Don’t Call for a Dialogue! This is Not Death of a Salesman: Organizing Communities between Pathos and Logos

Is dialogue still possible? In what forms and under what conditions? In this article, I attempt to answer these questions by reflecting on how dia-logue has lost its logos, that is, how exchanges organised around rational argumentative logic have been unsettled by both the unbridled proliferation of phantasmatic imaginaries and a renewed emphasis on corporeality, and hence on pathos, on embodied sensing as a locus of epistemic and ethico-political insight. I first reconstruct how organizational and feminist scholarship has proposed to centre dialogue on pathos, while also highlighting the limits of this perspective. I then suggest conceiving dialogue in aporetic terms, acknowledging and sustaining the tension between logos and pathos, between the rational signification of language and that which inevitably escapes it. Finally, I offer an example of a dialogue on care drawn from a two-day community study event, illustrating how such an aporetic form of dialogue is both (im)possible and necessary for the building of community. Dialogue thus becomes itself a device of care, unsettling the boundaries between public and private, rational and affective, masculine and feminine, truth and opinion.