Things are everywhere. They fill the world with their presence. Whereas it is possible to avoid the Other (person), to reject the encounter, to be solipsistic without condescension; to exempt oneself from an encounter-any encounter-with things is to die. Sensibility, having a body, is to be exposed to things. The body is the exposure. Yet, there are no things for Levinas. He encounters them within the economy of the Same, within a movement (of labor, of enjoyment) that takes its bearings from the Same and returns to the Same. Or he encounters them as gifts (TI 77), as the offer that the Same makes to the Other to welcome her/him, to cover her/his nakedness, and to enact the ethical relationship. It is the Other, however, who constitutes the principle of the donation, not the things themselves.2 In other words, things are for the Same, or for the Other, but not for themselves. That is, for Levinas there is no Otherness of things.3 Conversely, there are things in Heidegger. For him, things are the place where the gathering of the Fourfold-the mortals, the gods, the earth, the sky-comes to pass.4 But the intimacy of things and Fourfold is not fusion, it is dif-fering. Each thing remains other in hosting the Fourfold in its peculiar way: other than the Fourfold and other than any other thing; other than the mortals, who can dwell by things in their thinging only if they can take care of things as things, if they can let them be in their otherness. The purpose of this essay is to lay the theoretical foundations for an approach to things that does not ignore their Otherness. According to Heidegger, the enactment of this respectful relation encrypts the path human beings must follow to be faithful to their destination as mortals. Sharing Heidegger's conviction, this essay claims that in face of their relation with things, human beings determine the authenticity of their mortality, that is, of their being human. According to Levinas's suggestion, the place-which is not a place-where a relation with the Other can be achieved is ethics. Undoubtedly there is ethics in Levinas, even if his notion of ethics extends only to the other person (certainly the other man, hopefully, also the other woman and child).5 Conversely, there is no ethics in Heidegger, at least according to the most common reading. If the two thinkers are forced faceto-face in a confrontation that neither of them would advocate enthusiastically, the result is a chiasmatic structure,6 whose branches connect a double negation-non-ethics and nonthings-and a double affirmation-ethics and things. Since Socrates, philosophy has walked the path of negation. If there is ethics, it is not of things; and if there are things, they are not ethical. The path of affirmation is a narrow strip, which has seldom been explored.7 It leads to an ethics of things, where ethics cannot be traditional ethics in any of its formulations (utilitarian, deontological, virtue-oriented), and things cannot be traditional things (objects opposed to a subject). At the intersection between ethics and things, Levinas and Heidegger meet. The former offers the notion of a non-traditional ethics, the latter of non-traditional things. Some remarks are in order with respect to the modality of the meeting. Despite the common rootedness in Husserl's phenomenology, their encounter is not that of two Aristotelian friends; nor is the one the forerunner of the other; nor is the one in absolute opposition to the other. Levinas and Heidegger do not complement each other, either existentially or historically or philosophically (opposition being only the counterpart to complementation). They stand on their own as two separate, autonomous philosophical figures, one of whom, for chronological reasons, can exercise a sharp criticism of the other, which would be reciprocated, if chronology were to allow it. Their relation, escaping friendship, enmity, complementarity, is better characterized by the Derridian notion of supplement. …