Abstract

Bruno Latour, the increasingly popular French philosopher and foundational thinker for science studies, once wrote: “I know neither who I am nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who will define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me”. This invocation of an “other” as a self-definition is no longer surprising nor radical but has long been a common answer to Plato’s famous and persistent insistence that we must, before all else, know ourselves. I cannot know myself except insofar as I know and encounter others, who through a collective process, determine what I am. Within rhetoric, Diane Davis, in her recent account of the “prior...