•  16
    Canned Laughter
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 47 (4): 434-454. 2014.
    This article argues that the example of laughter continues to trouble the human/machine binary that so many have troubled, from Descartes to Zupančič. Sounding various objects of “recorded” laughter through psychoanalytic tweeters, deconstructive warps, and object-oriented woofers implicates ontology as so much noise for the projection of certainty. Derivatively speaking, I argue for the primacy of a rhetorical ethics.
  •  7
    This book examines the concept of public interest against the background of English politics from the Civil War to the coming of the Hanoverians. These years witnessed both the rise of the modern notion of the public interest as a part of ordinary political language and the growth of a social philosophy of individualism. The new ideas challenged the _status quo_, based on order, reason of state and national power, in the name of legitimate self-interest and respect for the rights of the private …Read more
  •  22
    On Mythic Mimesis
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2002 (122): 178-182. 2002.
  •  44
    Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject (review)
    with James J. Brown Jr
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 42 (2): 183-190. 2009.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that…Read more