In 2015 he received a prestigious French literary prize for political non-fiction, Prix Bristol des Lumières [fr], for his book on the rhetoric of jihadism: Paroles armées (2015; English title: Words are Weapons.

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.

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.

At the prompting of both his philosophy advisor Louis Althusser and French sociologist Georges Balandier, Salazar travelled to apartheid South Africa in 1978 to undertake field-research on racial rhetoric, which led to a first doctoral dissertation in social and cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

[12] He has since retained an interest in opera as a social form of knowledge (2000, keynote speaker of cross-cultural event Carmen 2000, SoBe, Miami,[13] and co-founded Espacio Cultural Triangular with New York photographer Ruben Roncallo).

Salazar's senior dissertation (or Doctorat d'Etat) concerned itself with oral culture in the French classical age and it remains to this day a reference work on the topic[15] as Le Culte de la Voix au 17e Siècle).

[17] In 1993 Salazar convened at Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, a prestigious locale for cutting edge research, a colloquium to salute Fumaroli's pioneering work in rhetoric.

During this "classical" phase Salazar published or edited key documents of French cultural tradition, such as Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy's seminal De Arte Graphica( a key document of French Classicism in the fine arts), Bishop Jacques Amyot's royal lectures on oratory for King Henri III,[18] royal preceptor and theologian Pierre Daniel Huet's Memoirs, and skeptical philosopher François de La Mothe Le Vayer, the Sun-King's teacher.

[19] Recognized as a prominent 17th century studies scholar, Salazar was appointed to a Chair at Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance, at François Rabelais University, Tours, France in 1999.

Seminal works have marked Salazar's reshaping of rhetoric as the study of forms of power in contemporary democracies: Truth in Politics,[24] Amnistier l’Apartheid (in Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou's series Ordre Philosophique), Vérité, Réconciliation, Réparation, a collaborative book with Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida), credited for having introduced in French political thought the concept of ubuntu (Edwy Plenel, Le Monde, 12/30/2004).

[58] In addition to his regular chronicles for online culture newsmagazine Les Influences as Le rhéteur cosmopolite and Comment raisonnent-ils?,[59] and blogs at Yale Books Unbound.

[61] The French book received the coveted prix Bristol des Lumières (best nonfiction) a day before the November 2015 Paris Bataclan (theatre) massacre by Islamic State's militants.

He collaborates with French publisher Piranha as editorial adviser at large for foreign fiction (novels by Christopher Hope, Kazuki Sakuraba, Phil Redmond).

From 2007 to 2014 he directed a series of publications on the power of rhetoric at Klincksieck [fr] (the oldest publishing house in the social sciences in France) ranging from Buddhist rhetoric (Rada Ivekovic) to Heidegger (Valerie Allen and Ares D. Axiotis), from visual eloquence (Hanno Hardt) at the time of the disintegration of Yugoslavia to Third Reich and DDR propaganda machines (Randall L. Bytwerk), from migrants' eloquence to political styles (Robert Hariman).