David A. Frank

The new rhetoric, Judaism, and post‐enlightenment thought: The cultural origins of Perelmanian philosophy

In search of justice, Chaim Perelman rediscovered the rhetorical tradition and reclaimed his Jewish identity after World War II. As an attempt to correct misreadings of Perelmanian thought and to situate the New Rhetoric as a response to post‐Enlightenment and postmodern culture, I advance two arguments in this essay. First, Perelmans philosophy and the New Rhetoric project reflect his Jewish heritage and Talmudic habits of argument. Second, because Perelmanian philosophy enacts Jewish and Talmudic thought, the New Rhetoric charts a “third way” between Enlightenment metaphysics and the dangers of the more extreme expressions of postmodernism. The New Rhetoric is much more than a relativist taxonomy of argument, for it aspires to replace violence, to create human community, and most important, to discover and craft justice with a Talmudically influenced system of rhetoric.

Arguing with God, Talmudic Discourse, and the Jewish Countermodel: Implications for the Study of Argumentation

Hebraic and Greco-Roman traditions of argument and argumentation both diverge and converge on key notions. In this paper, I explore these differences and commonalities by considering the Jewish tradition of arguing with God and in community. I examine three instances in the Jewish Bible of human argument with God, highlight key principles of argument in the Talmud, and reflect on the contributions made to an understanding of a Jewish- inflected argument in the twentieth century by Emmanuel Lévinas and Chaim Perelman. In the conclusion I juxtapose the Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions of argument and suggest that the former favors ethics over ontology, the vita active over the vita contemplativa, rhetoric over philosophy, and argumentative reasoning over apodictic logic, thereby reversing the terms of classical thought.

Chaim Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy": Commentary and Translation

31 p. The Translation has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The commentary is still available.

Rhetorical criticism of interpersonal discourse: An exploratory study

This study demonstrates how rhetorical criticism can be utilized to clarify the rhetorical nature of interpersonal discourse. Bitzers situational theory, Bormanns fantasy theme analysis, and Arnolds criticism of oral rhetoric are synthesized to explain the nature and form of selected portions of taped and transcribed interpersonal dialogue.

Innovative Approaches to Territorial Disputes: Using Principles of Riparian Conflict Management

Many belligerents in ethno-territorial conflicts claim they have an absolute right to contested space, operate on a zero-sum basis, and use maximalist negotiation strategies. This article draws on ongoing fieldwork that examines ethno-territorial conflict and focuses on the transition from rights-based to needs-based negotiations over sites of worship, parading routes, and national borders. These three sites represent different scales and expressions of spatial conflict, including accommodations for Jewish and Muslim worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron/al-Khalil, West Bank, the terms and conditions agreed to for sectarian parading in the town of Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and the return and subsequent lease of land on the Israeli–Jordanian border. In each case, negotiated arrangements allow for the belligerents to meet their minimal territorial needs, even as the broader dynamics of the conflict persist. Central to these arrangements is a shared recognition that space is a mutable resource and that needs-based negotiation can allow sharing of contested territory at a variety of scales. The article draws from analogous dynamics in international river treaty negotiations, specifically the riparian model developed by the authors in earlier work. We conclude by enumerating the contributions geographers can make to theories of conflict and peace.

A Traumatic Reading of Twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theory: The Belgian Holocaust, Malines, Perelman, and de Man

In this essay, I seek to read the rhetorical theories set forth by Belgians Chaïm Perelman and Paul de Man as responses to the Holocaust. To accomplish this aspiration, I draw from Dominick LaCapras framework for the analysis of trauma and its expression in historical and theoretical texts. Reading the rhetorical theories of Perelman and de Man, two of the most prominent of the twentieth century, through a lens of trauma theory allows critics to see them as post-war efforts to deal with the implications of the absence of meaning, the murder and loss of 25,257 Belgian Jews, Fascism, genocide, and de Mans collaboration with the Nazis. I argue that Perelmans rhetoric theory better “works-through” the Belgian Holocaust than the one offered by de Man because it offers a vision of reason that can yield justice and places collaborators in the “grey zone” of totalitarian societies and logical positivism, thereby offering de Man partial absolution for his endorsement of the German occupation and anti-Semitism. De Mans rhetorical theory appears to act out the Belgian Holocaust, for it rehearses the act of deconstruction, does not name its traumatic exigence, lacks the theoretical resources to deal with the material past, fails to offer better choices for the present, or provide a vision of the future. Reading rhetorical theories as responses to the exigences of trauma calls for a reconsideration of the contexts and motives driving the creation of the major rhetorical theories of the twentieth century, including those of Heidegger and Grassi.

Book Reviews: After the New Rhetoric

In search of justice, Chaı̈m Perelman alone and in collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca created the “new rhetoric” project, which is perhaps the most influential system of rhetoric of the twentieth century. Some of the project’s articles and books have been translated into English, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. I do not question the brilliance and importance of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric, but his writings have yet to be translated into French. The rhetoric entry in the 2003 online version of the Encyclopædia Britannica features the new rhetoric, including a condensed version of the longer 1970 chapter by Perelman in Britannica’s Great Ideas Today series. Oxford’s 2001 Encyclopedia of Rhetoric has a host of entries documenting the influence of the new rhetoric. In his entry on “Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Brian Vickers writes that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work is “one of the most influential modern formulations of rhetorical theory”; Dilip Gaonkar on “Contingency and Probability” observes that Perelman made a “founding distinction between demonstration and argumentation”; J. Robert Cox’s entry on the “Irreparable” reports that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s rhetoric is “groundbreaking”; Thomas Jesse Roach notes that “Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are the first to offer a prominent position to expository discourse as genre of rhetoric”; Barbara Warnick devotes her entire entry on conviction to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theories of rhetoric and argumentation. Contributors making entries on argumentation, arrangement, exemplum, the forensic genre, inference, law and rhetoric, logos, pathos, practical reason, and rhetoric and religion also cite the influence of Perelman or his collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca. Many contemporary book-length studies of justice, argument, and rhetoric are influenced by and reference Perelman’s writings and those of the new rhetoric project. Among the more conspicuous of these recent works are David Raphael’s Concepts of Justice (Oxford University Press), Thomas Farrell’s The Norms of Rhetorical Culture (Yale University Press), and James Crosswhite’s The Rhetoric of Reason (University of Wisconsin University Press). There are, of course, excellent chapters on Perelman and his collaborations with Olbrechts-Tyteca in: Foss, Foss, and Trapp; Conley; Bizzell and Herzberg; and Kennedy. The works of Perelman and the new rhetoric project are found in a diverse array of articles in the scholarly literature. In the last three years, the new rhetoric project has been cited in Welt Der Slaven-Halbjahresschrift Fur Slavistik, Arbor-Ciencia Pensamiento, Zeitschrift Fur Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Alteren Kirche, Etudes Francaises, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Political Geography, and a number of other journals. In comparison, Kenneth Burke is often cited in English language journals, but one finds Perelman rather than Burke in the footnotes of German and French publications on rhetorical themes. The 1958 publication of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s magnus opus, Traité de l’Argumentation: La Nouvelle Rhétorique, changed rhetorical studies. James Crosswhite declares the Traité “the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory.” Michael Leff writes that the 1970 English translation of Traité was a “bombshell” in U.S. studies of argumentation and rhetoric. Henry W. Johnstone reviewed the Traité twice, the original French rendition in 1958 and the English translation in 1970. In the latter review, Johnstone concluded that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s survey of argumentative techniques “may not be surpassed for another hundred years.” Perelman’s aspiration was to unveil an expression of reason that would navigate between the “cold logic” Hannah Arendt detected in totalitarianism and the nihilism of radical skepticism. The realm of rhetoric, Perelman argued, is that space between apodictic logic and aporia, the sphere of experience and action. Demonstration and formal logic, Perelman argued, are limited to the abstract and the vita contemplativa. Perelman sought to liberate reason from the constrictions of formal logic and to recover the role rhetoric played in the vita activa during the Renaissance, which, according to Dominic A. LaRusso, was “marked by its concern for humanitas, that unique blend of conception, passion, and expression.”

Mythic Rhetoric and Rectification in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a civil war, and their mythic systems will need to change before a pragmatic peace can break out. In this study, we examine Palestinian and Israeli myths, which consist of narratives both people use to define their identity, land, and the “other.” Drawing from the literature on rhetoric and myth, we explain how Israeli Revisionist and Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist discourse set forth stories to counter threats to identity. After describing the features of these stories, we place them in historical context and track how they change in and over time.

Jerusalem and the riparian simile

Abstract Many see the city of Jerusalem as an intractable religious political issue, beyond the pale of negotiation and problem solving. This view reflects a set of problematic assumptions, including beliefs that Jerusalem produces a contest between maximalist claims that only power can resolve. In this article, we conduct a conceptual exercise designed to rethink Jerusalem as an issue of political geography open to needs-based bargaining. Drawing from evidence in the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, we suggest that riparian negotiations offer an analogue that might be used to restructure the discourse used in the negotiations about Jerusalem. We propose the use of a riparian simile in which negotiators begin with the assumption that “the conflict over Jerusalem is like international water disputes.” Riparian negotiations encourage movement from sovereign rights to functional needs, the use of time as a flexible variable, a focus on beneficial uses, and the creation of language recognizing local contingencies.

“Shalom Achshav”—Rituals of the Israeli peace movement

Rhetorical critics have ignored the study of non‐western movements and have not paid serious attention to the construction of theories which help to explain and interpret the rhetorical form of movements. This study attempts to fill both voids by synthesizing concepts from rhetorical theory and anthropology to explain the linguistic process which made up the Israeli peace movement. An assessment of the rhetorical strategies, a listing of the indirect consequences of the movement, and the implications of the study to the development of rhetorical theory is provided to complete the critical act.