 As a critical reader of Levinas, Franck appears to be the only commentator who has raised Levinas’ later remarks to the status of epistemological inconsistency. Franck argues cogently that if we must be able to determine whether the third party is also an other, or a persecutor of others, or a criminal, then justice must precede responsibility, rather than the reverse. That is, rather than responsibility grounding justice thanks to the trace it leaves within justice, the latter must have priority (2008, 240–242). Franck’s objection has important implications for the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas. We live in human society, and we cannot escape that, he says. But does this not imply that it is impossible to set justice decisively outside politics, and as if outside ontology, as Levinas’ later work seems to do? That also means that we can never separate the sincerity that Levinas calls “the Saying” (or le dire) from the very words (le dit) that express and describe it. We therefore need words, and intentionality, to make what Levinas characterized as the pre-thematic into a theme (OBBE: 99). We even need words to stabilize the affect called sincerity or the Saying. Failing words, sincerity and with it proximity are simply abstractions, philosophical constructions. There is nothing wrong per se with such philosophical constructs, if that is what these concepts are. It is illegitimate, however, to argue that they precede intentional consciousness and even reflection.