Michele Kennerly
Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud’s work, respectively and collectively, invites an on going onomatopoetics of otherness, an attempt at name making that extends their verbal verve in the service of difference. Their alloiostrophic rhetoric “turns toward difference, diversity, and the other,”[1] and, to further their effort, I propose an alloiotrophic rhetoric that adds to a turning (strophos, tropos) toward difference a nurturing (trophos) of difference. How might endorsements of strangeness from a range of poetic, philosophical, and political perspectives advance principles and practices central to alloiō-rhetorics, whether followed by a spinning strophos or an insisting trophos? How might those endorsements lend rhetors resources for maintaining strangeness when it is found and regaining strangeness when it is lost?
This coda explores what wonder in Homer, estrangement in Viktor Shklovsky, and natality in Hannah Arendt offer to a rhetoric made other(-)wise. If pushed to excess, however, each potential source of strangeness flirts with the polarized dangers of the exoticization or fetishization of difference, on the one hand, and the too easy identification with or incorporation of difference, on the other. At times, this coda also gently counters Sutton and Mifsud’s problematization of Aristotle within their pursuit of other-rhetorics. Danielle Allen, in her book, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, provides a rousing defense of rhetoric’s role in promoting stranger relations, deeming Aristotle’s Rhetoric the original, essential “treatise on talking to strangers.”[2] She finds in its foundational theory of the three pisteis (ēthos, pathos, and logos)—which she translates not as the usual “proofs” but, more in keeping with the ancient Greek, as means of “trust production”[3] —a profound and provocative basis upon which to build a model of political friendship that could ease our dissociable and unsociable sense of stranger danger. My redemption of Aristotle is not so total, however, and I focus not on the books of the Rhetoric that most appeal to Allen—Books I and II—but instead on elements of Book III.
The Iliad begins with rage. Mēnis, its forceful first word, signals that the management of that affect will drive the action and interactions that follow. When the warlord Agamemnon claims Achilles’ war prize, Briseis, for his own, Achilles retreats from battle, refusing to resume the fight even after receiving from emissaries of Agamemnon a promise of her return and all manner of riches besides.[4] Acutely sensitive to the damage done to morale and the Greek advantage by Achilles’ withdrawal, Patroclus, his intimate friend, dons Achilles’ arms and armor, goes into battle, and falls at the sword of Hector. Since Quintilian hears in the verses of the blind bard the first flowing fons of rhetoric,[5] and Mifsud highlights Homer’s centrality to alloiō-rhetorics, it is appropriate to begin my account of alloiotrophic rhetoric with the strange Homeric scene in which Achilles’ rage finally and wonder-fully dissolves.
In Book 24, we find that killing Patroclus’ killer, Hector, has brought Achilles no relief. He cannot eat, and in his bed “he turned and twisted, side to side,” before wandering “in anguish, aimless along the surf,” and strapping Hector’s body to his chariot and dragging it around Patroclus’ tomb.[6] “And so he kept on raging” for days;[7] meanwhile, all the gods but Athena and Hera urge Hermes to steal the body of Hector and return it to Troy. Apollo laments that Achilles has lost all pity (eleos) and shame (aidōs, also “respect”), two essential social emotions.[8] Zeus declares that Achilles must receive a ransom from Priam and return Hector’s body, and he commands glistening Thetis, Achilles’ immortal mother, to speak sense to the son she finds sobbing inconsolably in his camp. The goddess Iris, in turn, sweeps into Priam’s palace, finds him undernourished, unrested, and unclean, and tells him Zeus’ decree. Hecabe, Priam’s wife, is convinced that Achilles—“that savage, treacherous man”[9]—will show no mercy, but Priam will not be dissuaded. Hermes, the trickster god of speech and borders, escorts Priam and the bountiful ransom into the Greek camp, appearing to Priam in the guise of a handsome young man serving as an aide to Achilles, and offering Priam protection because the old man reminds him of his own father.[10] Hermes offers that detail as a persuasive strategy, encouraging Priam to call upon Achilles to think of his own elderly father when he presents himself. And Priam begins his address in that very way.
Codes of conduct native to the worlds of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey dictate that the approach of an unknown person calls for hospitality rather than hostility, though obviously the condition of prolonged war that marks the Iliad rather complicates the usual ways of behaving toward unknown others. The ancient Greek word xenos and Latin hospes can mean friend or foreigner, capturing an ambiguity that is dangerous for guest and host both. Xenia, stranger-friendship, involves a series of welcome rituals that promote the stranger’s comfort and promise his safety. Despite the threat of a rage flare-up he himself acknowledges, Achilles extends xenia to Priam—they eat together, and Achilles arranges a soft sleeping spot for Priam before finally surrendering to sleep himself—thus going through the ritualized motions of a trusting and trusted host. Achilles ultimately surrenders Hector’s corpse and collects the handsome ransom.
Considering Achilles’ act from the perspective of both ancient and more recent accounts of altruism, Graham Zanker assesses that “although Akhilleus is acting under threat from the gods, is the subject of supplication, receives gifts, and reacts by thinking of his own father, his generous gesture towards Priam remains principally his own response, thus going beyond the requirements of reciprocity.”[11] Notably, during this exchange, neither Achilles nor Priam stop wondering at one another and at their connection, and neither do onlookers. Variations of the word thauma (wonder) appear five times in two hundred lines.[12] Before any words are exchanged, the two “wonder” at and behold one another.[13] Then, after they both enjoy food and wine for the first time in days, Priam “gazed at Achilles, wondering [thaumaz’] now at the man’s beauty, at his magnificent build—face-to-face he seemed a deathless god . . . and Achilles gazed and wondered at [thaumazen] Dardan Priam, beholding his noble looks, listening to his good speech [agathēn muthon].”[14] What occurs between Priam and Achilles is contact without conquest, affiliation without assimilation. Their chiastic exchange of gazing and wondering, wondering and gazing preserves strangeness.
The ancient Greeks deified wonder (thauma). The god Thaumas appears in registries and genealogies of the gods from Hesiod onward, and his most relevant contribution to human life are his winged daughters.[15] His daughter Iris bears the epithets “swift” and “swift-footed,”[16] and she appears over three dozen times in the Iliad, bearing messages from the gods to the humans; indeed, it is Iris who tells Priam he must go to Achilles.[17] As one of the English words derived from her name (“iridescence”) hints, Iris is also goddess of the rainbow, which stretches from earth to sky and back again, an arching emissary of water and light. Both what Cicero called the marvelous loveliness of the rainbow and its mysterious physical properties captured the imagination and stymied the investigative methods of many ancient thinkers.[18] Though the Roman poets Vergil and Ovid described Iris as trailing mille colores (a thousand colors) in her wake, Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century experiments with optics revealed a rainbow of only seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.[19] In the twentieth century, various publics and counterpublics enlisted those colors in the service of their integrative efforts; perhaps most notably, the LGBTQ community and anti- and post-apartheid South Africans.[20]
In South Africa, particularly from 1989 to 1999, the rainbow functioned as “shorthand for a nation seeking reconciliation and unity after decades of racial and political tensions.”[21] Its valence there was biblical: it first appeared during a 1989 march to Parliament in Cape Town spearheaded by church leaders. In a speech jubilantly delivered after the elections in 1994, Archbishop Desmond Tutu hailed South Africans as “the rainbow people of God,” relying on that powerful symbol in Genesis to craft an identity redolent of survival and promise that would bind blacks and whites in a new covenant. Amplifying its fragile grandeur, Nelson Mandela, in his presidential inauguration speech on May 10, 1994, called South Africa “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and with the world,” rallying that “we know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world.”[22] Sociologists studying South Africans’ perception of the rainbow symbolism that diffused from the spirited oratory of Tutu and Mandela and into political culture more broadly observed that it held “a stronger appeal to [sic] collectivists than individualists in that liberal South Africans were prominent among the group of sceptics.”[23] But, because “African morality emphasises mutual respect and support as well as group cohesiveness,” the rainbow spoke to and indeed helped engender a powerful coalition of believers in the delicate assembly of social wavelengths it symbolized.[24]
The rainbow represents a spectrum of relations, each color enjoying its own discrete band but the seven (or six, as is the case with the LGBTQ flag) standing tightly side by side. It offers variety and integrity in one simple symbol. But all is not rainbows. Thaumas’ other children are the three Harpies (from the Greek harpazein [to snatch]), whose journey through myth takes an unattractive turn. Though Hesiod describes them with only the benign epithet “lovely-haired,”[25] in Homer’s Odyssey they are winds that threaten to swoop down and scoop up characters without warning. By the time of Aeschylus, they are dark, snorting, bedraggled, and infamous for snatching Phineus’ feast and befouling any food they cannot carry away with them.[26] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, by the sixteenth century, “harpy” had expanded from denoting the three winged women of Wonder to any “rapacious, plundering, or grasping person; one who preys on others.” The Harpies come to be wonder made unpredictable or predatory.[27]
Philosophy, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder (thauma).[28] In Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates also credits wonder with birthing philosophy, and, with his characteristic flirtatious suggestiveness, in the next line he remarks upon the fittingness of Iris, too, being the child of Thaumas.[29] What can we make of that curious kinship of philosophy and Iris? While conversing with Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus, a dialogue about the norms of naming, Socrates plays around with the etymology of Hermes’ name—which Hermogenes’ clearly resembles—and adds that of Iris, because she, likewise, is a deity who delivers divine messages: “Iris also seems to have gotten her name from eirein [to speak] because she is a messenger.”[30] Iris and philosophy thus share a lineage originating in wonder and speech. That is the claim of alloiō-rhetorics, as well.
Above, we saw that Achilles not only wonders, gazes, and speaks, but also listens. From Achilles’ perspective, Priam issues forth “good speech” (agathēn muthon),[31] likely less a valuation of aesthetics than of ethics, though agathos can apply to one, the other, or both together. In Book IX, Achilles had been visited by an embassy led by the most famous talker in ancient Greek literary culture: Odysseus. Named a man of many turns by Homer (polutropos),[32] Odysseus spins too much for Achilles’ liking, and Odysseus can get no traction. Priam, on the other hand, does not, as Achilles suspects Odysseus of doing, “say one thing but hide another in his heart.”[33] Whereas Odysseus practices a polutropic rhetoric that turns every which way to protect himself, Priam and Achilles achieve through wonder—a stance of openness—an alloio(s)trophic rhetoric that turns outward toward the other.
Wonder is not only the starting place of an alloiotrophic rhetoric, but, perhaps more crucially, wonder is also a returning place. A xenophilia—affection for the strange or the stranger—rooted in and repeatedly restored by wonder occupies the generous space between the exoticization of and the enveloping of the other, the one objectifying difference, the other absorbing it. Wonder refreshes otherness. What resources of rhetoric feed the sort of wonder that nourishes strangeness?
An advocate for alloiotrophic rhetoric must delve into lexis (word choice, style) for the same reason that Aristotle does so for his antistrophic rhetoric: because “it is not enough to have a supply of things to say, but it is also necessary to say it in the right way, and this contributes much to the speech seeming to have a certain quality.”[34] Aristotle goes on to offer an anthropological aesthetics, judging that “people feel the same in regard to lexis as they do in regard to strangers compared to their fellow polis-dwellers [tous xenous . . . tous politas]”; that is, their unfamiliarity attracts our attention and stirs our sense of wonder. Rhetors should appeal to that tendency by making their language “strange [xenēn], for people wonder at [thaumastai] what is far off, and what is wondrous [thaumaston] is sweet.”[35] Above all lexical possibilities, “metaphor especially has clarity and sweetness and strangeness [to xenikon].”[36] Lexis should be not so alien as to be unintelligible, but it ought to cause a pause in perception while recipients marvel at the departure from the usual, the expected, the familiar. Aristotle displays a similarly high regard for metaphor’s departure from the familiar in his Poetics, in a passage to which he refers readers of the Rhetoric who want a longer discussion of metaphor.[37] Sutton and Mifsud, however, challenge metaphor’s status as rhetoric’s trope of tropes precisely because a metaphor renders alike in some capacity two items one normally does not consider to share much in common. They emphasize that metaphor produces “assimilation” by “rendering two distinct phenomena the same,” and they turn instead to the difference-respecting virtues of metonymy, which produces “association” by “juxtaposing two phenomena[,] rendering them distinct.”[38]
Can Aristotle’s approach to lexical strangeness teach us nothing about turning toward and preserving otherness and difference? Noting Aristotle’s emphasis on lexical strangeness, the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky introduced into art writ large the concept of ostraneniye (estrangement) in his 1917 essay, “Art as Device” (“Iskusstvo kak priem”): “According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign.”[39] Habituation and expectation familiarize, desensitize, and anesthetize, “and so,” he writes,
in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man [sic] has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a feeling of things, based on vision and not only on recognition. In order to achieve this goal, art relies upon two devices: “estranging” things and complicating form, thus making perception more difficult and laborious. The perceptual process in art is a purpose in itself and ought to be extended to the fullest.[40]
Art is at once a device of distance and intimacy; we defamiliarize to get better acquainted. As Shklovsky stresses, estrangement demands a lot of us perceptually and cognitively, and I would add rhetorically. This nourishing of the strange advances alloiostrophic rhetoric’s goal of recognizing and speaking to idiosyncrasy and individuality.[41] What Sutton and Mifsud call the “metonymy of difference” and place at the heart of their alloiostrophic rhetoric “allows for distinction of members in a set,”[42] for each to be dwelled upon as different rather than elided as equivalent. Alloiō-rhetorics attempt to restore a sensitivity to others that we lose due to habituation and automatization enabled by dominant ways of thinking and talking about difference: as something to be minimized, assimilated, overcome; as a centrifugal force in rhetorical physics; as a pluribus to be unum’ed. Estrangement helps us learn not to take others or otherness or ourselves, either, for granted.
In language, estrangement occurs by virtue of perspectival twists and turns that distance us from the expected and familiar, and jolt us out of automation and indifference. The rhetorical tradition boasts an extensive lexicon of tropes and figures that name how word workers can contort and structure their appeals so as to disrupt the smoothness of prosaic normality, seize attention, and burrow into memory. Such manipulation results in a texture that Shklovsky calls “roughened,” and the bumps impede perception, slowing it down to a “linger.”[43] Heightened attention to language makes possible, but does not guarantee, a greater attunement to its referent. More important than seeing the language is seeing what it conjures, for, according to Shklovsky, an “author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception.”[44] He demonstrates that effect with examples drawn primarily from Leo Tolstoy, whose writings would have been a commonplace for him and his Russian readers. For instance, Shklovsky focuses on Tolstoy’s Kholstomer (sometimes translated as Strider) whose narrator is a horse, “and it is the horse’s point of view (rather than a person’s) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar.”[45] Known in the rhetorical tradition as prosōpopoeia, this technique of giving voice to the voiceless—absent people, nonhuman animals, inanimate objects—was deemed so essential to the development of rhetorical thinking as to be one of the preliminary exercises (progymnasmata) practiced by students of rhetoric for hundreds of years. Estrangers of language alter perception by altering perspective, and provoking such dislocation was repeatedly deemed a necessary component of instructing, delighting, and moving others.
As literary critic Svetlana Boym observes, “ostranenie means more than distancing and making strange; it is also dislocation, depaysement. Stran is the root of the Russian word for country—strana.”[46] Displacement holds a vital but vexed position in traditional accounts of bridging the divide between self and other(s). Democratically motivated turns toward difference and otherness often hinge on imagined changes or exchanges of place with others, journeys that ostensibly overcome actual or perspectival distance and experiential ignorance. Iris Marion Young, among others, cautions that even the most well-meaning efforts to see where another is coming from or to walk in their shoes too often return simplifying assumptions about and projections and misrepresentations of those others.[47] “Such images of reflection and substitutability . . . support a conceptual projection of sameness among people and perspectives at the expense of their differences,” she charges.[48] Presumptions or imaginings of sameness or shared suffering between self and other can complicate or close communication, for
If you think you already know how the other people feel and judge because you have imaginatively represented their perspective to yourself, then you may not listen to their expression of their perspective very openly. If you think you can look at things from their point of view, then you may avoid the sometimes arduous and painful process in which they confront you with their prejudices, fantasies, and understandings about them, which you have because of your point of view.[49]
She recommends that a communicator recognize her relationships as one of “asymmetrical reciprocity,” in that s/he and others hold “a history and structured positioning that makes them different from one another, with their own shape, trajectory, and configuration of forces.”[50] This recognition is, of course, an achievement of observation and study, the result of perception slowed and intensified. Acknowledging asymmetry preserves a “respectful distance”[51] from which one can behold others in ways that facilitate deliberation, a polyphonic type of rhetoric that arises only around matters that can be otherwise.[52]
Pulling not from Homer but from Luce Irigaray, Young presents wonder as a facilitator of that attitude, asserting that “a respectful stance of wonder toward people is one of openness across, awaiting new insights about their needs, interests, perceptions, or values. Wonder also means being able to see one’s own position, assumptions, perspective as strange, because it has been put in relation to others.”[53] Being able to see oneself in that way and being able to communicate with others without presuming to subsume their experiences through imagination ultimately depends upon an ability to become a stranger to oneself, an ability actuated by techniques of estrangement that hamper and complicate perception.
Whereas Shklovsky’s “estrangement” summons a sensual rebirth, Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality” centers on births, both our entry into the private world of the oikos and our insertion and initiation into the public world of the polis. In The Human Condition, Arendt explores the trifold nature of the vita activa (active life), dividing it into labor, work, and action: labor refers to activities that sustain life, work to activities that produce things, and action to activities that establish and nourish human interaction, particularly but not exclusively en masse. Action, she explains, “corresponds to the human condition of plurality,” which itself is “not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.”[54] Of the three parts of the vita activa, “only action is entirely dependent on the constant presence of others.”[55] Labor and work, on the other hand, are often undertaken in solitary conditions and in ways that do not differ significantly from person to person. “Plurality,” she continues, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody ever is the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”[56] In our otherness lies our sameness.
The nimble orchestration of otherness through praxis and lexis (deed and word) is the central project of the politics of persuasion that is democracy.[57] Our natality interests Arendt far more than our mortality, because the outwardly unfurling quality of natality endows it with political potency; just as philosophical contemplation teaches us how to die alone, rhetorical action teaches us how to live together.
Action [constituted by speaking and doing] has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity for beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities.[58]
While labor arises from necessity and work from utility, action emerges with spontaneity.
Like techniques of estrangement, action “interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life.”[59] Natality and strangeness belong together—and to action, above all—because they counteract the frenzy of labor and the drudgery of work, the eternal return of the same old, same old. Both frenzy and drudgery can yield mindlessness and numbness that turn one inward and thus away from plurality and otherness. What Arendt calls “the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers”[60] offers the continual promise of deliberative renewal. This refreshment results in both earnest (sometimes even incredulous) and playful approaches to shared life, an attitude captured well in a satirical piece from The Onion entitled “Future U.S. History Students: ‘It’s Pretty Embarrassing How Long You Guys Took to Legalize Gay Marriage.’”[61] Each wriggling wavelet of new political actors thinks not better than but differently from those that came before. As Arendt assesses, “the frailty of human institutions and laws and generally, of all matters pertaining to men’s living together, arises from the human condition of natality and is quite independent of the frailty of human nature.”[62] Newness introduces instability into the structures that give forms and norms to the operations of the polis; recognizing the jolting nature of the new, ancient Romans’ idiom for “revolution” was res novae (new things).
Few can better attest to the political opportunities afforded by natality than the rhetorical tradition’s celebrated novus homo (new man), Cicero. In his Stoicism-based work, De Officiis (On Duties), he declares memorably—and for us, who have rendered compact one of Cicero’s characteristically complex sentences, pithily—that “not for ourselves alone are we born” (non nobis solum nati sumus).[63] Though Cicero would likely appreciate having been made a sound bite, that sententia comes from a context worth enlarging upon.
Cicero endeavors in De Officiis to articulate what the central tenets of Stoicism offer young Romans about to undergo what Arendt would call their “second births,”[64] that is, their entrance into public life: How can they meet their obligations toward themselves, their fellows, and to the public thing (res publica) that arises from the dense nexus of fellowships? In the Stoics’ view, human nature drives humans to unite not only for engendering and rearing children, but also “for the fellowship of speech and of life” (ad orationis et ad vitae societatem).[65] Communal life, that is, human life, proceeds from logos; in Latin, the dynamic duo of ratio et oratio. Stoic ethical theory calls the sum of the processes by which creatures adjust themselves to their natural conditions oikeiōsis (familiarization) or making oneself at home (oikos). [66] For Cicero, rhetoric helps make us more at home in the world. Through rhetorical action, communities cohere and coordinate. Decentering the role of the Stoic sage, who, even as he lives among others, still exists on and looks down from a considerably higher plane, Cicero brings speakers into focus: “it is better to speak copiously, provided one does so prudently, than to think, even with the utmost acuteness, without eloquence [eloquentia]; for, thinking turns in on itself [cogitatio in se ipsa veritur], but eloquence embraces those to whom we are joined in communitas.”[67] The outward turn of eloquence helps tug closer to us those with or among whom we live and those who lie in the hinterlands of our experience or imagination. The Stoic Hierocles placed every human in the center of a series of circles, with the circles smaller and closer to the center representing family and friends, and the circles larger and further from the center representing strangers. He named it the duty of every person “to draw the circles together somehow toward the center.”[68] How? Stoicism’s other-directed strategies are a bit muddled, but they come down to two options: “seeing others as ourselves” or “seeing them as if they were ourselves,” as Mary Margaret McCabe has phrased them.[69] And it is here that any advocate of alloiō-rhetorics must pause. Does ever-encircling eloquentia squeeze out difference? Does the human condition of speech condition us to see the idios (particular, individual) only as the not-yet koinos (common, shared) and never for its own sake?
Oikeiōsis’ counter-concept is allotriōsis (alienation or estrangement). Allotriōsis occurs when we behave in ways contrary to our natures as humans in general, or as a human in particular; the Stoics allowed that everyone had a nature unique to her- or himself. This manner of estrangement bears no resemblance to that championed by Shklovsky; indeed, it heralds a desensitizing; a withdrawal from otherness rather than a tickling, talking engagement with it; a disconnection with, potentially, even oneself. The Stoic Chrysippus asserted that allotriōsis “happens in no other way than through a deliberate turning away (apostrophē) from the Logos.”[70] Thus, we have in Stoic ethical theory several turns that are of interest to pursuers of alloiō-rhetorics: oikeiōsis turns toward logos, allotriōsis turns away; oikeiōsis turns outward, allotriōsis turns inward or even against. Oikeiōsis may minimize difference by turning strange others into familiar fellows, but allotriōsis shrugs in disinterest and disregard.
Conceiving of ourselves as having been born for others is central to the Stoic outlook and to Arendt’s conception of natality, both in the sense of our emergence as infants—from the Latin for unable to speak (in fans)—and our entry as speakers and doers. It is not incidental that the “born for others” passage appears in the part of De Officiis dedicated to a discussion of justice. Thinking of natality sub specie Stoic oikeiōsis, the newly born, unburdened by heavy histories and old bigotries, offer the promise of pulling far-out circles closer; of making democracy more inclusive and thus more just; of rendering strangers less strange by virtue of themselves being new and strange. Cicero writes in Brutus, his account of rhetoric’s historical development, that “not to know what happened before you were born [ante quam natus] is to be a child forever,” and he does not mean it as praise. This dimension of first-order natality, however, need not necessarily be harmful to the second birth that occurs when one enters public life.[71]
Turning again and at last to lexis, the sentence style most appropriate to natality is the ellipsis, and that dotted dangle of incompletion fits well with Sutton and Mifsud’s alloiostrophic championing of the running eironomic sentence over the periodic or katastrophic one that comes to rest.[72] Natality produces on going symbolic action rather than finality, a telling to be continued rather than a telos to be completed. . . .
We possess substantive theoretical equipment for living together in strangeness, once we turn toward it: from Homer we get wonder, from Shklovsky estrangement, and from Arendt natality. Moving into the twenty-first century, we can add to those three elements and to Sutton and Mifsud’s efforts, Bradford Vivian’s bold attempt to render rhetoric nonrepresentational and nonmoral in the service of “being made strange.”[73] As do Sutton and Mifsud, Vivian recognizes that we have been conditioned against an other-centric vision of rhetoric by dominant strains of the rhetorical tradition itself. By contrast, the “valuation of otherness” for which Vivian advocates yields a rhetoric based in “the discursive production of multiple subject positions and institutional relations, of an entire distribution of capacities for thought, knowledge, speech and judgment.”[74] This is the challenge and the promise of all alloiō-rhetorics, rhetorics made other(-)wise.
The notion of a distributive variegation or a variegated distribution recalls the rainbow, that symbol of complex unity, that icon of Iris, the go-between goddess. It also summons to my mind Cicero’s exploration of “varietas” in De Finibus: “Variety [varietas] is a Latin word, and it is properly used of different colors, but it is carried over [transfertur] to many differences [multa disparia]: one speaks of a varied poem, a varied speech, varied character, varied fortune, even of varied pleasure when one feels different pleasures from the effects of many different things.”[75] Transferre may be the Latin equivalent of the Greek metaphorein, but Cicero here describes an alloio(s)trophic transformation: varietas becomes more varied, and it performs itself with each new variation. “Carrying over to many differences” is an apt description of the alloiō-impulse, and it was the aim of this chapter to show how it may be nurtured.
Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud, “Towards an Alloiostrophic Rhetoric,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 2 (2012): 222.
Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 143.
Allen, Talking to Strangers, 140–59.
Homer, The Iliad. trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), Book 9. For the Greek, see Homer, Iliad I–XII, ed. M. M. Wilcock (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998). Henceforth, lines numbers from Fagles will be provided, with the corresponding Greek in brackets.
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Books 9–10, trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), book 10.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 24.7ff [24.10ff].
Homer, The Iliad, 24.26 [24.22].
Homer, The Iliad, 24.52 [24.44].
Homer, The Iliad, 24.245 [24.207].
Homer, The Iliad, 24.439 [24.371].
Graham Zanker, “Beyond Reciprocity: The Akhilleus-Priam Scene in Iliad 24,” in Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, ed. Christopher Gill, Norman Postlewaite, and Richard Seaford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 81.
In the Greek, 24.483–4, 629, 631.
Homer, The Iliad, 24.566–568 [24.482–3].
Homer, The Iliad, 24.740–45 [24.629–632].
Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 265ff.
Ibid.
Homer, The Iliad, 24.174ff [24.143ff].
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 3.51. For more on the rainbow in antiquity, see Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Publius Vergilius Maro, Opera, annotated by Roger A. B. Mynors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 4.700–2; Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, annotated by R. J. Tarrant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11.589–91ff.
For a brief history of the LGBTQ rainbow flag, see Steven W. Anderson, “The Rainbow Flag,” GAZE Magazine no. 191, May 28, 1993.
Helga Dickow and Valeria Møller, “South Africa’s ‘Rainbow People’, National Pride and Optimism: A Trend Study,” Social Indicators Research 59, no. 2 (2002): 176.
University of Pennsylvania—African Studies Center. Inaugural Speech, Pretoria [Mandela]—May 10, 1994 http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Inaugural_Speech_17984.html.
Dickow and Møller, “South Africa’s ‘Rainbow People,’” 176–7.
Ibid., 178.
Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), line 267.
Aeschylus, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), lines 50–55.
It is oddly appropriate that, according to some variants of their myth, they dwelled on the island Strophades (Turning).
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books 1–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 982b12ff.
Plato, Theaetetus. Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 155d.
Plato, Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 408b.
Homer, The Iliad, 24.745 [24.632].
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1997), line 1.
Homer, The Iliad, 9.379 [9.314].
Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd ed., trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). I have adapted it in places. The Greek comes from Aristotelis, Ars Rhetorica, annotated by W. D. Ross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 1403b.
Ibid., 1404b9–12.
Ibid., 1405a8–9.
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 1458a22ff. For the Greek, see Aristotelis. De Arte Poetica Liber, annotated by Rudolfus Kassel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Sutton and Mifsud, “Towards an Alloiostrophic Rhetoric,” 227.
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 22.
Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 12.
Sutton and Mifsud, “Towards an Alloiostrophic Rhetoric,” 229.
Ibid., 230.
Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 22.
Ibid.
Ibid., 14.
Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 515.
Iris Marion Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 340–1.
Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity,” 346.
Ibid., 350.
Ibid., 351.
Ibid., 352.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1357a.
Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity,” 358.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 7. For an important, eloquent feminist critique of Arendt’s division, see chapter 2 of Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012).
Arendt, Human Condition, 23.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 26–27.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 246.
Ibid., 9.
The Onion, “Future U.S. History Students: ‘It’s Pretty Embarrassing How Long You Guys Took to Legalize Gay Marriage,’” February 8, 2011, http://www.theonion.com/articles/future-us-history-students-its-pretty-embarrassing,19099/?ref=auto.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 191.
Cicero, De Officiis, annotated by M. Winterbottom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), I.22.1–2. As Cicero himself acknowledges, that line comes from [pseudo]Plato, Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), Epistle 9.358a.
Arendt, Human Condition, 176–7.
Cicero, De Officiis, 1.12.10–11.
For a longer treatment of Stoic social oikeiōsis, see Michele Kennerly, “Sermo and Stoic Sociality in Cicero’s De Officiis,” Rhetorica 28, no. 2 (2010): 119–37.
Cicero, De Officiis, 1.156.30–35.
A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57G, 379.
Mary Margaret McCabe. “Extend or Identify: Two Stoic Accounts of Altruism,” in Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought, ed. R. Salles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 415–6 (italics in original).
J. Von Arnim, ed. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta III (NJ: Irvington, 1986), 125, 20–21.
Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 120. Friedrich Nietzsche captures the zestful potential of such ignorance in this passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976): “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’” (139). For more on natality’s dynamic place between remembrance and forgetting, see chapter 2 of Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).
Sutton and Mifsud, “Towards an Alloiostrophic Rhetoric,” 225, 230.
Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). See also Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).
Vivian, Being Made Strange, 190, 184.
Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2.3.10.