We have written this article as performative co-autoethnography in which we focus on a crisis of communication we experienced as deaf/nondeaf collaborators. We bring together Deleuze's concept of 'becoming-other' with Guattari's concept of 'a-signifying semiotics' to demonstrate how a focus on the affective dynamics of a-signification allows us to attend to the immanent nature of deaf/nondeaf communication. Situating the highlighted crisis within the larger context of Joseph Valente's work as the only deaf professor within a larger, audist university culture, we work to performatively demonstrate the rich necessity of keeping the dynamic, unknowable, intense, frightening, and exciting nature of negotiating communicative differences at the forefront of our research and our day-to-day collaboration.