Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric

Those who do not become wild beasts when they write, who write to please, write nothing that has not already been written, teach us nothing, and forge extra bars for our cage.

—Cixous, “We Who Are Free,” 218; cf. Vitanza 1997, 25, 159, 233, 298

Like Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. (1988), from which it takes its clue toward narrative, Victor J. Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric does not fulfill the expectations we commonly bring to the history of rhetoric. Just as we constantly undid and remade G. H.’s identity through the progress of her narration, so Vitanza has perpetually deterritorialized the history of rhetoric only to escape to anOther beginning. Vitanza tells us that we must escape to anOther beginning if we are to think away something of our inheritance of exclusion, something that deeply underlies our notions of writing the history of rhetoric. Like G. H., Vitanza plans the escape to anOther beginning by becoming animal. Becoming animal, say a cockroach, may not please and may cause someone to scream, but becoming animal has its advantages. For one thing, it is easy, at least as far as cockroaches go, to see that our human way of envisioning rhetoric has been/is limited at various points (64–65). Seeing Otherwise, Vitanza, our surrogate cockroach, is viewing with a third eye, an eye capable of seeing behind the back of the history of rhetoric.

To write from the view of a third eye is to write through hope, the hope for something Other than a binary machine—masculine/feminine styles, rational/sophistic rhetorics, public/private discourse, citizen/barbarian speeches—organizing rhetoric. Viewing the history of rhetoric with a third eye, Vitanza writes without organizing it, for his is a book that-is-not-a-book and means to be read as a body without organs (17), without parts of rhetoric that contain a function of exclusion. In writing Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric through hope, Vitanza will have a marked influence on rhetorical studies; on anyone who is interested in rhetoric and the history of rhetoric; on anyone who dares to think of anOther beginning in rhetoric, sophistic, feminist, or Otherwise.

I shall begin again by adding two words to Nietzsche’s question “But why do you write?” (The Gay Science 146): “But why do you write like that?” In Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Vitanza writes history achronologically or metaleptically (171). For example, in Vitanza’s discussion of rhetoric and language (in chap. 2), he does not discuss the opening of Isocrates’ school and the opening of the French and Prussian-German schools in the order that they occurred (9). In the untimely logic of metalepsis, the opening of the Prussian-German schools influences the opening of the Isocratean one. When writing the history of rhetoric metaleptically, Heidegger influences Isocrates. Metalepsis is about making connections rather than making comparisons (see 125, 173). Albert Halsall, in his recent translation and adaptation of Bernard Dupriez’s Dictionary of Literary Devices (1991), notes that metalepsis is a rhetorical figure that “signifies a present effect by a remote cause” (275). In fact, he notes that the connection may be “so remote that we are inclined to think a double substitution has occurred” (275). However, Halsall/Dupriez goes on to say, the connection should not be understood “as a metaleptic two-step” (275).

In writing the history of rhetoric metaleptically, Vitanza connects effects to remote causes: the ends of rhetoric/philosophy, Heidegger, and “The Rector’s Address” are linked to Athens, the beginnings of rhetoric, and the speeches of Isocrates. The example Halsall/Dupriez uses in the Dictionary of Literary Devices helps to make vivid for us how metalepsis works in Vitanza’s book. The example is also a good way to illustrate how meaning in the history of rhetoric works in ways that are neither simple nor obvious. According to the Dictionary of Literary Devices, “When someone shouts ‘Thank you!’ from one country club tennis court to another, he usually means ‘Please get my ball’ and also ‘Every member of this club is polite’” (275). As I read Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, I understand that Vitanza is taking account of the linkages between classicism and postmodernism: When Isocrates shouts logos (as hegemon), guide, unity of Greeks to Heidegger it means “spirit” (Geist), “essence” (Wesen), unity of Germans. It is a long stretch, a theoretical marathon, to work through the linkages. Nonetheless, in doing so, we gain, at the very least, the courage to ask, Should we go on working with the negation of rhetoric when we can see that negation leads to a reduction of what we hope rhetoric can do in the public sphere?

Because metalepsis forms the basis of a pun, it also explains the word play in Vitanza’s (re)writing of the histories of rhetoric. In a way, Vitanza writes rhetoric in HTML, showing the codes embedded in creating rhetoric as the_history.doc. Writing metaleptically is not a “silly game with logic” (15) but a third way to write. Of course, it is difficult to read a document in HTML, in a WYSIWYG environment. If we want to make changes in the document/the history of rhetoric, we need to see the codes and expose the connections: “Those who write to please, write nothing that has not already been written . . . teach us nothing.”

I want to begin again and review the book a third time from within Franz Kafka’s parable of “The Tiger”:

Once a tiger was brought to the celebrated animal tamer Burson, for him to give his opinion as to the possibility of taming the animal. The small cage with the tiger in it was pushed into the training cage, which has the dimensions of a public hall; it was in a large-hut camp outside of town. The attendants withdrew: Burson always wanted to be completely alone with an animal as his first encounter with it. The tiger lay quiet, having just been plentifully fed. It yawned a little, gazed wearily at its new surroundings, and immediately fell to sleep.

(153)

The fact that the tamer has set up camp away from the city—polis, Athens—calls attention to a people (a third sophistic?) wandering around the countryside like a wild beast. The public-hall dimensions of the training cage that encloses the wild beast’s cage attest to the fear of escape. The wild beast—the wandering Other—is fed to its exhaustion. The food it is fed might as well be a cage, for it forges extra bars, makes the tiger rest, stops the beast’s incessant flow. What forges extra bars for the cage, what keeps the tiger still in its new physical surroundings? Vitanza suggests that the narrative of the struggle for democracy (14), the grand narrative of the beginning of rhetoric, forges extra bars for our cage. It is a grand narrative of emancipation, and the problem with grand narratives of emancipation is that they do not emancipate: “Those who write to please . . . teach us nothing . . . and forge extra bars for our cage.”

I used one of Kafka’s parables to illustrate how Vitanza reads the history of rhetoric as something Other than the narrative of the struggle for democracy (14, 327, 329). The story of the beginnings of rhetoric as a struggle for democracy has rarely, if ever, been rendered an entrapment, much less as the way we forge extra bars for our cage. Among rhetoricians, the vision of rhetoric as the struggle for democracy has a significant heritage. The story of the tyrants Gelon and Hieron, and Corax, who organized speech constitutes the trappings of rhetoric. It is a story of emancipation, adorning the art. Like an amulet, the story produces encomiums on rhetoric that can be said to overcome even the distinction between a sophistical and a true rhetoric, a distinction that underlies so much of the sharp attacks on rhetoric (chap. 1). A good example would be Isocrates. Following his attack on rhetoric in his Against the Sophists, which might be read as “his opinion on the possibility of taming the animal,” Isocrates pushes the animal in the training cage of his Antidosis, where he then proceeds to celebrate the art by feeding the beast with a formula of civicness.

Vitanza “turns the lever” (21) of the cage’s hinge so that rhetoric/sophistic and the oh-so-small-space of public speech meld into an unfixed, untrainable flow (51). He writes:

They [beasts, barbarians, and the gods] were excluded by and because of Genus-cide, which constantly created the space (scene-agents) of disciplinary, canny societies. Beasts and others were excluded to and, therefore, lived in the pagus, literally the country. The country that I am referring to is not a sentimentalized, romanticized, Rousseauistic country. It, instead, is a wild, savage (de Sadean, deRidean, de Manian, de Salesian, etc.) country. If any country at all. It is an atopos of Third subject/object, sophistic positions-that-are-not-positions. It is, as Hélène Cixous calls it, dépays, uncountry. There, nothing is fixed by a genus, everything is fluid.

(51–52)

Vitanza offers new insights into the question of the Sophists, rhetoric, and history. Still, I hear the metaphysical laughter as the trappings of rhetoric become its entrapment. (No victor believes in the Sophists. No, Victor believes in the Sophists.)

Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric is not an easy book to read. Vitanza is at home in many areas of scholarship. Moreover, he writes more like Kafka writes (14), and, as I said earlier, he means for the book to be read as a body without organs (17). Without organs, the book is digestion itself, something that happens through organs but cannot be stopped, cannot be taken out and examined, and cannot be divided into parts. Thus, the book can be read and digested only by you, by your body of thought.