Abstract

EDWARDS, Derek et al. Muerte y mobiliario: retórica, política y teología de los argumentos últimos contra el relativismo. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2016, vol.39, n.2, pp.305-337. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v39n2.58978.

The original "Death and Furniture" did not have an abstract because the journal in which it was published, History of the Human Sciences, did not employ them. Therefore this abstract is not a translation of the original. Instead it is an original.

"Death and Furniture" attempts a rhetorically performed deconstruction of the rhetorical strategies of realist argumentation. It's style, which is diverse, sometimes serious, sometimes "witty", engaging in properly sourced arguments and in blatant fantasies, quoting Tom Paine, Samuel Johnson and Monty Python, is vital to its intended effect. It /we certainly wish to have a particular effect just as the strategists of realism do. The latter wish to force their opposition, the relativists, to recant their foolishness upon being confronted with the "bottom-lines" of Furniture(the epistemic undeniability of solid material objects) or Death (the moral undeniability of poverty and pain). The relativists, as championed here, can better resist this attack by undertaking some equivalent rhetorical moves, as displayed and demonstrated in the text. A powerful motivation for doing this work, then, was as revenge for all those table-thumping lessons the authors had been subjected to at the hands of complacent realists engaging in the strategies examined here: with "Death and Furniture" in hand, ready to be thrown onto the table, relativists may be better prepared for similar performances - and better armed. Along the way, relativism is defended, and its ubiquitous caricatures denied. With the help of such allies as Bruno Latour, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Paul Feyerabend, relativism is configured as a non-position, a form of mobility activated in the moment of analysis. The relativist has no "no-go areas" for analysis (she is properly reflexive). Instead of the realists' nay-saying theology ("face the facts[...] you can't change reality, human nature, market forces[...]") the ethic of unfettered enquiry (of science, one might say) is the moral position endorsed by our relativists.

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