Hawhee, Debra. (2004). “Chapter 3: Kairotic Bodies” Bodily arts: Rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, University of Texas Press.

• Metic Kairos
  • The story about how Athena helps Odysseus in a race
  • kairos is about timing and time
• Forces of Kairos
  • Notes: the whole notion of forces can be related to attention, especially about the “quality of time”
  • kairos as the quality of time
  • chronos: the duration of time
  • kairos as a flexible concept.
  • kairos as the due measure or due amount.
    • Can be related to Aristotle’s ethic: the principle of the mean.
  • kairos as the opening in the body
  • kairos in weaving:
    • tightly woven
    • to combine many things, less criticism
    • the more tightly woven, the more to the point
    • the forces kairos bears
  • purpose of this chapter: to show immanence, movement, and embodiment in kairos.
• Kairos in Contemporary Rhetoric Theory
  • kairos as “reasoned accommodation and creation,” based on rationality and reasoned principles
  • James Kinneavy, George Kennedy, Baumlin
    • rhetor to consider and adapt/suit to the situation/audience
    • kairos as creative control, rhetor-in-charge
    • kairos exists outside the rhetor: an rhetor to analyze what is outside of the self.
• Historical Accounts of Kairos
  • Different from contemporary rhetoric theory on kairos, historians of rhetoric focuses on “immanent, embodied, mobile, nonrational version of kairos”
    • This is preferred by Hawhee
  • agonistic kairos
    • “kairos is an opportunity the rhetor discerns and helps to bring about during the course of the agon, given his perspective and abilities or skills” (69)
    • kairos is about
      • a kind of immanent awareness
        • “knowing how” and “knowing when” (70)
      • the ability of hunting and making opportunities
    • My notes: First of all, kairos is an opportunity; second, kairos as an opportunity is about awareness and the rhetor’s agency to hunt and make opportunities.
    • Agon is a context for kairos.
    • Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is about the ability to analyze. Kairos is the opportunity for the rhetor to practice this ability.
    • For Poulako, a kairotic rhetor is an opportunistic hunter.
      • In addition to the ability to analyze, Poulako gives kairotic rhetor more agency to intervene–hunting and making opportunities.
    • Consigny is also against an isolated view on kairos. He puts kairos in specific situations and relations.
  • both the rational mind and the body
    • from the agonistic view, a complete control is impossible.
    • an rhetor cannot know conditions in advance.
    • My notes: rhetoric and probability. Not only the results of rhetoric are uncertain, the situation and agon are uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean impossibility. A rhetor can still think/discern. The discerning mode is more than reasoned thinking. The reasoned discerning is about the mind. Another discerning mode is through the body.
  • the awareness can be achieved through practice.
  • “discerning kairos”
    • both mind and body
  • kairos also moves from the outside there, to the inside here, in the self.
• The Instructive Body of Kairos
  • Lysippos was the sculptor of Kairos
    • the sculpture was placed next to Hermes, next the entrance of Olympia
  • Posidippos: epigram for Kairos
    • subduer of all
    • razor at hand: Kairos is sharper than others
    • hair and the bald behind: for people to grasp his air and no one can grasp from the behind
    • My notes: all of these show Kairos is ready for winning.
  • bodily virtue: symmetry and movement (74); movement and instinct (76)
    • balancing the two through practice
    • My notes: this virtue is a virtue about the self, not toward the community. It is a kind of virtue to admire the strength, the ideal.
    • “virtue of aristocratic embodiment–kairos, the opportune moment and the instinct to seize it in a contest” (75)
      • kairos: instinctual, bodily capacity
    • My notes: on one hand, kairos is acquired through practice; on the other, it is instinctual. Kairos as a virtue is about ableism. Virtue as in physical strength.
• Sophistic Kairos
  • kairos: resists freezing
  • Gorgias: “listen (phere) as I turn (metasto) from one argument (logon) to another” (77)
    • When Gorgias turns, he identifies with the god Kairos
    • turning vs accommodation and creation (different versions of kairos)
    • accommodation and creation kairos
      • (step 1) rhetor to decode a rhetorical situation
      • (step 2) consciously select appropriate arguments
    • the turning kairos
      • a departure from reasoned
      • beyond overarching principles and rational design
    • this version kairos’s relation to reason:
      • “the fleeting movement of kairos necessitates a move away from a privileging of design or preformulated principles.” (78)
  • My notes: What Gorgias says is that he will turn. But other rhetoricians recognize the turn as a departure from the reasoned. They identify reason with a clear design and principle. Here, we need to see the definition of logos, whether it includes something that is beyond reason, because later, we see what Gorgias refers to as speech is logos. It means he does not move beyond logos, so does logos is embodied, too?
  • speech (logos) and pharmakon
    • Derrida: pharmakon does not have any definable virtue.
      • ambiguity
  • Gorgias’s somatic version of logos
    • space
    • mobility
  • kairos training: wrestling
    • how to teach kairos, through embodied training