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CHAPTER 6 Love THIS CHAPTER BRINGS US BACK to the problems of reading, writing, and textuality that we took up in the first chapter. At the same time, this will be the occasion for seeing the good body and good corporeality set against a broader social and intellectual backdrop. The occasion for this conceptual summary and reunion is Cicero's De oratore. And while we will be moving in closer to the problem of the text, we will also be moving back a bit from the close scrutiny of the orator's body in action to examine instead the text itself as a social performance. Where my first chapter saw textuality as both a problem and a ruse in Quintilian, here we will find the text to be an enactment of its own principles . Accordingly the good and legitimate pleasures that have been reserved for the present chapter are not only defined but also enacted by Cicero's work qua text, even as this text decries the idea of the rhetorical handbook.1 The mise-en-scene and characters of the De oratore, as well as its specific precepts, perform the text's own principles of good rhetorical theory by way of both rule and example. Furthermore, this vision of rhetoric , more than just refusing pleasure and pedanticism, also presents itself as a bond that holds together civil society. And so De oratore becomes a tract revealing and encapsulating homosocial desire. By reading this text as a performance - a paradoxical activity that immediately recalls Quintilian in the first chapter - we will descry the disciplined movements and tones, the actio atque pronuntiatio of pleasing masters of rhetoric, ofpraeceptores who become models of and for the very precepts they would disparage in a ruleladen handbook. Hence we have a text that performs for us the very manly presence of the vir bonus that our studies have long sought, and in so doing, it concomitantly assaults the idea of the handbook, as being the death of manly presence and thus of elite Roman society itself.2 What follows is intended to serve as more than an exposition of the De oratore and the technique it employs. This long and elaborate text admits of a variety of productive readings. Hall sees De oratore as a highly refined text and one very much concerned with the details of sociallife.3 MacKendrick 187 188 STAGING MASCULINITY (1948) reads for a politics of pedagogy in terms of aristocratic propaganda. If we relax somewhat the rigidity of this cold-war phasing, we can translate his argument into an investigation of the elitism and education. Orban (1950) vindicates De oratore as a philosophical dialogue that augments the intellectual status of rhetoric. Kroll (1903) is similarly interested in the union of philosophy and politics that De oratore advocates. Each of these readings examines one or more key threads of the text: Cicero, ever ambitious , has taken on society, politics, education, philosophy, and oratory. I would like to use this work to gather together many of the themes that have previously arisen and to show that Cicero's dialogue canonizes its version of pleasure and textuality in such a way as to legitimate not just Cicero and his rhetoric, but the whole social order that language is meant to help bind together.4 This reading will, I hope, both round out and advance the work of prior chapters. Such a reading, though, is itself enabled only by keeping in mind those earlier conclusions. If I read Cicero as if he were staging a comedy of Plautus or borrowing from the poetic lexicon of an amorous Catullus, I do so to stage and eroticize the authoritative version of rhetoric whose existence has been predicated on the exclusion of the histrionic, the seductive, and the hedonistic. Such a reading is meant to be more than mere willfulness or perversion on my part, for I will be examining the scars and traces of those prior excisions as oratory is translated into a sublimated reinscription of those same renounced qualities.5 Textuality itself is numbered among these problems that are announced and then overcome, purged and then reinstated. Textuality will thus offer another nexus at which the problems of authority and authenticity that plague acting and pleasure get worked at all over again. The De oratore has been praised lavishly as a rhetorical treatise. Courbaud, the editor of the Bude edition, says of it, "Le De Oratore est un chef-d'reuvre, en effet, non...

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