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After Community: An Interview with D.

Diane Davis

James J. Brown, Jr., Wayne State University

Enculturation: http://enculturation.net/after-community (Published

October 28, 2010)

Inessential Solidarity:
Rhetoric and Foreigner
Relations

Available October 28, 2010

University of Pittsburgh Press

When I say that Diane Davis'

Inessential Solidarity “comes
after” community, you might
assume that this book
suggests the possibility of a

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“post-community” world. You

might also put it in a certain
category of books—say, with Terry Eagleton’s After Theory—that
evokes a temporal after, suggesting that community is something we
can “get over” or “get past.” But this is not what I’m hoping to evoke.
Instead, I mean to suggest that Davis “comes after” the perplexing
question of community, quests after it, tracks it down. She is hot on its
trail. And yet, if she’s addressing the question of community, then it is
most definitely addressing her as well. As we’ll discover below, Davis
was hit with the question of community during her work on a previous
book, Breaking Up [at] Totality. And she has been “on” it—as one is
on a drug—for quite some time. Community was a kind of spectre,
haunting this first book project, calling Davis to question. That
nagging call is taken up in Inessential Solidarity, a book that asks the
discipline to radically refigure its relationship to “community” (a term
that can be, for rhetoricians, what Burke would call a “god term”) and
that refigures rhetoric as “first philosophy.”

The question of community is arriving from places unknown, and

Davis is attempting an answer. But this encounter points directly at the
difficulty of the approach of the other, a difficulty that she takes up in
her most recent work. Davis has been addressed by the question of
community, but this encounter is shot through with difficulties: How
does one address such a call? Where is the call coming from? How
does one answer a call that does not even present itself as such? What
are the ethical and rhetorical implications of thinking that we have
understood this call? Any attempt to address an-other inevitably
involves both an appropriation of that other—one that attempts to
make sense of it—and also a depropriating address that continuously
upsets any final move toward understanding. But while each attempt
to address the question is an appropriation, such gestures never

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completely succeed. And yet, every address demands a response.

Even a non-response is a response, for the address of the other
demands our attention prior to and beyond any choice we make to
accept the call (or its accompanying charges). These are the
challenges that confront and are confronted by Inessential Solidarity.

The address of the other is not one that we choose to receive. It

approaches us, and Davis’s work insists that this encounter is
rhetorical. If we are exposed to the other, then this “(re)sounds a
rhetorical imperative, and nonresponse is not an option” (Inessential
Solidarity 12). This rhetorical imperative is our existential
predicament, and Davis argues (along with Jean-Luc Nancy and
Levinas, among others), that exposedness to the other is what makes
the self solidary with the other. Community is not based on a shared
essence or identity, and it is not based on a project. The community
addressed by Davis is not based on a choice to expose ourselves to the
other. Rather, community is exposed by our exposedness to one
another—a (non)experience that every singularity shares. This
inessential solidarity suggests that scholars of rhetorical studies are
being called to rethink the relationship between rhetoric and
community. It’s important to note here that Davis does not insist that
we welcome the other. This has already happened, we are already
exposed to various others and responding to them. Rather, she asks
that rhetoricians recognize the rhetoricity of the other’s approach.
Every-body is exposed, and this points to a primary sociality that
leaves us radically open. The other arrives, and that other as other
disrupts any attempt to pin down its meaning.

So, when the question of community comes calling, Davis attempts to

answer it. And while this attempt brings with it an unavoidable
hermeneutic drive to interpret, Davis’s approach is also something

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otherwise than hermeneutics. While the hermeneut attempts to pin

down meaning, Davis comes after the problematics of community
with restraint, with a desire to ask after the question of community in
a way that does not completely domesticate it to the realm of the
understood. The entire undertaking raises immense questions: How
does one pursue a question without landing squarely in the realm of
the understood? How does one attend to the arrival of an alterity that
resists any attempt at description?

Accounting for the address of the other, an address that overwhelms

(as Levinas explains in Totality and Infinity, it “brings me more than I
can contain”), one is dogged by the difficulty that this other arrives
without mediation and leaves only a trace. Davis seeks out the trace of
an encounter with the other that is barely perceptible. It is, in
Levinas’s words, “an incision made in time that does not bleed” (“The
Trace of the Other,” 354). Any examination of the trace demands a
performative method that is otherwise than hermeneutics and the final
determination of meaning. This method is an attempt to recover the
seemingly unrecoverable. The trace is “not a sign like any other” but it
“plays the role of a sign” (356). The trace signifies “something on the
basis of a past which, in a trace, is neither indicated nor signaled, but
yet disturbs order, while coinciding neither with revelation nor with
dissimulation…A trace is a presence that which properly speaking has
never been there, of what is always past” (358). As this description no
doubt makes clear, any attempt to examine the trace is fraught with
difficulty, and it demands a careful attention to method. If we are
indeed able to attend to the unmediated approach of the other, that
method will have been attentive and tentative. It will have been, in
some sense, humble. In the interview that follows, Davis takes up the
question of Inessential Solidarity’s method, one that examines the
incision described by Levinas. In the book, she describes her

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challenge:

The task here—to expose a solidarity that precedes

symbolicity—cannot be accomplished through representation
(alone), through tireless exegesis, the constative work of
describing and explicating; there is also, of course, no way to
skip that work. The performative event of the saying takes
place at (or as) the limit, the ‘unexposable in,’ but the saying
by necessity gives a said that offers itself up once again to
thematization and appropriation. Perhaps the most I can hope
for here is that this text will testify to the saying’s tortured
rapport with the said, in which it barely hangs on. (Inessential
Solidarity, 15)

What is perhaps most striking about her discussion of Inessential

Solidarity during the interview is her insistence that it is an
experiment, something that may or may not “work.” Twice during the
interview, in describing her attempts to “figure the unfigurable,” to
speak of a pre-ontological rhetoricity and sociality that is the condition
of being and that is the basis of solidarity, Davis says: “Maybe it
won’t work. We’ll have to see.”

It would be wrong to see this statement as anything other than the

hospitality that defines Davis’s approach. This “we’ll have to see” is
not about a lack of confidence. Rather, it is about an incertitude that
has everything to do with the difficulties of finally and completely
understanding. Davis discusses this incertitude when she describes
Avital Ronell’s willingness to painstakingly read, and I would suggest
that this same description applies to Davis’s work:

A certain understanding is the goal, either way, but Ronell

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observes that ‘having understood, or thinking one has

understood stands precisely on a refusal to read.’ Reading
demonstrates that there is no ethical or logical past tense to
understanding; guaranteed to shatter prejudgment structures
and overwhelm cognition, it offers no comforting end point, no
refuge to mastery or payoff of certitude. Reading really takes
guts. (The UberReader, “Introduction” xxiv)

The payoff of certitude would suggest that the work is done, but
Davis’s approach to the interlocking questions of community and of
the other suggests precisely the opposite. Our work is never done, and
the danger is that we land on any final understanding. Whether she is
exposing the field of rhetoric to refigured notion of community,
questioning the anthropocentrism of Levinas and others, or insisting
that rhetoric cannot be completely collapsed into hermeneutics, Diane
Davis is always hesitant to suggest that she has the answer, that she
has understood something that we have all missed. It is this approach
that will make Inessential Solidarity and its simultaneously humble
and far-reaching mode of questioning such an important contribution
to rhetorical studies.

Jim Brown: It seems you've been grappling with the question of

"inessential solidarity" for quite some time. In a 1999 JAC article, you
used this phrase in its subtitle.1 How has the project shifted and
morphed? How has your thinking about these questions changed?

Diane Davis: The idea for this book actually began when I was
writing the first book, Breaking Up [at] Totality. A section in chapter
three, just a section, is devoted to rethinking “community.” But when I
started writing it, it really took over and took me over, without

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concern for my little outline or the aims and limits of the text at hand.
I started reading everything I could get my hands on about this notion
of a rapport sans rapport, an inoperative (Nancy) or unavowable
(Blanchot) “community” that has nothing to do with identity or
identification, with communion or contracts. I needed to set it aside
and “finish” (as if one ever finally finishes) my book, but in order to
do that I had to promise this new Master that I would be back, that I’d
return to give it its own space and time. It was a negotiation. Breaking
Up came out in 2000, and the article you mentioned came out in 1999,
so you can see the negotiation working itself out in the overlap. And
you can see my time line: I’ve been “on” this idea now for over a
decade. It’s crazy. And when I say I’ve been on it, I don’t mean it in
the way one does when one says, “no problem, I’m on it!” but more in
the way one does when one asks “what are you on?”

I’d have to go back and read that 1999 article and the other articles
between then and now to say anything halfway intelligent about how
the project has shifted. But I can say that it took a huge turn when my
reading finally included Levinas—along with the texts by Blanchot
that are devoted to reading (and typically rewriting) Levinas. I had
already “read” Totality and Infinity, but it didn’t resonate at first. His
vocabulary really turned me off; I couldn’t get past it. But in 2001 I
took classes in Switzerland with Avital Ronell and Jean-Luc Nancy,
and both of them opened me to Levinas in a way that I had previously
resisted. To really read Levinas, you have to recognize that he is
radically redefining certain very cringe-worthy terms, such as
“metaphysics” and “prayer” and “religion,” but also “face” and
“conversation” and “ethics.” So I started reading Levinas without
cringing (much). The project took on a discernable shape when it
occurred to me that the existential predicament that Heidegger calls
Mitsein, being-with-the-other, would itself have to be the function of a

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not-quite-existential predicament of “obligation,” what Levinas calls

substitution, or being-for-the-other. I realized that Levinas was right,
in other words: there could be no being-with, no ecstatic sharing of
world, that is not already a function of being-for. Being-for-the-other
(l’un-pour-l’autre, as Levinas says) does not describe your response to
some moral or cultural obligation, an obligation that you could choose
to obey or not; it describes the very condition for your existence, for
the birth of a subject, for being itself and therefore for being-with (as
Heidegger says, there is no Sein that is not already Mitsein). Once it
hit me that being-for-the-other names a preoriginary obligation to
respond to the other (to an underivable provocation, a presubjective
address or appeal) and that it is in this response that both the self and
the other emerge as existents, I understood that rhetoric precedes
ontology. Rhetoric is, as they say, “first philosophy.” That became the
“insight”—it feels a little silly calling it that—that compelled the
project in its current form.

Jim Brown: This relationship with Levinas plays out in interesting

ways in your recent work. If I'm hearing and reading that work
correctly, it seems that you're sparring (for lack of a better term) with
Levinas a bit in this book. Would this be an accurate statement? If so,
do you think this marks any kind of shift in your work?

Diane Davis: That’s an astute observation because though I would say

I’m mostly with Levinas in this book and that in a certain sense I owe
the whole thing to him, it turns out to be a somewhat conflicted
embrace. My sort of “grounding” argument, the one on which the
whole work is based, is that rhetoric is first philosophy. Levinas’s
famous declaration is, of course, that ethics is first philosophy. And
it’s no secret that he has nothing good to say about rhetoric, which for
him lines up with nonethical language. So I’m both agreeing and

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disagreeing with him on this point. He describes ethics as a

preoriginary obligation to respond to the Other, an obligation that
interrupts one’s sense of selfsufficiency and spontaneity; and I
redescribe that very obligation as a rhetorical imperative, since it
involves an obligation to respond to a nonsubjective “address” or
“appeal.” And at the end of the book, in a P.S., I take exception most
specifically to Levinas’s humanism. But again, my position is
conflicted since my entire argument assumes a Levinasian approach to
the language relation. I’m arguing that there is no way to limit
Levinasian ethics (or what I call the “rhetorical imperative”) to human
beings, and that Levinas’s own exclusion of non-human animals from
the ethico-rhetorical scene indicates a contradiction in his own terms.
So one could say I’m after a more Levinasian approach to the
language-relation than Levinas himself could or would embrace.

Jim Brown: It seems that Levinas’s stance on rhetoric shifts a bit

through the years, and I’m wondering if we might link this to the
so-called “new rhetorics” (Burke, Perelman, etc.) that radically
expand rhetoric’s scope. Would you say that when Levinas “rails
against rhetoric” as you’ve put it in P&R article that he’s railing
against a particularly narrow or restricted rhetoric? And when he’s
kinder to rhetoric, he’s speaking of a more generalized rhetoric?

Diane Davis: I think so. Levinas’s conception of rhetoric is usually

excruciatingly narrow, referring to the intentional use of persuasive
language. When I talk to you in order to persuade you of something, I
come at you both at and with “an angle,” as Levinas puts it. And he
argues that this angle makes it impossible to experience le visage
d’Autrui (the “face” or the radical singularity of the other). But that
experience is precisely the opening of what he calls “discourse” or
“conversation” (entre-tien) which names the specifically ethical

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relation. Throughout almost all of his work, rhetoric lines up with

non-ethical language. But as I have noted elsewhere, he can’t quite get
the opposition between rhetoric and ethical language to stick. In an
early essay called “Freedom and Command” (1953), he had already
described the ethical relation as a kind of persuasion before speech.
And in his most mature work, Otherwise than Being, he describes the
saying of the face (ethical language) as “an overflowing of the said
itself by a rhetoric which is not only a linguistic mirage, but a surplus
of meaning of which consciousness all by itself would be incapable”
(OTB 152; emphasis mine). In an essay published a decade later
(1981) called “Everyday Language and Rhetoric Without Eloquence,”
Levinas understands that rhetoric names not only persuasion in the
most banal sense but also the tropological function of language, which
takes place not simply as an eloquent distortion of reality but as the
production of “reality.” And he realizes that “the saying” takes place
in and through this tropological exchange, even if it has nothing to do
with “the said” or the content of the exchange. So his understanding of
rhetoric does seem to expand a little by the end.

Jim Brown: The coda of this text explores the question of the animal.
What brought you to this line of thinking? Is this a more recent
development in the project, or did you have a sense that this would be
part of the book all along?

Diane Davis: My very first publication, written when I was an MA

student and published in RSQ in 1990, was on language and
animalilty.2 This has been a serious concern of mine for as long as I
can remember having “serious concerns.” Some of my favorite
contemporary philosophers are unapologetically anthropocentric
—Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan to name just a few. It would be
irresponsible simply to dismiss them because of it, but I don’t let them

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off the hook, either, and it’s important not to. Since that first 1990
article, I’ve had the great fortune to talk with Derrida, Ronell, and
Nancy about the question of “the animal” in various settings, and their
perspectives have had a huge influence on me, as has their work more
generally. I mention somewhere in the book that Ronell frequently
hounded the Derridas about vegetarianism at the dinner table, and
Nancy told me just this past summer that Derrida ate less and less
meat toward the end of his life because he just couldn’t justify it. Of
course, the question of “the animal” is gigantic, much bigger than the
issue of vegetarianism, and really addressing it would have
apocalyptic implications—for philosophy, for rhetoric, for religion, for
Western culture itself.

But yes, to answer your question, from the beginning I knew that
some form of argument against Levinas’s anthropocentrism was going
to be a part of this book. It took a while to figure out exactly how it
was going to take shape, but it I always knew it would be in there in
some form.

Jim Brown: In a recent discussion on The Blogora, the discussion of

object-oriented philosophy/ontology/rhetoric came up. This seems to
be a hot topic right now. In fact, Enculturation recently published Scot
Barnett’s review essay “Toward an Object-Oriented Rhetoric” which
focused on Graham Harman’s work. In the Blogora discussion you
posed the question of “Why now?” That is, you asked why we are
asking questions about the object and the animal at this moment.
Clearly, these are not brand new questions, and all of this current work
is rooted in a long philosophical tradition. But these questions are
popping up with more urgency now. So, I’d like to deflect your own
question back to you. Why now?

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Diane Davis: Well, let me say first that Barnett is right that Jenny
Edbauer Rice, Byron Hawk, Debbie Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, and
Jenny Bay, for example, have all produced very interesting and
theoretically sophisticated contributions to what we could call Object
Oriented Rhetoric, exposing each of the supposedly discrete elements
of, say, the rhetorical situation, as ecologically relational and radically
exposed. In my contribution to that discussion on the Blogora, I noted
that some of the new work describing itself as Object Oriented,
however, worries me a little because it seems oblivious to the more
groundbreaking work done previously in that arena. I’m thinking not
only of, say Adorno and Baudrillard, two really compelling
interventions, but especially of Heidegger. But all of the thinkers I just
mentioned, and Harman, too, are onto the stakes of this inquiry. They
begin, for instance, with the realization that there’s no discrete object
to study, no das ding that is flatly and simply there. They don’t, in
other words, simply reconfirm the subject/object dichotomy by
presuming that there is an other of the subject that has been neglected
in order to flip the site of privilege from subject to object. They’re
interested in something else, something irreducible to this tired
dichotomy. Each in his or her own way points instead toward the
abject, toward that which is neither inside nor outside, public nor
private, subject nor object, present nor absent. The abject is what’s at
stake, it seems to me, in this discussion. It is also at stake in the
question of “the animal.”

I’m not sure why there has been a surge of interest right now in these
two questions, “the object” and “the animal.” I guess we are maybe,
hopefully, growing weary of talking about the subject as if it’s not
itself a product of subjection. Derrida actually has a theory about why
the question of “the animal” has become so important today. He says
that the West’s impossibly cruel subjugation of animals has, over the

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last 200 years or so, reached such “unprecedented proportions” that it

has sparked a surge of compassion. Animal suffering is so great today
that it’s no longer deniable, Derrida argues, and he uses the word
“genocide” unapologetically, reminding us that there are “animal
genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes
one’s breath away,” he writes in The Animal that Therefore I am (26).
But he is also talking about a different sort of genocide, one in which
“the annihilation of certain species . . . is occurring through the
organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually
interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would
have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life
proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their
continued existence or even their overpopulation” (26).

The impossible breadth of this cruelty and this suffering has sparked,
Derrida says, a “new experience” of compassion; indeed, he suggests
that a “war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) [is] being
waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal
life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other
hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity”
(28-29). Though this war has probably never not been going on,
Derrida hypothesizes that it is now in a “critical phase.” I find this
argument, this theory about why the question of “the animal” is
suddenly all over the place today, very compelling. And it’s very
likely linked to the sudden surge of interest in the question of “the
object.”

Jim Brown: Your writing style has shifted significantly since your
first book, Breaking Up [at] Totality. That text was very playful in
tone, and it was pushing the boundaries of the page. Do you have any
thoughts on this shift? What does this shift in style say about the

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changes you've undergone as a thinker?

Diane Davis: In the first book I was trying to perform what I was
talking about typographically in order to call attention to the limits of
the page as well as the materiality of language. I was, of course, very
much under the influence of Victor J. Vitanza and Avital Ronell at that
time; their styles are singular and contagious (though, no one can do
them the way they do). Anyway, that book was fun to produce and a
royal pain to publish (you would not believe. . .). I mean, it was
accepted by the first press I submitted it to, SIUP, but the process was
painful and long because of all the typographical play. When I finished
that project, I kind of felt that I had done what I set out to do, and I no
longer felt the need to make the performative argument
typographically. This time, the performativity is much more subtle—it
doesn’t jump out at you. You have to read really closely to experience
it. I try to perform two opposing methodological threads
simultaneously. On the one hand, my task is to offer a cautious
figuring of the unfigurable, or, in Levinas’s terms, to reduce the saying
to the said. (The saying lines up with the performative; it’s the
address, the greeting, the approach. The said lines up with the
constative; it’s the content, the signified meaning, etc.) And on the
other hand, my task is to allow the saying to show itself within the
said by interrupting it or, in Levinas’s terms, to reduce the said to the
saying. These opposing reductions operate in tandem without much
commentary from me as I go. And maybe it won’t work. We’ll have to
see. In the introduction, I say that the text offers itself up—tentatively,
experimentally—as a rhetoric of the saying, as a work devoted to
interrogating and affirming the saying as an extra-symbolic rhetorical
appeal. So the performativity is still there in this book, but it takes a
different, much more subtle form this time. I’m not sure if this shift in
approach reflects a shift in thinking. I think it’s more a matter of

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finding and testing different ways to engage with performativity. I

have no idea what my next book will look like.

Jim Brown: Your discussion of this work as tentative and

experimental raises interesting questions about your mode of address.
In much of your work, you ask the discipline to do some difficult
things--to consider the "nonappropriative relation," to redefine its
stance toward agency and ethics, to completely rethink the notion of
"community." And yet few would describe your tone as abrasive or
aggressive. How do you think you've been able to strike this kind of
balance?

Diane Davis: Well, I don’t do polemics. I understand the significance

of a certain type of polemics, and I can appreciate its potential. But I
don’t typically have the time or energy to write with or even against a
thinker that I don’t also respect and embrace. To really write with or
against someone, you have to spend some quality time with their
work. You can’t do much of anything worthwhile after a one night
stand; you have to go steady, commit for a while, and I only really
cuddle up to texts I’m attracted to, those that are clearly going to teach
me something substantial. So I end up writing with and against texts
and writers that I also love—at least a little—and certainly respect. I
may end up intensely disagreeing with some aspect of a work, but the
respect is still there, too. In Inessential Solidarity, for example, there
are two chapters in which I think with and against two well known
rhetoricians: Steven Mailloux and Michael Hyde. The aim in both
chapters is to expose something that their work covers over. But I
chose them because their work is solid and thoughtful, because I find
so much to agree with in it. Nonetheless, I want to talk about
something they don’t talk about, something that their work makes it
really hard to talk about—something that their work helps to

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foreclose. Still, you’re not hearing disrespect or dismissal there,

certainly not aggression, precisely because I embrace what they’re
doing for the most part. And because without them doing what they
do, I’m not sure I could be doing what I do.

Jim Brown: I wonder if you might talk about recent developments

that have happened under the banner of “community.” Specifically,
I’m thinking of the Tea Party Movement and the Obama campaign.
How does the work you do in Inessential Solidarity speak to the
various complicated questions raised by these kinds of
“communities.”

Diane Davis: What I’m trying to describe with the phrase “inessential
solidarity” is not reducible to any form of determinate “community,”
but determinate communities are potential effects of it. Members of
this party or that club form a “community” (in the most banal sense)
inasmuch as they share the presumption of a common being or interest
or purpose or practice or value; they share an identification across
some level of presumed essence or desire. The bond or contract that
takes place among the members of each community defines its limits,
marking what it takes to get in and so the measure by which others are
excluded. Now, Burke taught us that belonging is fundamentally
rhetorical, which means that what is presumed to be common among
the members the Tea Party or the Obama campaign, for example, is
not fixed ontologically (it’s not about essence) but is rather a function
of shared symbol systems. We identify with those we presume are
“like us” or share something with us, and the presumed overlap of
commonality is first of all a product of symbolicity. However, what
I’m trying to describe—and this is where Steven Mailloux and I
disagree—precedes and exceeds symbolic structure. Inessential
solidarity names a kind of presubjective relationality and responsivity

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(and so rhetoricity) that would be the condition for symbolic

exchange; we could say it operates on a more primordially rhetorical
level. It is thanks to this originary or preoriginary rhetoricity that any
sort of determinate “community” can take shape at all, whether we’re
talking about the Nazis or the PTA. But it’s also why there is
something called compassion. If identity preceded relationality and
responsivity, as is typically presumed—if the freedom to choose
preceded the obligation to respond—there would no generosity in the
world, Levinas notes, not “even the little that there is.”

Jim Brown: At one point in the book, you describe this preoriginary
rhetoricity by pointing to Nancy’s discussion of passengers on a train.
For Nancy, this is a situation that corresponds to the notion of “being-
with.” Passengers on a train are “not linked” and they are “quite
together.” They are singularities, exposed to one another, prior to or
beyond any choice to “respond.” This exposedness is the basis for the
theory of community that you’re developing in this text. They are next
to each other but “in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior
manner.” But even this correspondence seems to present a problem,
because everyone is headed in the same direction. There may be no
“fusion” amongst this group, but they do share a direction or
trajectory. I raise this problem not to “disprove” Nancy. Rather, I
wonder if the difficulty here is an inescapable one. How do we
describe an “inessential solidarity” when every metaphor seems to fall
short of such a description?

Diane Davis: Well, part of the methodological task is to demonstrate

the necessary impossibility of figuring a solidarity that is the very
condition for figuration. This inessential solidarity is exposed in the
experience of disfiguration rather than the other way around, but there
is no disfiguration without figuration—hence the back and forth

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action, the reduction, each time, of the said to the saying. In this case,
though, the analogy Nancy is using is a good one inasmuch as it
indicates a kind of liminal zone between relation and nonrelation,
“disintegration and aggregation,” “solitude and collectivity.” The train
compartment stands in for “world,” which the passengers share:
Dasein names (a) being that is first of all in-the-world and with-others,
and “world,” for Heidegger, is always a “shared world” (Mitwelt).
Dasein is constituted in and as its sharing of this world, a world that is
perpetually coming into being and putting being into play. There is no
pre-existing I, no subject of the verb “to be” that could precede this
being-with, so it indicates neither fusion nor, to be fair, a specific
direction/trajectory.

Nonetheless, as I argue in the book, being-with would have to be

dependent upon an always prior responsivitiy—in other words,
being-with does not adequately cover the sort of inessential solidarity
that I’m trying to expose; it is already derivative of another sort of
relationality or solidarity that is the focus of this book. That’s what
I’m trying to indicate when, a few paragraphs after I describe the train
compartment scene, I begin a new paragraph under the heading “The
Handoff.” The handoff is from Nancy to Levinas, from being-with to
being-for, from Mitsein to substitution (“l’un-pour-l’autre”). The train
passengers are simply seated next to each other, side by side,
suspended between disinterestedness and concern; they exist in and as
their ecstatic (non)relation. They are with-one-another, Mitsein-style,
which means that they share being and therefore states-of-mind
(moods) that attest to their being-outside, in-the-world, together. And
yet, they are capable of maintaining a fundamental indifference
toward one another, of continuing, as I put it in the book, to file their
nails or to read the paper (or Being and Time) without offering the
slightest gesture of acknowledgment or concern. They are exposed

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without being faced with the fact of their exposedness. And my

argument, alongside Levinas, is that this indifference must already be
dependent upon a prior nonindifference—that is, on a nonsubjective
responsivity that would be the condition for (and not the effect of) the
emergence of any Dasein, any Mitsein, any Mitwelt. What kick-starts
the emergence of world and consciousness, each time, is an obligation
to respond, a rhetorical imperative; we could also say that this
imperative operates as the kick-stand for both world and
consciousness.

Jim Brown: The introduction to the book includes a section on

“Methodology,” and it’s clear that both describing and enacting your
method is difficult and painstaking. This discussion of methodology is
not always present in works of rhetorical theory--it seems we often
assume that rhetoric entails an unspoken method (or that “rhetoric” or
“rhetorical analysis” is the method). Discussions of methodology are
(unfortunately) often reserved for the more qualitative work in our
field. I’m wondering if you might talk about what made you include
that section and whether you always think of your work in
methodological terms.

Diane Davis: That makes me laugh a little because the question of

method was so agonizing this time. No, I rarely focus on method in
my work; my approach is typically deconstructive, and I don’t usually
comment much on the implications of that “methodology” (if we can
call it that). But this time I really wanted to address the field of
rhetorical studies on both sides of the aisle, so I hoped to land on a
methodological approach that rhetoricians in communication studies
and rhetoric and writing studies would consider legitimate and
familiar. The quest really hounded and harassed me for a while. But of
course no standard method was going to work for me, no amount of

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archival work or qualitative or quantitative data collection would

expose what I wanted to expose—I tried to include a couple of what
one might call “case studies,” but it’s actually a bit of a stretch to
describe them that way. So I finally decided I better just come clean
right up front, admit that the work was not, in fact, going to adopt a
familiar methodological approach. I thought if I noted it explicitly and
also explained the perhaps unfamiliar method I had adopted, it would
make more sense to more readers. We’ll see how that works out. So
much of this work is experimental—I’m just not sure what will work
and what won’t, and I admitted that in the introduction. Maybe it
won’t work. We’ll have to see.

Notes

1 Davis, D. Diane. "'Addicted to Love'; or, toward an Inessential

Solidarity." JAC 19.4 (1999): 635-56. Print.

2 Mowery, Diane and Eve Duffy. "The Power of Language to Efface

and Desensitize." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20.2 (1990): 163-171.
Print.

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