This essay places rhetorical theories of publicity and the common in conversation around the concept of intimacy. Defined as a felt sense of proximity or closeness, intimacy is a form of affective relation that underlies both private and public worldmaking practices, and that produces investments in certain forms of life and community. Considering the relationship between publicity and the common in terms of intimacy makes clear that dominant forms of contemporary publicity are predicated on racialized and gendered enclosures of intimacy that have dispossessed noncapitalist relationships to land and community and instead fostered intimacies conducive to capital accumulation. Our argument suggests that critical scholars who are concerned with contemporary capitalism’s subjection of life to the market have a common interest in attending to the ways these histories of enclosure shape the horizons of modern publicity. Our argument also suggests further attention be directed to forms of counterintimacy aimed at producing anticapitalist coalition.

This essay reads The Civil War in France, Karl Marx’s account of the 1871 Paris Commune, as an example of revolutionary epideictic rhetoric that takes debt as a central unifying trope. Marx deploys the rhetoric of debt as a synecdoche to unify diverse French and international political constituencies around the political project of the Paris Commune. Simultaneously, in the wake of the Commune’s destruction, the trope of debt allows Marx to signal the political potential of the Commune outside its immediate context, inviting thinkers and activists after Marx’s time to invest in the Commune’s project in new and creative ways. I argue that this reading of The Civil War in France contributes to conversations about revolutionary community within Marxian rhetorical studies, as well as furthering discussions of the links between epideictic rhetoric and social change.

AbstractThis article stages a new encounter between rhetorical studies and the thought of Karl Marx. We examine one of Marx's central writings on French history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, arguing that Marx's text enacts a philosophy of rhetorical trope that facilitates new and productive connections between philosophy, rhetoric, and theories of social change. Focusing on Marx's use of metonymy and chiasmus to structure his narrative, we argue that these figures function as rhetorical machines—textual devices that render legible the causal logics which led to Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Louis being crowned emperor of France following an 1851 coup d'état. In addition, our diagram of Marx's tropological machines highlight points of unspent potential for resistance within and against such causal logics. We thus establish Marx as a resource for materialist theories of rhetorical trope, demonstrating the value of his concepts for accessing the political surplus of the present.