Moral pornography or ethical rhetoric?

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