Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric , livre ebook

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94 pages

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Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric considers rhetoric as the historical counterpoint of philosophical and religious discourses via its correspondences with antique rabbinic exegetical practices and contemporary psychoanalytic insights into causation. Timothy Richardson takes up the rabbinic position to demonstrate how traditional Greco-Christian rhetoric might be insufficient to account for what we now mean by rhetoric as a discipline.

Sujets

Philosophie

Philosophie de la religion

Philosophy

Philosophie et théologie

Religious

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Publié par	Parlor Press, LLC
Date de parution	14 août 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781602353664
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, and Jennifer Bay
The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.
Books in the Series
Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric (Richardson, 2013)
Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers (Goodburn, LeCourt, Leverenz, 2012)
Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era (Mastrangelo, 2012)
Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, 2e, Rev. and Exp. Ed. (Enos, 2012)
Rhetoric’s Earthly Realm: Heidegger, Sophistry, and the Gorgian Kairos (Miller) *Winner of the Olson Award for Best Book in Rhetorical Theory 2011
Techne , from Neoclassicism to Postmodernism: Understanding Writing as a Useful, Teachable Art (Pender, 2011)
Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies (Buchanan and Ryan, 2010)
Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre (Ostergaard, Ludwig, and Nugent, 2009)
Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics (Lipson and Binkley, 2009)
Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence , Rev. and Exp Ed. (Enos, 2008)
Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis (Eble and Gaillet, 2008)
Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching in Troubled Times (Bloom, 2008)
1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition (Henze, Selzer, and Sharer, 2008)
The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration ( Enos and Borrowman, 2008)
Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics , (Dew and Horning, 2007)
Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process (Foster, 2007)
Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum (McLeod and Soven, 2006)
Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline (L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo, 2004). Winner of the WPA Best Book Award for 2004–2005.
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies Exp. Ed. (Berlin, 2003)

Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric
Timothy Richardson
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2013 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richardson, Timothy, 1969-
Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric / Timothy Richardson.
pages cm. -- (The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-363-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-364-0 (hardcover : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-365-7 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-366-4 (epub)
1. Rhetoric. 2. Immanence of God in literature. 3. Rhetoric and psychology. 4. Causation in literature. 5. Rhetoric--Religious aspects. I. Title.
P301.R54 2013
808--dc23
2013031676
1 2 3 4 5
Cover photo, “Heavenly Light” by Greg Glau. See gglau.zenfolio.com for more of Greg’s photography. Greg Glau is the Official Photographer of Parlor Press.
Cover design by David Blakesley. Copyediting by Laura Batson, Brian Bowers, Patrick Clarke, Benjamin Cousins, Andrew Harris, Cody Lang, Karl Lykken, Courtney Mohan, Cleveland Noel, Patrick O’Friel, Melanie Payne, Connor Pencek, Parag Raychoudhury, Michael Wooten, and Devin Wrigley
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email editor@parlorpress.com.

For Laura and Benjamin and Harper, who are my causes

Contents
Forward
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 An Image to Honor and Worship
2 Rhetoric as Mitzvah
3 But the Greatest of These Is Love
4 Nothing But the Effects of Those Instances of Saying
5 What Stops Not Being Written
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Forward
David Metzger
The phrase “It is not in heaven” ( lo bashayim hi ) appears once in the Hebrew Bible ( Deuteronomy/Devarim 30:12). The Babylonian Talmud makes reference to it on six occasions or so (Eruvin 55a., Bava Metzia 59b). And we find six references to it in Midrash Rabbah , most of which are in Devarim Rabbah , a compilation of rabbinic commentaries on the book of Deuteronomy . Contemporary scholars and community leaders (from Chaim Perelman to Rabbi Walter Homolka) have made good use of the phrase as an anchor or authorization for their discussions of the unique expansiveness of rabbinic discourse where minority opinions and multiple voices are valued and preserved. Presumably, if “it” is not in heaven, then it is for us to decide and act–at least inasmuch as the majority of us can be rendered as a “universal audience” or “social conscience.”
The “it” is expressed variously within this corpus: sometimes it is “this mitzvah”; sometimes it is “the Torah”; in other instances, it is simply “knowing what to do or knowing what is right.” For Richardson, the “it” is rhetoric. Rhetoric is not in heaven, and—in this manner—he reorients rhetoric’s ontological narrative (at least the one that begins with Plato and Aristotle) into an examination not of how rhetoric has been marginalized but how its apparently beleaguered state has functioned as a necessary gap/relationship between word and thing, fiction and reality, transcendence and immanence, religion and history, desire and jouissance, Judaism and Christianity. Not only is this gap necessary, it is so necessary that it takes on the characteristics of a relationship and, as such, reinvigorates the question, “What is the rhetorical subject?” And it prompts us to ask “What is the Other for rhetoric?”
With this second question, Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric introduces readers to a bold concept, what I would call the “God of the Rhetoric.” Using the work of Jacques Lacan and Kenneth Burke, Richardson develops Aristotle’s basic description of the four causes (efficient, material, formal, final) into an argument regarding the Subject/Other/God of Christian and Jewish texts. He introduces, as well, a method for reading the necessary gap/relationship of these texts. Richardson’s treatment of the four causes provides a language with which to identify our attraction and engagement with texts lest and so that we might recognize the relationship/gap between our engagement with texts and our engagement with ourselves and others.
Each chapter brings its own original and welcome contribution. Chapter 1 resituates the familiar notion of negative theology in the work of Kenneth Burke, showing how rhetoric (understood as a way of working the negative in language) obviates the divide between the God of Philosophy and the God of Religion in both Augustinian and rabbinic discourse. Chapter 2’s focus on history and memory as ways to construct the Other is wonderfully accessible, and the Rabbinic texts selected as examples are the bread and butter of any Introduction to Rabbinics course. Chapter 3 juxtaposes Girard, Kristeva, Burke, and Kierkegaard’s reading of the binding of Isaac (the aquedah)—not only adding to our knowledge of each but explaining their attraction and engagement with narratives of sacrifice as attempts to create a good (enough) Other. Chapter 4 puts all of chapter 3’s important theoretical work to good purpose by offering a powerful and insightful reading of “The Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson,” a Jewish account of the Crusades. And Chapter 5 gives us our homework. How does the rhetorical engage us?: “If the rhetoric is going to (re)discover the contingent nature of its subject, it can only do so by turning back from the philosophical, by becoming its mirror image, by taking the place of the cause for its subject in order to imply in the subject what the subject cannot say but nonetheless performs daily.”
What does this have to do with our engagement with ourselves and others? And who, by the way, is this us you keep talking about? Given that sacrifice and love often find their home in the gaps/relationships identified in the texts Richardson discusses, it is possible to see that these gaps/relationships might also be blind spots for those who call for or valorize the bliss of suffering in their identification of heroes and heroines. To be sure, Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric does not explicitly aim to recover and value the silenced voices of the past to create a vision of a better future. But its attentiveness to rabbinic notions of textuality does bring Jewish texts into the ongoing conversation about rhetoric. And it does so without invoking the ocular equivalent of “entering into a conversation,” which bears all the evil that good conversation will not abide: the promise of safety through surveillance. For those of us who are concerned that, in developing a Jewish rhetoric over and against a Hellenic one, we must be careful not to see or only be seen by what emerges from that gap/relationship, the discovery of the rhetorical subject’s conti