This article keeps beating me up–every time I think I know what I am doing, it runs away. I believe I am finally whipping it in to shape, but I want to make sure the following paragraphs make sense to someone else beside me. Here’s what I think my thesis is…
Bruno Latour, Gorgias of Leontini, Emmanuel Levinas. At first glance, such a union might seem antithetical. Casting aside Platonic misrepresentations of Gorgias as a swindler and a cheat, how can Levinas’ Humanism, so intense that it fails to recognize animals as having ethical status, be reconciled with Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which refuses to distinguish any hierarchical ontological distinction between a human being and a laboratory beaker? Without dismissing these differences, I reconcile Latour’s challenge to Humanism’s traditional anthropocentrism with Levinas’s humanism of the Other person by highlighting how each shares a strong aversion to the isolated and autonomous Cartesian self operating at the core of much Western philosophy and rhetoric, an aversion shared by Bruce McComiskey and Scott Consigny’s versions of Gorgian sophistry.
The essay first reviews Latour’s challenge to the late 20th century critical tradition, calling instead for a renewed invest in political practice that he terms “concern.” Working in response to Graham Harman’s disavowal of any connection between Latourian politics and ancient sophistry, I will highlight how Latour’s turn toward “concern” shares both metaphysical and practical overlays with Gorgian sophistry (if, unlike Harman, we attend to recent studies of Gorgian sophistry and do not rely on the tired, cliché, and impoverished image of Gorgias offered to us by Plato). Gorgian sophistry offers an ethical defense for agonistic encounter. Finally, I turn to Levinas’ opposing obligations of responsibility (infinite hospitality to the other) and justice (inevitable violence stemming from the infinite obligation to both the other and the neighbor) to construct an ethical disposition requisite for the concerned political-sophistic-agonistic practice advocated by Latour and Gorgias.
