Abstract

The dissertation analyzes the representation of persuasion in pre-Platonic Greek texts, particularly in Homer's Iliad. Reduced to a mere psychological phenomenon by later Greek philosophy, persuasion is, for the early Greeks, a pre-ontological 'force' associated with a turning toward presence. As the trace before presence, the turning of persuasion disrupts the oppositions between self and other, inside and outside, persuasion by another and obedience to oneself. As such, it threatens not only the identity of the individual but, in the case of Homer, the continuity and linearity of the narrative. ;The basis for Plato's condemnation of rhetoric is shown to be adumbrated in the Homeric bifurcation of beneficent, male persuasion, associated with good counsel, oaths, and memory, and malevolent, female persuasion, associated with deceptive speech, seductive attire, and forgetting. But whereas in Plato these oppositions are stabilized and then hierarchized by the context , they are constantly interrupted in the Homeric text. In every case, the turning of persuasion marks each side of the opposition with the traces of the other. Persuasion is both a turning-toward and a turning-away, both recovery and loss. ;The turning of persuasion structures the entire Homeric epic and accounts for its profoundly 'tragic' nature. Because the turning is the trace of itself, it cannot come on the scene 'as such,' and thus must be betrayed, turned away from, concealed. Only in the exemplary relations established through gift-giving, prayer, narrative, and friendship, is the turning revealed in its concealment, shown to be that which can never appear on be circumscribed and defined. ;Because the turning of persuasion precedes the identities that are turned toward, persuasion threatens the sovereignty of philosophy as the search for identifiable origins and ends. It is thus argued at the end of the dissertation that ambivalent persuasion had to be suppressed, reduced to a more or less deceptive manipulation of appearances, a process which takes place between individuals but which in no way constitutes or threatens the identity of those individuals. In order for philosophy to ground and justify itself, then, the turning of persuasion had to be itself turned away from, transformed into an idea, an activity, or technique: hence the movement from persuasion to philosophy, from persuasion to the opposition and antagonism between philosophy and rhetoric