Uploaded April 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
http://www.egs.edu Diane Davis, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. July 2nd, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.
Diane Davis is a post-structuralist rhetorician whose work is situated at the intersection of rhetorical theory and continental philosophy. She is the Kenneth Burke Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as professor of rhetoric and writing and the director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary rhetorical theory.
Diane Davis’s work is heavily influenced by the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Avital Ronell; it aims simultaneously to offer philosophical contributions to rhetorical studies and to excavate the rhetorical basis for contemporary philosophies of relationality. Davis is known for explicating a theory of originary rhetoricity (an affectability or responsivity) that would be the condition for symbolic action. She is recognized for her investigations into radical exposedness at the level of the “creature”—the material subject created via response-ability to the other—which is affected, moved to response prior to cognition.
In Breaking Up at Totality, Diane Davis explores the ways in which irrepressible laughter challenges the apparent mastery and unicity of the human subject. In the throes of a laughter she cannot control or contain, the laugher is overtaken, possessed, her capacity for meaning-making suspended and her delusions of spontaneity interrupted. This textually performative work is an experiment in typography, a breaking up at the level of structure that is heavily influenced by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book and Jacques Derrida’s Glas. Offering laughter as a trope for disruption, this work showcases a play of language that joyfully shatters conceptual frameworks, exposing an exposedness and (therefore) a relationality more fundamental than any intention or symbolic meaning.
In Inessential Solidarity, Diane Davis spotlights an intersection of rhetoric and sociality that neither depends on a preexisting individual essence nor installs an essence of the community (the common); she names this intersection “rhetoricity”: an originary affectivity or responsivity that is prior to symbolic identification and therefore in excess of every prerequisite for solidarity. There is, Davis argues, an underivable rhetorical imperative, an obligation to respond to the other that precedes and exceeds comprehension. This rhetorical imperative would be the condition for symbolic exchange rather than the other way around, and any freedom to choose would already be its effect. That is to say, responsibility (response-ability) is not a matter of freedom; one is obliged to respond in the same way one is obliged to age. “An irrevocable passivity underpins your active decision to speak or not, to moisturize or not,” Davis writes. “You are responding, either way, aging, either way. This infinite responsibility does not make rhetorical practice irrelevant—it makes it both possible and necessary” (112).
Diane Davis has taught two multi-year seminars at The EGS: one (2007–2011) focusing on the work of Jacques Derrida and the other (2013–the present) on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The current course examines Levinas’s ethics against Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, for example, but it also positions Levinas as a proto-new materialist, zeroing in on his treatment of the sensibility of the creature and the horror of undifferentiated existence. Levinas was a new materialist long before it was cool, she argues, and his approach—which attends to an immemorial remainder—could be described as a kind of realism of the remains.
Diane Davis is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Southern Illinois UP, 2000) and Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (University of Pittsburgh, 2010), co-author of Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (with Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford, Routledge, 2008), and editor of The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (U of Illinois P, 2008) and Reading Ronell (U of Illinois P, 2009). She recently co-edited, with Michelle Ballif, a special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric (2014), “Extrahuman Rhetorical Relations: Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine,” in which she contributes an interview with Avital Ronell entitled “Breaking Down Man” and an article entitled “Autozoography: Notes toward a Rhetoricity of the Living.” Davis is currently at work on a book addressing the human/animal divide, tentatively called “Creaturely Rhetorical Relations.”
http://www.egs.edu Diane Davis, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. July 2nd, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.
Diane Davis is a post-structuralist rhetorician whose work is situated at the intersection of rhetorical theory and continental philosophy. She is the Kenneth Burke Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as professor of rhetoric and writing and the director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary rhetorical theory.
Diane Davis’s work is heavily influenced by the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Avital Ronell; it aims simultaneously to offer philosophical contributions to rhetorical studies and to excavate the rhetorical basis for contemporary philosophies of relationality. Davis is known for explicating a theory of originary rhetoricity (an affectability or responsivity) that would be the condition for symbolic action. She is recognized for her investigations into radical exposedness at the level of the “creature”—the material subject created via response-ability to the other—which is affected, moved to response prior to cognition.
In Breaking Up at Totality, Diane Davis explores the ways in which irrepressible laughter challenges the apparent mastery and unicity of the human subject. In the throes of a laughter she cannot control or contain, the laugher is overtaken, possessed, her capacity for meaning-making suspended and her delusions of spontaneity interrupted. This textually performative work is an experiment in typography, a breaking up at the level of structure that is heavily influenced by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book and Jacques Derrida’s Glas. Offering laughter as a trope for disruption, this work showcases a play of language that joyfully shatters conceptual frameworks, exposing an exposedness and (therefore) a relationality more fundamental than any intention or symbolic meaning.
In Inessential Solidarity, Diane Davis spotlights an intersection of rhetoric and sociality that neither depends on a preexisting individual essence nor installs an essence of the community (the common); she names this intersection “rhetoricity”: an originary affectivity or responsivity that is prior to symbolic identification and therefore in excess of every prerequisite for solidarity. There is, Davis argues, an underivable rhetorical imperative, an obligation to respond to the other that precedes and exceeds comprehension. This rhetorical imperative would be the condition for symbolic exchange rather than the other way around, and any freedom to choose would already be its effect. That is to say, responsibility (response-ability) is not a matter of freedom; one is obliged to respond in the same way one is obliged to age. “An irrevocable passivity underpins your active decision to speak or not, to moisturize or not,” Davis writes. “You are responding, either way, aging, either way. This infinite responsibility does not make rhetorical practice irrelevant—it makes it both possible and necessary” (112).
Diane Davis has taught two multi-year seminars at The EGS: one (2007–2011) focusing on the work of Jacques Derrida and the other (2013–the present) on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The current course examines Levinas’s ethics against Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, for example, but it also positions Levinas as a proto-new materialist, zeroing in on his treatment of the sensibility of the creature and the horror of undifferentiated existence. Levinas was a new materialist long before it was cool, she argues, and his approach—which attends to an immemorial remainder—could be described as a kind of realism of the remains.
Diane Davis is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Southern Illinois UP, 2000) and Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (University of Pittsburgh, 2010), co-author of Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (with Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford, Routledge, 2008), and editor of The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (U of Illinois P, 2008) and Reading Ronell (U of Illinois P, 2009). She recently co-edited, with Michelle Ballif, a special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric (2014), “Extrahuman Rhetorical Relations: Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine,” in which she contributes an interview with Avital Ronell entitled “Breaking Down Man” and an article entitled “Autozoography: Notes toward a Rhetoricity of the Living.” Davis is currently at work on a book addressing the human/animal divide, tentatively called “Creaturely Rhetorical Relations.”
