![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
John Searle and Jacques Derrida's legendary dispute over J. L. Austin's speech act theory is commonly interpreted as a conflict over first assumptions and/or as an historic engagement between the French-German and American-English philosophical traditions. This essay proposes that from Searle's and Derrida's respective interpretations and deployments of Austin's work alternate pedagogies may be explicated. Searle and Derrida differed in their responses not only to speech act theory itself, but importantly also to Austin's act of formulating speech act theory, as a function of their respective language philosophies. Analyzing the two theorists' understandings of signification and intentionality and how each oriented himself relative to a project that influenced his work, I present two teaching models. The essay extends the literature on academic pedagogy by identifying teaching models in teachers' scholarly subjects. Moreover, as my investigation of teaching and signification follows students' assumptions about what is rhetorically possible, it joins the ongoing disciplinary conversation about the efficacy and agency of language and language-users.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Review of Communication editor Pat Gehrke for his thoughtful advice and moderating throughout the review process, the two anonymous reviewers for their instructive suggestions.
Notes
1. John R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 48.
2. Searle, Speech Acts, 43.
3. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
4. Derrida, Limited Inc, 36.
5. Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 44.
6. For further bibliographic information regarding the controversy, see Mark Alfino, “Another Look at the Derrida–Searle Debate,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 24 (1991): 144.
7. This essay is reproduced in the book Limited Inc. References to it include page numbers from the book.
8. For a helpful analysis of Searle's and Derrida's productive (mis)understandings of one another, see Gregory Ulmer, “Sounding the Unconscious,” in Glassary, John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 23, 25, 27.
9. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 31.
10. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 164.
11. Austin, 6.
12. Austin, 12, 54.
13. Locating rhetoric, specifically persuasion, in the changing conditions of the historically-contingent “perlocutionary field,” Jeff Mason critiques Austin's emphasis on speakers’ intentions. Jeff Mason, “Rhetoric and the Perlocutionary Field,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (1994): 410–14. According to Mason, rhetors may be defined as such to the extent that they strategically manipulate the speech situation. He writes, “Consistent success in perlocutionary action depends upon the exploitation of regularities in the production of effects,” 412.
14. Austin, 11. See also 38.
15. Austin, 40.
16. Austin, 22.
17. Austin, 22.
18. Austin, 67.
19. Austin, 47.
20. Austin, 52.
21. Austin, 55.
22. Jonathan Culler, “Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin,” New Literary History 13 (1981): 17. Culler responds to Searle's “egregious misunderstandings” of Derrida, 16. He asks the dispute's critical question, “Can Austin proceed without reinstating the notion of meaning as a signifying intention present to consciousness at the moment of utterance and thus treating the meaning of a speech act as ultimately determined by or grounded in a consciousness whose intention is fully present to itself?” 19.
23. Austin, 67.
24. Austin, 72. James Benjamin recovers the concept of the performative, arguing that “[b]ecause performatives describe communicative relationships among speaker, audience, occasion, and message constructed for practical purposes involving the full personality of the persons involved, and because performatives are not aimed at any specific subject, there are reasons for accepting performatives as rhetorical acts.” James Benjamin, “Performatives as a Rhetorical Construct,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 86. Benjamin relates such paradigmatic performatives as promising and vetoing to Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation, demonstrating the concept's relevance to rhetorical theory. Specifically, he distinguishes between ordinary rhetorical acts and performative rhetorical speech acts, which, he claims, function only through “institutional prescriptions and allowances,” 92.
25. Mava Jo Powell emphasizes that Austin eventually “gave up the saying/doing criterion.” Mava Jo Powell, “Conceptions of Literal Meaning in Speech Act Theory,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985): 134. Characterizing Austin's followers differently than I, she explicates two kinds: “nondescriptivists,” who maintain that the question of truth and falsity was, to Austin, beside the point of speech act theory, and “descriptivists,” who insist that performatives are also assertions that may be evaluated for their veracity. The latter, who, she claims, misinterpret Austin, are characterized as “ungrateful benefactors, [who] take advantage of Austin's initial insights, use his principal distinction between constative and performative and his notion of felicity condition, and then conclude that he was mistaken on a central claim: the dimensions of true and false do apply to the propositions expressed by performative utterances,” 135, original emphasis. François Cooren undertakes a similar project of evaluating speech act theorists post-Austin and Searle. François Cooren, ‘Toward Another Ideal Speech Situation: A Critique of Habermas’ Reinterpretation of Speech Act Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 295–317. He argues that Habermas commits two “displacements” of original speech act theory, “purify[ing] communicative action of any rhetorical dimension,” and centralizing rational discussion in a manner that the Habermasian public sphere model requires, 296. Criticizing these “displacements”—Cooren's term for theoretical misunderstanding and/or distortion—Cooren claims that the Habermas's reading of Austin “opens the door to a perspective that is completely different from that of Habermas,” 303. Thus Cooren denounces, albeit politely, Habermas's use of speech act theory on the grounds that he ends up contradicting himself. As I argue in this essay, whether indictments of students’ use of original theory are warranted depends on one's view of signification and rhetorical intention—whether those who stray from what an original theorist's intentions might possibly have been are ingrates or just interpreters depends on whether one believes that such intentions are knowable and/or retrievable.
26. Austin, 14.
27. Austin, 16, 38.
28. Stanley E. Fish, “With the Compliments of the Author: Reflection on Austin and Derrida,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 716.
29. Austin, 13.
30. Austin, 25.
31. John R. Searle, “Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts,” The Philosophical Review 77 (1968): 405. Konstantin Kolenda demonstrates, for example, how, while Austin opted not to characterize a common feature of all illocutionary acts, Searle endeavored to do so, specifically relying on the truth/falsity dimension that permeates much traditional language philosophy. Konstantin Kolenda, “Speech Acts and Truth,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971): 230–41.
32. Robert E. Sanders, “In Defense of Speech Acts,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 113, emphasis added.
33. Robert E. Sanders, “Utterances, Actions, and Rhetorical Inquiry,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978): 117, emphasis added.
34. Hagi Kenaan, “Language, Philosophy and the Risk of Failure: Rereading the Debate between Searle and Derrida,” Continental Philosophy Review 35 (2002): 118.
35. Searle, Speech Acts, 12.
36. Searle, Speech Acts, 60.
37. Searle, Speech Acts, 16.
38. John R. Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 2 (1977): 201–2. Cushman and Kunimoto explain that this “intending uptake presupposes a belief on an agent's part that such a realization is possible given the audience's expectations regarding the agent, the conventions of language, and the context of communication.” Donald P. Cushman and Elizabeth N. Kunimoto, “A Symposium on ‘Speech Act Theory in Mainstream Communication Research’: An Introduction,” Communication Quarterly 29 (1981): 199.
39. Searle, Speech Acts, 58.
40. Jesús Navarro Reyes, “Can We Say what We Mean? Expressibility and Background,” Pragmatics and Cognition 17 (2009): 287.
41. Searle, Speech Acts, 48.
42. Searle, Speech Acts, 33–37.
43. Marcelo Dascal, “How Rational Can a Polemic Across the Analytic-Continental ‘Divide’ Be?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 (2001): 326.
44. Navarro Reyes, 286.
45. Searle, Speech Acts, 15.
46. Derrida, Limited Inc, 43.
47. Derrida, Limited Inc, 30–31.
48. Dascal, 329.
49. Derrida, Limited Inc, 36, 31.
50. Derrida, Limited Inc, 37.
51. Kenneth Rufo suggests in a bold reading of Derrida on materiality that, while Derrida recognizes indebtedness, he does not “fully appreciate its magnitude.” Kenneth Rufo, “Shades of Derrida: Materiality as the Mediation of Différance,” in Rhetoric, Materiality and Politics, eds. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 239. The angle from which I approach Derrida's notion of indebtedness here allows me to respond partially to Rufo's concern insofar as my project thematizes indebtedness in multiple modes.
52. Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 121. Challenging the humanist, sovereign and rational subject, Biesecker demonstrates that Derrida provides a way to see the subject as constituted not by internal identity or cohesion, but in and by différance. She advises rhetoricians to think of the rhetorical situation not as a moment in which the intending subject orchestrates influence upon others, but as a moment of the former's articulation; identity is an effect, not an a priori of the rhetorical event.
53. Derrida, Limited Inc, 30.
54. As many critics have noted, deconstruction of language provides the initial and important heuristic for Derrida's ultimate project. Language is the point of departure from which he launches “a full-bodied critical engagement with the whole of western metaphysical tradition.” Claire Joubert, “Saussure Rereads Derrida: Language and Critique,” European Journal of English Studies 10 (2006): 53.
55. Derrida, Limited Inc, 8.
56. Gregory Desilet, “Heidegger and Derrida: The Conflict Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction in the Context of Rhetorical and Communication Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 159. Tracing a distinction between the projects of hermeneutics and deconstruction, and aligning their respective models of communication and rhetoric, Desilet concludes that deconstruction warrants a view of rhetoric as “the stimulation and provocation of meaning with the additional advantage of neither implying nor precluding shared meaning,” 169.
57. Manfred Frank, “The Entropy of Language: Reflections on the Searle—Derrida Debate,” in The Subject and the Text, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125.
58. Frank, 130.
59. Frank, 132–33.
60. Frank, 134.
61. Frank, 140.
62. Derrida, Limited Inc, 12. Following this emphasis on context, John Lyne explicates a semiotic and pragmatic approach to speech act theory, identifying its potential usefulness for communication studies. John Lyne, “Speech Acts in a Semiotic Frame,” Communication Quarterly 29 (1981): 202–8. For further investigation of these issues, see other essays in the journal symposium: Richard A. Cherwitz, “Charles Morris’ Conception of Semiotic: Implications for Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication Quarterly 29 (1981): 218–27; Robert Hopper, “How To Do Things Without Words: The Taken-for-Granted as Speech Action,” Communication Quarterly 29 (1981): 228–36.
63. Frank, 147.
64. Frank, 152.
65. Derrida, Limited Inc, 15. Edmond Wright explains that, while Derrida's claim that Searle neglects context in his treatment of iterability is false, his criticism is relevant insofar as Searle leaves out “contextual transformation.” Edmond Wright, “Derrida, Contexts, Games, Riddles,” New Literary History 13 (1982): 469. Wright writes, “If Searle admits, as he does, that the meaning of a sentence is governed by the context in which it is found, he will have to include in his ‘pragmatic conventions’ the presupposition in his argument that all possible varieties of context have been tested out,” 469. Frank Farrell compares Derrida's and Searle's understandings of iterability, noting that, to the former, “the ‘context’ which determines meaning is open-ended and hostage to the future; it includes future situations which are at present indeterminable, no matter how much information I might have about the speaker's present situation.” Frank B. Farrell, “Iterability and Meaning: The Searle-Derrida Debate,” Metaphilosophy 19 (1988): 55. Farrell is careful to note that, although he demonstrates the inadequacy of Searle's criticism of Derrida, he does not endorse the latter's position on iterability and meaning, 57, 64.
66. Alfino, 150.
67. Derrida, Limited Inc, 8.
68. Derrida, Limited Inc, 9.
69. Derrida, Limited Inc, 20.
70. Derrida, Limited Inc, 5.
71. Joshua Gunn, “Review Essay: Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 77–102.
72. Rufo, 233.
73. Derrida, Memoires, 20–35, 64. See also Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). For a rich collection of analyses of haunting, particularl addressing the connection between ghosts and iterability, see Peter Buse and Andrew Scott, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London, Great Britain: Macmillan Press, 1999).
74. Derrida, Memoires, 33–34.
75. Efi Kyprianidou, “Memory and the Abyss of Communication: Philosophers’ Collective Memory, Citation and Meaning Attribution,” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 2 (2010): 186. Analyzing the notion of a scholarly collective memory, sustained by a cohort of users of a code, Kyprianidou explicates the function of memory in Searle's and Derrida's exchange. He claims that “Derrida and Searle do not simply put forward certain arguments, but rather […] appeal to a recollection of memories,” 183.
76. Derrida, Limited Inc, 77. Gunn proposes that Derrida discourages claiming the kind of knowledge of the dead, or “specter,” that renders deafness and an arrogant irresponsibility, 82–83. If we imagine the specter simply as a nonpresent figure, a teacher, this knowledge, presumably, includes a full grasp of the teacher's motives, what she would have wanted. According to Gunn, Derrida's later works of social critique advocate a willed indeterminacy that reframes the relationship between the self and other. Thus, it must be clear that to deliberately distance oneself from any attempt to recover and reconstitute a teacher's intentions is not to shirk ethical responsibility to this other—indeed, the opposite.
77. Ronald W. Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System; Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 439.
78. Derrida, Limited Inc, 9.
79. Austin, 54.
80. Austin, 14.
81. Austin, 50.
82. Fish, 701.
83. Dascal, 320.
84. Searle, Speech Acts, 78. See also Fish, 696–97.
85. Navarro Reyes, 286. For an analysis of Austin's and Searle's understanding of literalness and “truthconditional meaning,” specifically as contrasted with nonliteral language use, including metaphor, see Jo Powell.
86. Searle, Speech Acts, 55–56. See also Kevin Halion, “Parasitic Speech Acts: Austin, Searle, Derrida,” Philosophy Today 36 (1992): 162.
87. Frank, 162.
88. Frank, 144. Alan Gross explains Austin's and Searle's methodological analogy “between philosophy of language and the natural sciences.” Alan Gross, “Is a Science of Language Possible? The Derrida—Searle Debate,” Social Epistemology 8 (1994): 353. Even as he extols the merits of a science of language, however, Gross identifies a “relationship of literary form to intellectual force in How to do Things with Words,” 347. Referring to “Austin's expository deviousness” and characterizing his lectures as “throughout an interrogation,” Gross, I submit, gestures toward the parallel I draw below between Austin's and Derrida's deconstructive programs, 347–48.
89. Searle, “Austin,” 410.
90. Derrida, Memoires, 72.
91. Cavell responds to Derrida's challenge of Austin on this critical point, charging him with certain enduring misconceptions of Austin's linguistics, 44. Cavell argues that, while Derrida critiques Austin for excluding the theory of nonserious or parasitic instances from his general language philosophy, Austin actually excluded two theories: the doctrine or excuses and the doctrine of pretense or insincerity, 52, 55. Cavell insists that Austin excludes this content because he had developed it fully elsewhere, and concludes that Derrida's challenge may be chalked up to simple ignorance: “Evidently Derrida was not aware that these are each theories that Austin had developed elsewhere,” 52. Worth noting is that Cavell was himself a student of Austin. He recounts experiences of sitting in Austin's class, and the impact that the seminars had on his thinking, 81. Cavell notes that “I felt both that he [Derrida] understood something in Austin that others missed and also that he was not interested in something else in Austin which I regarded as fundamental,” 67. Cavell claims further that any pupil of Austin's, “with cause for gratitude to him” would be “aggrieved at the stinginess of response to his gifts of philosophy,” 67. “My fear is that the Austin–Derrida–Searle–Derrida exchanges have helped confine Austin's reputation, such as it is, to the fate of a few phrases from his work on the performative utterance,” 73. In this very effort to respond to criticism and/or interpretations of Austin's work, therein redeeming or somehow doing justice to his teacher, Cavell is enacting the issues at stake in my project.
92. Fish, 700.
93. Dascal, 328–29. See also François Cooren, “The Haunting Question of Textual Agency: Derrida and Garfinkle on Iterability and Eventfulness,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 42 (2009): 49–50. Paul Campbell's 1973 essay intersects with my project here in some noteworthy ways, illustrating the perpetual complexities of theorizing the speech situation. Paul Newell Campbell, “A Rhetorical View of Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 284–96. Provocatively asking for examples of “some typical speech acts that neither intend to, nor do in fact, produce effects on those who hear and/or those who utter them” Campbell challenges Austin's categories, 289–90. Like Derrida, for example, he completely deconstructs Austin's separation of “parasitic” and “nonserious” language from literal, referential language; he manages not only to redeem Walt Whitman and all metaphor, but to lament Austin's writing persona as “boring,” 296. Unlike Derrida, however, Campbell affirms his commitment to the humanist view of signification, advocating a “conception of acts that includes deliberateness, consciousness, and choice on the part of both speaker and hearer,” 293. With this assessment of speech act theory, Campbell reflects a predominant ideology of rhetorical studies, not only at the time of publication, but long after.
94. Dascal, 322. According to Kenaan, “Derrida is suggesting that communication's standard of ‘success’ is sustained by a paradigmatic disregard for the status of failure,” 119–20. Kenaan reviews Derrida's position, assessing the extent to which the philosophy of language has addressed it. He thoughtfully explains, “The target of Derrida's criticism is not the way philosophy—or philosophy's progressive representative, Austin—handles nonstandard cases of communication, but the metaphysical framework that initially enables philosophy to make use of (or depend on) a substantial distinction between standard and nonstandard, between success and failure, in communication,” 122. Kenaan concludes that “the very logic of success and failure prevents us from encountering fundamental dimensions of the phenomenon of speech that deserve philosophy's attention,” 131.
95. Desilet, 166.
96. Frank, 149.
97. Nigel Mapp, “Spectre and Impurity: History and the Transcendental in Derrida and Adorno,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, eds., Peter Buse and Andrew Scott (London, Great Britain: Macmillan Press, 1999), 108.
98. Halion, 171.
99. Derrida, Limited Inc, 15.
100. Cavell, 49. Frak distinguished between Searle and Derrida by noting that one insists that it is possible to maintain order in a system of linguistic rules governing speech acts, and the other insists that, as any system, language tends toward entropy, or disorder, 145. He remarks, “Derrida makes a quite general attack on the fetish in the humane sciences of forming rules and laws,” 145.
101. Derrida, Limited Inc, 13.
102. Cavell, 47.
103. Cavell, 68.
104. Searle, “Reply,” 204–8.
105. Dascal, 323–24. Dascal provides a taxonomy of critical and philosophical controversies in order to reflect on the ostensible incommensurability of Searle and Derrida.
106. Searle, “Austin,” 412. Notably, subsequent rhetoricians and language philosophers studying Searle's revisions of speech act theory assume a similarly clarifying stance, explicating Searle's folly relative to a perceived original truth of the theory. Establishing the “impossibility of a speech act theory of meaning,” Edward Shirley argues that, “having noted Austin's mistake, Searle must be careful not to fall into the same error […]. Yet he seems to do precisely this.” Edward S. Shirley, “The Impossibility of a Speech Act Theory of Meaning,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975): 115. In his refutation of Shirley, adding yet another layer, Sanders repeatedly criticizes Shirley for his “confusion” and “serious misunderstanding of what Searle was talking about.” Sanders, “In Defense,” 114. Sanders’ rebuttal is presented in the form of a recovery effort, of which the following statement is representative: “When Searle talks about illocutionary force he means the following …” Sanders, “In Defense,” 115, emphasis added. Disciplinary disputes of this sort aim primarily to discover the merit of Searle's interpretation of Austin's work. More to the point, they reflect scholars’ disparate evaluation of Searle's work relative to their perceptions of Austin's original ideas.
107. Fish, 709.
108. Derrida, Limited Inc, 41. Sec is Derrida's reference to the “Signature, Event, Context” essay.
109. Derrida, Limited Inc, 42.
110. Derrida, Memoires, 116. Stanley Raffel's analysis of Searle and Derrida's famously ardent conflict resonates with my project insofar as he investigates the mutual incompatibility of the theorists’ understandings of meaning. Stanley Raffel, “Understanding Each Other: The Case of the Derrida—Searle Debate,” Human Studies 34 (2011): 277–92. Raffel explicates “what the consistent application by Searle of his theory to Derrida's responses has been making him misunderstand about Derrida and what the consistent application by Derrida of his theory to Searle's responses has been making him misunderstand about Searle,” 292. Tracing these misreadings, Raffel demonstrates how the two, as long as they remain within their own models of signification, may never accept the other's critique as valid.
111. Searle, “Austin,” 408.
112. Frank, 126.
113. Cooren, “The Haunting Question,” 46.
114. Culler, 28.
115. Derrida, Limited Inc, 8.
116. Desilet, 153.
117. Derrida, Limited Inc, 7.
118. Biesecker, 117.
119. Farrell, 57.
120. Frank, 156.
121. Fish, 700.
122. Charles W. Kneupper, “A Modern Theory of Invention,” Communication Education 32 (1983): 39.
123. Mark Backman, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, by Richard McKeon (Woodbridge, CT: Oxbow Press, 1987), xxiii.
124. Karl R. Wallace, “Topoi and the Problem of Invention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 387.
125. For a discussion of structured heuristics for teaching invention, see for example Donald Lazare, “Invention, Critical Thinking, and the Analysis of Political Rhetoric,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, eds. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 131–47.
126. Worth noting is that Briankle Chang, challenging fundamentally my project in this essay, critiques the practice of drafting deconstructionist models of communication based on Derrida's deconstruction of communication. Briankle G. Change, “Deconstructing Communication: Derrida and the Impossibility of Communication,” History of European Ideas 9 (1988): 553–68.
127. Nola J. Heidlebaugh, “Invention and Public Dialogue: Lessons from Rhetorical Theories,” Communication Theory 18 (2008): 39–46. Echoing Heidlebaugh's notion of conceptual ambiguity, Geoffrey Bennington demonstrates how Derrida's deconstruction of foundations and the founding of certain institutions may be thought of as a pedagogical strategy: “The University (and more especially, says Derrida, the ‘Humanities’) have a responsibility to foster events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events (events ‘worthy of the name,’ as Derrida often says, being by definition absolutely unpredictable) in a way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is.” Geoffrey Bennington, “Foundations,” Textual Practice 21 (2007): 240–41, emphasis added.
128. Derrida, Limited Inc, 9.
129. They may perceive her voice in the memory of her, indeed be “haunted” by her absent presence, but they cannot turn to a trace or any concrete texts and in it find her intentions, and, moreover, find them controlling that text. As noted earlier, extending this analysis into its relationship with Derrida's theory of death, haunting, and the trace of the other would require more than a single essay.
130. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 86. Ulmer provides an instructive introduction to Derrida's writing project and deconstruction of “the book,” 29, 31, 35.
131. Important works include Barbara A. Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 351–64. Other works by Biesecker cited here also contain her reworking of subjectivity and agency for rhetorical studies. Dilip Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Cheryl Geisler, “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency” Report from the ARS,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 9–17. Geisler introduces some of the central themes of the 2003 meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies regarding agency. Gunn, “Mourning Humanism”; Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 1–23; Joshua Gunn and Dana Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 50–78; Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, “‘Quija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 83–84; Carolyn Miller, “What Can Automation Tell Us about Agency?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2007): 137–57.
132. Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 147.
133. Lundberg and Gunn, 88.