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Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory)

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McComiskey builds an interesting argument here. After a primarily destructive or dismissive reading of Plato's Gorgias, he ingeniously synthesizes the two surviving demonstration speeches by Gorgias himself, together with the fascinating and radical ontological/epistemelogical discourse that survives only in paraphrase, so as to educe a coherent rhetorical theory from all three. Then he argues that an enormous range of postmodern thought recapitulates or revives Gorgias' ideas. Unfortunately, every stage of this is made to depend almost entirely on the proposition that Gorgianic rhetorical theory was largely centered on the concept of kairos, the opportune moment; and actual evidence and argument for that proposition are completely missing from the book. The word kairos occurs only once in the extant fragments, as McComiskey admits very late in the book, and the ancient testimonies that mention the concept in connection with Gorgias are either ambiguous and late or in one case downright dismissive. If one or more of the modern sources that McComiskey cites has nonetheless made out a good case for this proposition, surely he owes his argument and his readers at least a summary of that case--but no hint of one is forthcoming.