If we but listen, we can hear a voice from the grave—Jacques Derrida’s mournful lamentation: “There is no longer, there has never been a scholar capable of speaking of anything and everything while addressing himself to everyone and anyone, and especially to ghosts. There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts” (2006, 12), a scholar who “does not believe in the sharp distinction between . . . the living and the non-living” (12). But, then, as if in response, we witness the apparition of just such a scholar: Stuart J. Murray, the author of The Living from the Dead, who very much is dedicated to the ethical project of attending to those dead who continue to haunt the living. Indeed, the book’s cover features a spectral image, entitled “Ghost,” as it were, conjured by artist Si Lewen. As well, the very title of his work renders the “sharp distinction” between “The Living” and “The Dead” porous, quixotically indistinct, as signified by the unattached and unhinged preposition “from.” That is, the title does not announce that Murray intends to distinguish the living from the dead, nor separate the living from the dead, nor identify the living from the dead—in some categorical, decisive demarcation. Rather, Murray’s use of the preposition “from” might conjure—instead, a Derridean sense of a “borderline”—a relation marked by différance between the living and the dead. Etymologically derived from an Old English preposition, “denoting the distance, absence, or remoteness of a person or thing in fixed position” (OED)—in time or space, from evokes Derrida’s neologism. “Différance as temporization [time/deferral], différance as spacing [space/difference]. How are they [time/space],” Derrida queries, “to be joined?” (1991, 61). Murray’s syntactically incomplete phrase suggests that the living and the dead are conjoined in a relation of interminable deferral and indeterminable difference, entangled in a fluxed, symbiotic—parasitic, even—relation.Much more could be said on this t(r)opic of deferred presence (and much more, indeed, of parasitic consumption and carnophallogocentrism), but to our immediate point, as Murray’s work entreats us to consider, there is much to learn in conversation with the dead; and indeed, it is our ethical responsibility—burden, even, as he remarks—to “hearken” to their voices. Murray’s The Living from the Dead undertakes this burden, listening to “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1), endeavoring to articulate “[u]nder what conditions might we hearken those dead who summon us, and exhort us, perhaps to reckon with our unspeakable complicity in their deaths” (1), while offering the following caveat: “These pages, which arise in care of such summons, exhortations, and calls to reckoning neither speak for nor as the dead, the dying, or lives lost” (1), for as he will reveal in his refrain, speaking for or as amounts to an unethical co-option, a resentencing to death of the dead and dying.Murray describes his work’s writing “something akin to thanatography” (1), which is through and through a rhetorical enterprise, necessitating an attunement to and with biopolitics’ “speech/acts and its tropological constitution of subjects, political identities, and lives lived” (10). That is, as Steven Mailloux has argued elsewhere, tropes are rotated in order to “rotate the troops” (1993, 299). Tropes, troops; life, death. Much is at stake.The subtitle of the book, Disaffirming Biopolitics, foregrounds Murray’s argument: that attending to these voices, to the dead, requires a certain disaffirmation of biopolitics, a disaffirmation of “a politics ostensibly devoted to life (bios)” (1), to the production of “life,” which is “governed by increasingly autonomous efficiencies and economies of scale, through techno-administrative mechanisms that include systems of surveillance, segregation, health and welfare regimes” (2), as well as “through education, . . . law, biomedicine, and popular culture, too” (2). The production of “life” instantiates itself by way of a “sacrificial economy” (5) that necessitates letting die (1), even “acceler[ating] or mand[ating]” (2) death. In short, “[b]iopolitics kills, albeit indirectly and in the passive voice. It lets die in the name of life. This book begins here in the care of deaths disavowed—rather than from life’s sacred vows and avowals” (1).Murray undertakes his thanatographical critique of biopolitics with an introduction, four chapters, and a concluding “refrain.” Through the use of case studies, examining sacrificial economies that mobilize tropes/troops, Murray listens to those—dead and dying—who are “let to die,” according to the rhetorics and logics of bioethics, as employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, by suicide terrorism, during the hunger strikes of California prisoners, during legal cases of “untimely” deaths of young children, and surrounding the technologically distributed, videotaped death of a disabled Black man. Each case study is situated within a rhetorical framework, and—as ever—critically foregrounds Murray’s own burden of “using,” for analysis, for his evidentiary purposes, these very “precious perilous bodies in sickness and suicide; in hunger, subjects of medico-legal power, of time and race and technology” (161). “My ‘uses’ are abuses,” he admits, “notwithstanding my intent” (161). This confession, which seeks no absolution, confirms, yet again, our/his irredeemable and “unspeakable complicity” in the violence of letting die (1).The stakes are grave, indeed, in Murray’s thanatographical critique—politically, ethically, and rhetorically, which remain, in refrain, indistinguishable, one from the other. In the face of “unconscionable state violence,” “the revivification of nativist nationalisms and racisms,” “merciless neoliberal governments and burgeoning authoritarianisms; and most recently, a deadly global pandemic”: “We live and die today on a knife’s edge of disaster” (1–2). Yet, the most devasting cut of his critique comes, on refrain, as an interrogation into his, my, our, individual and collective complicity in all. Once more, there is no option of good conscience, nor of absolution, although there remains “the future-to-come” (148). This should give us pause, to “wait abidingly” (148)—and should inspire a certain, disaffirming vigilance. At the gravest point, The Living from the Dead is a powerful, ethical invocation; a lyrical, performative provocation—and a promising, futural conjuration.Murray begins his rhetorical investigation citing Foucault’s halting attempt to “define” “biopolitics,” as worked through during a lecture at the College de France in 1976, where Foucault postulates that “one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. . . . This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (qtd. in Murray 3).Murray astutely notes that Foucault’s description of this “epochal transformation” of power can be articulated only in the passive voice, and Murray argues that this is Foucault’s only grammatical recourse precisely because this new right somehow manifests “seemingly by no one, or nothing, and yet in the name of an incipient ‘life itself’” (3). However, Murray continues, although this new right is, in contrast to sovereignty’s supreme agency, “decentralized and reticulate” (4), the grammar of liberal humanism has “become a great biopolitical ruse” (4), propagating the continuing illusion “that I freely choose and choose the very conditions of my own choosing—a grammatical ‘I’ propped up in its delusional sense of rationality, autonomy, and enlightened agency. An entitled ‘I’ through which ‘life itself’ would speak” (4).This grammatical habit—like Nietzsche’s worn coin in “On Truth and Lying” (1989, 250)—remains, circulating in this sacrificial economy as zombie currency: the illusion of individual sovereignty. This “lie”—supported and reproduced by “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” (250)—further belies that “the object of that [new] power, its site of application, is not a singular body to be disciplined or punished. Biopolitics makes live and lets die en masse. No longer concerned with given individuals, it is applied systemically on—and constitutes—particular ‘populations’” (Murray 2022, 4). Further, still, Murray maintains, not only is the grammatical “I” a rhetorical invention, but “life itself” is, also. That is, biopolitics mobilizes “a tropological regime that fabricates a vital ‘truth’ from which all else seems to follow” (3). This “truth” belies a so-called “concrete biological body,” which incarnates a trope of a “most disincarnate, sacred, or transcendental notion,” which is “neither given nor natural” (3). The Living from the Dead “surfaces” these mobilizations of metaphors—the tropes of “life itself” (14).Disaffirming biopolitics’ tropological moves is in response to scholars who advocate an “affirmative” or “democratic” biopolitics, who proffer a “kinder, gentler” biopolitics (12). Yet, as Murray convincingly argues, “to affirm is the performative speech/act of a (neo)liberal political subject and iteratively both relies on and shores up a problematic underlying ontology” (12). In this way, citing Nancy Fraser’s criticism, such affirmative attempts, therefore, do not “disturb,” but rather reify “the underlying social structures that generat[ed]” the very injustices, which we are interrogating and asking to be held accountable (12).Disaffirming, in contrast, is a thanatographical endeavor—a rhetorical one: “To critique is not to judge the truths or lies of biopolitics (it proclaims both), or whether it is good or evil (it can be both); rather, critique would pursue rhetorical questions concerning the conditions in and by which such statements could be voiced, circulate, and recruit desiring subjects as agents of the biopolitical apparatus” (13). In this way, “[t]o disaffirm is a devastating undertaking. It is not self-righteously censorious, neither a disapprobation nor a condemnation issued from a posture of moral superiority or a secure sense-of-self. . . . Instead, it would turn its gaze inward to reckon with my collusion and complicity in systems that let die in the name of my own livingness” (18). And, would amount to—if not a burial of the liberal, humanistic subject, certainly “a mortification of this subject, ‘I,’ who writes—here” (19).And then, what remains of The Living from the Dead is its refrain. After careful exegesis of the case studies, themes repeat. What remains, like a refrain, which repeats, remains. A refrain, etymologically, also carries the signifying saturation of the sense of “burden,” which Murray carries with him in his thanatographical study. As chorus or burden, Murray’s refrain through the book is to amplify, in its repetition, like a death dirge, the incalculable, immeasurable ethical burden that “we,” that “I,” that “he,” the author, carries as the ethical obligation in the face of the recognition of our own complicity in the letting die, in the knowledge that our, my, his, very living is at the purchase of the disavowal of so many deaths, the disavowal of all whom “we”/“I” have let die in this sacrificial economy (see also 171).Yet we must lend our ear. The responsibility to “hearken” to, address, and dialogue with “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1) (“however fictively” [144]), however rhetorically, however lyrically, Murray argues, necessitates the use of apostrophe as a non-co-optive, non-cannibalizing trope. Through a careful explication of the distinction between the tropes of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, Murray makes clear that the latter, prosopopoeia, speaks for and as the dead—a making present, as a projection of the addressor, and, as such, is “the master trope of biopolitics,” “whether expressly in the service of making live or letting die. It is a voice that impatiently projects the response it wishes to hear. It refuses to wait; inattentive, it willfully mistakes the echo for origin” (145).In contradistinction, apostrophe attends to a nonpresent absence (144), and eternally awaits a response—an impossible response, because the “impossible possibility of the reply ontologically precedes the call, and calls-forth that call, hearkening in advance: the apostrophe is summoned (by the absent addressee), the apostrophe in turn summons, and we tarry in this space. The address is always in the eternal return of this refrain” (145).And the address, “if we seek possibilities for a critical response that might disaffirm biopolitics,” requires a different “rhetorical register” (145). Hence the apostrophic address, the address summoned by the absent addressee, requires the “mortification” of the liberal human subject, perhaps summoning a sort of sacrifice of “letting die.” In this impossible space, unmoored from “our liberal subjecthood” and the illusion of agentic sovereignty, Murray takes up the (un)timely question: How then? What now? How might “we” proceed ethically (19)? In this concluding chapter, Murray faces the impossible, ethical injunction: How, then, to “deal” with these ghosts—with all these dead and dying with whom I have some complicity—by my very “livingness”? He turns/tropes his thanatographical eye from other systems to himself—to the very act of writing about the dead, about those lives that have been allowed (accelerated or mandated) to “let die.” The repetition is palpable. The lament has a corporeal texture. One feels the weight of corpses; the burden is heavy. This grave acknowledgment, however, is not cause for despair—but rather hope; here for a future-to-come, for a new way of being—for a new relation between the living and the dead.Murray suggests that there is a rhetorical, ethical responsibility to hearken to, to address—in a mode of call-and-response. How, then? Murray, thus, queries: might “we” (as tentatively as he inscribes such a collective), alternately, “gather around the impossible possibility of death, rather than life itself—a thanatopolitics rather than a biopolitics” (170)? Murray explains (and I realize I am quoting him heavily, but his prose is so gorgeously citation-worthy): “We must not think that by saying yes to ‘life,’ one says no to power and to death; on the contrary (to continue borrowing on Foucault’s phraseology), one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of biopolitics. And yet, in the sanctimonious affirmation of my ‘life,’ biopolitics demands that I say No to death, that I possess my life by locating death elsewhere, producing it there clandestinely, outsourcing it, as the condition of my living-on” (171).Speaking yes to life or yes to death, indeed, presumes that one can address such, and—to our purposes—presumes that one can, in present circumstances, “own” one’s own death, where nothing could be further from the “truth.” To speak the “truth” would acknowledge that “we ourselves are stuck in the universal contexts of death and cooperate with the death industry” (Sloterdijk 1987, 203). And this is where Murray resurrects the ancient Cynics, who acknowledged “the death-warranting of our established order. They refuse[d] to uphold the broken liberal contract, its ‘free speech,’ its false equalities” (175). Rather, they called for a “life which is radically other” and which “itself responds to—perhaps it has hearkened—death’s address” (175).By way of explication, he conjures Foucault’s late work on Cynic philosophy, as “a sort of parallel history to Western philosophy” (165). That is, Foucault contrasts the philosophical impulses as advocated by Plato’s with that of Plato’s In the the to is with a much relation to the as articulated in the Murray explains the of the the on the of an ethical relation to as a the manifests itself a and of in to the body the that we Western philosophy, and liberal In the in contrast, “the relation to itself . . . not on the care of the . . . but on the care of life (bios)” within Cynic contrast to the and of life within biopolitics rhetorical the or by which I my life and to it rather as by of as by a reply to that It does not speak it lives it. . . . a new to the of to say the (Sloterdijk 1987, It responds to the with “a dialogue of and An disaffirming mode of a mode of of of that one’s life and one’s one is or has one is to live or let to or of the has been a by scholars in our as in a to on Foucault and the of the to speak to speak and to speak The has a and history within the rhetorical (see and but of is the to to as is on the and rhetorics have their to critical This is a by who Foucault’s of power, and who argues that that we will or those that do not sense within the of or is, then, not in the according to much as it is an a The mode of thus, this critical as that up the possibilities for or of the of the to that have in that him his life, but he articulated a of that could one’s mode of one’s mode of death. the of the no such are or even even if we this Murray, in refrain, Cynic philosophy, the no no of an no but it us to still, on refrain, are the remains, the of remains, and the “burden,” or ethical to to Derrida has the work of attending to remains, to remains that do not remain, as the the impossible nonpresent absence that renders all thus, the for what I the (qtd. in 1987, in order to acknowledge that which the How to the of How to the work of our complicity in the systems of How to to the remains, to our complicity with injustices, in order to into the of the to address—in Derrida’s a and of a responsibility for This is what Murray is a scholar who deals with who to address, who for a of “life” that in one’s relation with the living and the ethical relation that would disaffirm our biopolitical regime and would not just an other life, it is an other in which an other death will one be (175). This is his this is what remains.

“When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks,” or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly “translating” Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, “I'd better get busy, really busy.”With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: “Really? What to do?”When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of (mostly) previously published essays on the sophists, on philosophy's systematic repression of their thought, and on the pragmatic and political value of sophistic “relativism,” I was struck by the volume's lack of engagement with similar scholarship that has been undertaken in the United States. Except for two references, one to the work of John Poulakos and the other to that of Ed Schiappa, the collection of essays does not otherwise engage with rhetoric studies that “we,” and I use this collective pronoun with increasing discomfort as I write this, have published in English. My first impulse, thus, after reading, was to react: but why recuperate the sophists now? Didn't “we” vociferously and variously praise, resurrect, refigure, and bury them several decades ago?My subsequent impulse was to acknowledge the very antisophistic drive at work in my own reception of a foreign scholarship (Oh, how easy it is to feel “at home” in one's disciplinary comfort zone, to circle the wagons around a constitutive “we”). I recognized, clearly, that now, right now is precisely the right time to readdress the sophists. Irrepressible, the sophists haunt us, no matter how hard we try to bury them (see the work of Victor J. Vitanza and Jane Sutton, for example), and in times of rampant bigotry, xenophobia, and fundamentalism, the sophists return to remind us that now will always already be the right time to rethink, revisit, and retheorize the sophists. As scholars in rhetoric and as Cassin, here, argue, the sophists represent the power to challenge totalizing beliefs and their oppressive effects.I acknowledge the argument that it is a totalizing move itself to group all the various rhetors and philosophers under one homogenizing category of “the sophists” (see the work of Schiappa, for example). By doing so, we risk dehistoricizing them, anachronistically reviving them, and compelling them to speak from their ancient graves according to a contemporary script. Yet as John Poulakos, Victor J. Vitanza, and others have previously argued—and as Cassin does here—“the sophist” serves as a productive, as Vitanza would say, representative anecdote/antidote, a way both to explore “neglected and repressed traditions, of alternative paths” (1) and to counteract the philosophical demand for homology. Cassin writes: “Sophistic texts are the paradigm of what was not only left to one side but transformed and made unintelligible by their enemies” (2). These neglected, repressed, and alternative texts—these “others,” she further argues, “have in common another way of speaking, even another conception of logos” (2).Contrary to the ontologists, the philosophers, who worship at the altar of the law of noncontradiction, of homogenization and the “one,” the sophists, as “logologists,” inhabit the unholy space of the many, “outside of the regime of meaning as univocity” (4). The philosophical tradition has embraced this law, Aristotle's “principle of all principles,” and its attendant communicational presumption and demand and thus, by structural necessity (just as structurally necessary as the prohibition of incest, she notes), excluded sophists and their language games (4-5). Cassin's methodological interest—and the interest for our future methodological muscle, then—is to query how and why the philosopher demands such prohibitions and, further, needs or feels the “right to say that people need punishment” for violations of the “one” and is thus compelled to violence (4).In a world forged across simultaneous intimacy (where the proverbial “seven degrees of separation” appears mistaken: it is always One degree of separation) and strangeness (where the One appears forever separated from the one), Cassin invites us to see the sophist as the figure who acknowledges us—all of us; every one of us—as a stranger, fundamentally, essentially, even when we feel most “at home.” Cassin's essays thus press us to welcome the stranger, the foreign other, to theorize a political system and a way of being that recognizes the complexity of our world, in its strangeness, to encounter the powerful strangeness that characterizes language, and to attend to the untranslatable quality that is world, that is being, that is being in the world.This is the theoretical impulse of the book—the recognition of the sophist as the “stranger,” inhabiting the unreadable if not inhabitable characteristics of the other—which comprises seventeen chapters, again mostly of previously published work, sectioned in five emphases: “Unusual Presocratics”; “Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics”; “Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy”; “Performance and Performative”; and “Enough of the Truth For….” The volume's emphasis is, thus, on the political implications for sophistical theories of language, as performative, of not describing a preexistent reality but of bringing worlds into being. Cassin's engagement with political philosophy leads her to propose what she calls a “consistent” relativism as a certain response to criticisms of “contingent” relativism as advanced by Richard Rorty, for example, as perpetuating opinions as the wind favors.I'll leave Cassin to argue with Rorty and others, as she does in a variety of chapters on the value(s) of political relativism (and I'll leave Steven Mailloux to meditate on sophistic pragmatism); I want to direct my brief comments here to the complicated relation between the impossibility of possibly living with others (consistently or contingently) possibly or impossibly.I want to focus on chapter 13, which is titled: “Philosophizing in Tongues,” which could be retitled as “How to Live Hospitably in an Inhospitable World When There is No One Language” (a mouthful of tongues to be sure), or more simply “Living Rhetorically in/with Tongues.” Obviously, the author nor the editors sought my opinion before selecting the chapter's title. But my point: we're “translating” Cassin's philosophical disciplinary focus/home into a more rhetorical one and hopefully a more unhomely one. She writes: “It is from the basis of the deeply nonviolent premise of this sentence—‘a language is not something that belongs’—that I would like to lay out what we attempted to achieve with the Dictionary of Untranslatables” (247). What I want to suggest is that the work of Cassin presses us—as a discipline—to think of the rhetorical as outside the simplistic hail of the “triangle,” of the presumption that a rhetorical agent “knows what he knows and knows what he speaks” and that audiences and messages are uncomplicated and dissociable entities. I further want to suggest that the work of Cassin presses rhetorical studies to think of communication as an “untranslatable” event.In service of this provocation is Cassin's edited, masterful Dictionary of Untranslatables, published by Princeton University Press in 2014. This hefty volume of approximately thirteen hundred pages celebrates the “cartography of language” (vii), of the various journeys of the word—and the singularity of each journey. The dictionary is a rich resource, reminding me of an expansive version of Michel Foucault's description of Borges's “certain Chinese encyclopedia” that instantiated The Order of Things. Do yourself the favor: buy this dictionary.In a world that trades in “untranslatable” values from continent to continent and in “untranslatable” words, such as “covfefe,” and when consequences, politically and ethically and mortally, are so dear, the field of rhetoric studies needs to take very seriously the “play of signification,” to refigure its theorization and praxis of attending to the “untranslatable.” Cassin invokes this refiguration, this revisitation of sophistry, not “as a destinal challenge to Babel but as an obviously deceptive and ironic commitment. The Dictionary of Untranslatables does not pretend to offer ‘the’ perfect translation to any untranslatable; rather, it clarifies the contradictions and places them face to face and in reflection; it is a pluralist and comparative work in its nonenclosing gesture” (247, emphasis mine). What a beautiful way to describe a sophistic enterprise: to work without destination and with some shot of irony in the face of the impossible, to reflect on contradictions face to face, in a “nonenclosing gesture.”Cassin historicizes this early acknowledgment of the plurality of languages and the impossibility of rendering the same—between the divide of “hellenizein” (“to speak Greek”; “to speak correctly”; “to think and act as a civilized man” [248]) and “barbarizein” (“which violently conflates the stranger, the unintelligible, and the inhuman” [248]). Not much has changed, it appears, from the first sophistic to our current rhetorical landscape, as Cassin acknowledges that this tension between what can be said “correctly” by the “civilized” and what can be said “otherwise” by the Other is indicative of the performative characteristic of language. Rhetoric is not governed by an “onto-logy” or a “phenomeno-logy,” “which must tell us what is and how it is” (249): the world is created by words (and by the relations that such words solidify, politically) that have no trans-signification guarantor. Cassin's deep scrutiny of the political and ethical ramifications of an impossible rhetoric hails what she calls a sophistic understanding of rhetoric studies as an impossible yet absolutely ethical endeavor that acknowledges that “different languages produce different worlds” (249) and that further acknowledges that any attempt to make “these worlds communicate” is a rhetorical process that “enabl[es] languages to trouble each other in such a way that the reader's language reaches out to the writer's language.” For “our common world is at most a regulating principle, an aim, and not a starting point” (249).That is, we cannot begin to realize justice or peace, for example, with any expectation of a “common” or translatable language. Yet it is this precise recognition (of the impossibility) that allows for the possibility of justice or peace. Citing Walter Benjamin—who describes the unsettling in every language due to the aftershocks of the “tremor of other languages”—Cassin writes: “This ‘wavering equivocity of the world,’ linked to the plurality of languages inasmuch as it is possible for us to learn them, seems to me to be the least violent of human conditions. A plurality of languages of culture that astound each other, this is what I wish for Europe. To be uncertain of the essence of things, uncertain of the essence of Europe, would be the best outcome for Europe and for us all” (258).Uncertainty is, granted, not a comforting political or ethical state of being. Yet we are here; we are always already here, neck deep in the “wavering equivocity of the world”—and word. The sophists (with all the scholarly caveats acknowledged) invite us to work with the impossibility presented by the plurality of languages—to embrace uncertainty and to view it precisely as our way forward. I acknowledge that this provides no satisfactory answer to uncertain times, but certainty is surely (I say with irony) the problem. It is time, the kairotic time, to start making bricks to build a less violent future.

Raymond Williams’s Keywords was first born in the form of an appendage to his book manuscript Culture and Society, but—although it showed no signs of rupturing or of sepsis—the publisher snipped th...

Traditionally, rhetorical theory has been defined as the study of human symbol use, which posits at the center of “the rhetorical situation” a knowing subject who understands himself (traditionally, it is a he), his audience, and what he means to communicate; indeed, this capacity to mean what he says and say what he means is, putatively, what distinguishes him as human. According to this very traditional approach, each of the elements in the rhetorical situation remain discrete—rhetor, audience, exigency, constraints, purpose, context, and message—and a successful outcome depends on the capacity of the rhetor to invent, organize, style, and deliver a message that will move this particular audience at this particular moment to some sort of action or attitude. Over the last several decades, the profoundly humanist and foundationalist (not to mention sexist) presumptions of this perspective have been challenged in various ways and to various ends by both continental philosophers and rhetorical theorists and practitioners.Decades of feminist scholarship has challenged the deeply sexist assumption that the rhetor is male, noting rhetoric's collusion with patriarchal and phallic modes, in addition to its accompanying complicity with racist and classist institutional privileges. That is, scholars have questioned the fundamental assumption that the rhetor is granted rhetorical agency precisely because of his humanity, which traditionally is associated with being a white, male property owner.1 Building on this critique, subsequent scholars have further challenged the humanist foundation of rhetoric by inviting our attention to the various ecologies that instantiate any so-called rhetorical situation, including material geologies as well as networked relations.2 Acknowledging how “the human” is indelibly networked in its relations to place, space, matter, and especially to technology and various media, many have theorized a notion of the “posthuman,” of a human that is fundamentally a technological construction or prosthesis.3This focus on the technological, on the networked, on that part of the so-called human that is arguably ahuman, has challenged us to consider in what ways human being is networked with “things,” with objects or technologies that are theorized to have their own rhetorical agency, their own ontological existence. The ensuing proliferation of “object-oriented ontologies” and rhetorics has proved a rich challenge to human-centric ontologies and rhetorics, inviting human beings once again to rethink the world and our supposed central relation to it.4Other scholars have asked us to think about the presumptive category of “the human” as the primal rhetorical being, investigating rhetorical practices of divination and prayer in relation to the dead and the divine.5 And still others have addressed the conscientious practices of forests, for example, as well as the communicative practices of the so-called nonhuman animal, including the intricate messages of chimpanzees and the mourning practices of elephants, to reveal the deeply humanistic assumptions that we hold, as rhetorical scholars, about communication and identification.6This special issue on extrahuman rhetorical relations aims to further a thinking of rhetoric beyond human symbol use. In the invitation we sent to potential contributors, we requested pieces examining how “the human” is produced through anahuman communications, but we left entirely open the range of potential approaches to our prompt; as a result, the responses published here are quite diverse. We did not, for obvious reasons, invite contributors who would simply challenge this prompt in an attempt to return to humanist notions of rhetorical exchange; therefore, you will note in each of these articles, despite their great diversity, an unapologetic push for us to move beyond traditional, humanist presumptions.We reproduce here a section from our letter of invitation (August 2012), which describes the general goals of the issue: The focus of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is extrahuman rhetorical relations, including any aspect of the scene of responsive engagement with or among nonhuman others. It's true that traditionally rhetoric names a specifically human art or science, requiring at least one discrete human subject at the center of its operations. Even what the discipline of communication studies calls “extrapersonal communication,” which involves communication with a nonhuman other (an animal, a plant, a deity, a ghost, an object, a machine, etc.), presumes first of all a preexisting human subject who uses rhetoric to establish the connection. However, we aim to honor this weighty inheritance in the tradition of what Avital Ronell has called the noble traitor, inviting essays that take it up in order to expose its limits and presumptions.We invite, for example, essays that examine the ways in which “the human” is produced through ahuman or inhuman communications very broadly conceived; essays that attend to a generalized notion of rhetoricity—a fundamental affectability, persuadability, or responsivity—that remains irreducible to “speech” and symbolic exchange more generally; essays that interrogate the predicament of addressivity or responsivity in the face of (or among) animals, objects, deities, and the dead—but also essays that deconstruct the clean distinctions implied in such designations as “the animal,” “the object,” “the dead,” and “the divine,” that expose the ways in which these dangerous supplements are mobilized in the name of the collective noun “the human.”Our aim is to open a space for provocative reflection on extrahuman—rhetorical—relations, on what takes place at the dimly lit intersections of these three terms. We welcome a diverse range of theoretical and methodological lenses, from deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to more familiar philosophical, rhetorical, literary, and historical methods of inquiry.It was not our intention to produce a volume that systematically covered every angle of our theme, leaving no remainder. We were not interested, that is, in finally wrapping up the nagging question of extrahuman rhetorics but in holding it open, in probing and pushing the limits of the anthropos, in part by zooming in on the relations that constitute the conditions for the appearance of the figure of “the human” itself.In the interview that opens the issue, Avital Ronell contemplates “places where there's contamination, where there are installations of the nonhuman, the machinic, the theological trace, the stall in, or even the stated impossibility of, constituting what counts as ‘the natural,’ ‘the human.’” She ponders the “equip-mentality of the anthropos,” the fact that “we're already equipped with receptors for drugs,” that “we're already made up of all sorts of apps and calling instruments and all manner of technological ciphers and chemical command centers,” all of which “require us somehow to break out of the humanist presumption.” This paradox of the living machine, what Elissa Marder describes in her contribution as the human's “primal relation to artifice, imitation, technology, rhetoric, and death” is taken up in various ways by each of the contributors here. The very notion of a living machine challenges the putatively clean distinctions between life and death, human being and technology, and—given the typical alignment of “the animal” with “the machine”—human and animal. If life itself is already machinic and vice versa, a host of prized presumptions are called into question, including those that situate an indivisible line between mortal and immortal life, the human and the divine.Marder offers Pandora, “first woman and first android,” as “a prehuman figuration for a nonanthropomorphic and nonnatural concept of the human that is, perhaps, still to come.” This extrahuman character, Marder proposes, becomes a figure “for what, within the human, challenges the possibility of defining the limits of the human.” An “animated artificial entity” bestowed “with special, technological powers,” Pandora is “not modeled after life but rather is the very model for life itself.” She both simulates divine life “(through language and representation)” and remains “inextricably bound up with sexuality, temporality, technicity, and alterity,” making it “difficult to decide whether she herself is alive or … merely an imitation of life, like an android, a robot or automaton.” Either way, after her “human life can no longer be simply opposed to death or figured exclusively as human.” Michael Bernard-Donals and Steven Mailloux describe the technics of a primal relation with the divine in terms of an unavoidable call (to or from the divine) that operates as limit structure, separating what it also joins. Mailloux offers a rhetoric of prayer, defining “angels” as the “finite, contingent conditions” in which it takes place, and Bernard-Donals explicates the ways in which the call from or of the divine initiates a violence that is constitutive of the human. Thomas Rickert also contemplates a divine call, linking Parmenides's sophisticated logical techniques not to reason but to revelation by examining this historical figure's dedication to incubation, an ancient Greek practice in which one sleeps (usually in caves, sometimes with the help of pharmaceuticals) on the ground in hopes of receiving divine inspiration through dreams.Laurence Rickels demonstrates in what he calls the “psy-fi” genre an allegorical link between standards of “normal” human behavior and “the maimed animal test subject” discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer. Allegory, by identifying or filling in the blanks “that disclose the ‘other story,’” turns “significance out of the blank itself,” Rickels suggests, “working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward.” But “allegorical legibility,” he adds, “would appear to require the broken-down psychotic state for discerning what goes into the norms into which we are plugged.” Indeed, he shows that psy-fi presents test situations in which “blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier.” Michelle Ballif, on the other hand, zooms in on an “originary mourning,” which she situates as the very condition for any rhetorical address. The relation between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible (specter) constitutes, she argues, the “ethical relation between the self and the other, the otherness of the self, and the otherness of the other.” Writing is, for her as for Derrida, “the very graphic scene of mourning,” a mourning “of the self as other and the other as other” that overflows the traditional limits of “the rhetorical situation.”Cary Wolfe describes two types of finitude at the heart of the extrahuman relation: the finitude of embodiment that we share with all other living beings and the (also shared) finitude of our prosthetic subjection to language or to any semiotic system from which concepts and modes of communication are drawn, and so through which “extrahuman relations” are recognized and articulated to begin with. These relations involve a scene of address in which all the possible modes of comprehension and expression were “on the scene” well before the interlocutors showed up. In the case of relations with extrahumans, this “iterative language” or “meaning,” Wolfe notes, is required to “form a recursive loop that can braid together different life worlds in a third space reducible to neither—the very space of ‘relation.’” James Brown, Joshua Gunn, and Diane Davis also take up, in distinct ways, this shared finitude of prosthetic subjection. Brown exposes some of the “machinic roots of the rhetorical tradition,” suggesting that “rhetoric is a collection of machines (‘whatsits,’ ‘gadgets’) for generating interpretive arguments.” Tracing what he calls the “robot rhetor,” which would be any “entity that ‘machines language,’” he calls into question the clear distinction between human and robot.Gunn runs Henri Bergson's formula for laughter (“something mechanical encrusted upon the living”) through Jacques Lacan's subversion of the subject to suggest that laughter names “something lawful encrusted upon the living.” Language here aligns with the lawful or the mechanical (the “Symbolic”), and Gunn examines the way it “comes to bear on that nominal domain of human spirit that Bergson dubbed the ‘life impulse,’ and that Sigmund Freud referenced as ‘the drive.’” Davis describes this prosthetic subjection as a kind of “preoriginary rhetoricity” through which every being, to be what it is, marks itself off from the other in a gesture of self-reference, repeating itself to gather itself and therefore to relate both to itself and to the other. At least since Descartes, self-referentiality has been taken as the putatively indivisible line distinguishing “the human” from “the animal,” but Davis proposes that self-reference or autodeixis is not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological “as such” (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical “as if,” which names the already relational condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.We would like to express our deep gratitude to each of the contributors in this issue, for their willing participation, their thoughtful and envelope-pushing essays, and their patience as we pulled it all together. Thanks especially to Cary Wolfe for so swiftly accepting our invitation to write the response piece that closes the issue. We are profoundly grateful to Avital Ronell, who graciously agreed to sit down with Diane for two hours on a Saturday morning in New York City for the interview that opens the volume; as always, her insights are both provocative and far reaching. We want to thank those colleagues who generously agreed to review the contributions published here: Janet Atwill, Erik Doxtader, Daniel Gross, Debbie Hawhee, John Muckelbauer, Jenny Rice, Greg Ulmer, and Victor J. Vitanza. We are grateful to each of you for your time and for your immensely helpful feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to Sam Baroody, a graduate student in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia, for checking Greek translations in two of the contributions published here, and to Eric Detweiler, a graduate student at the University of Texas, for transcribing the interview with Avital Ronell. And finally, we want to thank Jerry Hauser for inviting us to edit this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric—we are extremely grateful for your guidance, your trust, and your inspiration.

AbstractArguing that the foundational relation that constitutes the (rhetorical) address is that between the living and the dead, this article calls on rhetorical studies to reconceive rhetoric as a (non)visual relation between the “invisible” (specter) and the “visible” (living). I then complicate this relation—and the easy distinction between the two—and argue that regarding the dead, guarding them, mourning them, is the ethical relation that makes any rhetorical address possible.

This essay argues that traditional historical methods elide the radical singularity of the event by subjecting the event to meaning by way of categorical norms that cannot—by definition—include the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such historiographical methods render every event significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a proper beginning, middle, and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a linear, logic of time. Relying on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the event, specifically in “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” this essay will address the impossible possibility of writing the event by way of a hospitable historiography—beyond the representational demand, appropriative impulse, and temporal mandate of traditional historical methods.

Abstract This essay suggests that the Platonic question “Is Rhetoric a technê?” aims to interrogate rhetoric as a re‐productive “art,” specifically by inquiring whether rhetoric engenders anything and, if so, by what reproductive methodology. Further, this infamous question aims to identify the legitimacy of rhetorical intercourse and its resulting offspring, by subjecting rhetorical practices to genealogical scrutiny for eugenic purposes: to produce “words of the right sort"—those which establish a proper social and symbolic order.

(1998). Writing the third‐sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 51-72.

Women! This coin which men find counterfeit! laments Euripedes' Hippolytus.' Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world, in the light of the sun? If you were so determined to breed the race of man, the source of it should not have been (11.616-20). Phaedra is, as all women, the counterfeit coin. Her exchange rate is never quite legitimate. She is never quite legitimate. As the gold standard is Man, is Truth, Woman never measures up. She is always found lacking Truth-the Truth that is man-and is thus, like Phaedra, a counterfeit coin. But she is a coin imprinted with His signature, bearing His name, nevertheless. With his imprint, Woman's exchange rate is secured. Like a coin, she changes hands-from father to husband.2 Woman, the counterfeit coin, the site of false words and deeds, is inscribed with guilt; indicted with deception, penned as the Unspeakable and Undiscernible Lie, sentenced to silence. Woman is the text that paradoxically cannot speak but nevertheless speaks in its silence. Her silence is the message; it desires to be read. And now we-as historiographers of maleauthored texts concerning women, as feminists, as proponents of the Discourses of the Other-desire to (re)cover and (re)read Phaedra's, Diotima's, Aspasia's silent message.3 But why? What motivates our desire to read these women? What propels our desire to make these women readable? Are we not, perhaps, attempting to reinvest these women with value? Are we not trying to redeem them from charges of counterfeit? Are we not, then, merely making Woman into a legitimate coin, a proper currency, a respectable asset? Are we not, then, merely increasing her exchange rate, but without questioning the very standard-the phallogocentric standard of Truth-that finds her lacking, that is responsible for her devaluation? It is my argument that our attempts to (re)read women, to (re)cover women, to (re)present women, and to therefore (re)cast history, are insidious acts of (re)appropriation. Everyone knows that the exchange rate of a dog of papered lineage-of legitimate birth-is exponentially greater than that of a mongrel. To provide