DAVIS, Diane

Summer 2021, 51.3, pp. 193-203

Rhetoricity, Temporality, Democratic Nonequivalence

Abstract:

This essay proposes that the thought of rhetoricity, as the fundamental affectability and responsivity supposed in every rhetorical exchange, could offer an orientation through which to affirm an existence-in-common worthy of the name democracy. This coexistence, this being-together that is the demos, exceeds any possible figuration as well as any historical determination. Synced to the rhythms of another temporality, its kairotic eruptions open onto an unpredictable and unprogrammable future. It is from the affirmation of this existence-in-common that a truly democratic politics might begin to be imaginable, a politics faithful to this demos, and so to its fundamental repudiation of equivalence, calculability, exchangeability.