Text as a nowing: Towards an understanding of time in rhetoric

In this essay, I redefine a conception of text as a nowing. Resisting the linear argumentative form of the scholarly journal article, I opt for an internal dialogue as a form of argumentation. The circularity of this method performs the argument of time in rhetoric while elevating endnotes to the importance of the text at the top. I then identify three paradoxes in Aristotle’s argument of time in his Physics: presence as absence, identity as difference, and whole as parts. In analyzing these paradoxes, rhetoricians can gain new heuristic vocabularies to speak and write about time in time. Finally, I apply this understanding of time to a text that has been developing in the last three decades in México: La Caída del Sistema.