separates itself from the other. Creation out of nothing breaks the system; it posits a being outside the system, i.e. there where its freedom is possible. (149/78) The dimension of freedom, however, is not something created out of nothing by a God, for that would be to deal with it like some ontic thing caused by an agent. The dimension of freedom is indeed the dimension of Dasein, but Dasein's existence cannot be accounted for ontically-causally by way of creation, but rather only ontologically-transcendentally by uncovering and stepping back into its conditions of possibility, for freedom is the transcendental (not: transcendent) dimension par excellence. Lvinas presents the shift to the dimension of freedom as if he were shifting from the ontological dimension (in which the egoistic subject supposedly reigns) into the ethical dimension (in which the subject becomes ashamed of his egoism), but in truth he is shifting from the ontic dimension of causal relations to the ontological dimension of Dasein as freedom. He treats the realm of freedom, however, as the ethical dimension in which the egoistic subject is confronted with moral injunctions and imperatives mediated by the face of the other. This stance is maintained and even radicalized in his last major work, Autrement qu'tre ou au-del de l'essence , in which the "unbending, indeclinable ego, protected from every scratch" (171/95) is overwhelmed in its "sensibility" by the "non-phenomenon, a putting-into-question by the otherness of the other" (170/95) that results an-archically in a "giving", in which "the giving