Teaching Day

Teaching day at Berkeley, the first lecture of summer intensives. We'll be going over the syllabus and preliminary definitions (rhetoric, argument, textuality, and so on), and they'll get a first bite at the apple of the premise of the course: that rhetoric/persuasion is not an "outside" or "alternative" to violence, that testament to violence is rendered possible only through a discursive circumscription that is itself a violence, and that the rhetorical tradition is relevant to the work of nonviolence instead because of the rhetorical preoccupation with the traffic between literal and figurative language, which operates in much the same way as (very possibly because it is one and the same as) navigating among alternate regimes of testimony to violence. Class could get out early today -- that would be nice, it would be good to give them extra time to read for tomorrow already -- but it very well might not after all, even on the first day, since there is an awful lot to cover.