The Review of Communication

Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 5
19

Being for the Other-to-the-Other:

Justice and Communication in
Levinasian Ethics
Pat J. Gehrke

This essay provides an explanation of how Levinass unique philosophy of ethics, his
separation of justice from ethics, and his views of language and communication come
together to articulate not a system or code of ethics, but the impossibility of any
systematization or codification of ones obligations. Only by understanding the tensions
between ethics and justice in Levinass writing and by relating those to his philosophy of
communication can we understand the significance of a Levinasian communication ethic.

Keywords: Emmanuel Levinas; Communication Ethics; Justice; Alterity

Introduction
In the past decade communication scholars have paid increasing attention to the
writings of Emmanuel Levinas. While a few in the 1990s made reference to his works
(Cmiel, 1996; Woodward, 1996), more recently he has become a central figure in
studies of ethics and justice in communication (Arnett, 2003; Hyde, 2001; Jovanovic
& Wood, 2004; Lipari, 2004; Murray 2003; Pinchevski, 2003). Though certainly not as
well-known as other Continental philosophers, Levinas has become, as Thomas
Carlson wrote, one of the twentieth centurys most forceful and enigmatic thinkers
(1998, p. 42). That combination of force and enigma aptly describes the experience of
many who read Levinas and find something irrevocably compelling and maddeningly
difficult.
For all his volumes on ethics and obligation, Levinas does not produce a new
ethical system. His task is not to construct what ethics should be, but to trace out the
obligation that is always prior to any knowledge (Levinas, 1985, p. 90). What he offers
is not a groundwork upon which one may build a new cathedral of right thinking and

Pat J. Gehrke is an Associate Professor in the Program in Speech Communication and Rhetoric and the
Department of English at the University of South Carolina. Correspondence to: Speech Communication
Program, J. Welsh Humanities Center, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. Email:
PJG@PatGehrke.net

ISSN 1535-8593 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/15358590903248769
6 P. J. Gehrke
action but instead a reminder of our first obligation, our debt, and our inevitable
failure to ever systematize ethical response.
This essay provides an explanation of how Levinass unique philosophy of ethics,
his separation of justice from ethics, and his views of language and communication
come together to articulate not a system or code of ethics, but the impossibility of any
systematization or codification of ones obligations. Only by understanding the
tensions between ethics and justice in Levinass writing and by relating those to his
philosophy of communication can we understand the significance of a Levinasian
communication ethic. In order to work through these concepts, this essay first
explicates Levinass ethical theory by focusing on his claim that ethics is first
philosophy, prior to ontology or epistemology. Following this, it explores the tension
between ethics and justice: ones relations with the Other in relation to a community
of multiple others. The discussion concludes by considering how Levinass concepts
of ethics and justice affect his philosophy of communication and the possibility of
Levinasian communication ethics.

Ethics as First Philosophy

Wayne Woodward argues that Levinass principal goal is the countering of the
primacy of the same that has haunted Western philosophy since Socrates (1996,
p. 178). This move against sameness is what Arne Vetlesen describes as Levinass
determination to dismiss both being (i.e. ontology) and knowledge as founding and
sustaining relations to others (1995, p. 365). In the tradition of communication and
rhetorical studies in the United States, we might say that what Janice Norton calls the
common master trope of identification not only limits communication and ethics
but exacerbates the violence of both (Norton, 1995, p. 42). That trope, for Levinas, is
especially dangerous when it takes the form of essentialism or substantive humanism,
but also poses great risks when articulated as inter-subjectivity or negotiated
agreement.
Levinas, however, does not seek to vacate ethics, but locates ethics prior to
ontology or epistemology by releasing ethics from the need for a grounding principle
outside of ethics. Thus, Levinas seeks what Jeffrey Nealon refers to as postmodern
ethics of response (1997, p. 135). Placing ethics prior to ontology is contrary to most
of the history of Western philosophy. As Levinas notes, philosophy has most often
been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle
and neutral term that ensures comprehension of being (1969, p. 43). Roger Gottlieb
(1994) details the philosophical tradition of situating ethics as secondary to the
knowledge of things . . . including knowledge of or concerns about oneself
(p. 223).
We could likewise map this history of philosophy onto communication ethics,
particularly in the rhetorical tradition, which has taken its substance and justification
from some essence, be it of nature or the human. Thus, rhetorical theory and ethics
have historically been posterior and subordinate to ontologies, especially to
humanism (cf. Gehrke, 2009).
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 7

Hegels Subject of Desire

It is not merely anti-humanism that drives Levinass philosophy. As Gottlieb alludes,
part of Levinass argument is a reversal of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel refers
to as the stance of desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, but an unspecified
and insatiable desire that seeks affirmation of ones autonomous will (Hegel, 1977,
para. 167
168). At heart, desire is an anxiety about the possibility of a subject lacking
autonomy. In order to cope with this anxiety, one places the world in a condition of
dependence; the meaning of any thing is to exist for the desiring subject. The
dependence of all things on the desiring individual for their meaning, without
anything upon which the desiring individual would depend, thus grounds ones
autonomy. Everything is for the I and the I is for nothing but itself. However,
anxiety is produced by the need for a similarly autonomous individual to provide
validation of ones own autonomy.
The desiring I looks for another autonomous will to recognize the autonomy of
the I. Yet, if there is another whose will can be autonomous, this risks the
possibility that my existence is actually for this other person, and not the other way
around. The contradiction is created by the combination of needing to subjugate all
things to a status of existing for the desiring subject and yet also needing another
desiring subject who can validate ones own autonomy. This makes the desire
insatiable because its satiation is self-negating. According to Hegel, this drive may
lead us to kill or enslave others (1977, para. 186
187). Yet, the death of the other
cannot satisfy desire, for then the desiring will is left without the presence of another
to validate its autonomy. The only way for desire to escape this dilemma is to
subjugate another autonomous will to the service of the desiring self. This is why the
dialectic of the master and slave is born out of the dialectic of desire in Hegels
phenomenology. However, desire and its consumptive force can also be manifest as
theorizing: an intellectual enslavement that makes things objectively mean what they
subjectively mean for ones desiring will.

Levinass Inversion: From Desire to Responsibility

Levinas inverts Hegel by arguing that the otherness of the Other, her/his alterity, or
most simply the fact that we are not one being and can never become one being, is
both essential to the possibility of the emergence of any will and already bears ones
responsibility to and for the Other. The very possibility for subjectivity and
individuality comes in the approach of the Other; I become an I only in response
to the Others approach. The first event of will is always, for Levinas, to respond, and
will exists only as response. Thus, in the Other giving to me my subjectivity, I already
find myself in a relationship of obligation and debt. Unlike a Hegelian understanding
of the will that exists and then encounters the world and another will, for Levinas
there is no possibility for will except as a response to having been approached by an
Other, and every moment of will or choice is due to (due to meaning both because
of and owed to) this Other in front of me at this specific moment.
8 P. J. Gehrke
The first fact of the possibility of being, then, is a relationship of obligation, and
that relationship precedes (and exceeds) not only desire but even the possibility of
thought or language. Preceding cognition and subjectivity, giving the possibility of
cognition and subjectivity, means that both the Other and my responsibility to the
Other are beyond containing or schematizing in thought. This is one reason why our
study of Levinas*and ethics generally*can never yield a stable system or code of
communication ethics.

The Gift of the Other

The difference between the capitalized Other and the uncapitalized other is significant
in reading Levinas. In the original French, Levinas uses two different terms, both of
which are translated as other. The capitalized Other is used for autrui, which might best
be described as the personal other, the you, whereas the uncapitalized other is used
for autre, which simply means the common usage of other, such as another (Lingis,
1991, pp. 24
25). The capitalization is significant, for Levinas does not mean that the
Other is a collective or a generalized other, but this singular and unique Other before
me: you as an individual, different from all other individuals, in this specific moment
of appearance, different from every other moment, ultimately exceeding every attempt
I might make to organize you into a system of meanings or responses.
I do not exist prior to this relation. Rather, I only come to be as an I when the
Other approaches me. This approach of the Other places me in a capacity to respond,
which Levinas might call my responsibility. Thus, the self is constituted by and of
responsibility. For Levinas there can be no such thing as a self-constituting
subjectivity. Instead subjectivity is the accomplishment of a movement*a movement
not within an I but between an I and a thou, whereby the thou is the locus from
which the constitution of the I springs (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 374). To be a free
individual does not mean to claim authorship for oneself, to be autonomous, to be
the archaic principle of ones life, but rather to respond (or not to respond) to an
appeal coming from the exterior (Benso, 1996, p. 136). In all these explications what
becomes clear is that subjectivity is a gift from the Other that bears with it an
obligation that cannot be declined.
It is thus that I exist, as much as one can say that I exist, for the Other. My
existence is an existence given by the Other and it continues only in its constant re-
articulation in moments of the Others approach. Hence, Levinas argues, I do not
find that my dependencies and responsibilities are limits upon my subjectivity or will,
but are the very possibilities for any subjectivity or will at all. My entire being*the
very possibility of my being*is already owed to the Other, and thus all my
responsibilities and obligations are for that Other, and never for myself or my desire.

Responsibility as Subjectivity
The approach of the Other is not a relation of the self to something similar to itself, which
would allow one to see oneself in the eyes of another. Unlike the traditional search for
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 9

identification and sameness as the grounds of ethics, Levinas moves toward unicity, the
uniqueness of each person one meets and in every event of meeting: The strangeness of
the Other, his [or her] irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is
precisely accomplished as a calling into question my spontaneity, as ethics (Levinas,
1969, p. 43). The approach of the Other interrupts identification by presenting one with
something that can never be fully appropriated into oneself or ones cognition: the
ultimate otherness of this Other before one*the alterity of the Other. The subject
comes into its own insofar as it is addressed from outside, that is to say, by the alterity of
the Other. This is the sense in which moral responsibility is not added to an already
existing substance; on the contrary, it proceeds from the essence of my substance
(Vetlesen, 1995, p. 375). This essence of my substance is nothing more than my
capacity to respond to the Other, a capacity that cannot exist prior to the approach of the
Other. Since responsibility constitutes the self, then I can only be open to this ethical call
if I acknowledge it as prior to all my capacities to think, speak, or know.
Levinas reverses the traditional role of ethics as derivative from ontology or
epistemology, instead making ethics first philosophy, nonderived and absolute
(Farley, 1992, p. 210). The Other before me demands response*demands my
responsiveness and responsibility. This obligation to respond is prior to any thought
or action*before the solidification of any theoretical rules or political norms of
ethical conduct (Nealon, 1997, p. 131). This is not to say that I respond without
thought, but that thought can never grasp nor be the ground for my responsibility.
Since my responsibility to the Other precedes my very being, thinking, or acting,
my responsibility is inescapable. I cannot choose or think or act in a way that brings
about or escapes responsibility: Responsibility for another is not an accident that
happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a
commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have
always been under accusation*persecuted (Levinas, 1991, p. 114). Vetlesen clarifies
Levinass point well when he writes, the thou*the other, the neighbor, the stranger,
is before the I. Therefore, the I stands not in the nominative, but in the accusative, as
the accused one, addressed by the Other prior to any chance to address him
(Vetlesen, 1995, p. 372). I am a self only in relation to the Other, and thus the Other
precedes me, leaving me awaiting the approach of the Other*waiting for the other to
accuse me of an ability to respond. It is only in the approach of the Other, which
demands my response, that I am given to be as a self. Thus, I find myself accused
within a relation that the self does not initiate (Carlson, 1998, p. 50). My
responsibility is undeclinable, as is my subjectivity, for before I can ever be in the
nominative*as an I*I must first be in the accusative*as a you. Levinas points
to a communication ethic driven by response and attentiveness to the Other. The I
is not a communicative agent but is a response called forth by the Other.

The Ethics of Infinite Otherness

This call of responsibility might most accurately be described in relation to the
absolute otherness of the Other, the utter alterity of this Other before me, but this is
10 P. J. Gehrke
not to say that the Other and I exist in opposition or contradiction. Rather, we exist
in a relation of otherness so absolute that it cannot be systematized into an
opposition or a dialectic. The Other is so utterly other that s/he cannot be thought of
as being in relation to me, or at least that relation cannot be thought of except as
infinite otherness, which precludes the possibility of containing that relation in
thought, placing it along a geometry, or making it a substantive difference. As Nick
Smith recognizes, I can never locate the Other within my egocentric systems of
comprehension (1997, p. 524). In Levinass terms, the absolutely other is the
Other . . . He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say you or we
is not a plural of the I (1969, p. 39). If I am to be a self*an I*then my existence
as such relies upon my own subjectivity or singularity, which can only be given as a
function of the others unique and irreducible infinity (Nealon, 1997, p. 135). To
attempt to erase or reduce the alterity of the Other is to deny my own subjectivity and
singularity; it is to act against the very possibility of my capacity for action.

Difference Beyond Differentiation

In this way, Levinas interrupts thinking of myself or the Other as instantiations of a
category. Since ethics is found in absolute difference, in order to be responsible to
the other, which means in order to respect the alterity of the other, my obligation to
the other must not be grounded upon the in-common, for it is precisely this difference
without community that makes it impossible for me to remain in-different (Carlson,
1998, p. 63). This Other before me is not an example of the same genus nor is s/he
united with me by common nature, individuation of the human race, or chips off
the same block (Levinas, 1991, p. 159).
If my ethic is merely a system that understands the other as simply like the self, I
will be unable to respond adequately to the others uniqueness and singularity
because such a system of ethics will have already violated my obligation to the Other
by reducing all of the Others desires to the desires of the home country, the self
(Nealon, 1997, p. 129). Likewise, if I create an ideal thought of what it means to be
human, to think, or to communicate, then I have already effaced the irreducibly
ethical dimensions of the self and its language (Carlson, 1998, p. 48). Since any form
of ethics under the sway of idealist or humanist thought conforms the Other to the
Same so that s/he must always be, in some way, a reflection of me, idealist and
humanist ethics result in the Other being unable to make her/his mark as Other
(Busch, 1992, p. 196). Maintaining a relationship of alterity, in which the Other can
remain infinitely other and make its mark as Other, without subordination to
identification or classification in a typology of differentiations, is the first call of
Levinass ethics. The failings of totalizing schemes of thought are twofold on this
account. First, totalizing the Other is a lie because its modality of knowing is
essentially alienated from the known (Farley, 1992, p. 217). However, the lack of
veracity is far less important for Levinas than the ethical implications: since what is
being misknown is not an idea but another person, the distortion is ethical as much
as it is epistemological (Farley, 1992, p. 217).
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 11

This should not motivate us to seek to know the true Other in some more accurate
system of classification or differentiation, such as a new psychology; Martin Buber
calls this the monstrous, the dreadful phenomenon of psychologism that dooms
community in our time (1992, p. 86). The reduction of the Other to the same is a
movement of violence against the Other, even if that similitude is built upon
categories of distance as well as proximity. As Levinas writes, violence does not
consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their
continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves,
making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them
carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action (1969, p. 21). This
violence is found in any system that attempts to reduce the Other to an order of
identification, because such moves must empty the particular of those features that
are anomalous to the whole, but that are essential to concrete existence (Farley,
1992, p. 217).

Ethics as Limit to Knowledge

The history of Western ethics is marked by this inability to accommodate otherness
which bespeaks a grave ethical shortcoming (Smith, 1997, p. 507). The move to
contain ethics within knowledge, especially within an ontological system that unites the
Other and the self, is itself an ethical failure. Knowledge is the dual move toward and
away from alterity: Knowledge or theory designates first a relation with being such that
the knowing being lets the known being manifest itself while respecting its alterity . . .
But theory also designates comprehension*the logos of being*that is, a way of
approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being
vanishes (Levinas, 1969, p. 42). Thought itself, moving from self to Other and back to
self, is to some extent always an attempt to strip the other of its alterity in order to
make it fit the categories and structures of thought (Farley, 1992, p. 216). As Gottlieb
phrased it, knowledge of others necessarily reduces the other to something we possess,
something we have acquired (1994, p. 223). To know something, to be able to theorize
and explain it, is to make it mean what it means to the will of the knower. When the
thing about which one claims knowledge is not an object or a force of nature, but
instead a person or persons, the movement of the desire for knowledge becomes the
dialectic of the master and slave. After all, there is no subjugation more complete than
being able to define the meaning and essence of another person.
Whether we are referring to social sciences or humanism, the Other is most often
reduced to an instantiation of the universal, shared, categorical, or dialectical, and is
thus stripped bare of any semblance of independent identity (Smith, 1997, p. 545).
The movement of my inherited modes of thinking imprisons the Other within
imperialistic cognitive categories and performs the extermination of alterity that
Levinas so passionately denounces and calls us to resist (Smith, 1997, p. 545).
Cognition and theory move toward totality, subsuming the Other, stripping it of its
infinity and making it into something different from itself (Farley, 1992, p. 217).
Levinas is offering not only a particular explication of the movement of ethical
12 P. J. Gehrke
responsibility, but a stern warning that our desire for a knowable schema of response
or a set of guidelines for good behavior is dependent upon knowing the Other as a
generalized ideal or principle outside of the Others uniqueness and the uniqueness of
each moment of approach. Yet, the Other is not merely different in some definable
way but is defined by an alterity that is without limit or schema. The term most often
used to describe this is infinity, for the alterity of the Other cannot be given either a
quantitative or qualitative value*it is absolute.
The infinity of alterity is instructive in clarifying the impossibility of theorizing
ethics. Infinity can never be fully accounted for; it overflows the thought that thinks
it (Levinas, 1969, p. 25). Infinity is not a mathematical operator, it is not deployable
in a formula, and though we may have words and symbols to represent infinity, they
are no more (nor less) sensible or referential than God. I cannot contain infinity
within language or within thought, for the attempt to think infinity thinks more
than it thinks in the sense that there is an excess in this idea for which the I which
contemplates it is unable to account (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 368). Infinity itself cannot be
the object of a contemplation for it is not proportionate to the thought that thinks
it (Levinas, 1986, p. 56). The infinity of the alterity of the Other calls me to a
position of consciousness that is more fundamental than intentionality (Levinas,
1969, p. 27). This infinite strangeness and irreducibility of the Other is what is
sought, neutralized, and overcome in theory and ontology alike (Vetlesen, 1995,
pp. 365
366).

Otherwise Than Instrumentality and Reciprocity

Since my responsibility emerges in response to the infinite alterity of the Other and I
am called to guard that alterity, my responsibility is something that I can never fully
meet, a responsibility which thereby manifests the infinite (Carlson, 1998, p. 44). If
my first responsibility is a respect for the infinite alterity of the Other, then my first
obligation is already infinite, hence unconditional. As Smith writes,
if I were to treat the Other with the types of respect called for by Levinas only
because I expect the Other to do the same for me, I would miss the point altogether
since I would again be attempting to fit the Other into my instrumental and
systematic understanding of the world. We must neither expect nor be motivated
by reciprocity (1997, pp. 531
532).
Since my obligation precedes my subjectivity, precedes my capacity to think or
choose, and overflows my thinking and intention in its infinity, it is not an
obligation that can be opted out of, nor that I can be released from by any action or
condition.
If I attempt to move to an ethic of reciprocity or contract, I find myself moving
away from the I-for-the-Other that is demanded in the primordial subjectedness that
produces the I as the possibility of responding to the Other (Vetlesen, 1995, p. 376).
Vetlesen outlines four issues arising in reciprocal ethics that turn away from the
infinite alterity of and obligation to the Other. First, ethics of reciprocity revolve
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 13

around a question of desert: does the other deserve my reciprocity? Second, desert
also assumes reward*a calculation of gains and losses that are tallied as a sort of
balance sheet. Third, reciprocity limits the ethical obligation to those others who are
capable of reciprocating. Finally, reciprocity places obligation to the Other as
something from which one can be released (1995, pp. 376
377). For Levinas, each of
these moves is contrary to ethics, which is to say that they are contrary to the
obligation that is inherent in me as I am given to be as a subject. Each positions my
obligation to the Other as deduced from a cognitive system*calculated, accounted
for, and contained within thinking*which is only possible if I can both contain the
Other within thought and give myself to be as an I outside of the obligation of
response, as first a subject onto whom responsibility is later added.

The Problem of Justice

Levinasian ethics are most often articulated as a non-equitable I-for-the-Other that
calls for no return or reciprocity. It is an incomparable and incommensurable
obligation, preceding and exceeding any action or thought that might seek to meet
my obligation of being for the Other. In this way, one might say that Levinass ethic
actually resists an articulation of community (Carlson, 1998, p. 42). Of course,
Levinas recognizes that my obligation does not occur in pure dyads:
The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also establish with
other [women and] men; there is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the
Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions, which are
inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation
(Levinas, 1985, p. 90).
Justice is what is confronted at the moment that I am in relation to the Other and
another Other (which is every moment), and justice lies in tension with the initial
articulation of obligation to the Other.
The interpersonal relation is defined by a relation between two: the one self and the
other (Carlson, 1998, p. 65). The approach of another Other introduces a contradiction
by introducing a third party who also demands my infinite obligation (Levinas, 1991, p.
157). Thus, the approach of the Other-to-the-other is of itself the limit of responsibility and
the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice (Levinas, 1991, p. 157). Yet, the
responsibility that is limited is also infinite, which produces the irresolvable contradiction
between the obligation for the Other and the obligation for the Other-to-the-other.

Ethics and Justice in Tension

Ethics stands in tension with justice and in opposition to politics, which
unavoidably attempts to master alterity by conflating it with the self and organizing
and codifying the infinite with its instrumental strategies (Smith, 1997, p. 540).
Thus, I find myself in a position of contradiction, requiring that I act out of infinite
obligation to the Other and yet also violate that infinite obligation in my attempt to
14 P. J. Gehrke
do justice to my infinite obligation to another Other. It is exactly because we find
ourselves in an irresolvable quandary of comparing the incomparable and weighing
the incommensurate that we have need of language, decision, politics, and justice.
Levinas does not believe that justice should be avoided under the rubric of
preserving ethics. Rather,
justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling,
order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality and the intellect, and in
intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a system, and thence also a copresence
on an equal footing as before a court of justice (Levinas, 1991, p. 157).

One simply cannot live in the world without these things, but even more important
one could not respond to the call of multiple others without such tools. My
obligation in this dilemma is to maintain the original ethical obligation for the Other
as an interruption of the totalizing movements of politics and justice. Justice cannot
and should not be avoided, however it is likewise constantly interrupted and
complicated by the ethical. There must be positive political formation . . . but these
concrete political axioms must always be problematized by the ethical (Smith, 1997,
p. 541). Thus, justice must find its articulation in its own interruption by the original
dyadic obligation to the Other.
Such being for the Other could not be justice if one saw the self as valueless or
irrelevant. To the contrary, Levinas believes that my lot is important (Levinas, 1991,
p. 161). However, the value of my lot is a result of my responsibility for the Other.
Tension between the value of the self and obligation to the Other introduces the
danger that the importance of my lot may encompass and swallow up this
responsibility, just as the State issued from the proximity of the neighbor is always
on the verge of integrating him into a we, which congeals both me and the neighbor
(Levinas, 1991, p. 161). My obligation to justice, then, is the maintenance of this
uncomfortable position of tension with ethics; this alterity that ties what can never be
common in a community of infinite Others. Ethics is tied to the particularity of the
call of the Other, void of humanistic trappings such as sympathy and similarity.

Living with Others

Justice is the question of the down-to-earth and the practical. Moral dilemmas
that place one in contradictory obligations, such as Jeffrey Murrays (2000) use of the
Heinz dilemma or Michael Hydes (2001) grappling with questions of euthanasia,
while steeped in ethical calls, are fundamentally in the purview of what Levinas would
call justice and politics, of the measurement of the immeasurable and the weighing of
incommensurables. The attentiveness to alterity and unicity in Levinasian ethics
might give us a sense of an approach or a style of response, but the enactment of
response in the world in which we live is always a response to multiple others, to the
Other and to the Other-to-the-other. In short, from Levinass view, we are never faced
plainly with concrete or specific questions of ethics, since ethics is the space of the one
for the Other, a space in which we never purely live. The world of lived experience is
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 15

always the space of the one for the Other and the one for the Other-to-the-other.
Lived experience occurs in the tension between ethics and justice.
We might, through considerable simplification, distill an ethical imperative from
Levinass writings. Michael Barber (1998) attempts to do so through a focus on the
concept of docility. For Barber, five key elements compose docility: (1) a capacity to
be taught; (2) responsiveness to others; (3) flexible action in deference to others
feelings; (4) allowing others needs and beliefs to impact oneself; and (5) making a
space for the independence and autonomy of others (1998, p. 125). Yet, such a
position reduces Levinas to little more than a reciprocal dialogical position similar to
Bubers, which Levinas explicitly resists in his contention with Bubers emphasis on
reciprocity (Levinas, 1994). Any such position already stings of the tension between
ethics and justice. Rather, we might say that Levinas refuses to be systematized into a
set of ethical rules or commandments, for to do so would reduce the Other to a being
that could be identified and recognized, through the system of obligation, prior to its
actual moment of approach.

Communication, Communion, and Otherness

In its concern for ethics, justice and community the discipline of communication studies
has largely followed a tradition of identification. Peter Simonson notes that at least
since the Progressive Era onward, there has been a dream that communication,
especially mass communication, might overcome the distinct finitude of local civil
society and bring about a far-flung nationwide community (1996, p. 342). Similarly,
Kenneth Cmiel writes, the search for community became one of the most important
themes in communication research (1996, p. 99). All of these moves toward
community represent desires to subordinate difference in favor of identification or
similarity. Simonson notes that the dream that communication might bring about a new
unity is not simply a relic of thinkers such as John Dewey, but continues to hold sway
today (1996, p. 333). This desire for sameness is not only a hope that communication
might build a community, but also that communication might help us to triangulate the
true meaning of being human and being together. Levinas recognizes a similar tendency
for philosophy to view language as a space where the truth of being might reveal itself.
Language is always seen as an order of phenomena destined to do the same work as that
of thought: to know and to reveal being (Levinas, 1994, p. 141).

The Speaking I
In radical contradiction to the history and hope shared by traditional philosophy and
communication studies, Levinas focuses on the role of expression in a relation of the
I to the Other. Woodward describes Levinass perspective on dialogue as one that
challenges important assumptions of a triadic model based on principles of relation,
continuity, commonness, unity, and participation (1996, p. 178). For Levinas, in
speech there is a relationship with a singularity located outside of the theme of the
speech, a singularity that is not thematized by the speech but is approached
16 P. J. Gehrke
(Levinas, 1986, p. 115). This singularity that cannot be thematized is the Other,
whom I approach through speech. The Other and I do not even share a border. S/he
persists in her or his alterity. This is why Vetlesen argues that language is
fundamentally non-monologic; indeed it presupposes that there be a plurality of
interlocutors (1995, p. 371).
In speaking with the Other, Levinas contends, the first thing that must happen,
prior to any verbal utterance, is bearing witness to oneself (Levinas, 1969, p. 201).
When I approach the Other in speech, the first thing I always do is attest to myself.
Without uttering a word, I say, Here I am. Being-for-the-other is a communicative
moment in which the subject who speaks does not situate the world in relation to
himself, but instead, by offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays
himself open and, in a sense, prays (Levinas, 1989, p. 149). This communication is
not a linking nor a connecting, but an opening up before the Other, making myself
vulnerable to the demand of the Other.
Contrary to Hegelian or even Habermasian notions of subjectivity bearing witness
to itself, for Levinas this is neither an originative nor an autonomous subjectivity.
Instead of a subjectivity that pushes itself out into the world as agent or that takes the
world into itself as meaning, Levinas posits a subjectivity erupting as a response to
the interruption of its own continuity. As Ronald C. Arnett puts it, Levinas holds that
the self is a responsive derivative, rather than a willful agent (2003, p. 39).
Subjectivity is not first a making sense of the Other, but is the imposition of
subjectivity upon me in the Others indeclinable demand for my response.

The Saying and the Said

Thus, Levinas emphasizes the Saying over the Said. The specific words being offered
are less important than the offering of words. Levinas does not value communication
for its informational contents but rather for the fact that it is addressed to an
interlocutor (Levinas, 1985, p. 42). This is the distinction between Saying and Said,
which, while perhaps mundane, is important for the relationship between ethics and
communication. As Thomas Busch notes, the Said attempts signification, but the
Saying is the performative act of exposure and approach at the basis of all
communication (1992, p. 197). While the Said may attempt to inscribe itself as
representation, the Saying takes precedence over and forever interrupts and
problematizes the said (Smith, 1997, p. 523). The Saying is the here I am in
relation to you, the Other, being for you that stands under every statement said,
making the Said possible. The Saying is beyond the possibility of the Said.
The Said lies in tension with the Saying, interrupted by it, just as politics and
justice find themselves at tension with and interrupted by ethics. Yet, the Saying must
inevitably bear a Said, just as ethics must bear the obligation for the Other-to-the-
other that necessitates the consideration of justice (Levinas, 1985, p. 88). The
significance of the Saying, however, is not in its function toward or for the Said. The
Saying is neither merely, nor even first, a vessel or vehicle for the Said. Saying extends
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 17

beyond the thematization of the Said and of the content stated to signify the
approach of the other person (Levinas, 1994, p. 142).
Saying comes to be defined as the anarchic givenness of oneself to the other in a
relation whose significance precedes any thetic subjective activity (Carlson, 1998,
p. 61). In my sheerest existence, before any words are spoken, I am always already
responding to and before the other (Nealon, 1997, p. 146). Thus, for Levinas, at
bottom, communication is not an operation of information-transfer in which one
might or might not choose to engage. Rather, the self in its very structure is a
communicating of communication, a sign of the giving of signs (Carlson, 1998,
p. 58). I stand before the Other, in the accusative, already in a mode of response*of
Saying. My very subjectivity is structured by the necessity of a Saying that already says
that I acknowledge the alterity of the Other, and which interrupts the possibility of ever
unifying or mediating between myself and the Other. To speak is to respond to the
approach of the Other, and to recognize the Other as other and yet also in proximity.
Yet, the moment that I speak*the moment I respond to the Other*I also violate
the Other, making my ethical obligation only more pressing with each attempt I make
to live up to it. Every act of language is another act of colonizing violence, reducing
the Other to a system of signs and cognition, making it impossible to expect a
resolution of myself with my infinite ethical obligation. Since I cannot avoid
perpetrating violence in my use of language, just as justice and politics cannot help
but place the alterity of the Other at risk, I must struggle with the risk of all discourse,
recognizing the danger that is carried with my every use of language. Perhaps the
most important aspect of the Saying, as the ethical obligation that interrupts the Said,
is to realize my violence as such so that I may use such a realization to inform each
word I subsequently speak (Smith, 1997, p. 528). In a hypersensitivity both to
languages colonizing of the Other and to my simultaneous obligation to respond, I
might find the possibility of speaking with pained attentiveness.
For communication scholars and theorists, Levinas can be considered a counter-
point to the historical preoccupation with humanism, identification, and common-
ality. Cmiel notes that the traditional desires of American communication scholars
are in contradiction with Levinasian ethics:
For Levinas, however, this [normative communicative convention] was a mistaken
search for fusion. It tried to create a knowledge and clarity that would make the
multiplicity of reality refer to a single being, but such a goal, if successful, would
abolish the proximity of the Other (1996, p. 108).
Levinas might go even farther, to claim that the search for fusion is only the most
blatant manifestation of the priority of the Same. For Levinas, any communication
that does not begin from an attentiveness to alterity*infinite otherness*is already
a communication that attempts to erase my ethical obligation and invites war,
domination, precaution and information (Levinas, 1991, p. 119). Communication
ultimately finds its struggle with ethics in its infinite obligation to the infinite
otherness of the Other and to the Other-to-the-other. To communicate is indeed
18 P. J. Gehrke
to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition
(Levinas, 1991, p. 119).

The Other as A Priori

In conversation, this recognition of the alterity and unique singularity of the Other
consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying
oneself. Apology, in which the I at the same time asserts itself and inclines before the
transcendent, belongs to the essence of conversation (Levinas, 1969, p. 40). As I
speak with the Other, I apologize; I incline myself before the Other, as in prayer, and
recognize the priority of the right of the Other over me. My infinite, inescapable,
undeclinable, a priori ethical obligation manifests itself in communication through
my efforts to maintain within anonymous community, the society of the I with the
Other (Levinas, 1969, p. 47). I must respect the alterity of the Other, take
responsibility for my inevitable violations of that alterity, and accept my infinite
obligation to guard against such violations.
Perhaps most important is that I must address the Other. Above all, I cannot let my
infinite and impossible obligation paralyze me nor drive me to seek an inside of
myself away from any responsibility. Such would be the ultimate violence, in that it
would refuse my responsibility for the Other and would place the Other outside of
those to whom I am in response. Responsibility is first and foremost found in my
ability to respond, which is given to me by the Other. If I respond with non-response
then I do even more profound violence to my responsibility and to the Other. Even if
something as basic as acknowledgement must also always carry the violence of
language and cognition, such a dilemma only highlights the necessity of justice, the
requirement that I compare the incomparable, and struggle endlessly in this
irresolvable quandary. After all, as Alphonso Lingis wrote, real action in the world
is always action in which the devil has his part (1991, p. xiv).
The fact that such will always place ethics at risk only magnifies the obligation and
makes me responsible for the vigilant (and by necessity inadequate) attentiveness to
the ethical responsibility that makes all being, thinking, and choosing possible.

References
Arnett, R. C. (2003). The responsive I: Levinass derivative argument. Argumentation and
Advocacy, 40, 39
50.
Barber, M. (1998). Docility, virtue of virtues: Levinas and virtue-ethics. International Philosophical
Quarterly, 38, 119
126.
Benso, S. (1996). Of things face-to-face with Levinas face-to-face with Heidegger: Prolegomena to a
metaphysical ethics of things. Philosophy Today, 40, 132
141.
Buber, M. (1992). On intersubjectivity and cultural creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Busch, T. W. (1992). Ethics and ontology: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. Man and World, 25, 195
202.
Carlson, T. A. (1998). Ethics, religiosity and the question of community in Emmanuel Levinas.
Sophia, 37, 42
71.
Cmiel, K. (1996). On cynicism, evil, and the discovery of communication in the 1940s. Journal of
Communication, 46, 88
105.
 Justice and Communication in Levinasian Ethics 19

Farley, W. (1992). Ethics and reality: Dialogue between Caputo and Levinas. Philosophy Today, 36,
210
220.
Gehrke, P. J. (2009). The ethics and politics of speech: Communication and rhetoric in the twentieth
century. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gottlieb, R. S. (1994). Ethics and trauma: Levinas, feminism, and deep ecology. Cross Currents, 44,
222
240.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (Original work published 1807).
Hyde, M. J. (2001). The call of conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, rhetoric and the euthanasia debate.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Jovanovic, S., & Wood, R. V. (2004). Speaking from the bedrock of ethics. Philosophy and Rhetoric,
37, 317
334.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.).
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity (Richard A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press.
Levinas, E. (1986). Collected philosophical papers (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht, Netherlands:
M. Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1989). Transcendence. In S. Hand (Ed.), The Levinas reader. New York: Blackwell.
Levinas, E. (1991). Otherwise than being or beyond essence (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Boston, MA:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Levinas, E. (1994). Outside the subject (Michael B. Smith, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Lipari, L. (2004). Listening for the other: Ethical implications of the Buber-Levinas encounter.
Communication Theory, 14, 122
141.
Lingis, A. (1991). Translators preface and footnotes in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than being or
beyond essence. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Murray, J. W. (2000). Bakhtinian answerability and Levinasian responsibility: Forging a fuller
dialogical communicative ethics. The Southern Communication Journal, 65, 133
150.
Murray, J. W. (2003). The face in dialogue: Emmanuel Levinas and rhetorics of disruption and
application. The Southern Communication Journal, 68, 250
266.
Nealon, J. T. (1997). The ethics of dialogue: Bakhtin and Levinas. College English, 59, 129
148.
Norton, J. (1995). Rhetorical criticism as ethical action: Cherchez la femme. Southern Commu-
nication Journal, 61, 29
45.
Pinchevski, A. (2003). Ethics on the line. The Southern Communication Journal, 68, 152
166.
Simonson, P. (1996). Dreams of democratic togetherness: Communication hope from Cooley to
Katz. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 13, 324
342.
Smith, N. (1997). Incommensurability and alterity in contemporary jurisprudence. Buffalo Law
Review, 45, 503
553.
Vetlesen, A. J. (1995). Relations with others in Sartre and Levinas. Constellations, 1, 358
382.
Woodward, W. (1996). Triadic communication as transactional participation. Critical Studies in
Mass Communication, 13, 155
174.
Copyright of Review of Communication is the property of National Communication Association and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express
written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.