Notes on “Addressing Alterity” by Diane Davis

The major problem of this article is that it doesn’t actually demonstrate a non-hermeneutical rhetoric. What would that mean? Everything is interpretable, because everything is interpreted. Part of Davis’s problem is that she imagines a stable mental model on the part of the interpreter (which can happen), but, often times, we find that encounters with the unfamiliar demand a change of mental models (which I would argue is still a hermeneutical operation, just the refinement of the hermeneutic in use).

• “However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not in the ‘said’ (le dit) but in the ‘saying’ (le dire). The said indicates the constative production of conceptual forms, themes, ideas; it thus offers itself up to interpretation. The saying, by contrast, indicates a performative, an address that necessarily unsettles what is congealed in the already-said�most specifically for our purposes, it shatters the conceptual image that ‘I’ have interiorized of ‘you,’ which takes us both out, ‘essentially.’” (191-2)—The thing I find troubling about this quote is the fact that, of course, performatives are open to interpretation and and the appropriation of meaning. It’s silly (and I think missing the point of post-structural thought) to assume that language is hermeneutically appropriated and gesture/performance isn’t. Of course, if you want to do the whole French, pomo Feminist thing, I suppose you have to make that distinction (as Cixous does).
• Just because Levinas says something, doesn’t mean it is true. Davis’s “proof” of the above claims lies in citing a collection of quotes from Levinas. This seems really strange, especially as the evidence is “take it or leave it.” What does this mean: “No matter what you say to me, when you address me you present yourself as an interpretable phenomenon from which you are always already busting loose, as a theme or concept that nonetheless cannot contain you” (192).
• “So though I readily affirm the significance of this work, what I am trying to attend to here is precisely what it cannot abide: I’m attempting to offer a rhetoric of the saying�that is, an elaboration of rhetoric’s explicitly nonhermeneutic, ethical dimension” (193). So, for Levinas (because Davis seems to have just borrowed this distinction), the saying is the moment at which my being and my status as other to you escapes from the framework of your interpretation. Why is this ethical? Why is this rhetorical? It seems that “the saying” which Davis connects to questions of eloquence and style (I think) are going to always be connected to hermeneutics because they are, themselves, linguistic simple-systems. Yes?
• “Levinas describes learning quite differently: if it’s really learning, then it is necessarily a trauma, a shattering of ‘self’ and ‘world,’ not an appropriation but an experience of depropriation and alteration from which there is no return. Learning, in Levinas’s lexicon, takes place via an encounter with the other, who, in addressing me, exceeds my thematizing powers and ‘brings me more than I can contain’ (1961, 51). This could not be further from the process of homogenization and accretion that Mailloux describes, a process that grows the learner’s ‘world’ while simultaneously shielding him from any outside encroachment. Learning only what he already knows or is preprogrammed to assimilate, the rhetorical hermeneut makes sense of others by running them through his own structures of understanding. And there is, of course, no other way to make sense: hermeneutic interpretation is grounded in pre-understanding, in what Heidegger describes as a tripartite ‘fore-structure’: fore-having (Vorhabe), fore-sight (Vorsicht), and fore-conception (Vorgriff) (1962, �150-53). I want to be clear that I am not challenging this. What I’m suggesting, rather, is that pre-understanding is precisely what’s shattered in the address, which announces its own sense, an unmasterable surplus irreducible to semantic appropriations. The instant that the other addresses me, all of fore-structuring’s bets are off. The address�the encounter, the saying�is the specifically rhetorical gesture that ‘rhetorical hermeneutics’ effaces, and what one ‘learns’ in the face of it is not the effect of an appropriation” (199). Again, with the Levinas said it, so clearly it’s more true than what Mailloux says. Why? I suppose this makes some kind of sense, but it questions the nature of learning: is it about acquiring facts or being “shattered”?
• “There are (at least) two terms, ‘I’ and ‘you,’ involved in the language relation, and for conversation (the relation) to continue, these terms must by necessity remain separate. Conversation’s odd rapport takes place in the between of the ‘I’ and the ‘you,’ holding an ‘us’ together only by keeping this ‘us’ separate, exposing within an experience of profound intimacy an infinite distance, an uncrossable abyss” (200).
• “No big hermeneutic breakthrough here. Picard’s incessant questioning, his demand for immediate answers, calls to mind the intimate connection between speech and violence, indicating that he has not yet begun to question. But as he’s struggling for an interpretive appropriation, the other’s call somehow makes it through. Dropped by the address into response-only mode�or, more carefully, exposed by this address to the fact that he may have no other mode�Picard appears for the first time vulnerable, de-situated, which prompts a pause, however brief, in his hyperhermeneutic disposition” (202). Actually what’s happening in the scene is that Picard is verbalizing his thought process because we are watching TV and have no other access to interiority as we do in fiction. Just because something involves language, doesn’t mean it is a text. This flattening of textuality effaces the meaning of gestures necessitated by various media.
• I stopped reading here. After 202, when the beast is figured “as an allegory in the allegory, as a figure for Picard’s hermeneutic machine, which must by necessity kill off the other,” I stopped taking this argument seriously. Part of the problem is that Davis’s argument hinges on a flattened understanding of media and partly because I think this “argument” doesn’t have a point other than showing how much French philosophy she’s read (203).

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