Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric [Paperback]

Vitanza's book then asks its readers to receive this gift without reserve--that is, to read by way of a general, not restricted economy. If we receive thus we will have accepted his challenge to reconsider desire and to revisit our (erotic) relation to others in/through language. Vitanza's gift to us is wrapped in the immediate challenge to overcome the History of Rhetoric as it has been canonized via the Negative; but of course, as we continue to unwrap the text, we are also offered the gift, the challenge to overcome our own subjectivity--a subjectivity based on bad faith and ressentiment, subject to k(no)w. And if we accept this challenge, we will find ourselves attending to the kai(e)rotic moment wherein desire desires desire, not its fulfillment, and where it luxuriously, unreproductively, uselessly spasms via "rherotics" (24): subjectivities without reserve, language without reserve, histories without reserve.

Georges Bataille argued that during the twentieth century, the intimacy between self and other had become merely a relation of self and things, demanding returns and profits; likewise, today, at the end of the twentieth century, we could argue that the relation between self and other has become merely a relation of self and information. The question of/for desire within this economy is always: "What is the pay off?"--Answers, of course, which risk nothing, but merely keep exchanges within the restricted economy of supply and demand. In contradistinction to this economy, Vitanza asks us to desire dangerously, without reserve, without return, as a sovereign. The figure of the Vitanzian Sovereign requires that one sacrifice both the self and the other. This risk appears to the subject as irresponsible, apolitical, and apathetic. But it is a risk that must be made, if we are to overcome the negative and its death-grip on all we know of sociality, community, and the other. We are subjects, subject to the Negative. But the sovereign contrariwise is a figure of (non-positive) affirmation.

As we come to risk ourselves and the other, we will have become sovereign and will be able to accept the book for what it "is" a sovereign lover's gift: a sacrifice which expects no return, which is by its very definition useless splendor--and hence divine--as in "impossible, yet there it is" (Bataille, Erotism 206)--as in the schizophrenic's excessive table (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 6). Of this gift--the one given without reserve--Barthes's writes: "The gift is not necessarily excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation as waste: the gift I receive is more than I know what to do with, it does not fit my space, . . . it is too much: `What am I going to do with your present!'" (76). Indeed, what are we to do with Vitanza's gift? Nothing! and everything. We will ask, not what does it mean, what desire can it fulfill, what use can it serve, but we will ask: how to give?

Whether Vitanza's "book" can really be called a book is an interesting question. Its very structure disrupts and challenges the sense of authority and closure that is typically expected from the book as a medium. Vitanza's performative prose enacts language in a way that exposes the hypertextual playfulness beneath the discursive imperative. That is, it both addresses and *performs* a linguistic overflow that "civilized" discourse cannot finally expel or absorb. So, while certainly progressing forward, it also proceeds to "steal and fly"--as one of his most important influences (Hélène Cixous) might put it--to steal and fly seemingly *everywhere*, in all directions at once. Through his light manipulation of typography--his unusual and/or illegal diacritical marks--and his joyful skewing of grammatical/mechanical injunctions, Vitanza manages to write a "book" that is no book, that in fact acts as a showcase for language's perpetual mis/behavior--indeed, this "book" exposes and affirms the "authority" not of the author but of the language that takes the author hostage.

The bottom line: _Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric_ is a linguistic tour de force, a must read that will leave no reader unmoved.