Dialogues: Don’t Call for a Dialogue! This is Not Death of a Salesman Organizing Communities between Pathos and Logos

Paper Details

Authors: Pianezzi D.

DOI: 10.19245/25.05.pij.11.02.14

Journal: PuntOorg International Journal

Year: 2026

Publisher: Editoriale Scientifica srl

Document Type: Article

Open Access: All Open Access; Gold Open Access

Cited by: 0

Abstract

Is dialogue still possible? In what forms and under what conditions? In this article, I attempt to answer these questions by reflecting on how dia-logue has lost its logos, that is, how exchanges organised around rational argumentative logic have been unsettled by both the unbridled proliferation of phantasmatic imaginaries and a renewed emphasis on corporeality, and hence on pathos, on embodied sensing as a locus of epistemic and ethico-political insight. I first reconstruct how organizational and feminist scholarship has proposed to centre dialogue on pathos, while also highlighting the limits of this perspective. I then suggest conceiving dialogue in aporetic terms, acknowledging and sustaining the tension between logos and pathos, between the rational signification of language and that which inevitably escapes it. Finally, I offer an example of a dialogue on care drawn from a two-day community study event, illustrating how such an aporetic form of dialogue is both (im)possible and necessary for the building of community. Dialogue thus becomes itself a device of care, unsettling the boundaries between public and private, rational and affective, masculine and feminine, truth and opinion. © 2026, Editoriale Scientifica srl. All rights reserved.

Keywords

(dia)logos; caring; community; organizing; pathos

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