Abstract

In her essay examining how rhetoric attends to an “explicitly nonhermeneutic, ethical dimension” of the relationship between self and other, Diane Davis argues that the act of attunement is vital to the rhetorical challenge of “keep[ing] hermeneutic interpretation from absorbing the strictly rhetorical gesture of the [other’s] approach, which interrupts the movement of appropriation and busts any illusion of having understood” (2005, 208, original hers). This comment is part of a larger conversation about ethical action in the face of radical alterity, those marks and gestures of the other that “communicate more than I can comprehend, a ‘surplus’ of alterity that I can neither appropriate nor abdicate” (2005 ..