 Thus, even the verbality or event-like quality of being can take on a nominal form, such as in “a being”. Levinas calls this convertibility “the amphibology of being and entities” (OBBE: 43). While this back-and-forth reference expresses the danger of taking being for a thing—a danger about which Heidegger warns us—the amphibology also fails to grasp fully the reflexive quality of verbs like se dire, understood as “to say” but in a passive sense, as though one were saying oneself, self-communicating. Levinas then sets his ethical-hermeneutic “reduction” on the reflexive particle se, urging that, although being “speaks” through the logos, the se points toward an intersubjective mode of our embodied sensuous passivity (OBBE: 43–45). This passivity is enigmatic because the se is not a verb and cannot really be made into a noun. It is in its enigmatic structure that the vulnerability that arises in proximity as if grounds signification, and words said, to another. To this reflexive se, or “self”, corresponds our passivity, as it occurs in the temporal lapse called “diachrony”. Diachrony thus expresses our sincerity toward the other and a certain transcendence: “the spirit hears the echo of the otherwise” (OBBBE: 44). With the adverb (“otherwise”), a modalization of fleshly investiture momentarily escapes the nominalization flowing out of the aforementioned amphibology between verbs and nouns, between being and a being. Here we find the ultimate sense of transcendence, which Levinas compares with Merleau-Ponty’s “fundamental historicity”, those unremarked, passive bodily sedimentations that make up our selfhood (OBBE: 45).