Abstract
What is the relationship between ethics and persuasion? Is ethics an after-thought or does it ‘infiltrate’ persuasion from the onset? Brooke Rollins engages with these questions through deconstructive readings of ‘a series of canonical rhetorical texts that have traditionally been understood as insistent or even guileful instances of persuasion’ (blurb) by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates and Plato. Rollins draws on Derrida’s work to define ethics as ‘the ongoing interruption of being by otherness’, namely ethics as emerging ‘in the event of an expropriating encounter with otherness in which self-identity is unsettled’ (p. 2). One of the aims of her book is ‘to show the ways that the largely instrumental art of persuasion involves a transformative encounter with otherness in which the subject is at stake’ (p. 3). She writes, While several important thinkers from the classical tradition argue that there can and should be an ethical component to artful persuasion, the received wisdom is that ethics is something that must be added on – a supplement to an art and practice that is constituted by its capacity for manipulation. Over the course of The Ethics of Persuasion, I challenge this received wisdom by demonstrating the ways that the preoriginary, interruptive ethics I’ve begun to describe with Derrida infiltrates persuasion essentially. What my readings of ancient rhetorical texts reveal is that when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes. (p. 5)
The book is split into Introduction, six substantive chapters and Epilogue. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Derrida’s rhetorical ethics. Chapter 2 focuses on Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen speech. Chapter 3 includes a deconstructive reading of the ghostwritten speeches of Lysias. The other three chapters are devoted to ‘the famed rhetorical paideia of Isocrates (Chapter 4), the pedagogical displays of Socrates in Plato’s Lysis (Chapter 5), and Derrida’s own funeral speeches (Chapter 6)’ (p. 6). All in all, while offering a thoughtful and in-depth analysis, the book can be a challenging reading for those students and scholars who are not particularly familiar with the work of Derrida and his followers.