COMM 6310: Advanced seminar in rhetorical criticism
Spring 2010
Instructor:
Gerard A. Hauser
HLMS 86
303.492.6756
hauserg@colorado.edu
Course description
Communication 6310: Seminar in Rhetorics of Conscience
In response to Nazi atrocities, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in hopes that violations human dignity would never again occur.
Subsequent history has not redeemed these hopes. Authoritarian and totalitarian
regimes have treated those who do not conform to their dictates with repression,
imprisonment, torture, and sometimes death. Georgio Agamben has claimed that
this condition is symptomatic of a state of exception in which the sovereign can act
outside the law to reduce those who oppose to the condition of homo sacer, the bare
life of biological existence (zoe) that lacks identity as a political being (bios). Against
the utter hopelessness of Agamben’s vision of contemporary biopoliotics, resistance
is not only possible, but at times prevails. Central to these moments of resistance are
the rhetorical performances of political prisoners, both through parrhesia (telling
the truth) and the hidden transcripts of hush harbors. Parrhesia is always a
performance of morality and responsibility, a refusal to accept threats to beliefs,
causes, principles, and freedoms. Hidden transcripts are always a vernacular
rhetoric of subversion. Contra the view of Foucault, parrhesia’s challenges to the
state of exception, also is an intensely rhetorical projection of a polity that not only
challenges the status quo but also issues a call to conscience to fellow citizens and
the world. These discourses speak not only to the specific circumstances of their
place and time but to larger issues of the relationship between rhetoric and the
constitution of identity, social movements, public memory, and human rights, and of
the possibilities of and for a counterpublic sphere. In this seminar we will consider
these calls to conscience a form of moral vernacular rhetoric—a rhetoric of the people
rather than the official forum. Issues will include the rhetoric of parhessia (frank speech),
biopolitics, and performances of resistance (including embodied performance),
sovereignty, agency, identity, and human rights.
TENTATIVE READING LIST
Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech
Mohanda Ghandi, ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings
Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth
Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
Adam Michnik, Selected letters from prison
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
Irina Ratushinskaya, Grey is the Color of Hope
Bobby Sands, Writings from Prison and selected press accounts
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
Testimonies of prisoners on Robben Island, South Africa
Jacobo Timmerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number
Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme
Selected articles, essays, films, letters, and speeches
2