Inessential Solidarity

Examines critical intersections of rhetoric and sociality in order to revise some of rhetorical theory's basic presumptions. Rather than focus on the arguments and symbolic exchanges through which social relations are defined, it exposes an underivable rhetorical imperative, an obligation to respond that is as undeniable as the obligation to age.

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.