 Two additional innovations in Otherwise than Being include: (1) the proposed phenomenological reduction to the birth of meaning in a bodily self that carries what it cannot identify as properly itself (the “other”, affectively). This appears to be a radicalization of Husserl’s discussion of the pre-reflective ego in Ideas II (§58, “Supplement 12” §§2–3). Whereas Husserl emphasized the basis of the ego in its ongoing flow of lived experience, which he said was “lawful”, Levinas focuses on the discontinuity of time consciousness (see also Franck 1981 [2014: 149–166]). (2) A hermeneutics of the self, emerging through intersubjective contact in which the “proximity” of the other elicits passive “substitution” and opens onto spontaneous communication (OBBE: 113–121). In what suggests an attempt at deepening Husserl’s concept of empathy (Einfühlung; OBBE: 125), the figures of proximity, recurrence, and substitution characterize the intersubjective intertwining that makes communication possible: “Communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war” (OBBE: 119). Indeed, prior to spoken or written language, prior to signs reciprocally exchanged, “we suppose that there is in the transcendence involved in language a relationship that is not empirical speech, but responsibility” (OBBE: 120). As “my pre-originary susceptiveness”, the nature of intersubjective sensibility shares its time-structure with strong passions, sometimes indeed with trauma (OBBE: 122–124). As Levinas writes: 