 Aware of the seemingly artificial quality of calling his authorial witness “immediate”, Levinas’ claim is nevertheless more than a literary artifice. Basterra compares it to Kant’s idea of autonomy, which shows itself only when we follow a law that “exceeds and addresses the subject”, motivating our ethical act (Basterra 2015: 126). Earlier in her study, she had argued that the intellectual affect of Achtung was capable of focusing our attention and opening us to a respect comparable to Levinas’ Saying, which he also calls “sincerity”. For pure reason, autonomy “is therefore an illusion”, but it is one only insofar as that which is not intrinsically part of my interests can still motivate me to act. Thus pure reason erroneously supposes that my ethical gesture came from me (Basterra 2015: 129). Levinas provides us a crucial hermeneutics of the intersubjective origin of this Kantian “illusion”. He sets our misinterpretation of heteronomy as autonomy in Kant’s practical reason into a hermeneutic register, referring to the sincerity and substitution underlying the words we offer: “It is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness … exposure to traumas, vulnerability” that I bear witness to, and for another (OBBE: 48). Again, it does not come from us. Levinas finds illustrations of such witnessing in many places, from the justice imperative of the prophets to the concern of Latin American clerics over the events unfolding in Chile in 1973 (OGCM 81–82).