Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Philippe-Joseph Salazar (salazaʁ), a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris (founded 1563) before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a prestigious French literary prize for political non-fiction, Prix Bristol des Lumières, for his book on the rhetoric of jihadism: Paroles armées (2015), translated in four languages (in English, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP, 2017). Salazar's advisor at Ecole Normale Supérieure was Louis Althusser. While at ENS he joined the Conférence Olivaint, an exclusive club dedicated to training future leaders in the Catholic and liberal tradition of public oratory, and completed a voluntary internship at the cultural affairs section of Paris City Hall when President Chirac was mayor. Salazar would later pursue graduate studies in metaphysics (on metaphor and ontology) with Emmanuel Levinas, in semiotics (on voice) with Roland Barthes and in political theory with Maurice Duverger. Lacanian psychoanalyst and film theorist Anna Guédy of École Freudienne de Paris further influenced his academic career (lectures on film and voice in Paris), which led to a collaboration to critical theory journal La Cause Freudienne edited by Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller. Early friendships with French avant-garde actor Serge Merlin and professor of declamation (in the tradition of Sarah Bernhardt) Pierre Spivakoff deepened his understanding of voice. He began contributing extensive articles on voice, opera and psycho-analysis, to leading journal Avant-Scène Opera (from 1977 to 1984).