PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with V.Vitanza, 2

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 00:24:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Steven Mailloux
Subject: Re/inter/view of VV & NSHR; sm>vv

OK, people, it's time! Send in those questions and comments for Victor J. Vitanza re: his NEGATION, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC (SUNY, 1997).

Here's a couple to get the rhetorical ball rolling:

VV, a sort of preliminary question for you.

_____You do a good job explaining why NEGATION and SUBJECTIVITY are important topics for your denegating the negative, your nonpositive affirmative deconstructing, but did I miss your explanation of why your "chosen" site to perform these practices is the HISTORY OF RHETORIC?

Or perhaps you'd like to answer this one. Take your pick.

_____Do you have any reactions to VoidBoy's review sent out over this list ten days ago?

SM

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 09:07:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv: v1, vb's review

Thanks for getting things rolling; now, I will try to get things into an uncertain intensity, taking up your second choice of a question.

vv: on the phrase "springboarding from critiques":

A very special 'Thank You' goes to the person I know by the name of VoidBoy (a.k.a. colleague Professor J.D.H. Amador) for his ever so careful reading of NSTHR. One thing that I can say is that he wrestled with that angel (deve[i]l or/and beyond) that in the rebeginnings wins out over all of us. But the point/less is that he wrestled.

And now I would like to rebegin by wrestling with his wrestling, especially VB's last reservation concerning 'Helen.' (I can hear someone thinking ... 'Oh, these men, all they think of is combat, is agonistics!!' The wrestling that I all alluding to has nothing to do with combat or agonistics. If 'you' think that thought, then you miss the thought that I allude to!)

But first, I do have some particular comments. VB writes:

"Springboarding from critiques of the recent works of Edward Schiappa, John Poulakos and Susan Jarratt on the question of the Sophists and their relationship to rhetorical history and tradition, Vitanza takes us on a labyrinthine journey of modern, postmodern and classical theorists in order to clear a space for alternative readings."

I feel uneasy when the verb "to critique" (or the noun "critiques") is used. Of course, there is a critiquing going on, especially when I shift to 'a language game of critique,' which I engage in from time to time in the name of using reason against reason. (I was trained in High School by the best of Jesuits to assassinate someone with Aristotelian logic! Is it not easy to drive a wedge between someone's mind and body!) Or in the un/namely of saying NO to the Negative. (I was untrained in postHS by the best of Nietzscheans to assassinate the Negative, though KB [_LASA_] and Kristeva [_BS_] say we must k/not!!) I have no problems with saying NO to the negative, with denegating, which I do through out the bookless.) But the approach, the other langauge game, which for me is of greater importance, is the examination of the 'conditions' for the possibilities of Ed's, John's, and Sue's and our field's 'doing history.' What I discover is that they-cum-'we' are deeply indebted to the Negative, or the Symbolic. (I include myself ... Why else would I write this book/less!) And therein all of us reside. And therein our history of revenge, reactionary thinking, our uneasiness about an unfulfilled past, takes shape. And therein, we want to redeem the past in the name of the present and future.

Now, please understand that I am not saying these things about VB's use of the word 'critique' as if it suggests to me that VB does not understand what I am suggesting through out. He does. Over and Over again. He does understand. One could but pray for such a syspathetic reader! But it is easy to nod, as I do myselves occasionally, and use a word that takes us in the wrongful direction. VB understands when he writes and combines 'critique' with 'avoid.' He writes: "It is this negative essentializing that Vitanza wants to critique, wants to avoid, in order to develop a nonpositive affirmative Third Sophistic based upon a general, libidinalized economy of excess." It is important not only to avoid it but to 'void' this negative esse. As in denegating the esse.

VVhere am I coming from to get to t.here?

Here are some haunting ... (some ethical [yes, a play on the etymology of e'thea]) ... some haunting words that I recalled and restudied midway through the w/riting of the bookless:

<<<<"To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it'--that alone should I call redemption. Will--that is the name of the liberator and joy-bringer; thus I taught you, my friends. But now learn this too: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? 'It was'--that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time's covetousness, that is the will's loneliest melancholy.">>>>

And a few lines later:

<<<<"Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool; and the imprisoned will redeems himself foolishly. That time does not run backwards, that is his wrath; 'that which was' is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what _revenge_ is: the will's ill will against time and its 'it was.' ">>>> (Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke..._ 2nd Part, "On Redemption")

This is an encapsulated way of saying ... The History of Rhetoric, like virtually all histories, is written in the name of redemption. Revenge. Against Tyrants. It's Salvation history! I spend a tremendous amout of time talking about time, casuistically stretching, time in the last Excursus. And of course, the entire book.less is plotted and s/paced in relation to time stretched. The entire book, ironically-paradoxically, is written, is desired, metaleptically. But I do not stretch time as TSEliot does in the _Four Quartets_. My Stretchings are no attempt to return to the Rose Garden! I am not interested in the poets's nostalgia for 'a great, good place.'

Like a topologist, I have tried to reconfigure The History ... casusitically stretch it ... so as to bring into being newer 'conditions' for a reconfiguration for thinking histories of rherotorics [sic]. Those stretchings would do away with, e.g., the conditions that legitimate binaries. Therefore, we would not have subjectivity-ethos as male/female, or have a negative deconstruction as female/male, wrecking more revenge, but have an affirmative deconstruction of limitless--or an excess of--sexes. And both carbon and silicone and whatever stretched combination of elements yet undiscovered. I do allude to non-carbon li(v)es in the rebeginnings of the last-cum-first Xcursus.

So whereas the word 'critique' could strongly suggest the condition of a correction, a setting straight, within a discipline or species or genus, a 'casuistic stretching' should suggest a search for a changing of conditions. A new 'springboard.' That search, however, cannot be done by typical methods of invention, which I see as predicated all on the Negative. John wants to use the 'topos' of the 'possible', and generate from it a new view of the Sophists and different from the conditions of the 'Ideal' and the conditions of the 'Actual,' but his choice is Heidegger's 'possible,' which, as I point out at great length, is indebted finally to the Negative. 'We' desire a paramethod of invention, I would think. 'We' desire, I would insist and incite, to reconsider Nietzsche's question--not as it is rephrased by Heidegger, but as it is asked by Nietzsche himselves--"What is called thinking?" Or 'What is called writing histories of rherotics?' Instead of going with Heidegger, though I 'go' with him, I go and go and go with Deleuze's Nietzsche. I go metaleptically with Deleuze's-(Borges's)-Leibnitz's Nietzsche. I go with the 'atopos' of the 'compossible' and its limitless number of 'incompossibles.' Incompossible worlds. It's been a matter of refolding (or 'stretching') """"""The History""""" into refoldings of a radical setless of multiplicities of histories of rherotics. Thereon--all along the countless surfaces--'we' would attempt to perpetually rebegin. rebegin. rebegin.

To rebegin. Meaning: To overcome not only our Self, but also the whole problematic of _to apeiron_.

victor

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 09:05:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv: v2, vb's review

vv: on "the Isocrates-Heidegger trajectory:

VB writes:

"To avoid the difficulties of the Isocrates-Heidegger trajectory, Vitanza turns to Gorgias and casuistically stretches him through Nietzsche to (re)turn to a Third Sophistic."

Again, VB understands, but it's easy to slip on the banana ap/peal of the negative. I don't for the most part talk about "the Isocrates-Heidegger trajectory"; through out, I stretch these chroNoNoNological schemes around--i.e., trope them around--metaleptically, from Heidegger to Isocrates. The whole book is one huge METALEPSIS. But of course, there is another tactic that is the (desiring-)machine that throws the whole (theory-)fiction out of the stable site of the present or any possible negative synthesis between the past-and-future.

ChroNOs is not the god I favor; aiON is. (See _The Logic of Sense_ 77.)

Rotciv

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 09:09:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv: v3, vb's review

vv: on "measure the success(es) of an anti-humanist...."

And now thirdly and rebeginingly.

I would like to take up VB's question toward the end of his review, which is a question that returns because of the n/ever effect of the Negative. VB writes:

"There are so many questions that arise, and are addressed, when reading through this difficult, thought-provoking work. But I want to raise just one issue in light of the impassioned plea for/by/of the repressed (excluded, suppressed, oppressed): How do we measure the success(es) of an anti-humanist dispersion of power and subjectivities?"

How do we measure the success(es)...?

Good question. In a Capitalist economy that has a Kapitalist analytic and hence determines how to resist all attempts at de-negation, we would customarily (nomos) say and ask: Well, if I am going to sink my Symbolic, Revolutionary Kapital into this un/kind of thinking, which VV has as an *Objective,* I've got to know not only what his *Objective* is, but also whether or not it can be *Implemented* and more importantly whether or not we can *Assess* it as a sucksess or a failure. Yes, the hermeneutic we would use is the basic triad of the measurement of Capital, which we see proliferated thorugh out our society and especially on campus. Have you looked at any methods of assessment of writing skills lately? As a dear friend of mine wrote, we are s...Killing our students! We are Kapitalizing them.

The question that VB raises is extremely important. He, no doubt, anticipates the kind of question that, in relation to 'Helen' many feminists would ask. Though I dealt with this question at great length in the Xcursus "Feminist Sophistic?", and in the chapters on 'Helen', this question will ever return because of 'our' being heavily invested in the Negative, and 'our' thinking that 'we' can find a just world in the Symbolic. (I mean, it's not easy giving up Mommy, or NeoMommies, or Daddies, Right? I take my lead from Cixous: "Whose degrading do you like better, the father's or the mother's? ... We are pieced back to the string which leads back, if not to the Name-of-the-Father, then, for the new twist, to the place of the phallic-mother." I desire to know what non-Oedipal Histories of Rherotorics might be like?)

Begone. I must be about the business of my others's denegation.

For many Feminists--and understandably so--there is a need for redemption. For redeeming the past. (How in hell does The History of Rhetoric get started? By redeeming the past that was stolen by the Tyrant on the isle of Sicily.) And therein lies the problem. For a few Feminists--and misunderstandably sow--there is no need for redemption but an attending to the most forbidden. This attending is a transgression, but not a negative transgression. An example? As I point out in the bookless and go with, I have in, yet mostly out of, mind Cixous:

Who makes so much of Clarice Lispector's _The Passion According ot G. H__:

"I sought a vastness.... there in the sun.... Looking at it, I saw the vastness of the Libyan desert.... All the time I had been wanting not to think about what I was really thinking now: that the cockroach is edible like a lobster, the cockroach was a crustacean" (97, 105)

Cixous's and Lispector's are such a writing of The Book ... The Passion According to _______.

In dis/order to resurface a new economy, a general economy, Cixous, Lispector, G.H. cross binary-boundaries, destroying a difference according to species and genus. According to. The Logos. Get(s) recounted. They embrace the excluded middle. And. Cixous crosses. As. Gregor Samsa crosses. Etc. Becomes-animal. Becomes Vastness. And in doing so, ARE THEY SUCCESSFUL? How do we determine that they are a success? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Now, I would have to say to the Question that would pull us back to the ground of the Negative ... Now, I would have to say, 'It is best to forget the questions about success and listen to the Kafka in you-cum-us laughing?' I have to accept the Imund, the Imund, Imund, un/just as Cixous does. And you, yet my brothers and sisters?

My position through out the bookless--or though out the libidinal installments--is that we cannot find justice here and we should t/herefore leave the Negative.Symbolic || Not so that we can find a peaceable kingdom!, for none exists anywhere || I cannot promise you the Land || I am not asking anyone to march around in the desert for 40 years so that the olde farts with cultural memory will die off and the young will accept whatever is claimed to be the Land that was promised by the olde f/arts! || I do not promise you, as I said, Eliot's Rose Garden. || I promise you only the "red cruelty of singularities" against "the white terror of truth" || ... these allusions as freightening as they might negatively-symbolically sound, are something else. ... these allusions are from the closing cum rebeginnings of Lyotard's _Libidinal Economy_ 241- ). I promise you radical singularities, not unities. I promise you the Lands of Ovid, not Virgil. All of this is performed, in un/terms of vv/riting hystories, schizzories of rherotics in the passion according to the last cum rebeginnings Xcurs(e)US.

As I spent so much time, excessively vvriting about, I'm referring to a completely different Economy that would call into being a completely different, yet ever shifting, means of measuring success. || And which would require the denegation of the oppression that makes for a stable ego, a fixed subject || Yes, yes, yes, each of us will have to give up our egos, identities, careers || but not to become the collective new man and woman || but to become-animal, become-wolf, become-crystal, become-becoming || To become the red cruelty of singularities || In other words, I am saying that when w/riting histories of rherotics we must leave the polis and light out for the pagus, the border zone w/here 'What is called w/riting?' is perpetually placed at stake (cf. Lyotard, _Differend_ 151). Try writing the red cruelty of singularities. Anyone can write the slave-writing of The History of the The Negative. Try writing the red cruelty of singularities. Such writing does not win prizes, awards; such writing cannot be judged a SUCKCESS. So you can't look back ... when you're writing the red cruelty ... you cannot be concerned with who is watching you ... you cannot be concerned with recognition. For if you do look back or you are concerned, then, you will *not* to w/rite.

Now to the question of measurement, to valuing. (One more pass over it.) The cruxlessness of the whole bookless is the idea of revaluing value. We are and have been for some time now in an 'accomplised nihilism.' As we standless t/here on the Negative, we await a new measuring, valuing systemless. The measuring system (ecoNOmy) that we have had ... has been predicated on the Negative. (I write and muse about this forever in the book; I don't want to go over and over it again here between the light and the pixels.) What remains is a General, instead of a Restricted, Economy. We are headlessly going in that directionless. I am not an anti-Humanist in saying this. I am a non-Humanist. I am more than ever finished with words, words, vvords. I am on the verge of throwing away my *word processing programs* and playing with *photoshop.* With *Director.* With *Kai3.* But in versions yet to be paraprogrammed. Do you catch my drift-ecomony?

rotcivvie

From: TheVoidBoy@AOL.COM
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 15:26:49 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: VB --> Victor: Here I am

Sorry for the delay. I was kinda hoping somebody else would jump in, but I'll get the responses going, I guess.

Every review is a work of translation and condensation - an attempt to bridge audiences across gaps of time, intension andexpertise, and to do it in a way that merely introduces them and perhaps entices them to read (or not) the book-in-mind. Translation and condensation - the result is a thick essence that could go completely wrong. I have never seen/heard/read a translation that suits me. I have never written a single thing that, by the end of writing it, hasnít gone all wrong. I am always surprised how differently things end up than where they were going to be going when first begun.

I am only thankful that Victor is generous and patient enough to assume the best, and kind enough to clarify where my own muddle left things in a mess.

"And now thirdly and rebeginingly." - My question. Ah, yes, another fine mess I made of things.

Two quick questions come to mind as a response to my self (not to Victor), in an effort to blunder even more:

...

No, I take it back. I tried writing them, and they wouldnít come out. The questions I wrote in the review weren't 'right'/write/rite in the first place. They were more like hauntings.

I hear Victor, and see him dancing and laughing, and I want to join him. But his pagus land, his Dionysian world is being born at a time when Iím not quite there, yet. I will join him, but later.

For now, for me, the problem is an issue of an analytics of power, an analytics that I read Victor as also participating in/by/with/for, but with a different result or purpose or goal or participatory effort in mind than what I have.

You see, I like the idea of the middle voice, but rather than (or also than) stretching it through a dispersal of excess power that fragments the Selves into a formlessness, I stick to my old linguistic and philological trope of the vox medialis - where the subject is both performer and recipient of the action of the Verb. The subject does not lose herSelfs into voicelessness, does not surrender to the kairotic moment (why surrender? why are people always being told surrender is a good thing/God thing?), but is the cite/site of forces at work on the body-without-organs. And those forces are, at that kairotic moment, both *for* f/herm and *by* h/ferm, where power becomes excess through the middle voice.

I have wanted to say, but am loathe to be misunderstood, but...what the hell: ìVictor, my read of your read of Helen makes her out to be powerless, overwhelmed and overcome by the schizophrenic moment. She is not powerless, she is *powerful*. And I donít mean powerful as participatory in the Negative (power is not negative, it is also as well and maybe even moreso positive, productive; it certainly is not neutral), but fully participatory in the kairotic moment itself. She becomes power, her middle voice is not lost, her self is not lost, but is intensified by her own singularity - a Verb in which she is both the actor and actant.î (Do I misunderstand you? Did I read you in an unanticipated fashion?) And, for me, it is her power that becomes the threat to the systems of Negation that unleash the historical forces that lead to the sacking of Troy, the death of Iphigenia, the Athena-sanctioned death of Cytemnestra. And it is *this* that interests me - how power, in all its forms, carves its mark in blood upon the body-without-organs. And esp. how it does so in the face of alternative modalities of power that seek out, create, scream across the fissures of freedom.

"Anthropos is not in charge here or elsewhere." - But I desire to understand how anthropos (and andres) *thinks* itself to be in charge, how it inflicts its "charge", upon the world, upon nature, upon the spirit, upon the flesh. Sometimes its charge is horrificly ugly, painful, abhorrent, terrifying; sometimes it is awesome, beautiful, inspiring, terrifying. I want to understand how.

But, notice: I am not interested in this as a critique/criticism of Victor. To do so would be to create a differend, would be to impose my standards of judgment upon him to silence him. Screw that! That is NOT what I mean to do. (I am so tired of diatribe; Iím so tired of the (not only) academic habit of defining oneself by beating the shit out of someone else in print, in seminar, in conferences.) Because I think Victor is simply much further along in his understanding of power than I am, that he has journeyed to a place where he can hear the party.

There is a West African phrase, its exact spelling I can't remember (something like, ëmbugu-mwuguí), from which Black Americans have introduced to American English the phrase 'boogie-woogie'. It is not directly translateable, but it means 'that feeling one has when one sees a party happening in the distance, and one has to strip off all oneís clothes and run to join in.' For some reason, I have this feeling this is exactly how Victor feels when he writes/rites us into the Third Sophistic.

I have much more I could say (about non-Humonism, about feminism, about a rhetorical analytic of power), but I'll try to give others some time to respond.

-VoidBoy

Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 16:00:00 -0500
From: Byron Hawk
Subject: Re: VB --> Victor: Here I am

VB said

"Anthropos is not in charge here or elsewhere." - But I desire to understand how anthropos (and andres) *thinks* itself to be in charge, how it inflicts its "charge", upon the world, upon nature, upon the spirit, upon the flesh.

Sometimes its charge is horrificly ugly, painful, abhorrent, terrifying; sometimes it is awesome, beautiful, inspiring, terrifying. I want to understand how.

?

The it seems to refer to anthropos in this context, but reading makes me feel that the last two sentences apply to a power that is not tied to anthropos. Certainly its both and/or neither... YES?

Either way.. I'll concur with the question. I'd love to hear/see VV riff on either/both/neither.

B.

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 01:25:17 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: subjectless

VB, to your 'subject' heading |||| Subject: VB --> Victor: Here I am ||||| 'I am tempted' to resub-ject myselphs to < VoidBoy: Here I am NOT>> but such a temptation would only get us full force into the FortDaGame.

Some will eventually rite in and say ... See ... he's contradicting himself. But they will not have understood that this is a ShellGame, under which every shell Es Gibt a pea. You studies the shells, carefully, takes your choice, breathlessly, and reaps what you pick. ;-)

So whateva you say about what desire w/rites, you are a winner.

When I say that I am not an 'anti-Humanist' but a 'non-Humanist' ... When I quote Sartre elsewhere saying, "I [ Roquentin] don't want to be integrated, I don't want my good red blood to go and fatten this lymphatic beast: I will not be fool enough to call myself 'anti-humanist.' I _am not_ a humanist, that's all there is to it" (_Nausea_) ... When I say this thing, I am saying that I do not want to be anti-anything, for such a stance would only make me fall prey to being the very thing that I do NOT want to be. I am a non-Humanist Sophist, which means I don't go with the man-measure doctrine. For the most part. I am a Sophist because there is no such thing as a Sofist except as in a catchrestic, not catachistic sense. In other words, to claim to be a Sophist is to claim to be something (say, a metaphor) for which there is no literal referent. I would have it no other way. For the most part.

Look ... no, Blink, ... "I am not a man of ideas. I am a man of style.... This involves taking sentences ... and unhinging them," as Celine says.

Sintax is everything. Look at the second paragraph above. It is filled with ... how many? ... squinting modifiers. T/here to unhinge while hinging. How to seeee, spectacaleyezze? Just blink and squint. When you perform your w/riting. Coordination-Subordination. Coordination-Subordination. How(l) can we leap out of that one? Congregation-Segregation. (This is a slot and substution grammar; you can make, therefore, any number of substitutions that you might desire, so as to control your desire.)

A thing to recall: Dionysus was/is/will not be only a happy reveler. He ... joyfully pessimistic. He ... danced with tears in his eyes. There ... nothing ludic in his an.tics. KB, responding to WBooth, entitled his article dancing with tears in my eyes. KB lifted this right out of Nietzsche's-Zarathustra's mouth. KB practiced this saying. He almost got himself in a heap of trouble when he said publically ... 'nothing warrants outrage.' The bottom line, the foundation, is that people want revenge.

The decentralized questionless for me is to rethink that e.motive. Differently from the way KB did. Human beings might be given (as in giving a gift of potlatch) to the Negative, but human beings are perverse enough to say No to such giving, expecting nothing in return and getting everything without debt.

When I was four years old, I knew enough to know that I was witnessing a most evil act. (There are millions of kids in the world who have witnessed an evil above and beyond what I witnessed and at a much younger age.) I danced up and down and all over the place with other kids my age and size, but we could not stop the evil act. The other kids were just too big for us. Intuitively, I begin to think that human beings were the strangest of the strange. But I could not phrase it that way until much later, when reading Gr. tragedy.

I really wish that someone would write an extensive History of Rhetoric that was solely informed by Gr. tragedy.

What I w/rite might make some sense then.

'Every review is a work of translation and condensation' - AND - Every re.inter.view should be a play of transvaluation and decepshun.

I am only thankful that VoidBoy is generous and patient enough to assume the best, and kind enough to believe publicly that my w/riting the excluded middle is not a hopeless muddle. The gods forbid for someone to think that I am saying Nothing! Why in the whirl would I say Nothing, when JCage has already said that odd nausea? What I am saying is No to NO. That's all--the excess--that I am saying. In dis/respect to The History of Rhetoric. And yes, yes, yes ... saying No to NO and Yes to everything ... has been said many times before, but never enuf, never ever enuf ... for me.

... every thing should end with another non sequi_tour_ ...

and besides, VB, the 'Helen' that I have less in, yet more out of, mind did not go to Troy but to Egypt. It's that way on the road to incompossible worlds.

Some more and some more later, V///ger