”The Real Tea Party”: SCoR Summer Seminar - July 16, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA

Tomasz Tabako (Georgia State University) put together a seminar on Badiou and the rhetoric of rupture, which was held at Georgia State in Atlanta on July 16 from 1-5pm. The authors of two of the readings for the seminar, Barbara Biesecker (U of Georgia) and Tom Goodnight (U of Southern California) were able to join us, contributing to a particularly spirited and intense discussion. Other participants included Nathan Atkinson (Georgia State), David Cheshier (Georgia State), James Darsey (Georgia State), Kelly Happe (U of Georgia), Vincent Lloyd (Georgia State, Religious Studies), Curtis Otto (Hampton U), George Pullman (Georgia State, English), and Mary Stuckey (Georgia State).
George Pullman and Tom Tabako listen as Tom Goodnight clarifies a point.


The reading list for this seminar is:
Badiou’s Preface to his Logic of Worlds (2009)
Barbara Biesecker, "Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century:  Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending With a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan," in Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Mark J. Porrovecchio (New York: Routledge, 2010), pgs. 16-36.
Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 43 (2010), 1-25.
Thomas Goodnight, “The Metapolitics of the 2002 Iraq Debate,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 13 (2010), 65-94.
After much dithering, consultation, and debate, the text chosen as the exemplar of rupture following the original Tea Party was the obvious: The Declaration of Independence. As Stephen Lucas wrote as part of our exchange over this question: “There is no better exemplar of rupture than the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it is the first official text to proclaim the colonies' separation from Great Britain. Everything before that, including the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, still hoped for reconciliation. In April 1775 the colonies took up arms, but they did so in order to compel the mother country to provide just terms of reconciliation within the structure of the British empire. When that failed, they finally moved to independence a year later, and declared it in July 1776. Of course, there were lots of documents that can be seen as forerunners of the Declaration of Independence, but all of them, at least the official ones, continued to proclaim the colonies' loyalty to Great Britain and their desire to continue in connection with it.”


Mary Stuckey hosted a cook-out after the seminar.


Click here for additional photos from this event.