The postmortem enthymeme: Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation as argumentation

Existing scholarship has emphasized the material significance and persuasive potential of self-immolation. However, given that the majority of self-immolations fail to garner sustained public attention, this essay seeks to further understanding into why certain extreme acts of bodily rhetoric gain entry into the public imagination while others are largely extinguished from view. To account for the rhetorical salience of certain self-immolations, this essay explores what I refer to as the postmortem enthymeme. Understood as a proof for which audiences are required to fill in premises and/or the conclusion, the enthymeme helps to explain how the non-discursive qualifies and functions as an argument. When rhetors engage in bodily forms of argument resulting in death, audiences are often afforded considerable power in determining the significance and meaning of actors and events. The postmortem enthymeme therefore encourages scholars to critically interrogate the role of filled-in values and assumptions in hegemonic determinations of whose deaths are permitted to matter and why. To illuminate this construct, I present a rhetorical analysis of public reactions to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in English-language news coverage.