Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris (founded 1563) before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure.

Philippe-Joseph Salazar, a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco.

He began contributing extensive articles on voice, opera and psycho-analysis, to leading journal Avant-Scène Opera (from 1977 to 1984).

On Maria Callas' death (1977) French far-left daily Libération (founded by Jean-Paul Sartre) 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 (see preface to his bookAn African Athens and eventually published as L'Intrigue Raciale: Essai de Critique Anthropologique. He has since retained a strong interest in anthropology.

After returning to Paris, Salazar served for a while as Arts and Letters editor of controversial psycho-analytical magazine Spirales, edited by Armando Verdiglione.

He published lengthy interviews with William Styron, and painter Elizabeth Franzheim, and he resumed writing on opera in Avant-Scène Opera as well as Opera International, and Lyrica (interviews of Nicolai Gedda, Mirella Freni).

He wrote also in French conservative-liberal monthly Commentaire.

His first book Idéologies de l'opéra (1980) is considered a breakthrough in the field of sociology and anthropology of opera.

Salazar dedicated the book to his mentor, Germaine Lubin.

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 (Fumaroli shows how High Church rhetoric and its institutions had been appropriated by a centralized monarchy and then a secularized Republic).

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.

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.

Salazar's senior dissertation (or Doctorat d'Etat) concerned itself with oral culture in the French classical age and it remains to this day a reference work on the topic as Le Culte de la Voix au 17e Siècle). 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( a key document of French Classicism in the fine arts), 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.

Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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.

At that time (1999) 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.

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 (Mission Statement).

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 ( author of Le Pouvoir Intellectuel) called him an "atypical philosopher".

He has since retained an interest in opera as a social form of knowledge (2000, keynote speaker of cross-cultural event Carmen 2000, SoBe, Miami, and co-founded Espacio Cultural Triangular with New York photographer Ruben Roncallo).

This intersectional interest in anthropology, philosophy and political theory led him to engage with a newly re-emerging field, rhetoric.

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.

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 (in Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou's series Ordre Philosophique), Vérité, Réconciliation, Réparation, a collaborative book with Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida), credited for having introduced in French political thought the concept of ubuntu (Edwy Plenel, Le Monde, 12/30/2004). 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 (Philosophy and Rhetoric). His work on the rhetorical foundation of politics extends beyond Europe and Africa, with a publication on Les Slaves (2005) and a book Mahomet (2006), a study of rhetorical common places regarding The Prophet of Islam.

His publications led to a sustained conversation and broadcast on forgiveness and secularism with Arab poet and philosopher Abdelwahab Meddeb in 2006.

and broadcast Cultures D'Islam, 27 May 2006).

Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award.

With Hyperpolitique (2009) Salazar opened a new area of investigation : rhetoric studies as philosophy of power.

In 2015 he received a prestigious French literary prize for political non-fiction, Prix Bristol des Lumières, for his book on the rhetoric of jihadism: Paroles armées (2015), translated in four languages (in English, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP, 2017).

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 (on metaphor and ontology) with Emmanuel Levinas, in semiotics (on voice) 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 (lectures on film and voice in Paris), 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 (in the tradition of Sarah Bernhardt) Pierre Spivakoff deepened his understanding of voice.