An Enfolding and Fertile Abyss: Rhetoric as the Creative Becoming of Biological Life

This dissertation seeks traces of enfolding corporeal paths within the ontological, epistemological, ethical abyss separating Human and Animal. The question of the animal, as it is often called, is currently en vogue within a larger ecological movement in the humanities. I seek to extend this engagement with animality beyond rhetoric, literature, and philosophy by enfolding the sciences and arts as well for a deeper understanding of humans as animals and therefore, I argue, as rhetorical life. This path of the HumAnimal emerges with a diffractive reading of new material feminism, evolutionary biology, contemporary art practices, and visual rhetorics, and in doing so, theorizes a definition of rhetoric that is prior to intention, consciousness, and mind. I argue that rhetoric is instead present at the origins, struggles, and flourishings of life itself. Rhetoric becomes a process, a movement, and a biological becoming that emerges in nonlinear and discontinuous ways, illuminating the dark abyssal waters in which humanimals and animals are mutually and materially enfolded. Given the ethical implications of our entanglements with the world, this dissertation further argues for a different way of looking with animals in visual culture. The representationalist looking that places animals at a distance and visually grasps them is demonstrated with contemporary examples of viral memes as well as the destructive human-animal interactions practiced for capturing selfies and cute photographs. These animals are but objects grasped by human eyes across a staggering ontological divide. I turn to Heidegger\u27s Parmenides to theorize an encountering, being-enabling look for animals in visual culture that ontologically entangles humanimals and animals in the looking relation. Such an encountering look simultaneously brings forth an awareness of one\u27s own being such that the abyssal requisites for self and other, subject and object, human and animal are compromised. An encountering look is essentially a phenomenological awareness of entanglement. These alternative practices of looking become the basis for a HumAnimal rhetorics and pedagogy