Arguing Violence: The Theory and Politics of Truth (original) (raw)

Argumentation and Advocacy

Certainty leads us to attack evil; being less sure we would but resist it. The difference between attack and resistance is the difference between violence and argument, the thread on which our lives dangle.-Alien Wheelis, cited in Brummett, 1976, pp. 39-40. In the wake of September 11, 200 1, and the ensuing global "war on terrorism," we might expect students of public argument to return to the study of American foreign policy rhetoric with the fervor witnessed during the Cold War. As Gordon Mitchell (2002) recently observed, scholars from within and without communication departments have already begun the vital task of exploring security studies and international relations through the lens of argumentation. At the same time, scholars, myself included, drawn to the intellectual questions echoing in the cadence of war drums, would be mistaken to suppose that the only brutalities worth our attention are those so obviously framed by the flames of a terrorist bomb or the flash of a military rifle. In the hope of encouraging rhetorical inquiry relevant to the broad range of human aggression in the contemporary world, this essay considers four recent books concerned with diverse expressions of violence from equally varied theoretical perspectives. The texts reviewed herein address discursive violence in the form of hate speech, literary representations of rape, modem geopolitical violence, and the metaphysical underpinnings of violence as an abstract phenomenon. The decision to examine such eclectic treatments of violence