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ABSTRACT
The “end of the world” trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric’s relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast “world” as “worlds” to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric’s investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis)continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric’s troubled place.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Fabian; Heidegger; Massey; Derrida, Beast; Nancy, Fragile; Nancy and Barrau; Quijano; da Silva, Global.
2 “World” operates for many as an experiential envelope of different beings (Agamben 39–47, Derrida, Beast 8–12).
3 For example, Mignolo, “On Decoloniality”; Towns, “What”; Wynter, “Ceremony Must” and “Unsettling.”
4 18–19. Also see Lugones.
5 See Anzaldúa 1–23; Chandler; Coulthard 31–42; Fanon; Glissant Relation, 11–22; Lethabo King; da Silva “Invisible/Obliterating”; Simpson 10–34; Yusoff 16–19; Weheliye; Wynter “Unsettling,” 263–303. Also see Na’Puti; Towns, “Fanonian.”
6 Also see Alarcón 29, 34; la paperson, 21–42; Mignolo; Tuck and Yang; Wilderson 12–16.
7 For example, see Coulthard 152; Lugones; Tuck and Yang 12–13; Walsh 17, 22.
8 Approaches vary widely: for example, decolonial feminist (Alarcón 38–39; Lugones; Walsh 19), Black feminist (da Silva, “Feminist”), deconstructive (Derrida, Beast; Nancy and Barrau), variations on process philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari; Glissant Relation; Whitehead, Process), or quantum thought (Barad Meeting; Haraway, “Promises”; Wright).
9 Global. “The humanization of the flesh is the racialization of the flesh” (Harney and Moten All 15; also see Wehiliye).
10 Allen might say this concern is about freedom as a study of ethical constraints, but I believe a broader concern over power not reducible to freedom is also at play.
11 Derrida, Specters 54–55, 59–65. Da Silva refers to Gordon for her conception of ghosts.
12 See, Foucault 303–42; da Silva, Global; Weheliye; Mignolo and Walsh 153–75.
13 Harney and Moten, All 14–15. See also Clark et al., Luciano and Chen, Lechuga, Na’Puti, and Wynter “Unsettling.”
14 Unpayable 63. Also see Barrau, What’s 60–65.
15 Debt. This racial differentiation resembles Wynter’s genealogy of the human (“Unsettling”), but da Silva emphasizes raciality as an analytic of being.
16 Unlike Heidegger saying animals are “poor in world” (see Agamben 49–56; Derrida Beast), da Silva argues “affectable others” (Global loc. 415, 1985) follow an analytic of raciality, suggesting animality extends raciality (also see Jackson).
17 This differs from seeing the human as various rhetorical projects (e.g., see Goodale; Rowland). I suggest a blurry, undefinable capacity for rhetoric haunts the premise of humanness as a rhetorical project.
18 Nietzsche, Ecce 8–17 and 429–36 in Kaufmann. See Deleuze, Nietzsche 12–38; Derrida, Ear 3–19.
19 Boyle, loc. 689. Canguilhem described heteropoetics: “adjusted to the outside, and it takes from the outside its means, or the means to its means” (9).
20 Gordon writes, “ghosts are characteristically attached to the events, things, and places that produced them in the first place; by nature they are haunting reminders of lingering trouble” (loc. 243).
21 Concept 61–63. Also see Deleuze, Difference 345–59.
22 Stormer, 39. The present is an “event” in Whitehead’s terms, a “nexus of actual occasions” (Process loc. 2124) that “steals away as it gives” (Nancy, Fragile 2).
23 Cram, 202; Harney and Moten All, 131–36; Moten Universal, loc. 2662 and all of 1508–3068.
24 Relation 7, 8. This knowledge is endemic to diasporic experience and not, as Barrau argues, yet to come: “The language of the ‘all together,’ of the non-world, or of what happens after the leap has not yet been invented” (86).
25 Introduction 117. Glissant’s errantry resonates with Derrida’s destinerrance (see Miller; Nancy, What’s 56–57). One who is errant would find their striving inevitably governed by destinerrance. Glissant also reminds one of Nietzsche’s amor fati, but his view of enjoyment and suffering in Relation is quite different (Relation 19–20; see Deleuze, Nietzsche 25–38).