The subject of ethos at the ends of rhetoric

This project unmoors the rhetorical concept of ethos , or character, from its foundational trappings in classical rhetoric in order to investigate what new ontological effects it might achieve. Ethos has signified two traditional yet radically opposite conceptions of the self one, that it preexists language; two, that this self is an effect of language, constructed in and by it. Both meanings, however, when deployed in the service of modern rhetoric, still retain traces of the Cartesian self---unitary, transcendental, rational, and above all, knowing. This project refigures ethos through antifoundational philosophy and actualizes new connections between the conditions of subjectivity, identity as an effect of language, and most importantly, between the questions of ethics and the relational, not essential, subject---to see ethos as active practice, a composing of subjectivity with varying degrees of intensity. To this end, this project will look at the various types of ethos as theorized and performed by central movements from the landscape of poststructural epistemologies which I'll argue began with Nietzsche, specifically deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism. An extended study of ethos is critical to our discipline(s) today because it opens up a space in which we can observe language's effects on material bodies and the unstable subjects that experience them. The yielding of ownership over what one writes and the impossibility of designating the self in terms fully recognizable as the self has multiple implications for the sense of shared community. In the unstable and ambivalent terrain of discourse, the self is always in some way speaking in and through the language of a stranger. Therefore, this project is situated in an interdisciplinary matrix, where the concerns of rhetorical and critical theory merge in their consideration of the complex relationship between the subject of discourse and its implication for ethics.