The present essay concerns the Levinasian understanding of responsibility in relation to the two spheres that Levinas introduces in his second major work Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, namely the Saying and the Said. The essay investigates some of the different meanings that the concept responsibility takes on in regard to these two spheres, and thus also in regard to the separation between the ethical and the political that is apparent in the book. Is it possible to find a politically uttered responsibility in Levinas Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence?

The essay wants to emphasize the continuous transition between the ethical or the Saying and the political or the Said, and vice versa, with the purpose of showing how the two spheres may be conceived simultaneously. By posing the relationship between the two as a reciprocal rather than a oppositional one, the essay aims to suggest that an understanding of responsibility at once must be ethical and political. In order to show this, the essay analyses responsibility as communication, sensibility and exposure. Thereafter, it turns to Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself to offer an ethical/political reading of responsibility as the subjectivity of the subject. Levinas' concepts of the Trace, the Third Party and the question of Justice is discussed, using Jacques Derrida's Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Bettina Bergo's Levinas Between the Ethical and the Political, and Howard Caygill's Levinas and the Political. The essay poses the question of how we are to discuss responsibility if its original, ethical meaning is undone at the very moment that we try to grasp it.  Therefore what Levinas calls the philosophical reduction of the Said is taken in consideration.