ABSTRACT
There is a problem in any attempt to link rhetoric and ethics: How one proceeds from speaking to acting, from acting to speaking involves some articulation of causality; there must be some agency at work, some being, some substance, some body that might guarantee the grounding of action as well as the grounding of speaking. Emmanuel Levinas might suggest that such placeholders for cause only thematize or occlude an other on the side of the infinite with a more mundane, finite other. For Levinas, the ethical begins and ends with such an infinite other, not the mundane other of common everyday morality. In fact, Levinas is most concerned with how we might speak about this infinite other, this other of pure causality, pure agency, that calls the subject into being as a subject of responsibility. This turn away from being and its finite wisdom (a turning away from knowledge) is an important challenge to rhetoric since it demands us to consider how the very language we speak as neighbors must first act in relation to this cause, this other that is otherwise-than-being, otherwise than a face across a divide since the very divide is the face of the infinite.
