Victor J. Vitanza - Biography

Victor J. Vitanza, Ph.D., Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, is Professor of English and Rhetoric at Clemson University. He is also the Director of the Ph.D. program at Clemson University in Rhetorics, Communications, and Information Design (RCID). Victor J. Vitanza is the Editor of PRE/TEXT: a journal of rhetorical theory, and the Director of the PRE://TEXT Publishing Webwork.

Internationally recognized as 'the bad boy of American rhetoric', Victor J. Vitanza brings together classical and modern rhetorical theory with contemporary French and Italian philosophy. In doing so, he brings into question the status of rhetoric as a discipline by opening an inquiry into its relation with composition and vice versa, how each is immanent to the other, and how this mutual relation opens the possibility for asking about the third interval, which is outside of both.

Through the deployment of various figures drawn from Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Hélène Cixous, and several others, Victor J. Vitanza attempts to find a space outside of the university where writing can (potentially) happen. In his essay 'Abandoned to Writing: Notes Toward Several Provocations', he makes the highly subversive claim that the university cannot teach one how to write. Writing cannot be commanded in a teleological or means-directed way; it can only be listened to in the 'unsubstantial territory' of the third interval (Vitanza, 'Abandoned to Writing'). This attending to a call from a 'somewhere' which is outside is found through different paths, such as Martin Heidegger's 'impotentiality' and Giorgio Agamben's reading of the unthought 'potentiality' in Aristotle and Heidegger.

In the essay 'Two Gestures, While Waiting for a Third', Victor J. Vitanza approaches the third term(s) through an analytic of economy – political, libidinal, discursive – as capitalism makes its shift from restricted to general economy. This shift is fomented by a collapse in the power of negation, which 'allow[s] for the return of the excluded third + body' (Vitanza, 'Two Gestures'). Following Jean-Francois Lyotard's characterization of Karl Marx (in Libidinal Economy) as hermaphroditic, at once 'old man and young woman', the collapse of negation opens up unlimited potentialities for 'an exuberance of sexes: [M, F, Hermaphrodites, Merms, Ferms, etc.]' (Vitanza, 'Two Gestures'). Victor J. Vitanza finds in this proliferation of sexes, which go beyond the distinction of genus and species, singularities of pure potentiality in which a community can emerge outside of the demands of a transcendental State.

Victor J. Vitanza is the author of several books and articles, including: Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (1997); Writing Histories of Rhetoric (1993); CyberReader (1998); Chaste Rape: Sexual Violence, Canon Formation, and Rhetorical Cultures (dissertation); 'Love, Lust, Rhetorics (from Double Binds to Intensities)' (1998); 'The Hermeneutics of Abandonment' (1998); 'Abandoned to Writing: Notes Toward Several Provocations' (2003); and 'Two Gestures, While Waiting for a Third' (2003).