Ewalt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (3): 523–538. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0523 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Joshua P. Ewalt; Points of Difference in the Study of More-than-Human Rhetorical Ontologies. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2018; 21 (3): 523–538. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0523 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. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Recently, the work of Jacques Rancière, particularly that work which theorizes the distinction between the police and politics as it maps onto the activity of the (re)distribution of the sensible, has become of interest to rhetorical studies. However, this work is performed with little attention to how the term “rhetoric” actually emerges in the material texts authored under the signature of Jacques Rancière. In this article, I intervene in the movements characterizing our field's contemporary uptake of Rancière's philosophy by offering a reading of his The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, paying particular attention to its mobilization of the distinction between poetics and rhetoric and offering a conceptualization of poetics that, although necessarily built from a violent characterization of rhetoric, can become a productive companion to a more egalitarian rhetoric of social change.