Work
Vitanza's work concentrates on histories of rhetorics and specifically on a "third sophistic" as well as the "excluded middle." His efforts extend the implications of Gregory Ulmer's electracy to the field of rhetorical historiographies, or what Vitanza calls "hysteriography" (and later "schizography"). Vitanza's efforts are to reread and rewrite questions and concepts raised by such theorists and historians as Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Ijsseling, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-François Lyotard. Vitanza deploys these figures to consider and disrupt the role of negation and subjectivity in "the" history of rhetoric.
Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (1997) is the title of Vitanza's first book. His efforts are large-scale re-assessments of the sense of negation that Kenneth Burke helps define. Vitanza's efforts extend to a reconsideration of other figures important to rhetorical historiography such as Susan Jarrett, Edward Schiappa, and John Poulakos. Through it all, Vitanza seeks a movement from (negative) possibilities and probabilities to (denegated) incompossibilities (counter-factual, co-extensive possibilities).
In Vitanza's recent work, he challenges Leibniz's foundational example of using Sextus's rape of Lucretia to ground a conception of "the best of all possible worlds." Extending Deleuze's re-reading of Leibniz in The Fold and Agamben's sense of "decreation," Vitanza seeks after all the denegated incompossibilities that result when "what happened and what did not happen are returned to their originary unity" (Agamben's Potentialities 270).
Vitanza's long-term project, according to a description on his website, is entitled Design as Dasein, and it "will examine how philosophical and architectural attitudes are represented under the signs of negativity and death."
From Vitanza's "final(rebeginning?) excursis" in NSHR: "WHAT WILL HAVE BEEN ANTI-OEDIPAL (De-Negated) HYSTERIES OF RHETORICS? WHAT WILL HAVE THEY LOOKED, SOUNDED, READ LIKE?" (22, emphasis Vitanza)
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