Deliverance

Abstract

This essay proposes thinking about civic wounds as assemblages. It draws on the historical case of antebellum Cincinnati, where the physical contagion of cholera entangled with the social contagion of slavery in ways that articulated across both cultural and physical domains of activity at once. Taking this approach reveals the ways rhetoric’s pharmakon mediates the operations of delivery within assemblages; I further suggest that the intersecting figural movements of catachresis and metonymy account for the granular pharmacological work of a given wound/assemblage’s historical emergence. Along the way we see how both rhetoric and liberal democracy are toxic enterprises wherein goods and bads commingle in fateful ways.