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Megan Foley
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Peri Ti?: Rhetorical Generation Beyond the Genitive Case
You, who call yourself a rhetorician, what is your art? With what particular thing
is your skill concerned? Weaving is concerned with fabricating fabrics, music with
making melodies; rhetorician, with what is your know-how concerned? This is the
question that Socrates poses to Gorgias in Plato‟s notorious refutation of rhetoric. “Peri
tēs rhētorikēs, peri ti tōn ontōn estin epistēmē?”i Gorgias—or, to be fair, Plato‟s
ventriloquized version of Gorgias—answers that rhetoric is concerned with speech: “Peri
logous.”ii
Socrates‟ question and Gorgias‟ response both frame rhetoric in the genitive
case—which, in this case, specifies the source or origin of one thing from another. To ask
of rhetoric “peri ti tōn ontōn?” is to ask from whence rhetoric comes, from where rhetoric
originates, from what rhetoric is generated. So Socrates‟ question—“peri ti tōn
ontōn?”—asks about the becoming of rhetoric, about rhetoric‟s becoming. And Gorgias‟
answer—“peri logous”—supplies a genitive source of that becoming: rhetoric is about, is
composed of, and comes from speech.
But, Socrates responds, the same is true of many other technae: medicine,
gymnastics, arithmetic, and geometry, for example. These, too, are concerned with
speech: speech about bodily condition or speech about numbers. Pressed, Gorgias
clarifies that rhetoric is the power to speak and also to persuade: “tō dunamenō legein kai
peithein.”iii But, Socrates still asks, to speak and to persuade about what? He presses on,
parroting, “Peri ti? Peri ti?”iv What is rhetoric about? “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” What is
rhetoric‟s ontic domain? To what category of existing things does it belong? From what
category of existing things does it emerge?
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While Plato‟s Gorgias plays along with this ontogenetic question, Aristotle‟s
response to the Gorgias in the opening book of his Rhetoric questions the question itself.
Plato‟s repeated question—“Peri ti, peri ti?”—contains a categorical error. Or, to be
more precise, Plato‟s error is categorization itself. Plato‟s question, Aristotle suggests,
mistakenly attempts to contain rhetoric within a particular genus. Instead, Aristotle
argues that rhetoric is “ou peri ti genos idion.”v It is not concerned with any particular
genus; it is not proper to any genus; it has no genus of its own.
This, Aristotle explains, differentiates rhetoric from all those other technae like
medicine, geometry, and arithmetic. Each of them are indeed able to persuade about their
own particular area of study: “peri to autē hypokeimenon.”vi These techae are about what
they lie underneath: hypo-, below; -keimenon, positioned. They come from and are
subordinate to a specific genus, category, or class of things: arithmetic peri numbers, or
medicine peri health. While these other arts are “to hypokeimenon”—set underneath their
specific domains, as a species to a genus—rhetoric is instead “tōn prokeimenōn”—set
before, set forward, set forth.vii
Aristotle‟s genius is his resistance to the genus of the genitive case. Recognizing
that rhetoric is ou peri ti genos idion, without any genus of its own, Aristotle sidesteps
Plato‟s trick question, “peri ti tōn ontōn?” He refuses the genitive ruse of basing
rhetoric‟s becoming in “qualified genesis,” the genesis of one thing out of another [ek
tinos kai ti].viii Rather than emerging out of some genus of ontically existing things [ek
tinos], rhetoric comes-to-be ek mē ontos, from that which has no ontic status.ix The mode
of becoming that Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric corresponds to what he elsewhere
calls aplē genesis, or “unqualified becoming.”x
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This mode of becoming is unqualified in two senses. First, it is unqualified in the
sense that it is without qualification. It is not limited by or delimited to any specific
category with any specific characteristics. Unqualified becoming is thoroughgoing and
absolute, not partial or particular.xi Rhetoric, as unqualified becoming, does not come to
be from anything in particular; rather, it comes to be from nothing in particular. Although
it is common to read Aristotle‟s famous definition of rhetoric as a statement of rhetoric‟s
particularity—“an ability in each case [peri hekaston] to see the available means of
persuasion”—peri hekaston may instead be read as an assertion of rhetoric‟s indefinite
genitive source.xii Peri hekaston translates not merely as “in each,” but moreover as
“about each and every.” In this definitive indefinite definition, rhetoric does not just
come out of a given case, but can emerge from any given case whatsoever. Rhetoric, as
peri hekaston, is not particular but imparticular.
But here appears the second sense in which rhetoric‟s mode of becoming seems
unqualified: arising out of nothing in particular, it may seem to come from nothing at all.
This unqualified mode of becoming is not a transformation of one thing into another; it is
a transubstantiation from the immaterial to the material.xiii It is more than an alteration of
qualities; it is a conversion of substance.xiv This haplē genesis is absolute genesis in the
sense that it is not a mere change from something else, it is the radical appearance of
something new. It does not follow from a previous generation; it is generation itself—
generation without a genitive source. This seemingly ex nihilo emergence appears
„unqualified‟ in the sense that it does not meet prerequisite conditions; after all, ex nihilo
becoming is thoroughly unconditioned.
But Aristotle explains that this unqualified becoming does not simply come out of
nowhere. Rather, it emerges from “dunamei on entelecheia mē on,” from that which
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exists [on] potentially [dunamei] but not actually [entelechia].xv Against Plato‟s attempt
to show that rhetoric lacks a definition because it does not belong to any domain of
ontically existing things, Aristotle defines rhetoric‟s domain as precisely that which has
no ontic existence, but nevertheless has the potential to appear. And rhetoric‟s radical
emergence through aplē genesis is an appearance in the most literal sense.
Rhetoric‟s potentiality is a “dunamis … tou theoresai,” a capacity for genesis
through seeing.xvi So for Aristotle, rhetoric‟s potentiality is a sensory potentiality, and
aplē genesis is an aesthetic mode of materialization. This genesis “out of non-existence”
[ek mē ontos] is a potentiality‟s passage out of the imperceptible or anaesthetic [ek
anaisthētou].xvii More than just seeing what is given, rhetorical potentiation envisions the
virtual. Here, rhetoric becomes ontoaesthetic catachresis, the sensorial realization of an
as-yet-unrealized potentiality.
Into the “tō dunamenō legein kai peithein” definition of rhetoric in the Gorgias,
Aristotle inserts an (an)aesthetic criterion: “dunasthai theōrein to pithanon.”xviii So rather
than specifying speech or persuasion as the object domain of rhetoric, Aristotle identifies
the persuasive, or the plausible, as that which has no objective existence, but must instead
be aesthetically materialized. Against Plato‟s genitive question—“Peri ti?” What is your
art about?—Aristotle refuses to objectify rhetoric‟s becoming with that insidious little
pronoun “ti.” Rhetoric, he counters, comes not from a “ti,” not a thing or a what, but
rather a maybe, an indefinite domain that is less than something yet more than nothing.xix
Instead of being generated from a genus, rhetoric generates the appearance of the
immaterial out of the underdetermined, not-yet-actualized space of an aesthestic dunamis,
an (im)perceptible potentiality that may be or not be.xx
Megan Foley
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Notes
i
Plat. Gorg. 449d.
Plat. Gorg. 449d.
iii
Plat. Gorg. 452e.
iv
Plat. Gorg. 451b-d.
v
Aristot. Rh. 1.2.1.
vi
Aristot. Rh. 1.2.1.
vii
Aristot. Rh. 1.1.14.
viii
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.1.
ix
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.1; Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.25.
x
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.20. Readers of Gilles Deleuze may be interested to know that
aplōs translates literally as “unfolded.”
xi
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.25.
xii
Aristot. Rh. 1.2.1.
xiii
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.25.
xiv
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.25.
xv
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.15.
xvi
Aristot. Rh. 1.2.1.
xvii
Aristot. Gen. Phth. 1.3.25.
xviii
Aristot. Rh. 1.2.1.
xix
Aristot. Met. 1046a31.
xx
Aristot. Met. 1047a24-26.
ii