 With the return to a philosophy of consciousness and representation, the indispensable figure of the trace that Levinas has introduced becomes attenuated. As we have seen, to confront eventual skepticism about the trace, he enacts his witness in a literary here and now. His figural performance points not toward another world or to a being different from that discussed by Heidegger, so much as to the intensities and vulnerability of pre-conscious affectivity. Levinas’ writing thus appears to come down to a poetics of the inexpressible. Nevertheless, since he also demands that we reflect on intersubjectivity from a standpoint outside the face-to-face encounter, his work gives us a double task: conceptualization and the as-if of an enacted here-and-now. Still, justice does not only come down to the question “what do I have to do with justice?” It entails an additional explanatory move that Levinas cannot make. This move would have to account for what the other means to the third party, and why third parties insist that “I” also receive just treatment. These are questions requiring a systematic perspective, outside the now-moment in which “I” emerge and enact my witness, affectively invested by alterity (OBBE: 158).