ABSTRACT
The practices of rhetoric, as the ‘historical and practical-human character of reason and of knowledge’, are also the mirror that Jerzy Grotowski demands of the encounter, as that action of stepping over as transgression. The small slips of worlds beyond its confines are the site of encounter, brought into being through a deeply held humanity. High Court Justice Virginia Bell in 2012 turned to them to criticise the place of rhetoric in law. But unlike Gummow J she used rhetoric in the colloquial sense, as meaningless show, turning to Walter Sofronoff’s word picture in a speech to women lawyers, to whom she said that ‘none of the decisions of the justices were in the least bit influenced by the poetry by which the proceedings had been outlined’.
