Editorial [PDF]
Christine Caruana, Aaron Aquilina: University of Malta, Lancaster University
Introduction to Deadly Delusions #5 [PDF]
Barry Mauer: University of Central Florida
Barry Mauer began the comic series Deadly Delusions in 2013 in response to the increasingly extreme and dangerous right-wing propaganda he had observed over the past several decades. His aim for the project has been to combine scholarship, maximal rhetorical force, and a punk do-it-yourself aesthetic. Deadly Delusions shifts away from debates about whether the media is biased or if it is fair to both sides. Rather, it asks whether the media is spreading mass delusion and pushing eliminationist policies.
Deadly Delusions #5 [PDF]
Barry Mauer: University of Central Florida
Oral Rhetoric and Digital Media: The Twitter Campaign of the 2016 Presidential Election [PDF]
Ben Mifsud Joslin: University of Malta
The idea that social and other online media are key platforms for political rhetoric is hardly novel at this point. Few will deny the influence that Twitter had on the 2016 American Presidential Election as a means of engaging and communication with a wider audience. This article questions what it means to be successful practitioner of online rhetoric, ultimately arguing that persuading a digital audience heavily involves knowing how to evoke their humanity in ways that been consistent since classical observations of rhetoric as an art and practice. Therefore, this essay explores the audio-visual qualities of Twitter which allowed Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders to use Twitter as a means of projecting an authentic human persona, particularly by emulating an oral mode of delivery through written social media posts. Simply put, their audiences should have been able to “hear” them through online posts, despite the fact that the primary means of engagement of Twitter is text. Ultimately, this paper argues that this sense of oral delivery is essential to our understanding of the 2016 election, as well as our conceptions of contemporary rhetoric. Twitter, as a digital space, has created a platform where we can conceptualise digital orators.
Towards an Agonistic Account of Democracy, Conflict, and Institutions [PDF]
Usdin Martínez: Northwestern University
In this article, I offer a move back from a trend in political theory that posits strong divergence—even a contradiction—between two meanings of democracy. On the one hand, a liberal account of democracy conceives it as the set of institutions that shape a political regime and allow government; on the other, a radical tradition identifies democracy with a critical principle for transforming social order. By discussing these trends through the opposition between institution and conflict, I make the case for an agonistic approach of democratic institutions and conflict that relocates democracy both beyond liberalism and the radical tradition. I will do so by critically examining the works of Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour, principally, where a Machiavellian ontology of social conflict inhibits this agonistic approach. I then draw on the analysis of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière in order to argue for a political theory of democracy that accounts for this link.
Thinking the Moment of the Originary: Memory and the Paradoxes of Re-turning [PDF]
Subro Saha: Utrecht University
Focusing on the paradoxes of thinking the originary, this essay attempts to explore the contingencies and ambivalences shaping the modalities of memory and turning. Examining the role time and presence play in enabling the thinking of turning, the conceptual specificities constituting time in terms of linearity are here opened up in terms of the contingent relationalities (un)tying time, memory, and presence. On this ground this essay turns towards Bergson and Heidegger’s views on time and explores the problematic turns characterising such views. Reflecting on how the thinking of turning in terms of linear, homogenous time enables the signification of originary, and foregrounding the (im)possibility of turning towards the originary, this essay gestures towards acknowledging the continuous negotiations and movements of simultaneity that constitute any attempt at turning. Here are no messianic claims to alterity, or to radically rethink time and the originary, but rather a questioning of the paradoxes of any such attempts, with the cautionary awareness, however, that any such attempt remains operative always as one of many partial, ambivalent, and contingent turns.
