It's basically applying Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction to collegiate composition, rhetoric, and writing instruction (with a lengthy detour into feminism, and little-to-no discussion of comedy.) Reading it 25 years after we both spent time at the University of Iowa (me as a student, she as a professor), it actually seems a lot of the deconstruction she advocated eventually came into reality, though perhaps not in the way she had hoped—the breaking apart of our existing structure, the breaking apart of an oppressive totality (to Davis, breaking apart = laughter) would admit a wide diversity of unheard voices, a wide diversity of unheard thoughts, into the conversation; listening to this "laughter" was a way to combat fascism, the domination of one voice, and thus would open up new paths forward as a community. What she didn't anticipate was that a majority of those unheard voices with unlistened-to thoughts would break up our existing structure by actively choosing someone who blatantly promised totalitarianism. If this loose summary/analysis feels unnaturally compressed, it's because the book is extremely involved—I don't think any discussion of post-structuralist/deconstructionist philosophy can possibly not be involved. That's the thing though: after reading this book, post-structuralist/deconstructionist theory has never made better sense to me. (What’s funny is if you really wanted to understand this very heady subject, Derrida is perhaps the last person you should ever turn to.)* Four stars.
*"There can be no doubt about it, the deaths of God and Man have left us abandoned in the 'world'—if that term, world, can still be used with any significance at all. The 'foundations' on which we have attempted to construct meaning—about living, about dying—have crumbled, broken up. We have been abandoned to a free-fall. But the aim of this project has not been to dis-cover an-other toehold, to discover another way to stop the fall. Rather, the call issued here is for an abandonment to this abandonment, for a giving of oneself up to it affirmatively. Abandonment is, after all, what we share; the only commonality among we-singularities is our finitude: that we are infinitely singular and all alone together. To abandon oneself to abandonment in, for instance, a fffffit of laughter, is to experience the very limits of finitude, the place where singular beings touch, irrepressibly. Such experiences propel us, in a flash, beyond the fascist within and expose us to an/other community, without essence or telos, a community that always already is, that always already shares, that always already operates on an ethic of care for the Other beyond the transcendental one.
...This work will not help anyone 'gain time.' It attempts only to open an/Other sensibility … an/Other 'logic,' an/Other 'sense,' an/Other way of thinking about being-with-one-another-in-the-world. Not through the reinscription of community, not through the creation of new myths. But through the exposure of what those myths exscribe, through tiny interruptions that could give community back to us … sans the 'myth of community,' in indiscriminate flashes."