The time and place of rhetoric: a response

Classical rhetoricians talked about kairos, the timeliness and time-boundedness of any speech. When was it delivered? What were the conditions of its reception? Did it speak successfully to the moment and place in which it was delivered? Among other things, my book offers a discussion of time and space in medical law scholarship and adjudication in just this way. But what is the kairos of the text itself? My concern with this and my thoughts on it are prompted by the generous and insightful responses to the book that have been given above. The book's content, its theoretical ambitions and its relation to the broader political context are realized, in so far as they are realized at all, across three temporal dimensions