Dr. Katherine HeenanEnglish 472Spring 2007March 27, 2007Biesecker, Barbara. "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différance."Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110-30.Introduction- Two grounds for the consideration (110) The understanding of the rhetorical text as a discourse...commits us to a naive notion of influence and blinds us to the discourse's radically historical character.- The construal of the rhetorical situation as an event mode possible by way an exchange between consummate individuals, severely limits what we can say about discourse which seeks to persuade.Bizer's "rhetorical situation" forces theorists and critics to appeal to a logic that transcends the rhetorical situation itself in order to explain the prior constitution of the subjects participating or implicated in the event (111)Examination of "rhetorical situation" through "différance" - A re-examination of symbolic action (the text) and the subject (audience)...enables us to rethink the rhetorical situation as articulation. (111)- Derrida's "deconstruction" the way in which the language of any given text signifies the complicated attempt to form a unity out of a division. (112)- Signifiers not only the play of the tropological figures operating on its surface level, but also the (non)originary finessing of a division that produces the meaning of the text as such (112).- Rhetorical dimension names; the means by which an idea or argument is expressed- the initial formative intervention that...makes possible the production of meaning" (112).Rhetorical audience: the effect of différance (112).- Rethinking rhetorical situation: as governed by a logic of articulation rather than influence (112).- Hierarchy between situation and speaker By upsetting the hierarchy and producing an exchange of properties between situation and speaker" (115)- "Différance"; is what makes the movement of signification possible (117)Biesecker- is the nonful, nonsimple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences (Derrida 117).- is the formation of form (117).- permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order...or between two orders of expression (Derrida 117).- permits the articulation of speech and writing (Derrida 117)- is the name for "the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience"(Spivak 118).- is the structural condition which makes it possible for us to perform any act" (Derrida 118)."Deconstruction"—- allows us to take seriously the rhetoricity of discursive practices (120).- begins by considering the way in which all texts are inhibited by an internally divided non-originary "origin" called différance (120).- Différrance underwrites all discursive practices and thus exposes all beginning points, allprimordial axioms and all founding principles as constructions - impositions, traces of a will to knowledge (120).- This textual knot or inadvertent "sleight of hand"...enables us to locate the unwriting and interested gesture that finessed différance in such a way that the writing could proceed.- In every case the rhetoric of the text marks the intervention of difference onto the scene of writing (121).Subject- Derrida takes seriously the possibility that the subject...is constituted by difference. (124).- Subjectivity...is an effect of différance, an effect inscribed in a system of différance (Derrida 124).- Think the subject...as a production or effect-structure of différance (125).- The subject is a historical construct (125).- The subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral (125).- The subject designates a noncoincidence, "a complex and differential product" continuously open to change (125).2Biesecker- The deconstruction of the subject opens up possibilities for the field of Rhetoric by enabling us to read the rhetorical situation as an event structured...by a logic of articulation (126).- The rhetorical event may be seen as an incident that produces and reproduces the identities of subjects and constructs and reconstructs linkages between them (126).- "Rhetorical situation" as an event that makes possible the production of identities and social relations(126).Conclusion - Différance obliges us to read rhetorical discourse as processes entailing the discursive production of audiences, and enables us to decipher rhetorical events as sites that makevisible the historically articulated emergence of the category 'audience' (126).- The gift of deconstruction is that it obliges us to resist universalizing gestures, enabling us to open up a space wherein it becomes possible for us to discern the considerable heterogeneity of the social sphere and the formidable role that rhetoric plays in articulating the heterogeneity(126).Derridean deconstruction help rhetorical critics analyze texts- promotes a rigorous reevaluation and rebuilding of the concept-metaphor "rhetorical situation"(127).- it is possible to open up the field of rhetoric by deconstruction...as a brcoleur's or tinkler' that produces...the exorbitant possibilities of