Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity

by Nancy S. Struever

Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.

 

Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.

Genres: Theory

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Struever's book (an extended essay) is steeped in the history of rhetoric, in philosophy, in historical and contemporary debates between rhetoric and philosophy. I was reading it primarily for her arguments about the inventive/rhetorical possibilities of Walter Benjamin's critical, pessimistic ways of thinking and writing. Those arguments are brief, though--Struever spends the most time with Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico, positioning Benjamin as a modern manifestation of those thinkers' own pessimism. In short, she argues that Hobbes and Vico are attuned to the numerous ways in which communication and rhetoric fail and fall apart--a pessimistic view that leads them to trace out a range of rhetorical tactics and possibilities, and that moves differently than the necessity-oriented logic of more analytic or formal philosophers.

Because she draws on so many specialized sources with which I'm not familiar, and often cites them without taking much time to provide context (which is definitely her prerogative), I found myself having to take Struever's word on a lot of things. I can't speak to the defensibility of many of her claims, but I can say they opened up a lot of interesting avenues of thought. There are also some wonderful aphoristic lines throughout.