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  • Editor’s note

annual special issue

The annual special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric for 2014 carries the title “Extrahuman Rhetorical Relations: Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine.” In 1992, George Kennedy published his by now much-cited article “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric” in Philosophy and Rhetoric. Kennedy advanced the controversial thesis that there was a rhetorical energy in all of nature, which meant that confining rhetoric to an investigation of human discourse, especially public discourse in formal assemblies, was a misconceived limitation on its scope and purview. Kennedy’s article was a harbinger of sorts, heralding the uptake of new materialists, object- oriented ontologists, posthumanists, and others who are seeking to theorize rhetoric in terms that exceed a human-centric account and to ground it in claims that go beyond and decenter the word or symbol. Although challenges to the humanist perspective on rhetoric have been raised for the past several decades, the last decade especially has seen a significant uptick in submissions to the journal that look to the body, to assemblages in nature and the constructed world, to the animal world, or more generally to the material world, as the theoretical frame for rhetoric. They reflect a deeply felt unease with traditional rhetoric and an attempt to rethink its intersection with philosophy, or put differently, to reconsider the philosophical commitments of rhetoric in posthuman terms. This issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric enters this ongoing discussion in an exploratory attempt to reanalyze what it means to formulate a conception of rhetoric that is not grounded in the human subject, the human as agent, or the human as prior to practices of the nonhuman. I am grateful to Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif for accepting my invitation to assemble a collection of articles that explore the roots of rhetoric that lay beyond the human. The journal looks forward to the discussion these essays promise to provoke.

Ed. [End Page vii]

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