Reviews for Contemporary Essays on Greek Ideas: The Kilgore Festschrift

The average rating for Contemporary Essays on Greek Ideas: The Kilgore Festschrift based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-24 00:00:00 Aasss Assssa Vitanza's book is a highly performative, historiographic critique of histories of rhetoric that are premised on negation--histories, in other words, that practice negative essentializing as a way of classifying and excluding subjects, groups, and methodologies from "The History of Rhetoric" (338). Edward Schiappa's erasure of "the sophists" from the history of rhetoric is a key example to which Vitanza points (37). Drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and especially Nietzsche, Vitanza attempts not to provide his own counter-history of rhetoric, but to practice a form of "nonpositive affirmation" that constitutes a perpetual interruption within the history of rhetoric (275). Vitanza seeks to foster radical dissensus, concerned that attempts to write histories of rhetoric premised on consensus and reterritorialization become imperialistic, exclusionary, and at worst genocidal. He especially associates such totalizing consensus with Isocrates and Nazism via Heidegger. He also sympathetically challenges feminists whose views of gender and/or sex are based on negative essentializing, positing a "Third Sophistic" premised on excess, desire, and a "system of one, two, and 'some more'" (236). (His "Third Sophistic" draws on Helene Cixous and is a challenge to Susan Jarratt's "Feminist Sophistic.") This Third Sophistic is not the end of a counting to three, but a single gesture toward an interminable "some more" that holds open the question of Being within the context of the history of rhetoric. To put it one more way, Vitanza seeks a sophistic way of saying 'Yes to everything! except reactionary thinking and acting" (232)--a "libidinalized Marxism" (317) that, among "some more"/other things, allows him to forward a post-Gorgian defense of Helen as a "non-human subject" (237).

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-15 00:00:00 James Laster Cratylus is one of Plato's early-middle dialogues. It is somewhat puzzling for the modern reader, since much of the dialogue is taken up with fanciful folk etymologies of Greek words. Socrates is investigating whether the names of the Gods, heroes, citizens, or natural elements are meaningful, and in the process spins off etymology after etymology, each one more implausible than the next. The intention seems to be mockery; just as Plato earlier reveals the faulty logic of the sophists, so he exposes the emptiness of grammarians. I wish I could say that the satire has lost its bite with the passage of time; but, alas, folk etymologies remain common, and I have heard argument-from-word-origin too many times for comfort. Still, the dialogue can be fairly dull if you do not know ancient Greek. But the beginning and the end retain philosophic interest. Socrates investigates the connection between words and things. Cratylus holds that names are essential and elemental, even god-given, while Hermogenes first maintains that the signifier is arbitrary. Socrates effectively confuses both parties, until nobody is quite sure what they think. Along the way, several theories are entertained that now seem hopelessly naive, such that legislators gave original, onomatopoeic names long ago. Nevertheless, given the time in which it was written, this dialogue shows a remarkable prescience in its view of language and Plato's willingness to consider multiple factors. One wonders, then, to what extent Plato himself took it seriously'where the satire begins and ends'since questions of language are absent from his mature system. By chance, I have just heard a recent version of the onomatopoeic theory of names (that the sounds of names imitate what they signify), put forward by Daniel Tammet (famous for his mental math and memory abilities) in a TED talk. Tammet suggests that names have emotional tones in their sound that even non-native speakers can grasp. He uses the Icelandic word "hnugginn" as an example, which apparently means "sad." According to Tammet, respondents with no knowledge of Icelandic are more likely to associate this word with negative emotions when given a choice. This certainly wasn't true in my case, since the word reminded me immediately of "hugging." I think Tammet would profit from this dialogue.