 As indicated, Otherwise than Being problematizes Levinas’ earlier, more ontological approach on the basis of Husserl’s inquiries into passive syntheses and Einfühlung (empathy). There is good reason for this. Responsibility denoted an event that repeats, and even increases as it is assumed (already TI: 100–101). In Otherwise than Being, however, the question of immanence and passivity arises in regard to responsibility’s unremarked persistence and its affective upwellings in us. This is because the status of a memory of sensuous events, which affect us before we represent them, is elusive. For the phenomenologist, it might correspond to an apperception or horizon, in the sense of something not directly perceived. Thus Levinas also insists that, unlike the apperceptions Husserl was able to explore thanks to the reduction he set on  memory,[33] this affective past continues to elude thematization because it was never an intentional object at all, and because memories of our lived flesh precede the consolidation of our ego (OBBE: 144–147). John Drabinski has explored this “pre-history” in light of Levinas’ reprise of genetic phenomenology (2001: 185–206). Theodore de Boer approaches it as an echo of both Rosenzweig and Jewish prophetism (1997: 87–100). Of course, Levinas is aware that such a temporality is open to skeptical critique. He even reminds us that skepticism itself obeys an ethical imperative to deconstruct philosophy and with it, all totalizing discourses, whether they are logical or political (OBBE: 168–170).