Philippe-Joseph Salazar


Philippe-Joseph Salazar, a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on February 10, 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and presently affiliated to the Law School.
Salazar writes a regular column in the French public intellectual online magazine Les Influences. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a prestigious French literary prize for political non-fiction,, for his book on the rhetoric of jihadism: Paroles armées, translated in four languages.

From voice to rhetoric

Salazar's advisor at Ecole Normale Supérieure was Louis Althusser. While at ENS he joined the Conférence Olivaint, an exclusive club dedicated to training future leaders in the Catholic and liberal tradition of public oratory, and completed a voluntary internship at the cultural affairs section of Paris City Hall when President Chirac was mayor.
Salazar would later pursue graduate studies in metaphysics with Emmanuel Levinas, in semiotics with Roland Barthes and in political theory with Maurice Duverger. Lacanian psychoanalyst and film theorist Anna Guédy of École Freudienne de Paris further influenced his academic career, which led to a collaboration to critical theory journal La Cause Freudienne edited by Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller. Early friendships with French avant-garde actor Serge Merlin and professor of declamation Pierre Spivakoff deepened his understanding of voice. He began contributing extensive articles on voice, opera and psycho-analysis, to leading journal Avant-Scène Opera . On Maria Callas' death French far-left daily Libération asked Salazar to write her obituary.
At the prompting of both his philosophy advisor Louis Althusser and French sociologist Georges Balandier, Salazar travelled to apartheid South Africa in 1978 to undertake field-research on racial rhetoric, which led to a first doctoral dissertation in social and cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne University in Paris. The examination copy of his dissertation was blocked by the South African Security Police but sneaked out of the Apartheid state via diplomatic pouch. He wrote also in French conservative-liberal monthly Commentaire. His first book Idéologies de l'opéra is considered a breakthrough in the field of sociology and anthropology of opera. Salazar dedicated the book to his mentor, Germaine Lubin. In 1981, he published his opera Icare in Islamic poet and psychoanalyst Michel Orcel's literary journal L'Alphée and contributed to Philippe Sollers's famed avant-garde journal L'Infini at the prompting of novelist Dominique Rolin. He has since retained an interest in opera as a social form of knowledge.
This intersectional interest in anthropology, philosophy and political theory led him to engage with a newly re-emerging field, rhetoric.
In the 1980s Salazar's senior doctorate advisor and Balzan Prize laureate Marc Fumaroli had reshaped the field of rhetoric studies in regard of French literary and political culture. Since the late 1980s Fumaroli's work, in Paris, in Italy and at the University of Chicago, has been decisive in the reshaping of cultural studies from a non, if not anti structuralism and deconstruction approach. Salazar's senior dissertation. The book is dedicated to the memory of Roland Barthes and Georges Dumézil who had both encouraged him to make "voice" his very own scholarly project. In 1993 Salazar convened at Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, a prestigious locale for cutting edge research, a colloquium to salute Fumaroli's pioneering work in rhetoric. During this "classical" phase Salazar published or edited key documents of French cultural tradition, such as Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy's seminal De Arte Graphica, Bishop Jacques Amyot's royal lectures on oratory for King Henri III, royal preceptor and theologian Pierre Daniel Huet's Memoirs, and skeptical philosopher François de La Mothe Le Vayer, the Sun-King's teacher. Recognized as a prominent 17th century studies scholar, Salazar was appointed to a Chair at Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance, at François Rabelais University, Tours, France in 1999. In 2000, Salazar relinquished the Tours Chair to devote his research to rhetoric as a "technology of power" in modern, public affairs. He took up an appointment as Distinguished Chair in Rhetoric and Humane Letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. At that time he was elected to a sought after 6-year Directorship in Rhetoric and Democracy at Jacques Derrida's Foundation, Collège international de philosophie, in Paris, extending the work done at the Centre for Rhetoric Studies, Cape Town, he founded while Dean of Arts in 1994.

Rhetoric as a philosophy of power

The Centre for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town was founded with a view to study the importance of rhetoric for peaceful democracy. The projects based at the Centre in Cape Town mirrored Salazar's own research chair in Paris. Both focused on rhetoric as a foundation for public life, and in post-totalitarian democracy in particular. Influential magazine Sciences Humaines praised Salazar's book Hyperpolitique for resetting rhetoric at the centre of human sciences enquiry
If Salazar's work is not unique in regard of a concern with rhetorical forms among contemporary French philosophers, its originality lies in its focus: rhetorical technologies of power in democracy, the question of reconciliation, and the practices of opinion-based, political "evil.". His work parallels that of fellow philosopher François Jullien on Chinese "manipulation" and of philologist and Heideggerian philosopher Barbara Cassin on Sophistry in Ancient Greece. Historian of the public sphere Emmanuel Lemieux called him an "atypical philosopher".
Seminal works have marked Salazar's reshaping of rhetoric as the study of forms of power in contemporary democracies: Truth in Politics, Amnistier l’Apartheid, credited for having introduced in French political thought the concept of ubuntu. Salazar's works also include edited volumes on Democratic Rhetoric and the Duty of Deliberation and The Rhetorical Shape of International Conflicts. In addition to his rhetorical analysis of declarations of war and a study of Nobel Prize rhetoric in his edited volume on French rhetoric and philosophy today. His work on the rhetorical foundation of politics extends beyond Europe and Africa, with a publication on Les Slaves and a book Mahomet.
With Hyperpolitique Salazar opened a new area of investigation : rhetoric studies as philosophy of power. Le Nouvel Economiste carried a laudatory critique of the book and of its relevance for leadership studies. More recent publications, Paroles de Leaders, Décrypter le Discours des Puissants in August 2011, and L'Art de séduire l'électeur indécis have placed him at the forefront of the field. Premier management quarterly L'Expansion Management Review placed Paroles de Leaders on its "Books To Read" list. Salazar is currently engaging with covert forms of power, intelligence and surveillance studies, with a lead essay in Italian philosophy journal Lo Sguardo, an edited volume for Swiss transnational journal and think tank Cosmopolis, following a collaborative volume on Surveillance/Rhetoric.
Salazar's work has secured him a global influence in his field. He has addressed the Observatoire de la Transition démocratique et Forum de la Citoyenneté, in Rabat, Morocco, ahead of the Moroccan :fr:Instance équité et réconciliation|Equite et Réconciliation National Commission. He has held the Annual Seminar in Peace and Conflict Resolution at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Among his signature public lectures: the Annual Lecture in Law and Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York; the 18th Kenneth Burke Annual Lecture at the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State in which he outlined his thinking on the rhetorical foundation of political philosophy and addressed a colloquium on the U.S. presidency and its rhetoric of virtue ; the Buenos Aires Forum of Rhetoric ; the Balkan Summer University for young philosophers on rhetorical technologies of domination in democratic societies; in Brussels the ULB's annual public lecture on democracy and debate; in 2011 at the University of Nanking and at Yangzhou University; in 2017 at the Fondazione MAST, in Bologna, Italy; and at the Berlin literature festival Haus für Poesie. Salazar has extended the scope of rhetorical critique to marxism in avant-garde journals Consecutio Temporum and Transeuropéennes.
As a public intellectual Salazar has appeared on France-Culture, French C-Span: Public-Senat. and notably TV5 Monde. He has written for Le Point, Le Nouvel Observateur Plus and Atlantico. He contributes to the publications of the French Centre for Intelligence Studies and a Defense and Security studies site. In addition to his regular chronicles for online culture newsmagazine Les Influences as Le rhéteur cosmopolite and Comment raisonnent-ils? he blogs at .
His award-winning book, , has received international praise. It is a full-scale analysis of the Islamic State's propaganda and rhetorical strategies of influence. On the occasion of the Darmstadt premiere of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's play Wut, on the January 2015 Paris terror attack against Charlie Hebdo by militants of the Islamic State excerpts of Salazar's Die Sprache des Terrors'' were reprinted to introduce the play. The French book received the coveted :fr:Prix Bristol des Lumières|prix Bristol des Lumières a day before the November 2015 Paris Bataclan massacre by Islamic State's militants.

Professional activities

He is Honorary Life President of the Association for Rhetoric and Communication in Southern Africa, Vice-President of the Chinese Global Society for Visual Communication, Founding and Honorary Member of the Sociedad Latinamericana de Retorica. He sits on the Editorial Board of Philosophy and Rhetoric and Javnost-The Public. He collaborates with French publisher as editorial adviser at large for foreign fiction. From 2007 to 2014 he directed a series of publications on the power of rhetoric at ranging from Buddhist rhetoric to Heidegger, from visual eloquence at the time of the disintegration of Yugoslavia to Third Reich and DDR propaganda machines, from migrants' eloquence to political styles. Founder and current co-chairman of the Macmillan Club. Aviator member of the Aéro-Club de France, and author of and a regular contributor to SA Flyer-African Aviation; journalist-level member of the National Press Club of Washington, and of the Owl Club.

Publications

Monographs and edited volumes

As an Editorial Advisor At Large for Foreign Fiction, publishing house:
As Director, Klincksieck publishing house: