Department Member, Communication Studies
University of Pittsburgh, Communication
Thesis Title: Being, Rhetorical: Martin Heidegger's "Dialogue on Language" and the Nature of Rhetoricity
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John Poulakos
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About
At what point does thinking about language cease to be thinking about rhetoric? The history of rhetorical theory is not one solely concerned with the production and reception of texts. It is also a meditation upon rhetoricity, that is, the character of being rhetorical. In contemporary rhetorical theory, one finds rhetoricity attributed to an ever-larger class of entities: objects of science and technology, still and moving images (both iconic and everyday) philosophical discourses, spaces real and imaginary, clandestine deliberations and ethical conundrums. What do rhetorics mean for rhetoric, and how do they intersect with language or symbolic thought broadly considered? What does it mean to claim that a matter "is rhetorical?" This project seeks to approach rhetoricity from a hermeneutic, phenomenological perspective, shifting the question away from what is rhetoric/al to how the rhetorical is, particularly how it is in relation to conceptuality and poetics as modes of language. Rhetoricity is not a property of an object or discourse, but rather a mode of appropriation and expression—it is how we find ourselves called to speak and hear.
This dissertation recovers rhetoricity as the originary mode of language that constitutes human Being-in-the-world in the later work of Martin Heidegger, specifically “A Dialogue on Language” (1971, hereafter referred to as “the Dialogue”). For while Heidegger’s discussion of language after the so-called Kehre or “turn” in the 1930s emphasizes the speaking of language over the speaking of people as an expression of Being, the Dialogue engages in a process of concept-formation borne in talk. The Dialogue provides a unique opportunity to distinguish between rhetoricity, conceptuality, and poetics as related modes of language by seeing them at work, in what Heidegger would call the “how of their Being.”
