 In Seduction, Sophistry and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure, UGA assistant professor of English Michelle Ballif asserts that the rhetorical tradition is based on the systematic exclusion of subtly seductive reasoning known as sophistry.
According to Ballif, the search for truth manifests itself among current rhetoric and composition scholars in the form of an assumption that language is primarily communicative (i.e., that language can represent truth more or less faithfully). Ballif questions why the profession wants to retain these beliefs in the face of vociferous arguments from “new rhetorics” that the discipline no longer posits a foundational self or truth, and in the face of the post-structuralist critique, which has demonstrated that founding truth is always accomplished by first positing and then negating an “other.” As alternative to this negative and violent rhetorical process, Ballif suggests a turn to sophistry as embodied in the figure of Woman, one with the power to seduce us (literally, to lead astray) from our truth and our demand for it.
This figuration of Woman, however, is not the dialectical “other” used to sustain the identity and privilege of Man. On the contrary, this Woman is an Other Woman: A Third Woman as a Third Sophistic practice that escapes Plato’s binary (philosophic rhetoric vs. sophistry) system and renders the distinction between truth and deception incalculable.
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