Engel’s Conclusion and Unruly Bodies by Paul Achter

Engels Conclusion:

Engels conclusion offers a solid final argument to Politics of Resentment by comparing rhetoric and the politics of resentment. Rhetoric is described as a tool of creation and destruction, but altogether a necessary part of politics. On the other hand the politics of resentment is the worst sort of schooling for politics because of its destructive attitude.

Engels suggests that the problem with resentment is in the way it is cultivated and addressed. It is primarily expressed in two forms: ad ratio ( at a social system), and ad hominem ( at a person). Because of our human nature that likes the certainty of creating a scapegoat for problems, the ad hominem method has become overused, which has resulted in a loss of meaning for the human person. In this debate, Trump utilizes ad hominem to attack Cruz, while in Obama’s hopeful farewell speech, we see an effort to leave behind resentment.


Engels wraps this book up with an offering of his own to combat the politics of resentment. He says that rather than banning resentment from politics altogether, we as citizens must become better rhetoric critics. This includes being able to identify violence, and understanding how rhetorical violence is utilized by politicians to cause a warlike mentality amongst our fellow citizens.

Unruly Bodies: Paul Achter

In Unruly bodies Achter discusses the role that injured war veterans have in our society as tools to maintain support for US foreign policy. Achter calls this “domestication”. Involving war veteran bodies are a useful rhetorical method because they themselves are borrowed by the state for warfare. The injured bodies are therefore a material witness to the violence of war.
Achter makes three arguments to show how the unruly bodies of the injured have become disassociate with war and associated with normative notions of bodily propriety and care. First, that the mainstream media invokes veteran’s bodies as metonyms for the nation state. Second, that veterans are domesticated by strategic placement in ordinary contexts, and thirdly that dominant visual discourse domesticates veteran’s bodies by ascribing a strategic purpose to the bodies.
Tommy Reiman is an example of a wounded war veteran who has been used as a kind of American mythology and a means to help advertise the military to the public.

In addition, video games such as America’s Army have been used to bridge the gap between the military and civilian life.

We also see in this article that people like Reiman only have this kind of influence because they have whole bodies, and not a body that has amputations and severe burns. Otherwise, it would not be possible to structure the civilian and entertaining relationship with him.

“The Walter Reed Medical Scandal forced a public accounting of medical care for surviving vets because the hospital put already vulnerable bodies at risk”.

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