Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan - Hardcover

Metzger, Assistant Professor David

9780809318551: Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809318555 ISBN 13: 9780809318551

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

In this brilliant study of the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, David Metzger boldly poses and answers questions of major significance to the field of rhetorical studies. By asking what rhetoric is, he examines why it has always been difficult to define and to determine its purpose and value. Metzger seeks to ascertain how rhetoric can be more clearly valued and therefore better understood, both on its own and as a set of tools with which to write and think.

Metzger explores the nature of knowledge in terms of what is created in the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, noting how rhetoric is eliminated in the epistemology of Western culture and how it can he replaced through geometry in the places vacated by philosophy. He argues that the dismissal of the "here and now" (and thus the dismissal of rhetoric itself) takes the form of two basic philosophical moves: the onomastic, which dismisses rhetoric because it is not philosophic, not geometry, and the genealogical, which dismisses rhetoric because it is philosophic, not geometry. Using Descartes’s cogito and Derrida’s discussion of genre as examples of these two philosophical moves, Metzger introduces the work of Aristotle and Lacan as their counter-examples. He then argues that rhetoric is about the present. For Aristotle, rhetoric is a dunamis, a faculty and potentiality, but not a potentiality with reference to the future. For Lacan, rhetoric is a means of delineating, through the laws of metaphor and metonymy, the instance of the letter, the instant(s) or "nowness" of the unconscious understood as a zeitloss, a tireless worker. For both Aristotle and Lacan, the formal properties of rhetoric appear in rhetoric’s relation to geometry.

Metzger points out that contemporary researchers in rhetoric often assume a definition of rhetoric for the purpose of classification; distinguishing, for instance, among a medieval rhetoric, a feminist rhetoric, or a phenomenological rhetoric. This kind of research, he believes, examines rhetoric in terms of what it was or might be, but not in terms of what it actually is.

As the first postmodern discussion of the relation of rhetoric and time, Metzger’s book examines rhetoric as it is, breaking new ground as a study of Aristotle’s notion of faculty (dunamis), of Lacanian rhetoric, and of the relation of rhetoric and geometry as it does so. It is a book for all theorists (particularly poststructuralist theorists and others eager to know more about Lacan), Lacanians who have ignored Lacan’s relevance to rhetoric, and historians critical of the division, in modern rhetorical studies, between theory and history.

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About the Author:

David Metzger is an assistant professor of English at Old Dominion University.

Review:

"To someone like me someone, that is, who remains an undeconstructed logocentrist Metzger’s book seems like both a logical’ and a necessary’ next step. At any rate, I can recommend this book both to those, like me, who seek out and live in the quite traditional, classical world, with all its contradictions; and to those who wonder what living (and writing) in the sophistical, postmodern world might be like." Jasper Neel, from the Foreword

"David Metzger’s book is not only a contribution to the field of rhetoric, it will I believe this completely redefine that field. . . . [It] could be read by a beginning student in rhetoric. And he also has something new to teach Lacanians about Aristotle. . . . I believe David Metzger has written a book which brings together threads left dangling for several centuries in fields of study as diverse as rhetoric cum stylistics and rhetoric cum logic." Ellie Ragland, University of Missouri, author of Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Lacan and the Subject of Language, and Essays on the Pleasures of Death. From Freud to Lacan

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