Philippe-Joseph Salazar is a French rhetorician and philosopher born 1955, Casablanca, Morocco. Educated at Lycée Louis-le-Grand (founded 1563) in Paris. Alumnus of École Normale Supérieure, Paris and past director at Collège international de philosophie, Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida. Currently Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Humane Letters at the University of Cape Town.[1] Has a regular column on French public intellectual online magazine "Les Influences".[1]. He edits a series on Powers of Persuasion at prestigious Klincksieck, the oldest publishing house in the social sciences in France. Director of AfricaRhetoric Publishing [2]. Recipient of Africa's premier research award 2008 Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award.
Contents |
As an undergraduate Salazar was tutored by Louis Althusser and while a first year student he was a member of exclusive club Conférence Olivaint (where future leaders, in the Catholic and liberal tradition, are trained for public oratory) and did a voluntary internship at the cultural affairs section of Paris City Hall.
He undertook graduate work with Emmanuel Levinas (on metaphor and ontology), Roland Barthes (semiotics of voice) and Maurice Duverger (political theory). Lacanian psycho-analyst and film theorist Anna Guédy of Ecole Freudienne de Paris gave him the opportunity to begin his academic career with lectures on film and voice at Censier faculty (1978), in Paris[2], followed by a collaboration to critical theory journal of Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller's La Cause Freudienne).[3] In 1976 he met Russian-French drama teacher, historian of elocution (Sarah Bernhardt), also well-known for his rare collection of Vaslav Nijinsky memorabilia [3], Pierre Spivakoff [4].
At the prompting of French sociologist Georges Balandier, he travelled to South Africa to undertake his field-work on racial rhetoric, which led to a doctoral dissertation in social and cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne (adviser, Michel Maffesoli). This thesis, embargoed by the South African security police, was sneaked out of the Apartheid state via diplomatic pouch (see preface to his book An African Athens [5]) and was later published as L'Intrigue Raciale. Essai de Critique Anthropologique [6]. He has since retained a strong interest in anthropology, and was, for instance, instrumental in bringing to South Africa Jean Rouch the celebrated film ethnographer.[7]
Back in Paris, he worked for a while as Arts and Letters editor of controversial psycho-analytical magazine Spirales, edited by Armando Verdiglione, and also as an opera critic (Opera International [8], Avant-Scène Opera [9], Lyrica). He contributed to leading French conservative-liberal journal, Commentaire .[4] His first book Idéologies de l'opéra (1980) is considered a breakthrough in the sociology or anthropology of this art form.[5] It is dedicated to his mentor, the celebrated Wagnerian lyric soprano Germaine Lubin. He wrote for Maoist daily Libération the funeral eulogy of Maria Callas, with whom he spoke shortly before her death (September 26, 1977), thanks to novelist Marguerite Duras and actor Serge Merlin (The Song of Roland) during a rehearsal at Orsay Theatre (now the Orsay Museum), then run by Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1981 he published his opera Icare in poet and psychoanalyst fr:Michel Orcel's literary journal L'Alphée and contributed to Philippe Sollers's avant-garde journal L'Infini, successor to Tel Quel, at the prompting of novelist and Prix Femina laureate Dominique Rolin .[6]
Then, combining anthropology, philosophy and political theory with his interest in voice, he moved on to rhetoric.
In the 1980s, in France, the field of rhetoric was being reshaped by Marc Fumaroli both as a critique of structuralism and American-style cultural studies, and as a new turn given to the mainstay of French literary culture – « Les Classiques » (roughly speaking, from Montaigne to Proust). Fumaroli fostered a new conception of French literary and political culture, showing how High Church rhetoric and its institutions had been appropriated by a centralized monarchy and then a secularized Republic. For thirty years Fumaroli’s work was to influence deeply cultural studies and give it an international reputation that is still today a matter for heated controversies.
Fumaroli became Salazar's adviser for a senior doctoral dissertation (or Doctorat d’Etat, a prestigious degree since disestablished, due to European Union rules). This investigation in oral culture of the French classical age[7] was later published as Le Culte de la Voix au 17e Siècle).[8]
In the mid-90s, Salazar organized a colloquium at Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle to mark Fumaroli’s international ascendancy in rhetoric, later followed by an edited a volume of essays whereby leading "second generation" rhetoric scholars took stock of what the French school had achieved since Fumaroli’s seminal Age de l’Eloquence. During this phase, Salazar published or edited key documents of the French cultural tradition, including Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s seminal De Arte Graphica (a key document of French Classicism in the fine arts), Bishop Jacques Amyot’s royal lectures on oratory for King Henri III,[9] royal preceptor and theologian Pierre Daniel Huet’s Memoirs, and skeptical philosopher François de La Mothe Le Vayer, also the Sun-King’s teacher.[10] Recognized as a prominent 17th-century studies scholar, he received a cabinet-level appointment to a Chair at renowned Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance, at François Rabelais University, Tours, France (1999).
However, his sustained interest in politics and public rhetoric had already resulted in early essay on the rhetorical framing of French sociology, part of a British collective project on "the recovery of rhetoric," and is now regarded as having broken new ground in the historiography of the social sciences.[11] Salazar relinquished the Tours Chair and took up a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (2000) where he began to develop a new field of enquiry: rhetoric studies applied to the practice and theory of public affairs. At that time (1999) he was elected to a sought after directorship in Rhetoric and Democracy at Jacques Derrida’s Foundation, Collège international de philosophie, in Paris. In 2000, looking back onto rhetoric, sex, voice and hispanidad, he keynoted the cross-cultural event Carmen 2000, SoBe, Miami,[12] and co-founded Espacio Cultural Trangular with New York photographer Ruben Roncallo [10].
When South Africa became a democracy (1994) he founded the Centre for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, to study the importance of rhetoric for peaceful democracy and in 1999 he inaugurated at International College of Philosophy a "directorate of research" into the “intersection” of rhetoric studies and the practical philosophy of citizenship[13]. Monthly Sciences Humaines saluted the re-rentry of "eloquence" into the human sciences following the release of Salazar's Hyperpolitique[14].
His research in rhetoric and politics of peace parallels that of philosopher François Jullien on Chinese philosophy of “manipulation” and of philologist and Heideggerian philosopher Barbara Cassin on “sophistical effets” in Ancient Greece. Seminal works resulted from this “intersective” thinking about rhetoric and democracy, notably Truth in Politics, Amnistier l’Apartheid (in Alain Badiou's series), Vérité, Réconciliation, Réparation (a collaborative book with Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida), introducing the concept of ubuntu in French humanist philosophy (Edwy Plenel, Le Monde, 12/30/2004[15]). Followed by edited volumes on Democratic Rhetoric and the Duty of Deliberation and The Rhetorical Shape of International Conflicts (also, his rhetorical analysis of declarations of war taken up by Atlantico)[11] and a study of Nobel Prize rhetoric in his edited volume on French rhetoric and philosophy today (Philosophy and Rhetoric). His work on the rhetorical foundation of politics extends beyond Europe and Africa, with a publication on Les Slaves (2005)[16] and a book Mahomet (2006)[17], a study of rhetorical common places regarding the Prophet of Islam, was lauded by the daily press[18] and led to a sustained conversation on forgiveness and secularism with Arab poet and philosopher Abdelwahab Meddeb (Contre-Prêches, 2006[19] and broadcast Cultures D'Islam, 05/27/2006,[12]) . A volume on intelligence, surveillance and control, with contribution by Antonio Negri, has been announced by the African Yearbook of Rhetoric, a cutting-edge journal in rhetoric edited by Salazar[13]. Historian of the public sphere Emmanuel Lemieux ( author of Le Pouvoir Intellectual)[14] calls him an "atypical philosopher": when Salazar's Hyperpolitique was released (2009) Le Nouvel Economiste carried an influential review of his work and of its relevance for leadership studies ([15]). His latest book, Paroles De Leaders, Decrypter le Discours des Puissants was released in August 2011(François Bourin Editeur) ("bloc-note" editorial by Marcela Yacub, August 18, 2011)[16]. Premiere management quarterly L'Expansion Management Review placed Paroles De Leaders on its "Books To Read" list (September 2011).
Salazar's analysis of the rhetoricity of ethics in relation to peaceful politics served as framework for the 2004 Report to the French Prime Minister on Corruption [17]. That same year he addressed the Observatoire de la Transition démocratique et Forum de la Citoyenneté, in Rabat, Morocco, ahead of the Moroccan Equite et Réconciliation National Commission and gave the Annual Seminar in Peace and Conflict Resolution at Concordia University, Montreal. In 2007 he delivered the Annual lecture in Law and Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York. In 2010, he gave the prestigious Kenneth Burke Annual Lecture at the Center for Democratic Deliberation (Penn State)18th Burke Lecture, in which he outlined his thinking on the rhetorical foundation of political philosophy and addressed a colloquium on the US presidency and its rhetoric of virtue (lecture broadcast on France Culture). His most recent interventions took place in Buenos Aires, at the Forum of Rhetoric (Conferencia de Apertura) and at the Balkan Summer university for young philosophers (Quelques Réflexions ) on the importance of rhetorical technologies of domination in democratic societies (Revistaretor).
Salazar received in 2008 the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, Africa’s premier award for research, in recognition of his work. He is a regular commentator on France-Culture and "French C-Span:" Public-Senat