Moral pornography or ethical rhetoric?

Authors

  • Frédéric Regard Ecole Normale Supérieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.82

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the literary implications of Judith Butler's views on pornography. Butler chooses to argue againts a restrictive view of the performativity of injurious speech. She notes that pornography charts a domain of unrealizable positions and that the phantasmatic power of signs cannot, strictly speaking, constitute that reality. Butler also contemplates the possibility of a counter-speech, a kind of talking back that would implicate the emergence of an agency. Drawing on Angela Carter's famous theoretical essay on the marquis de Sade, I want to add grist to Butler's mill, but also to suggest that the production of an agency can only be achieved if the talking back has a rhetorical dimension, that only rhetoric can constitute an appropriate tool to fight back the threat of injurious speech. I henceforth suggest that Carter's contentious analysis of Sade as a "moral pornographer" should be best described as a theory of ethical rhetoric

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References

Carter, Angela. 1993 (1979). The Sadeian Woman. An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago.

Carter, Angela. 1997 (1983). "Notes from the Front Line". Shaking a Leg. Collected Journalism and Writings. London: Chatto and Windus.

Barthes, Roland. 1970 (1957). "Le Mythe aujourd'hui". Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Barthes, Roland. 1994 (1971). Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Vol. II.

Black, Max. 1993 (1979). "More about Metaphor". Metaphor and Thought. Ed. A. Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge Foucault, Michel. 1976. La Volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.

Kermode, Frank. 1979 (1966). The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MacKinnon, Catherine. 1993. Only Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Published

29-05-2002

How to Cite

Regard, F. (2002). Moral pornography or ethical rhetoric?. Journal of English Studies, 3, 265–274. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.82

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