Review Essay: Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Epilogue: Contributions from Rhetorical Theory,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford, 1998), 610. 2. Edward Schiappa, “Sophisticated Modernism and the Continuing Importance of Argument Evaluation,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2002), 51–58. 3. Julia Keller, “After the attack, postmodernism loses its glib grip,” Chicago Tribune, September 27, 2001, available http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0109270018sep27,0,6301525.story (accessed 10 January 10, 2005). 4. For informative overviews, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991); and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford, 1997). 5. For an excellent, exhaustive excavation of the rhetorical subject, see Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 6. My purpose here is not new; there are a number of attempts to explain posthumanism in rhetorical terms. For example, see Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–61. 7. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 3. Kenneth Rufo's work investigates this "turn" from the different angle of media ecology. See Kenneth Rufo, "Ghosts in the Medium: The Haunting of Heidegger's Technological Question," Explorations in Media Ecology 4 (2005): 21–48. 8. See Jean Baudrillard, The Sprit of Terrorism, 2nd ed., trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002); John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verson, 2002). The list goes on and on and on, of course; for a quick account, see Weinstock, Spectral, 3–17. 9. The communication was subsequently rendered into an essay titled "The Humanism of Existentialism," translated by Bernard Frechtman, currently collected in Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), 31–62. The cited phrases are found throughout the essay. 10. In particular, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Verso, 1991), in which Sartre stresses the collective subject over the individual. 11. For an excellent overview, see Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1988), 218–48. 12. Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, 51. 13. Also see Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, trans. unacknowledged (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1991); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972). 14. Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, 47. 15. The remark appears in Sextus’ Against the Schoolmasters as "Of all things the measure is man, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not." See The Older Sophists, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 18. 16. See Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 3–24; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Ontological Foundations of Rhetorical Theory,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 3 (Spring 1970): 97–108; and Robert L. Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal 18 (February 1967): 9–17. 17. Scott, “On Viewing,” 16; also see Robert L. Scott, “Rhetoric Is Epistemic: What Difference Does That Make?” in Defining the New Rhetorics, ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown (Newbury Park, NJ: Sage, 1993), esp. 131–33. 18. Scott, “On Viewing,” 16–17. 19. See Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” trans. Alan Bass, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 109–36. 20. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” rev ed., edited by David Farrell Krell. (San Francisco: Harper SanFranciso, 1993), 217–65. On 223 he remarks that "If man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless." 21. Friederich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 43. 22. For a sampling of the U.S. version of posthumanism, much of which concerns the kinds of “new” subjectivities that are emerging in the twenty-first century in the wake of the death of the humanist subject, see Neil Badmington, ed., Posthumanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 23. Barbara Biesecker is, incontestably, the scholar who has worked most diligently to introduce posthumanism and poststructuralism to rhetorical studies. See Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies and the ‘New Psychoanalysis’: What's the Real Problem? or Framing the Problem of the Real,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 222–39; Barbara A. Biesecker “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 351–64; Barbara A. Biesecker, "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différence," Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110–30. Also see Gregory Desilet, “Heidegger and Derrida: The Conflict Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction in the Context of Rhetorical and Communication Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 152–75; Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 1–23; Joshua Gunn, “On Dead Subjects: A Rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) Psychoanalytic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 501–13; and Christian Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken: Joshua Gunn's ‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead’ and Lacan's Symbolic Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 495–500. 24. For a deeper and more detailed reading of Derrida and spectrality, see Kenneth Rufo, "Shades of Derrida: Materiality as the Mediation of Difference," in the forthcoming edited collection by Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites. Also see Bill Trapani's essay, "Rethinking Rhetoric's Materiality from the esprit d’á-propos of the Event," in the same volume. 25. Derrida, Specters, xviii. 26. Derrida, Specters, 78–82. 27. See Moishe Postone, “Deconstruction as Social Critique: Derrida on Marx and the New World Order,” History and Theory 37 (1998): 370–87; and Michael Sprinkler, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999). 28. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400, esp. 391. 29. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4. 30. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4. 31. Postone, “Deconstruction,” 371. 32. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 9. 33. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 28. 34. See Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” esp. 397. 35. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 96. 36. Also see Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: The Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Richard Kearney, On Stories: Thinking in Action (New York: Routledge, 2001). 37. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 38. Kearney, Strangers, 4. 39. See René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). 40. Kearhey, Strangers, 39 Also see Edward J. Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 177–201. 41. Kearney, Strangers, 61–62. 42. Kearney, Strangers, 66–67. 43. Kearney, Strangers, 68. 44. Kearney, Strangers, 69. 45. Kearney, Strangers, 70. 46. Kearney, Strangers, 80. 47. Dana Cloud, “Introduction: Evil in the Agora,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 509. 48. For a more extensive elaboration of Kearney's understanding of narrative vis-à-vis self, see On Stories. 49. Kearney, Strangers, 186. 50. Kearney, Strangers, 75. 51. These claims are emblazoned on the back of the paperback edition; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003). 52. Royle, The Uncanny, 51–52. 53. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. David Mclintock, in The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003), 121–62. 54. Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 55. Royle, The Uncanny, 24. 56. Royle, The Uncanny, 25–26. 57. See John Mowitt, “Trauma Envy,” Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 272–97. 58. Karyn Ball, “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies,” Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 6–7. 59. See Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication (2003): 35–67; and Marouf Hasian Jr., “Remembering and Forgetting the ‘Final Solution’: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 64–93. Also see Stephanie Houston Grey, “Writing Redemption: Trauma and the Authentication of the Moral Order in Hibakusha Literature,” Text and Performance Quarterly 22 (2002): 1–23. 60. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. 61. Leys, Trauma, 304. 62. See Joshua Gunn, “Prime-Time Satanism: Rumor-Panic and the Work of Iconic Topoi,” Visual Communication 4 (2005): 93–120. 63. Leys, Trauma, 247. 64. Leys, Trauma, 252. 65. Leys, Trauma, 253. 66. Leys, Trauma, 305. 67. Also see Linda Belau, “Trauma and the Material Signifier,” Postmodern Culture 11 (2001), available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc (accessed January 22, 2005); Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or, the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 13–60; Petar Ramadanovic, “Introduction: Trauma and Crisis,” Postmodern Culture 11 (2001), available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc (accessed January 22, 2005); and Tom Toremans, “Trauma: Theory—Reading (and) Literary Theory in the Wake of Trauma,” European Journal of English Studies 7 (2003): 333–51. 68. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 69. For a helpful and detailed explanation of the importance of de Man to trauma studies, see Toremans, “Trauma: Theory—Reading,” 335–43. 70. Leys, Tranma, 269. 71. Leys, Trauma, 305. 72. Leys, Trauma, 307. 73. Kearney, Strangers, 72. 74. For a scathing criticism of Ley's book, see Murray Schwartz, “Locating Trauma: A Commentary on Ruth Leys's Trauma: A Genealogy,” American Imago 59 (2002): 367–84. 75. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 76. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 38. 77. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 4. 78. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 12; see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 79. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 80. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 47–48. 81. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 86. 82. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 55. 83. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 59. 84. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63–64. 85. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 73. 86. Also see Karen A. Foss and Kathy L. Domenici, “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 237–59. 87. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 92. 88. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 96. 89. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 182. 90. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 97. 91. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 200–206. 92. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” trans. Joan Riviere, in Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory (New York: Touchstone, 1963), 165. 93. Laurence A. Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 41. 94. See Johnathan Kandell, “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74,” New York Times, October 10, 2004, late edition, 1, for the original act of cannibalism, and the web-based shrine maintained by the University of California at Irvine (http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/) for links to various responses to the obituary. For an overview of the controversy, see Ross Benjamin, “Hostile Obituary for Derrida,” The Nation, November 24, 2004, available at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i = 20041213&s = benjamin (accessed January 29, 2005). 95. See Joshua Gunn, “On Dead Subjects: A Rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) Psychoanalytic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 501–13. 96. Michael Leff and Andrea A. Lunsford, “Afterwords: A Dialogue,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 62. 97. See Cheryl Geisler, “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 9–17; and Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (2005): 83–106. 98. See Stephanie Houston Grey, “The Consolation of Rhetoric: A Coming to Terms with the Discourse on Thanatos,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 103–32.