This article responds to Donna Orange’s and Robert Bernasconi’s suggestion that I present a developmental view of ethical subject formation in “Emmanuel Levinas and the 'specter of masochism.’” Arguing that the particular kind of development that underpins Levinas’s account is one of traumatic interruption, I ask what role the ego’s traumatic “prehistory” might play not just in constituting ethical subjectivity but also in closing it down: why is it that ethical hospitality, enabled by what Levinas calls “substitution,” so often finds lived expression in hostile refusals of responsibility? I propose that, to answer these questions, we need to consider Levinas’s “anarchic traumatism” not just from a philosophical but also from a psychoanalytic perspective.