Communication is an intertwining of selves in rhetorical spaces. Dr. Davis focuses upon this intertwining as the space wherein not only meanings, but also interdependent identities emerge. He describes this rhetorical space as a reversibility of the roles of author, narrator, text, and audience when we seek to be understood. This account presents personal identity as dynamic rather than static, communal rather than individual, and emergent rather than given. In his phenomenological account, he relies upon works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Calvin O. Schrag.
Dr. Duane H. Davis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He was Distinguished Scholar in Residence in Curitiba, Brazil in 2011, and the Ruth and Leon Feldman Research Scholar in 2013-14. He served as Assistant Director of the annual meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle in 1990, and Director in 2001 and 2010, and, with Ivan Kolev, co-directed a conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2008. He has published numerous articles in recent French thought, is co-editor (with William Hamrick) of Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception (SUNY Press, 2016) and is editor of Merleau-Ponty's Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility (Humanity Books, 2001). He is currently working on two book projects: Reversibilities of the Flesh (exploring the provenance, promise, and peril of Merleau-Ponty's notion of reversibility); and Repairing the Flesh of the World (exploring Achille Mbembe's political appropriation of Merleau-Ponty's ontology).
Co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, Humanities Center, and the L.P. Irvin Fund of the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies
