Persuasion à la pointe de l’épée : l’imagination thérapeutique en action. Étude du chapitre 30 du Zhuangzi « Shuo Jian »

“ Persuading With Swords” : Therapeutic Imagination in Motion. A Translation and Study of Zhuangzi’s chapter 30. How can you bring about sudden and radical moral change in someone who shows himself blatantly impervious to reason, who cannot be forced in any way and may end your own life at his will ? This crucial issue was discussed and debated with growing acumen throughout the Warring States period and underlies many a speech strategy, from Mencius’s encounters with the grandees of his time down to the cunning rhetorical devices used by diplomats sent on perilous missions among the contending states of the third century. In the heretofore neglected Chapter 30 of Zhuangzi, “ Persuading with Swords”, a strange tale casting Zhuang Zhou himself as a brutal swordsman, the author conceives of a very specific intervention on the swashbuckling ruler of Zhao in order to stop him from inciting lethal battles among his champions and wreaking havoc on his State. We attend as readers to a new form of moral persuasion based on the therapeutic powers of imagination, which turns the Prince of Zhao’s own desire against him. Chapter 30 “ Persuading with Swords” () may be construed as a reflection on the power of fiction embedded in a farcical hoax, in which the author seems to have made headway with the problem tackled in Chapter 4, dealing mainly with scholars’ perilous political missions. The present study of this chapter translates, comments on and interprets the radical switch of perspective adopted in the attempt to solve the problem of the inefficacy of speech in certain critical contexts. This intervention on the ruler is analysed in the light of modern forms of story-telling psychotherapies also used to bring about a satisfactory change in persons who suffer from obsessions or violent behaviors, and contrasts them with traditional forms of persuasion best exemplified in the Mencius, which this chapter ironically references in a subtle interplay.
Graziani Romain. Persuasion à la pointe de l’épée : l’imagination thérapeutique en action. Étude du chapitre 30 du Zhuangzi « Shuo Jian ». In: Études chinoises, n°28, 2009. Numéro spécial sur le droit chinois. pp. 193-229.