Spotlighting a rhetorical “situation” irreducible to symbolic relations, Davis proposes quite provocatively that rhetoric—rather than ontology (Aristotle/Heidegger), epistemology (Descartes), or ethics (Levinas)—is “first philosophy.” The subject or “symbol-using animal” comes into being, Davis argues both with and against Emmanuel Levinas, only inasmuch as it responds to the other; the priority of the other is not a matter of the subject's choice, then, but of its inescapable predicament. Directing the reader’s attention to this inessential solidarity without which no meaning-making or determinate social relation would be possible, Davis aims to nudge rhetorical studies beyond the epistemological concerns that typically circumscribe theories of persuasion toward the examination of a more fundamental affectability, persuadability, responsivity.
Diane Davis is associate professor of Rhetoric & Writing and English at the University of Texas at Austin, and she holds the Kenneth Burke Chair of Rhetoric at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Davis is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter, coauthor of Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition, and editor of Reading Ronell and The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell.