The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies

Persuasion has always carried an ethical charge. From the orators of ancient Greece to the rhetorical theorists of today, the question of how we move an audience, and what obligations we bear in doing so, has never been far from the center of philosophical debate. In The Ethics of Persuasion, Brooke Rollins draws on the work of Jacques Derrida to argue that this ethical dimension has been systematically undertheorized across more than two millennia of rhetorical tradition. Working through canonical texts by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, works typically read as exercises in calculated or manipulative persuasion, Rollins brings deconstructive reading strategies to bear in order to recover the ethical imperatives embedded within them. She argues that our persuasive endeavors are not simply the deployment of linguistic technique by sovereign, self-present speakers, but are constituted by what Derrida calls an always prior encounter with otherness, an irreducible ethical relationship that precedes and conditions every act of communication. Rigorous, original, and intellectually demanding, The Ethics of Persuasion makes a significant contribution to both rhetorical theory and Derrida scholarship, offering a new way of inheriting a tradition that has too often been read in purely strategic terms.