The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar brings together twelve essays in honour of the scholarship of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. In his work, Salazar’s relationship with the Incomprehensible has been variegated and profound.

It begins at the end of the seventies, when Salazar travelled to apartheid South Africa - on the advice of his mentors in Paris - to study the discourse of racialisation while it was being actively and concretely practised as state racism. Since then, Salazar’s contributions have never strayed from the study of the incomprehensible languages, discourses, rhetorics and philosophies that marked the end of the twentieth century and continue unabated in the new millennium.

This volume aims to illustrate, further, that Salazar is as much a rhetorician of technologies of power as he is a ‘critical’ rhetorician, that is, a rhetorician who has moved through the bases of semiotics and psychoanalysis in order to step out of (manufactured) ‘common sense’ altogether so as to apprehend the repressed and repressive aspects of such common sense and of ubiquitous commonplaces.

• Jaco Barnard-Naude Preface -‘The handkerchief, the handkerchief!’: Rhetorical unconsciousness and the Incomprehensible: Towards an analytic
• Erik Doxtader - Messianic hopes at the moral carnival – The [rhetorical] question of advocating for the humanities, for now 
• Claudia Hilb - On some ‘long-forgotten propositions’: Reflections on the ‘Epilogue’ to Arendt’s 
• Eichmann in Jerusalem 
• Pascal Engel - An incomprehensible rhetoric 
• Maria Alejandra Vitale - The self-image of intelligence agents in an archive of state repression in Argentina 
• Klaus Kotze - South African Amnesty 2.0: Incomprehensible? 
• Sisanda Nkoala - A rhetoric of terror and of the terrified
• Sergio Alloggio Hic sunt leones reloaded: Elements for a critique of disciplinary self-(af)filiation within professional white philosophy in South Africa 
• Cheryl Glenn & Jessica Enoch - The ongoing necessity of suffrage rhetorics (or ‘suffragism’): On the Amendment to the US Constitution 
• Philippe-Joseph Salazar - The Covington smile: Norms and forms of violence in the age of the White Awakening 
• Reingard Nethersole - Piercing incomprehensible power 
• Dominique De Courcelles - For Philippe: Sharing questionsof unintelligibility, security and diversity — from Babel to Pentecost 

Scholars in the fields of law, philosophy, politics, rhetoric, psychoanalysis and the Humanities in general