Communication Theory 122 Lisbeth Lipari Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter Despite their shared concerns with dialogic ethics and engagement with alterity, the discursive encounters between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas were marked by miscommunication and misrecognition. This paper aims to trace the implications of these “failed” encounters for communication ethics. Beyond warning of the danger of the failure to make strange and see the other as wholly other, the story of the encoun- ter between Levinas and Buber highlights a relation somewhat in shadow—the connection between listening and alterity. In contrast to previous readings of the Buber-Levinas engagement, this essay suggests that their “failure of communication” resulted primarily from each scholar’s insufficient dialogic engagement with the alterity of the other— a failure, in short, to listen for the other. The point is not to discern what either scholar’s work or their encounter “really means,” but to loosen some of the rigidities within the received narratives about their relation and examine the connections between alterity and listening. Reciprocal recognition is possible only if each side renounces its attempt to steal the others’ possibilities, acknowledges the other, and allows her [sic] to be. Release means allowing the other to be and accepting the other as she wants to be accepted, gives herself out to be, and so on. Allowing the other to be means to renounce attempts to control and master. (Williams, 1977, p. 411) A rhetorically and ethically sensitive listener keeps an ear out for places of silence, erasure, misrecognition. Such a listener notices gaps and fis- sures, the elisions that occur when one voice speaks in place of another or when another is silenced. Who speaks? Who is heard? Whose voice rendered unintelligible? These are questions of discourse ethics, and they are poised on the fulcrum of the communicative dynamic between speak- Communication Theory Fourteen: Two May 2004 Pages 122–141 Copyright © 2004 International Communication Association