Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (review)

The theoretical project of Diane Davis’s powerful new book, which deftly brings continental philosophy to bear on key issues in contemporary rhetorical theory, unfolds at the intersection of rhetoric and community, but only in the sense that those concepts are radically refigured in the unfolding. In Inessential Solidarity, Davis argues that all symbolic action (including persuasion and identification, two of rhetorical studies’ primary critical locations) is premised on and always conditioned by “a constitutive persuadability and responsivity that testifies . . . to a fundamental structure of exposure” (3). This “fundamental structure of exposure” is primarily a Levinasian one, and Davis carefully works through Emmanuel Levinas’s discussions of encountering the face of the other (le visage d’Autrui) to demonstrate that we are neither spontaneous agents nor even complex collections of Burkean identifications, but rather something more like hostages obligated to respond to the radically incomprehensible other.

To encounter the face of the other, as Davis explains, “is both to be called into question and put into service” (13). Called into question because the encounter with the face precedes and exceeds all cognitive capacities and so interrupts any fantasies of plentitude; it is “an encounter with vastness that overwhelms the powers of comprehension” (53–54). Put into service because there is no choice but to respond; in fact, “‘the subject’ is the response to alterity. It has no substance beyond this inessential solidarity, this receptivity and responsivity that are the conditions . . . for symbolicity itself ” (14). This simultaneous exposure and obligation to the other, Davis tells us, underwrites all of our conscious or symbolic rhetorical endeavors, so what we would call the art of rhetoric (the strategic use of symbols to produce effects in the world) is already an effect of the prior—preoriginary—“affectability or persuadability” (2) that she articulates with Levinas. Insisting that this exposedness is a rhetorical imperative (and parting with Levinas on this particular terminological point), Davis issues a challenge to the field whose critical and theoretical endeavors focus disproportionately on rhetoric’s symbolic function: to draw the curtains wider. Look not only to rhetoric’s symbolicity, Davis contends, but also to the always prior “structure of exposure” that gives rise to both symbolic action and to the very subjects who employ these symbols. This is precisely the project of Inessential Solidarity. Offering precise explication and analysis as well as innovative performative readings of critical and rhetorical theory, Davis exposes the exposedness, or in her words, the “preoriginary rhetoricity” (16), already at work in some of rhetoric’s most highly symbolic arenas (to this end the book includes chapters on identification, figuration, hermeneutics, agency, and judgment). In so doing, Inessential Solidarity illuminates rhetoric’s vast ethical significance by refiguring rhetoric itself as a kind of preoriginary community—not of indivisible subjects, but of radically exposed existents.

The community Davis is after, then, is not composed of discrete individuals who share in common some essential belief or identity, some political rallying cry or ethnicity. Instead, Davis articulates a community that is conceptually prior to (and, again, the condition for) symbolically situated markers like these. Situating Levinas’s thought in relation to that of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, Davis explains that there is no being without being-with, and that “the ‘I’ is already a kind of ‘we’” (4). If this we “is already operative essentially, constitutively,” she adds, “then contamination is originary and ontology’s project is busted before it begins” (4). There is no ontological subject—no being—in other words, before being exposed. With exposure comes the obligation to respond, and only after all of this can the subject make its appearance. What we share in common, then, is our preoriginary exposedness to the other, an exposedness that comes before our capacity to join a political party or identify with our neighbors. For Davis, this cannot be a matter of welcoming everybody in some grand embrace of difference. She frames community as an ethical imperative, yes, but only in...