The Rhetorical Function of the Abj ect Body: Transgressive Corporeality in Trainspotting

Abstract

RI1etorical studies has long been concerned with the moral progress of the human. Critics have traditionally sought either to account for the successes ofrhetors who unify and mobilize their audiences by appealing to shared moral virtues, or to condemn those who use rhetoric to lead audiences off the path of reason toward harmful, immoral ends. This persistent fidelity to moral judgment and linear reason has produced a valuable critique of oppressive discourses as well as a much needed acknowledgment of dissident voices that otherwise might have been ignored. However, this approach to rhetoric also produces a troublesome dilemma. On the one hand, it assigns to the critic the task of identifying the ways in which discourses either defend or resist moral norms, and, on the other, it does not require an interrogation of those norms and the underlying assumptions that gird them. Humanist critiques of both oppressive and subversive rhetorics often assume an a priori unity, or sameness, that oppressive discourse conceals and subversive dis­ course reveals. In doing so, rhetorical critics perpetuate, however unintentionally, the acceptance of a view of moral norms as natural, universal phenomena. Similarly, as cultural theorist Elizabeth Grosz argues, our faith in rational­ ity as the uncontested epistemological ground affords us a belief in knowledges that seemingly do not distort, manipulate, or constrain their objects. Instead, they describe and/or explain them without loss or residue (Space 27). Overwhelmingly, moral norms-in conjunction with an ideology that privileges rationality-o bscures or deni es a parti cu­ lar site of rhetorical forces that threaten the assumptions of the critic: the physical body. Could it be that the common rhetorical practice of silencing bodies-and thus denying them theirrhetoricity-is linked to the challenge they pose to moral normativity? Indeed, might it be that the