Inessential Solidarity, by Diane Davis

Abstract: Inessential Solidarity is a re-examination of the intersections between rhetoric and community after the so-called death of the humanist subject. The rhetorical tradition typically presumes that rhetoric is an inherently communal art accomplished by a speaker or writer to pull communities together, to establish order, and to get things done in the world. This project proposes instead that an existential structure of exposedness, an irreparable openness to the other, precedes and exceeds the apparently self-sufficient subject, and (so) that an always prior but inessential "community" is rhetoric's very condition of possibility. This exposedness, this inessential solidarity that precedes any figuring of essence, is both what grants the experience of community and/but also what perpetually interrupts the drive toward communion. The ethico-political question this project explores, then, is not how to use language to build community but how to learn to listen for the communications of a "community" that always already is and/but that remains inessential and so beyond representation. How to listen for the communications of a community that exposes itself only in the interference, in the interruptions that disrupt the achievement of communion? And from there: How to activate rhetorics of community that do not immediately efface its very conditions of possibility?"