The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Lee Chancey Olsen Brooke Rollins The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies. Ohio State UP, 2020. 230 p. In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins reads the classical rhetorical tradition against Jacques Derrida's ethics of otherness, and vice versa, to illustrate that the tradition, while oriented toward persuasive utilitarianism, carries considerable ethical weight and illuminates the transformative capacity of address and response. To put this differently, Ethics of Persuasion argues that the rhetorical tradition, often studied for and defined by its instrumentalist aspects, is shot through with ethical implications and imperatives. Also, as Rollins demonstrates, Derrida's ethico-philosophy is "powerfully rhetorical" (2), but not typically considered as such. The book will benefit scholars of rhetoric, pedagogy, ethics, and deconstruction—the last of these has been defined by Derrida, as Rollins notes, "as a turn towards the other" (26)—and it will serve well in graduate seminars on these topics. Rollins explicates usefully how Derrida's oeuvre extends earlier philosophers and theorists—Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of otherness and J. L. Austin's theories on speech acts and performativity, for example—in its formulation of an aporetic ethics of radical alterity in which subjects are interrupted, disturbed, and altered through encounters with and responses to others. The first chapter elucidates what Rollins calls Derrida's rhetorical ethics; the last chapter analyzes Derrida's eulogistic texts through this ethic-rhetorical lens. The other body chapters illustrate how various Derridean concepts—alterity, vulnerability, immunity, addressability and responsibility, hospitality, hostage, haunting, for example—allow new readings of classical rhetoric. The author examines specifically Gorgias, Lysias, [End Page 248] Isocrates, Plato, and earlier conceptions of persuasion and pedagogy, productively extending important critical, rhetorical, and pedagogical work by Michelle Ballif, Simon Critchley, Diane Davis, David Depew and Takis Poulakos, Debra Hawhee, H. I. Marrou, Natasha Seegert, Victor Vitanza, Jeffrey Walker, Lynn Worsham, and many others. As will be apparent to readers familiar with the work of Ballif, Critchley, Davis, and others, Ethics of Persuasion engages a broader, ongoing effort—sometimes identified as "the ethical turn"—to reclaim critical theory generally, and deconstruction specifically, from accusations of ethico-political detachment, relativism, excessive focus on textuality, and so on, in this case using Derrida to illustrate at once how his work is deeply ethical and how it illuminates the ethical dimensions of the aforementioned rhetoricians. But Rollins also helps to change the narrative by suggesting that other scholars of language have, in their extensive attention to persuasion, overlooked certain ethical, political, and ontological elements in the longer tradition. The author posits that scholars ought to attend more closely to issues of ethics, relationality, alterity, and subjectivity, especially as concerns knowledge production, discourse, and pedagogy because "each contributes to our thinking of what it means to address another [and] the ethical potential that underlies this address" (15). As a plea for a more ethical approach to persuasion and pedagogy, The Ethics of Persuasion feels especially timely, considering several recent disruptions to our collective lives. How many of us planned for a pandemic that would disrupt our lives, classrooms, and pedagogy, and increase our shared precarity? Scholars and instructors of rhetoric and ethics may be most interested in the fourth chapter, "Isocrates's Promise," which presents Isocrates—not Plato—as the true predecessor of the contemporary humanities. Rollins argues for a differently articulated legacy for Isocrates, one that incorporates an ethics of alterity, a more nuanced notion of unknowable futures, and a more complex approach to kairos. These points seem particularly apt, considering the uncertainties caused by Covid-19, climate change, and ongoing political economic violence worldwide—and considering our ongoing responsibility as scholars and educators to help others prepare for unknowable futures even as the humanities face budget cuts (or "austerity measures"), the ongoing neoliberalization of the academy, and so on. Extending the Isocratian tradition, Rollins champions a powerfully ethical, diverse, and self-validating vision of the humanities [End Page 249] that defies the conservative version espoused by, among others, William J. Bennett in The Book of Virtues (1993)—that is, a reactionary, elitist, xenophobic version that is increasingly...