Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” questions the notion of the colonial (and Western) “subject” and provides an example of the limits of the ability of Western discourse, even postcolonial discourse, to interact with disparate cultures. This article suggests that these limits can be (partially) overcome. Where much commentary on Spivak focuses on her reading of Marx through the prism of Derrida, and on her contention that the “native informant” is simultaneously created and destroyed, I contends that Spivak's terms of engagement always imply a liberal-independent subject that is actively speaking. Moreover, given the limits of understanding implied by Spivak's essay, I advocate a reading of culture(s) based on the assumption that all actions offer a communicative role, and that one can understand cultures by translating the various conducts of their culture. On this basis I argue that the title of Spivak's essay might be more accurately stated as “Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”

The cartoon, comic, or—as influential cartoonist Will Eisner called it—“sequential art” is an art-form that is cognitively friendly to contemporary notions of individualistic-liberal-democracy. Whereas traditional forms of art have rather hierarchical standards of aesthetics, which then enforce customary notions of power and the conventional hermeneutic pecking order, the iconography of comics and cartoons is supportive of a kind of pluralistic democratic individualism. If, as some thinkers suggest, the world is understood by cognitive images in the brain, then—as the work of C. S. Pierce, Scott McCloud, and others support—comics is an art that allows for the individual self-creation that subsequently supports democracy.

This article examines six presidential speeches/statements ranging from Bush's remarks on the night of the terrorist attacks to his (in)famous State of the Union address declaring Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “Axis of Evil.” Using qualitative content analysis to investigate closely the six speeches for their “reality creating” and “persuasive” rhetoric, the study scrutinizes Bush's allegorical creation of the “identity” of the enemy. David Zarefsky's concept of the “Power of Definition” and Carl Schmitt's notion of the “state of exception” are applied to the shifting rhetoric of Bush's speeches. The article concludes that Bush used increasingly strong language after the September 11 attacks to create a war‐like aporia and that Bush's rhetoric set the limits of discursive definition, and hence created the parameters of thought regarding the issue of terrorism.

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Plato famously banishes the poets from his ideal city in book X of his Republic. Yet in this banishment Plato establishes the boundaries of reason, art and poetry — boundaries that have haunted western thinkers since antiquity. In this article I will explore those Platonic boundaries, specifically the intellectual limits of poetic writing as reflected upon by self-identified Platonist Alain Badiou. That being said, I am not attempting, strictly speaking, to look at Badiou’s interpretation of Plato’s banishment of poetry. Instead, I am using the banishment as a springboard for discussion of Badiou’s notion of poetry as the ‘birth of truth’ in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. I will examine the way this text interacts with Plato’s conceptual banishment. I assert that this interaction should illuminate the status of writing — especially artistic writing — in the state.