Abstract

Why must the humanities be defended? What is to be said in their name? This inquiry does not seek to make a case for the humanities. It is rather concerned with what happens in contemporary advocacy that contends for the value of the humanities, the myriad arguments that take on the responsibility of speaking for the humanities and expressing the good for which the humanities are thought responsible. In all of this work, in so many efforts to argue the humanities, what remains uncomprehended, and indeed what is regularly set aside as simply incomprehensible, is the work of rhetorical-argument itself, the contingent conditions, dynamics and power of a response, the response-ability on which a comprehension of the humanities may yet depend.

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the last pages of the Epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, but it concerns a question that runs through Arendt’s work practically in its entirety, which can be put as follows: How can we judge when we can no longer rely on the certainties of tradition, when – with the emergence of totalitarianism – the categories and concepts with which we used to judge no longer help us to account for the horrifying reality of crimes of an unknown nature and of criminals who do not comply with the notion of criminals that we used to consider? The text aims to dwell on these somewhat strange final pages of Arendt’s chronicle of Eichmann’s trial to try to see how they nourish our reflection on how to confront an unknown evil of a new kind.

‘Qu’on ne s’étonne donc pas si un crime insondable
appelle en quelque sorte une méditation inépuisable.’
Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’imprescriptible

‘When the incomprehensible is presented as routine,
sensitivity mercifully diminishes.’
Yosal Rogat, The Eichmann Trial and the Rule of Law

Abstract

In his pioneering essays on the role of rhetoric in political discourse in South Africa, and in particular within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Philippe-Joseph Salazar has emphasised the ‘postmodernist’ overtones of these debates. But he has clearly distinguished an Aristotelian line in the use of rhetoric in politics, according to which it ought to promote truth in order to convince, and a Protagorean line, according to which truth is relative and useless. Some commentators on these issues, such as Barbara Cassin, have – without a blink – espoused the postmodernist and Protagorean line. I take their view to be incomprehensible and incoherent. Rhetoric should not be used as a tool to bury truth, but to praise it. So, I prefer to see Salazar more as an Aristotelian than as a Protagorean.

Abstract

This article examines, from a rhetorical-discursive perspective, the self-image or ethos of intelligence agents in an archive of state repression in Argentina. The archive, which has been open to the public since 2009, once belonged to the Information Service of the North Atlantic Naval Prefecture (SIPNA). The article describes some of the problems related to opening this type of archive, such as disagreements about its current purpose and the historical actors and memory processes involved. It then describes two of the predominant self-images that characterise the intelligence agents who compiled it: that of repressors and that of political experts or analysts. The corpus is composed of documents produced on the occasion of the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to Argentina in 1979. This visit was in response to international complaints about human rights violations by the military government of the time.

Abstract

The South African democracy faces a crisis of legitimacy and identity that locks it into a state of inertia. The state is proving unable to critically advance the constitutional ends of transformative democracy. It lacks the strategic concepts and arguments to do so and has subsequently become embroiled in an existential battle for the soul of the country. As a critical contribution, this essay evokes the need for politically expedient approaches and arguments. It reflects on the past, on the methodologies employed to bring about the unitary, democratic state, and on the need to look at purposeful, albeit incomprehensible, strategies that will allow transcendence beyond the current impasse. By and large, South Africa sets an example. It is a laboratory for democracy, and for that very reason, much like Athens, it will long remain an oddity, not only in Africa (as the Afro pessimists’ simplistic litany would like to have us believe) but also in global politics. South Africa is a test case for global democracy; it is a test case for rhetoric; and it is a test case for the relevance of rhetoric studies in a postmodern democracy.

Abstract

This paper draws on Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s work in Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror (2017) on ISIS’s persuasive self-presentation on social and traditional media, to consider the rhetoric of the terrified Farmers evident in the framing discourse of selected South African television news reports on Farm attacks. Scholars who study ISIS’s use of media have noted the efficacy with which this group has been able to harness the capabilities of media platforms to speak directly to audiences and construct its image. Likewise, the communicative strategies employed in the framing discourse of South African media around the victimhood of Farmers have been effective and have spread to audiences worldwide. Using Salazar’s examination of ISIS’s rhetoric, expressed through its use of words and images in the media, this paper discusses similarities between ISIS’s self-presentation in audio-visual media and the news media discourse that articulates a sense of self-othering by Farmers through these platforms.