In this book I speak of responsibility as the essential, first, fundamental structure of subjectivity. Because it is in ethical terms that I describe subjectivity. Ethics, here, does not come in addition to a prior existential basis; it is in ethics understood as responsibility that the very knot of the subjective is tied. Humanity in historical and objective being, the very breakthrough of the subjective, of the human psyche, in its original vigilance or sobering up, it is the being which gets rid of its condition of being: the disinterestedness. This is what the title of the book means: Otherwise than being. To be human means: to live as if we were not a being among beings.