The previous chapters have examined how the Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity is derived on the basis of a materialist phenomenology of sensate life and have sought to clarify how his ‘ethics of alterity’ is ontologically grounded in the materiality of contact, touch and the affective relationship to other experienced on the passive surface of ‘the skin’. Levinas's discourse of the skin, the wound, allergy, and so forth, and of the ethical Subject as a being-in-a-skin, it has been shown, is neither simply figural nor metaphorical, nor is it expressive of a literalism or naturalism. It must be referred back, rather, to his thinking of the empiricism of the pre-phenomenological life of the Subject as an existent whose existence is prior to the differentiation between language and lived experience. It is from within this claimed perspective that this notion of the skin could be said to refer to the ‘actual skin’, but to the actual skin before it is conceptually or thematically re-presented. The skin in Levinas's discourse is not an object of knowledge, a something, nor is the being-in-a-skin a someone. The skin is presented in terms of what it does rather than what it is. This could be summed up in the following way: the being-in-a-skin is being ‘in touch’ with the Other. To think the skin in this way, as ethical sensibility, does not logically predetermine or delimit what actually constitutes the materiality of the contactual interface with the Other; and ‘the skin’ is, effectively, the generic name Levinas assigns to this.