Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Barthes as pedagogue: Fragments of two seminars

Summary Both texts presented here are previously unpublished material from Roland Barthes. By from the translator, who functions as a scriptor, means that the authenticity of these fragments is relative to what is usually understood by authorship. As verbatim excerpts of Barthes’ live teaching their ambiguous status would have pleased the author of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. These texts illustrate the Barthesian pedagogic rhetoric as well as throw a disturbing light on his conception of ecriture in its rapport with academic writing. To a large extent these fragments offer an insight into what is often denied to university lecturers: the pleasure of playing games with institutional discourse.

What “1989”? A Rhetorical Rhumb on the Topic of Date

This article follows a “rhumb” along four nonrhetorical observations on the concepts of date, moment, time, and semelfactive, and nine rhetorical theorems concerning “date” in relation to eidos, eugeneia, credibility, kairos, anagnôrisis, Innerzeitigkeit, evidence, différend, and the sublime, so as to explode our “idiocy” about the topic of date and to offer a rhetorical and phenomenological critique of “date.”

Rituals of complicity, the ‘humanities’ rhetoric, and the closing of the South African mind

(1) There is a muted controversy regarding the ‘humanities’ in the context of the SA Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) that signals a closing of the South African mind – no one cares about it in the general public. Indeed the country is slowly but surely slipping back into two traditional patterns of deference to authority: on the one hand, we suffer a return to ‘pastoral governance’, rooted in imagined, rural traditions often shaped by the apartheid regime and now reclaimed by post-modern politicians in defence of irrational behaviours; on the other hand, we endure a renaissance of a ‘boom town’ mentality straight out of the glorious era of the gold and diamond rush. In both instances, what matters in this dual ‘return of the repressed’ – the pastoral and the capitalist – is precisely ‘matter’, that is land, things, objects, yet nowadays bathed in the anaesthesia of silly consumerism, comforted by the insipid materialism of popular culture and vouchsafed by the acquisitive ethos of the new oligarchy. This phenomenon is rapidly consigning to the dustbins of our history the last remains of our long and rich and contrasted intellectual tradition and ethical care for the inner self, whether indigenous or colonial, a compact that truly made this country stand apart on a continent otherwise subdued, alienated or incapacitated. (2) However rhetoric teaches us that a controversy, when it deals with matters of opinion, is unlikely to resolve anything tangible unless we try to deal first with facts. Let me then begin where it all began, the controversy surrounding the SARChI affair. I would like to review a few basic facts of the controversy and, specifically, of phase 1 of the chairs allocation (in phase 2 successful proposers will have to submit fuller proposals, whereupon universities will propose actual names to fill the chairs – so goes, for now, the official storytelling). First fact: universities that set up procedures to screen and prioritise applications have not yet received any ‘feedback’ from the ministry, and it is likely to take many months before that happens; if it does and is not perfunctory. In the meantime the reason for rejections have to be worked out by the victims themselves, although it

Confessions of a Sometime Opium Eater

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)’s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l ’âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don’t] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don’t loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school). Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won’t. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills.

Heidegger and Rhetoric (review)

to/Heidegger and Rhetoric/ (let me use forward slashes to indicate a commonplace) because, in spite of all efforts of reconciliation between France and Germany, my knowledge of German is not so adequate that I would ever contemplate reading Heidegger in his native tongue. As a rule I mistrust translations and rely on derivative knowledge only in cases of extreme urgency. This being said, I must add that such ignorance is somewhat informed by some knowing—where would French philosophy and French philosophy of rhetoric be without the long-standing and continuous dialogue between Heidegger and France, from Levinas’s seminal essay to today’s iterative debate on Heidegger’s so-called introduction of Nazism in philosophy? Be that as it may, I read the edited volume by Gross and Kemmann as a naive reader would, undisturbed by and unaware of intra-ecclesial wrangling. As it happened, as I was reading this book, I had advanced knowledge of a stunning little book by Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (2007), on Heidegger’s plea for exoneration in July 1945. It was a numinous conjunction.