Rhetoric is typically considered an art or a techné (of identification and persuasion) that is accomplished by speakers and/or writers to establish order, to pull communities together, and to get things done in the world-even to change the world. This (rhetorical) agency, in other words, is typically presumed to be the function of a willing subject, a subject of representation, who is in charge of his or her "own" speech/writing. However, the "death" of the autarkic, humanist subject did not take all notions of agency down with it; instead, it inspired various post-humanist versions of agency that begin precisely with the subject's limitations, with its finitude and its subjection. This course will examine the possibilities for (rhetorical) agency after humanism.

Psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist (etc.) critiques of the subject expose its subjection to prior structures (linguistic, ontological, heterosexist, socio-economic, unconscious, etc.), which at the very least name the positions from which the subject speaks and writes, its places of articulation. The question very often raised in response to these critiques, however, is whether the undeniable agency granted by these subjecting structures implies a supplement of self-determination. If so, we are again in the arena of the self-ruling subject, even if it is not totally self-ruling. And if not, many have argued, if agency is completely (over)determined by structure, then agency cannot be tied to any notion of social change-certainly not to any sense of revolution or liberation. If the subject is simply the passive dupe of prior structures, the argument goes, then agency is meaningless.

But many post-structuralist critiques reveal that this position is grounded in a false and reductive dichotomy. Judith Butler, for example, takes structural constraints to be the very condition of performativity: agency, she says, can only take place within the reiteration of the reiterable. However, because legal and social structures get their authority only through an echo-chain of their own reinvocation, and because there is a space of slippage between discursive command and its appropriated effect, these structures perpetually reinstitute the possibility for their own failure. The rhetorical agency that effects these structural ruptures, however, has nothing to do with self-determination. Jacques Derrida exposes the reductive nature of this subject/structure dichotomy, as well, when he observes that it does not account for the experience of the undecidable, for that moment of "madness" in which a decision is required precisely because no course of action is predetermined by the contextual structure. No decision, strictly speaking, is possible or necessary without the experience of the undecidable: until one is faced with the undecidable, there is no opportunity to decide, but in the face of it, by definition, one cannot decide. This uncompromising impasse, Derrida observes, shatters the contours of the subject, which means that "I" do not take decisions; rather, the decision takes me-it comes from the "outside," so to speak, leaving us with an instance of agency that is neither the function of a willing subject nor the function of a preceding structure. This agency does not escape structure, since it takes place within structural limitations, but it does end up exceeding structure, and without returning to pre-structuralist notions of subjectivity.

In this course, we will focus our attention on these and other such post-humanist notions of (rhetorical) agency in an attempt to re-think what we might call the "task" of rhetoric itself after humanism.