Rhetoric, violence, and the subject of civility

ABSTRACT While critical scholars often focus on the ontological boundaries of rhetoric and violence, this article analyzes the rhetoric/violence relationship from the perspective of cultural governance. It builds upon earlier work in rhetoric and civility to analyze how authorities and institutions cultivate deliberative rhetorical norms as a means of regulating citizens’ political conduct. The rhetoric/violence opposition is used as a police logic to suppress radical political action. This police logic is used to suppress physical violence and to expand violence’s conceptual domain. As a result, certain subjects are marked as violent and are, therefore, singled out for suppression and criminalization.