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In "The Trace of the Other" (in Deconstruction in Context, Literature and Philosophy, 1986, pp 356-359) Emmanuel Levinas argues that the exteriority (illeity) of the Other can only be acknowledged by refusing to reduce it to the Self's language. Only then can the Other be honoured and approached. For Levinas, the spaces of the Other must remain beyond the scope of language.

Levinas' Other becomes an unmitigated trace or presence beyond Self and Other, an absoluteness of "being" that completely disrupts all linguistic orders of representation. It is difficult to conceive of this precisely because this is where language breaks down and "being" dissolves into the sublime, when the Immanent Self becomes perceptible, and the contingency of all possibility realisable.