167 Notes Introduction: A Rhetoric of Responsibility 1. The term “community” remains for many reasons problematic. Jacques Derrida, for one, couldn’t allow himself to use “community” or to endorse its use, even in the deconstructive works of his student and dear friend Jean-Luc Nancy. See, for example, The Politics of Friendship, where he suggests that it may be necessary to dump the too fraternal motifs of “community, appurtenance or sharing, whatever the sign assigned to them. Affirmed, negated or neutralized , these ‘communitarian,’ or ‘communal’ values always risk bringing the brother back” (298). Nonetheless, Derrida does concede that “perhaps this risk must be assumed in order to keep the question of the ‘who’ from being politically enframed by the schema of being-common or being-in-common, even when it is neutralized, in a question of identity (individual, subjective, ethnic, national, state, etc.)” (298–99). Nancy, too, admitted in an interview that he didn’t “like to use the term community without certain precautions,” and that he was “against any interiority of community.” This is why he prefers to speak of being-in-common or being-with, but they have their own problems. (“Thought as a Gap” 6). We will therefore use the terms “community,” “belonging ,” and “solidarity” with extreme caution here, and with a vigilance against the humanist, androcentric, and anthropocentric histories with which they are associated. 2. In Speaking for the Polis, Takis Poulakos argues that for Isocrates the logos was the “maker of unity and guide to unification—a force which brings people together under a common end and a shared set of values, which shapes their self-understanding as agents of their own destiny through their participation in political deliberation” (5). Twenty-five hundred years later, rhetoric continues to be credited not only with the power to shape self-understanding but also to create communal sensibility by unifying separate selves across common purposes and values. In the preface to his edited volume, Rhetoric and Community, J. Michael Hogan defines community as a “repository of shared purpose, values, and traditions” (xii). He notes that his collection is designed to explore the ways in which “rhetoric defines, rallies, polarizes, or marginalizes specific communities,” and to map “the discursive routes that lead communities either to constructive unity or to fragmentation, even bloodshed” (xv). In Addressing Postmodernity, Barbara Biesecker states up front that her book is rhetorical insofar as it “insists on, indeed argues strongly on behalf of, the power of persuasive discourse to constitute audiences out of individuals, to transform singularities into collectives, to fashion a ‘we’ out of a plurality of ‘I’s,’ and to move them to collective action” (1). Obviously, Burke’s rhetor hails his or her audience into existence, pulling together a community of listeners by prompting them to identify with (and to identify themselves across) a common interest, value, or desire. It is in this way, as Carolyn Miller puts it, that the problem of the one and the many finds “a rhetorical solution.” Rhetoric’s task, she says is “to construct one out of many, over and over again” (91). In Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, Jeffrey Walker 167 n o t e s t o pa g e s 0 0 – 0 0 0 Davis Text 1••-000.indd 167 8/30/10 11:54:09 AM 168 explicates Aristotle’s description of the role of epideictic’s audience in order to propose that it is epideictic that “shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives; it shapes the ideologies and imageries with which, and by which, the individual members of a community identify themselves” (9–10). Similarly, Michael Halloran and Gregory Clark propose that epideictic does not “argue the ideas or ideals that bind people into a community so much as it displays them to a witnessing public” (141). And in his Rhetorical Landscapes in America, Clark notes with Burke that epideictic persuades people to attitude before it persuades them to action, arguing that “when individuals identify themselves with a particular enactment of a belief or a commitment that symbolizes the common ground of their community, they engage privately in the public ritual of rhetorical interaction that Burke called identification” (20). And so on. 3. See, most specifically and extensively, Victor J. Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, which, by the way, is an exemplary treatise on relationality, as well. In his introduction to Hogan’s collection, Roderick...