This essay contends that in his effort to develop a poetics, Joyce intuits in his writings Levinas’s ethical swerve from Heidegger. By making the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses “dramatic” according to his own terms, Joyce presents a relation that exists prior to, or sets the stage for, the ordinary representational plane of the novel. Although the limits of language necessitate a spatial show, Joyce makes the show “dumb,” altering the relation between knowledge and responsiveness by taking deferral, the usual condition for knowledge, out of the equation. Joyce’s effort is towards the creation of a certain messianic time, or time without space, and his presentation of a non-appearing, non-reciprocal relation delineates the passion, or responsiveness independent of the need for knowledge, by which the chapter moves. By effectively staging responsibility as an infinite desire for the other as such, Joyce begins in “Ithaca,” as in Levinas, are the sound without echo and the journey without return.