Levinas's Rhetorical Demand ─ The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy explicates a human obligation and responsibility to and for the Other that is both an unending and an imperfect commitment. In Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics, Ronald C. Arnett underscores the profundity of Levinas’s insights for communication ethics.

Arnett outlines communication ethics and this primordial call of responsibility as central to Levinas’s writing and mission. Arnett analyzes communication ethics through a Levinasian lens with examination of social artifacts ranging from the Heidegger-Cassirer debate to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World story concerning illicit possession of information.

Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand offers an account of Levinas’s project and the pragmatic implications of attending to a call of responsibility to and for the Other. This book yields a rich and nuanced understanding of Levinas’s work, a constellation of related theorists and thinkers, and application that reveals the practical importance of Levinas’s understanding of ethics.

Ronald C. Arnett is the chair of and a professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University and the Patricia Doherty Yoder and Ronald Wolfe Endowed Chair in Communication Ethics. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, including ?Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope, recipient of the Top Book Award from the Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association; and Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, recipient of the 2006 Everett Lee Hunt Award for Outstanding Scholarship.