Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005. Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 191 Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation Diane Davis Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity There is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger’s motif of our being able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversa- tion belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object. —Avital Ronell, Dictations From Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has bril- liantly performed and explicated a “rhetorical hermeneutics” that demon- strates the “practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rheto- ric” (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux’s various arguments and have more generally objected that “rhetorical herme- neutics” leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze. 1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize. 2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux’s adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a “hermeneutical rhetoric” that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that “all inter- pretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that ev- ery rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work” (1997, 197–98). This essay is dedicated and addressed to Steven Mailloux, who generously encouraged me to elaborate the notion of a nonhermeneutic rhetoric. What follows is, before anything else, a response to Steve’s call—a response that is also an address, a return call.