from the outset that dialectic (especially when conceived as a Socratic discipline of “rational” disputation, in the course of which the authority of reason is invoked to persuade and gain an advantage over another) is often a kind of violence, insofar as it seeks to conceal its own reliance on rhetoric. The art of dialectic, assuming the aspect of a “neutral” rationality, dissembles its purely suasive intervals by submerging them within the sequences of its style; it achieves the appearance of seamless