Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines challenges for the practical evaluation of arguments, and texts more generally, in critical thinking and pedagogical Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It examines a public sphere argument which supports genetically modified (GM) agriculture. The book engages with a public sphere argument which supports, five years after it began, the intervention of the US-led coalition in Iraq in 2003. It draws on corpora of texts to explore potentially relevant absences from the standpoint attacked in a public sphere argument; on this basis, the book show where the argument unravels. The book provides general reflection, situating the approach as a posthuman critical thinking and a posthuman critical discourse analysis. It also draws on ideas from Deleuze and Guattari.