Paul' s letter of thanks to the Philippians, written on receiving their gift through Epaphroditus while he was a prisoner of the Romans in 60AD, is integrated into the King James New Testament as 'The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians.'2 Therein, Paul invokes a kind of symbiotic relation with an absent other which culminates in the desire that his addressees become, quite literally, situated in the same place as him by being 'of the same mind' : 'If therefore there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.'3 This desire requires a metaphysical link of humility, which Paul likens to what Jesus did when he 'emptied himself,' and then took on human form:4 'Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and being made in the likeness of men.'5 The idea that such symbioses can occur presupposes a self-identity between purpose and action which is premised upon some sense of faith, proven by ensuring that the body of the slave, rather than the idea of the slave as God, be 'grasped.' Or, from a rhetorical standpoint, Paul's dream is for the formulation of arguments that seamlessly speak to the universal audience, overcoming the 'gap' between speaker and listener, writer and reader, intention and result. For Chai'm Perelman, from whom Michel Meyer inherited the torch 1. I realized in returning to these ideas, originally formulated in my earliest work on Mikhail Bakhtin and in a tribute I wrote for a conference in honor of Michael Holquist, that the ideas expressed herein have been on my mind and in my body for a long time; they have finally found form and passionate meaning with Marsha. 2. See Peter Oakes, Philippians: From People to Letter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,