Abstract

In The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory, Ira Allen does much more than give us a theory of rhetoric. He gives us a map of reality, of how we make the world real to ourselves, how we convince one another of its realness, even as what we so deem is constantly changing. This book is a primer on how the fact of radical contingency is not in and of itself fatal to the project of human life and politics. On the contrary, for Allen, it is the source of human life and politics. In his careful and elegant way of thinking Allen shows us how out of the chaos and swirl of all that is, we manage nonetheless to continuously produce a tension between what we claim the world...