The Event That We Are: Ontology, Rhetorical Agency, and Alain Badiou

Abstract

As scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event.

Rhetoric and Logical Reasoning as Engagement with Being

“…The existential rhetoric literature already considers rhetoric as a relation to, and exercise of, being (for representative examples, see Daniel 2016;Hyde 1990;Scott 1964). But beyond the existing discussion, I want to show, first, that when the deepest or foundational aspects of truth are at issue, engagement with the participants' being is a legitimate and in fact necessary part of attempts to establish not only truth that directly concerns or turns on their personal being, but also truth or justification about fundamental aspects of things and issues in general.…”