Regarding the Dead

Arguing that the foundational relation that constitutes the (rhetorical) address is that between the living and the dead, this article calls on rhetorical studies to reconceive rhetoric as a (non)visual relation between the “invisible” (specter) and the “visible” (living). I then complicate this relation—and the easy distinction between the two—and argue that regarding the dead, guarding them, mourning them, is the ethical relation that makes any rhetorical address possible.