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 encounter 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.