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7 Trope, Affect, and Public Subjectivity it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension. —Jacques Lacan, “The Seminar on the Purloined Letter” in this chapter, i demonstrate two strategies for reading public economies of tropological exchange. i undertake these readings under the presumption that the general and specific economies of tropological exchange and affective investment are mutually constitutive, and my goal is to embody a form of critical practice that takes seriously the Symbolic and imaginary charges in rhetoric without reducing one to the other. Thus, i hope to demonstrate the productivity of a rhetorical theory that engages two specific economies of tropological exchange in the light of failed unicity and that,by extension, attends to the productivity of feigned unicity. The first reading, which focuses on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, takes up the economic exchange between identitarian practices and the ontological register of public making by tracing the metaleptic exchanges that constitute an evangelical Christian public around the metaphor of constitutive violence. i engage in a close reading of The Passion and the tropological exchanges it performs in constituting an evangelical public through,around, and beyond the film.The second reading focuses less on a close reading than on characterizing the logic of investment and formal rhetorical processes that animate a specific kind of demand: in this case, the demands of radical antiglobalization protestors to be recognized as dangerous. Thus, my reading of radical antiglobalization protest takes up the political possibilities of the democratic demand,arguing that a purely formal account of the demand eschews attention to the rhetorical production of enjoyment and therefore overstates the political potential both of the democratic demand and a politics of resistance.Here i would like to show how a rhetorically inflected reading of Lacan’s work provides an analytic prescription for public politics that moves beyond enjoyment and aims at the articulation of collective political desire. if the first reading is focused on the relationship between the specific imaginary contents that underwrite a public bond, the second is engaged in 152 / Chapter 7 understanding the ways that symbolically constituted practices of address and investment imply determinate political consequences. Both of these readings imply critiques of conventional rhetorical practices of interpretation,suggesting an alternative analytic practice of engaging the nexus between trope and affective investment. Thus, these readings form a critical-interpretive couplet:in reading The Passion, i would like to demonstrate the shortcomings of fetishizing the imaginary in isolation from the broader symbolic economy that underwrites it;conversely,in reading the demands of radical antiglobalization protest, i would like to show the shortcomings of a purely formal account of the demand that operates in isolation from the practices of enjoyment and the imaginary relations of address underwriting radical demands.1 Evangelicals in Public As i characterized it in the preceding chapter, Michael Warner defines publics as social forms that exist “by virtue of being addressed,” “organized by nothing other than discourse itself” and “constituted through mere attention ” to specific texts.2 Warner’s publics come into being when strangers forge affinities to one another based on shared attention to texts. Although Warner provides a powerful account of how textual circulation organizes publics, he provides a comparatively thin theory for figuring why strangers are paying attention to a text in the first place.Warner’s account,which privileges the act of paying attention to a text, draws focus away from both the general economy of signifying exchange that organizes the specific economy that comes together around a text and, by extension, from the modes of investment that constitute the durability of specific publics.Attention to a singular text does not create a public ex nihilio:members of a public pay attention to a text because it solicits them, trading on investments that, although manifest in a text, precede and organize a public’s attention to it.3 implicit, although not fully explicated, in Warner’s model of a public is a process not unlike an economy, a process of exchange where preexisting discourses and identity investments are presumed and remade in a public’s encounter with a text.Were this model of economy to be made explicit, we might define particular publics as a mobile assemblage of associations and relationships of address mediated by common attention to a text; through a...

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