rest in peace, prof. leff

Music: Sade: Love Deluxe (1992)

Yesterday my colleagues and I learned that rhetorical theorist and critic Michael C. Leff succumbed to cancer. Once the shock abated (although it still lingers), the mood gave way to sadness. We believe he was 67.

Mike was one of those scholars who gave his life to the field and made it a better place for us to work. I learned last night that, true to his character, the night before he passed he was working the on details of an upcoming conference on the phone with colleagues---in the ICU!

Leff's scholarship is required reading for all courses in rhetorical studies. In addition to getting rhetorical scholars to rethink Cicero, he helped to pioneer a particular version of close textual reading drawn heavily from Gadamer (as opposed, say, to the New Critics). I daresay every rhetorician of my generation has had (or should have!) an intimate encounter with Leff's work and carries around a gem of his sensibility.

Unlike many of my friends and mentors, I was not close to Mike. I knew him professionally and informally; we had a few exchanges on mail and spoke at conferences. That said, I know many of you out there who similarly were not close to Mike, nevertheless, experience news of his death with a lump in the throat. What is it about this man that was able to get in us from afar, as an author, and as a leader?

Leff's passing is experienced as a loss for so many because of his stature in the filed, but I want to say more especially because of the intimacy or care of his intellectual work. There is something about the way Mike writes and approaches scholarship, something loving and gentle, which makes the reader fall in love a little. And with that ascent, however slight, you start to feel a relationship with the author---as if you know something intimate about him.

I'd need to think about this connection more, but it is more than, say, the parasocial relationship fans develop with stars (though there is something similar). Many of us walking around at conferences feel like we have some intimate knowledge about Mike's person having been seduced by his work; there's something about the scholarly imaginary that emplaces us in a certain proximity of feeling that makes his passing hurt.

For folks in my generation (30s-40s), Leff's death is also a first of sorts: he is one of the first among the generations that taught us to move on to the celestial university. With him, then, we are caused to reflect on a person who changed the way a field thinks, and how deeply that way abides. Mike had to persuade his cohort, and those before him, that textual critique was a merging of horizons. For my generation, his approach was a major (de)fault line--a tectonic plate, a boden, a ground.

Standing on the shoulders of giants.