Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric (2013) interrogates classical Greek and Christian understandings of rhetoric and writing via both antique Rabbinic Judaism’s insistence upon textuality as materiality and post-Freudian psychoanalytic insights into the nature and reception of the symbolic order. Or, as David Metzger’s introduction to the book offers:

Rhetoric is not in heaven, and—in this manner—[Richardson] reorients rhetoric’s ontological narrative (at least the one that begins with Plato and Aristotle) into an examination not of how rhetoric has been marginalized but how its apparently beleaguered state has functioned as a necessary gap/relationship between word and thing, fiction and reality, transcendence and immanence, religion and history, desire and jouissance, Judaism and Christianity. Not only is this gap necessary, it is so necessary that it takes on the characteristics of a relationship and, as such, reinvigorates the question, “What is the rhetorical subject?” And it prompts us to ask “What is the Other for rhetoric?”

(If you’re on the fence, it’s also a book about love. Find out more at Parlor Press or Amazon.)