Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism
- 1 Isocrates' philosophia and contemporary pragmatism
- 2 The degradation of rhetoric; or, dressing like a gentleman, speaking like a scholar
- 3 Antilogies, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric
- 4 The “genealogies” of pragmatism
- 5 Philosophy in the “new” rhetoric, rhetoric in the “new” philosophy
- 6 Individual feeling and universal validity
- 7 Pragmatism, rhetoric, and The American Scene
- 8 The political consequences of pragmatism; or, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution
- 9 In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism
- Selected bibliographies
- Index
4 - The “genealogies” of pragmatism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism
- 1 Isocrates' philosophia and contemporary pragmatism
- 2 The degradation of rhetoric; or, dressing like a gentleman, speaking like a scholar
- 3 Antilogies, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric
- 4 The “genealogies” of pragmatism
- 5 Philosophy in the “new” rhetoric, rhetoric in the “new” philosophy
- 6 Individual feeling and universal validity
- 7 Pragmatism, rhetoric, and The American Scene
- 8 The political consequences of pragmatism; or, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution
- 9 In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism
- Selected bibliographies
- Index
Summary
This is the way one should understand the Lacanian thesis according to which Good is only the mask of radical, absolute Evil, the mask of “indecent obsessions” by das Ding, the atrocious, obscene Thing. Behind Good, there is a radical Evil: Good is “another name for an Evil” that does not have a particular, “pathological” status. Insofar as it obsesses us in an indecent way, insofar as it functions as a traumatic, strange body that disturbs the ordinary course of things, das Ding makes it possible for us to untie ourselves, to free ourselves from our “pathological” attachment to particularly worldly objects. The “Good” is only a way of maintaining a distance toward this evil Thing, a distance that makes it bearable.
Slavoj Zizek, Looking AwryWhat I would like to ask in this essay is whether what we today call “neopragmatism” cannot be seen less as an extension of high American pragmatism than a contemporary idealogy that evades the very materiality (of language, of the sign) that it has implied from the start (at least, that is, since Emerson and Peirce, if not Protagoras). Or differently put: whether the role that neopragmatism has played in contemporary critical politics, and more particularly that of the late eighties in a general turn from “theory” into historicism, cultural studies and the politics of identity, has not involved an ideological blind.
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- Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism , pp. 94 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995