An Appetite for Rhetoric

Abstract

The impetus for writing this essay is dreadful despite being ordinary (all the more dreadful because its ordinary). Today, just like yesterday or tomorrow, hundreds of millions of people will not eat or eat so little that it seems as nothing to those who always have food in easy reach. I am no moralist, this is no sermon, yet the emptiness of rhetorical theory regarding hunger has begun to gnaw at me, especially since philosophical concern for the body and for materiality in rhetoric studies has only intensified in recent years. Hunger might draw the attention of rhetorical critique when public action is taken to feed the poor or when gazing on their suffering exposes capital’s cruelty. In the philosophy of rhetoric, however, hunger is something of a void, so I think it is important to note, amid omnipresent food insecurity, the unmarked satiety of the rhetor’s body, which is typically assumed to be a well-fed body or at least not a starving one. It is not a simple case of oversight; hunger is separated from rhetoric as a condition of understanding both and recognizing that we might begin to reckon the significance of assuming instead that rhetoric’s materiality, and hence its potential, is not detachable from food so far as human bodies are concerned. “Experience teaches us with abundant examples,” Spinoza remarks, “that nothing is less within men’s power than to hold their tongues or co ntrol their appetites” (1992, 106). Speech is effectively a species of appetite f or Spinoza. The “or” he inserts between tongues and appetites is botherso me, though, and it is exactly this analogic separation that I want to trouble: it is wrong to borrow from the master figure of appetite, hunger, to explain rhetoric’s persistence while granting rhetoricity independence from nour ishment. Rhetoric (understood as a collective noun) is per manently famished, but its human agents never seem to know the want of food. But maybe they could know that want, or maybe they have, and that is what I wish to discuss. My only point, ultimately, is that an appetite for