Abstract

The problem is to reintroduce rhetoric, the rhetorician, the fight of discourse into the field of analysis.... The problem is to "rhetorize" philosophy.Philosophy takes place in the medium of language, in spoken and written discourses, which are themselves given as texts. Texts are written, read, memorized, reproduced, and cited; they circulate and are disseminated, but may also get damaged or lost, censored or forbidden, or become opaque and unreadable. This textual constitution is not a contingent but an essential attribute of Western philosophy. In fact, the staging of dialogic and agonal orality in the medium of text is one of the characteristic features of Greek thought. Thus, the...