The World Has Ended, Long Live Worlds: On New Humanisms (original) (raw)

2022, Rhetoric Society of America Conference

The “end of the World” trope can be crushingly rote in apocalyptic discourses, but its critical deployment is not, and it goes to the heart of rhetoric’s self-concept. My starting point is obvious and well-marked: world is not severable from Man, so the end of the world is about the end of Man. Etymologically, the term “world” derives from Germanic languages and refers to the life of mankind, being a compound term of “man” and “age” with the literal meaning of “age of man.” Unsurprisingly, the “end of the world” invoked by many feminist, post-structural, and posthuman theorists, as well as by Black, decolonial, and science studies scholars is often a comment on the death of Man’s entitlement as the organizing matrix for life on earth. I’ll pull at three threads of “end of the world” troping, all of which revolve around diffracted conceptions of world and, concomitantly, humanity. Then I pose two questions raised by multi-world ontologies for the potential of humanism in rhetoric: First, how do diffracted ‘worlds’ impact rhetoric’s know-ability? Second, can co-extensive being function as an orienting heart of ‘worlds’ without contradicting a logic of diffraction?