Diane Davis - Biography

Diane Davis, Ph.D., Kenneth Burke Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, is Director of the Computer, Writing, and Research Lab and Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing, English, and Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Working at the intersections of rhetorical theory, media theory, and poststructuralist philosophy, she is recognized for her investigations into radical exposure at the level of the 'creature', the brute fact of the incarnate being’s susceptibility and vulnerability, in the face of which human reason is mostly impotent. In her first book, for example, she 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 by a force echoing from the 'noise' of physis rather than the melodies of nomos. To be possessed by laughter, Diane Davis proposes, is to be thrown into a petit mal in which your capacity for meaning-making is suspended and your delusions of mastery and spontaneity are interrupted.

Diane Davis devotes many articles, three book reviews, and two edited collections to the work of Avital Ronell, frequently zeroing in on its affective charge: 'It's not unusual to take tiny hits in a critical work that advances a specific position or viewpoint; however, the distinguishing feature of the Ronellian punch is that it's the effect of no positive knowledge claim. Ronell's critical texts operate not as formal arguments but as the obliteration of any possible argumentative ground, and that's what delivers the KO blow'. Diane Davis exposes the destabilizing force of Avital Ronell's extreme close-ups, noting that they institute a break, an interruption in inherited meaning. The 'Ronellian punch', Diane Davis writes, takes place 'in or as a devastating withdrawal of understanding that leaves you with no recourse to anything like counter-argument'. Diane Davis spotlights the affective charge of Avital Ronell’s unprecedented style: the jarring effect it can have on the reader when, for instance, this author abruptly breaks with 'the conventions of scholarly distance to speak to "you," addressing "you" directly and putting you on the spot', giving you the sense that she is suddenly 'very close range and onto you' – and you’re not ready for it because this wasn’t supposed to happen to you in a scholarly work.

In her most recent book manuscript, Diane Davis focuses on the intersections of rhetoric and solidarity, exploring a sort of commonality, oblivious to borders (a débordement), that precedes and exceeds symbolic identification and therefore any prerequisite for belonging; put in another way, she attempts to expose an originary (or pre-originary) rhetoricity – an affectability or persuadability – that is the condition for symbolic action. For there to be any sharing of symbolic meaning, any effective use of persuasive discourse at all, she proposes, a more originary rhetoricity must already be operating, a consitutive persuadability and responsiveness that testifies, first of all, to a fundamental structure of exposure. If rhetorical practices work by managing to have an effect on others, then an a priori openness to the other's affection is its first requirement: the 'art' of rhetoric can be effective only among affectable existents, who are by definition something other than distinct 'individuals', intentional subjects, or self-determining agents, and whose relations necessarily precede and exceed symbolic intervention.

Diane Davis is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (2000), co-author of Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (2008, with Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford), and editor of The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (2008) and Reading Ronell. She is currently putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript entitled Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations.