Abstract

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler demonstrates the priority of rhetoric to ethics, noting that any giving of an account already involves the scene of address: a relational dimension of language which supersedes the account itself . You demonstrate in The Telephone Book and elsewhere that you are called into being, that the call precedes you, indicating the priority of rhetoric to a certain pre-Heideggerian ontology. A major concern of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric involves the ways in which “the human” is constructed and/or deconstructed through this predicament of addressivity, particularly when the address comes in from or goes out to a nonhuman other: say, an animal, an ..