Bio

Philippe-Joseph Salazar is an alumnus of Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. He holds three master’s degrees, a doctorate in social anthropology, and a senior doctorate (Doctorat d’Etat) in Letters and Human Sciences, all from the Sorbonne. He wrote postgraduate dissertations on political theory with constitutionalist Maurice Duverger, on semiology with Roland Barthes, on metaphysics with Emmanuel Levinas, on social anthropology with Georges Balandier and Michel Maffesoli, and lastly on rhetoric with Balzan Prize laureate Marc Fumaroli. Louis Althusser was his tutor and dissuaded him to research on Eurocommunism but guided him toward racial studies.

 

He travelled to South Africa in 1978, aged 23, to undertake covert field work for a PhD in social anthropology,  “Idéologies de l’apartheid” (later published as L’Intrigue raciale). The South African Intelligence Service seized the completed typescript in 1982. However the public viva took place at the Sorbonne in 1983, in singular circumstances. Meanwhile, in 1980, he had published his first scholarly book, in sociology, Idéologies de l’opéra (still regarded as the first book to investigate that bourgeois genre as a sociological phenomenon; at Presses Universitaires de France).

 

In 1986, after completing his military service, and having returned to South Africa, he was appointed to the Chair of French at the University of Cape Town. In 1993 he was appointed Dean of Arts. In 1995 he was elected to the College of Fellows. That same year he founded the Centre for Rhetoric Studies, pioneering the discipline in Africa. He has been Director of the CRhS ever since.

 

In 1998 he was elected Director in Rhetoric and Democracy at Jacques Derrida’s Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (tenured completed in 2002). The same year he was elected to a professorial chair in France, at Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François-Rabelais, Tours, and appointed to a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters at UCT. He chose to remain in South Africa, to pursue his work in rhetoric, and he is now a Distinguished Professor in the Law Faculty.

 

In 2001 he lectured in the UNESCO Transcultural Chair of Philosophy of Peace, Russia. This  was a shared appointment, under an agreement between Collège international de philosophie and UNESCO. He opened the 2001 series with seven graduate lectures on Rhetoric and the Invention of Democracy at Lomonosov State University (Department of Government, Moscow) and at the State University of Saint-Petersburg (Department of Philosophy).

 

In 2008 he was awarded the African, prestigious Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship. The National Research Foundation promoted him from A (2002) to A1 in 2008, a rating he has held since. 

 

He has been or is a board member of 30 scholarly journals and learned societies, and has led 15 international projects in rhetoric (Argentina, China, France, Hungary, Morocco, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden). Since 2000 he has delivered 110 plenaries, keynotes, and guest lectures world-wide. 

 

Since his first scholarly article (1978) on power and preaching in 15th century Florence, he has published 25 book-length monographs (in French and English), 15 co-authored volumes or scholarly editions (in French, English, Spanish), 110 chapters, and 165 articles (in English, French, German, Italian, Slavic languages, Spanish, and Arabic).

 

He has earned recognition by his peers for extending the reach of rhetoric to topics ranging from nation-building (An African Athens, Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa, 2002) to White separatism (Suprémacistes, 2021), from political reconciliation (Amnistier l’Apartheid, 2004) to Islamic extremism (Words are Weapons, Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, 2017). The French version of Words are Weapons  (Paroles armées, 2015) garnered a prestigious prize for best non-fiction (Prix Bristol des Lumières), shortly before the Paris massacres of November 2015, which he had predicted on national radio, later translated in a variety of languages (Parole armate (2016), Palabras Armadas (2016), Die Sprache des Terrors (2016), and Words are Weapons, Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror (2017).

 

In 2017 a symposium was held at the University of Buenos Aires to celebrate 35 years of his scholarship (going back to the completion of his PhD on racial discourse). It was organized by Straussian scholar Professor Claudia Hilb (laureate of the CONICET Prize in political science). That same year  he was guest of honour at Berlin Literature Festival Haus für Poësie, and sole speaker at a special event held by the Fondazione MAST, Bologna, Italy – in both instances he spoke on Islamic militant oratory.

 

In 2022 international rhetoricians under the editorship of  J. Barnard-Naudé presented him with a Festschrift, The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. His forthcoming book is “against rhetoric” (at Editions du Cerf, Paris, October 2024).

Curriculum Vitae