Diane Davis

Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are

Kenneth Burke bases his theory of identification on Freuds; however, whereas Burke insists that identification is a symbolic act that therefore remains available for conscious critique and reasoned adjustment, Freud reflects on an affective identification that precedes the distinction between “self” and “other.” This nonrepresentational identification—Freud sometimes calls it “primary identification”—remains stubbornly on the motion side of the action/motion loci, impervious to symbolic intervention. This article argues that Freuds scattered insights on primary identification undercut any theory of relationality grounded in representation, and therefore any hope of securing a crucial distance between self and other through conscious critique. It further argues that Freuds theory on identification presents rhetorical studies with a distinctly unBurkean challenge: to begin exploring the sorts of rhetorical analyses that become possible only when identification is no longer presumed to be compensatory to division.

Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation

There is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heideggers motif of our being able to learn only what we already understandwhen does learning take place? what do we already understand?the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object. Avital Ronell, Dictations

Some Reflections on the Limit

Rhetoric, as we in the West have inherited it, names the specifically human enterprise defined as, for example, the art of winning souls through discourse (Plato), the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion (Aristotle), speech designed to persuade (Cicero), or more generally the art of speaking well (Quintilian). Kenneth Burke, a.k.a. the father of modern rhetoric, defines it as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (Rhetoric 41). In a frequently cited passage, Burke defines human being as “the symbol using (symbol-making and symbol-misusing) animal,” apparently pinpointing rhetorical ability as the definitive distinction between human beings and all the other animals (Language 16, emphasis added). Indeed, to study “the rhetorical tradition” in the West, our vastly pluralistic cultural legacy from antiquity to postmodernity, is to study the history, theory, and practice of a multifaceted relation between human beings and language or discourse more broadly, the role of the latter in the construction and deconstruction of meaning, identity, power relations, and socioeconomic practices: our use of discourse and its use of us. And to my knowledge, this human-centered depiction of rhetoric’s arena of operation was not explicitly or directly contested from within the field of rhetorical studies until 1992, when renowned Aristotle scholar and translator George A. Kennedy published “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of a General Rhetoric.” In this essay, which seemed at the time to come from out of nowhere (hence, the title), Kennedy directly but quite matter-of-factly—without polemics—disputes the limits of a long and proudly humanist tradition of rhetoric, scandalously proposing

The Fifth Risk: A Response to John Muckelbauer's Response

The alterity that disturbs order cannot be reduced to the difference visible to the gaze that compares and therefore synchronizes the same and the other. Alterity occurs as a divergency and a past which no memory could resurrect as a present. And yet disturbance is possible only through an intervention. A stranger is then needed, one who has come, to be sure, but left before having come, ab-solute in his manifestation. . . . Disturbance is a movement that does not propose any stable order in confl ict or in accord with a given order; it is a movement that already carries away the signifi cation it brought: disturbance disturbs order without troubling it seriously. It enters in so subtle a way that unless we retain it, it has already withdrawn. It insinuates itself, withdraws before entering. It remains only for him who would like to take it up. Otherwise it has already restored the order it troubled—Someone rang, and there is no one at the door: did anyone ring? —Emmanuel Levinas, “Phenomenon and Enigma”

By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (review)

Emmanuel Levinas maintains a crucial distinction between the Said ( le Dit ) and the Saying ( le Dire ): whereas the Said names the realm of conceptual forms, themes, ideas—signifi ed meaning—the Saying indicates a nonreferential performative intrusion that institutes, produces, transforms. Communication studies focuses almost exclusively on the Said, on the content of addressed language, but the Saying names the address as such , the opening toward the Other. When you address me, “you” simultaneously By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication by Amit Pinchevski