Energy: Rhetoric’s Vitality

Abstract

From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning the vitality of speech, and the related enargeia referring to vivid description. Recent interest in affect, the Anthropocene, new materialism, and the more-than-human has only made “energy” more salient, yet more promiscuously evoked than ever. Notwithstanding the concept’s centrality to some major works of contemporary scholarship, the importance of energy to rhetoric has remained widely underexplored. This essay traces some of the quiet history that energy has played in the rhetorical tradition and charts some points of its ongoing importance.

Keywords:

• affect
• Anthropocene
• energy
• more-than-human
• new materialism

Notes

¹ See Ahmed, Terada (13), Whitehead (153).

² For more on affectability, see Davis (Inessential Solidarity 2), Rickert (159).

³ For more on energy as resource, see Cozen.

⁴ In the second edition of his translation of Aristotle, among the few changes Kennedy made to his introduction, one was a revision of what he had earlier written about rhetoric’s energy (2007, 7). And compare that with his slightly different definition in Comparative Rhetoric (14). I leave these curious changes as breadcrumbs for the hermeneutic detectives to investigate.