The Artistry of Obedience: From Kant to Kingship

Abstract

Efforts to mutually adjust wise thinking and elegant speaking have contributed to the development of at least two programs for rhetorical scholarship: (1) the treatment of writing as a species of civic discourse, or as and (2) more recent efforts to derive ultimate terminologies from the figurai plane of political texts and performance, or rhetoric as Although the later mode of inquiry continues to receive attention from rhetoricians,1 the critical project of reading as a mode of politics is in need of further development. Considerations of as rhetoric tend to limit themselves to the task of revealing the persuasive motives and features of treatises, displacing efforts to coordinate rhetoric and with the more anxious project of confirming the presence of rhetorical motives in discourse. Philosophical finesse, philosophical style, philosophical rhetoric, metaphysical releve of metaphor all are thought to await exposure in the work of would-be thinkers.2 Revelations of this sort do not come cheap. Philosophers may be unmasked as rhetoricians only insofar as they produce texts bearing the recognizable marks of philosophy. That certain works can be shown to privilege an identity of meaning within arguments aimed at a timeless readership over and against efforts to coach situated audiences into bodies of identification has become a precondition for the rhetorical study of as a genre of civic discourse. This brand of ideology critique is premised on the abstraction or, better still, the reification of philosophy as an exposable method apart from the more operative methods of its exposure. Critique becomes surgery, as Peter Sloterdijk well notes: