A French thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) willingly uses grammatical metaphors in his phenomenological and existential analyses. Grammar for him becomes a source of ontological categories, while the parts of speech serve as expressions of kinds of being. This article is an attempt to draw a general sketch of "ontological grammar" of Levinas and also to expose such a conception of language, which is supposed to be the basis of this ontological expansion of grammar. Giving an original interpretation to Heidegger's ontological difference, Levinas associates "Being" with a verb or an impersonal sentence. Thus he uses an impersonal construction il y a ( similar to English there is) as a term expressing "Being in general" - so "Being" proves to be an essential anonymity, the impossibility of name. It also reveals itself as an effect of struggle with language - as the failure of the attempts to cross its borders, as the impossibility of not to speak. In il y a one may find a primitive, atavistic stratum of language - it is "noise" as some residual "sense" of senselessness, as well as the senselessness of "sense". Nonetheless, Levinas principally insists that this impossibility of eradication of "sense" does not provide the sufficient reason for "sense" itself yet. On the contrary, the "existent" or "hypostasis" is an analogue of substantive. So, Levinas interprets and even structures the ontological difference by means of grammatical opposition of the noun and the verb, and also of the subject and the predicate. The relationship with existence, which is held by the existent, forms a complete ontological sentence. This sentence is the place of "sense", and "to exist" means to possess "sense". The function of the copula or the ontological differing is being interpreted by Levinas as "comprehension". But this understanding identification itself does not save the "sense" yet - neither the existent as self-identical, nor the totality of spoken can serve its guarantors. The existent takes onto itself the work of copula but fails to accomplish it - that is why the "hypostasis" is not yet a name, but a pronoun, the grammatical function of the name is the subject. The possibility of the name, as well as the possibility of "sense", comes from the Other. The "sense" proves to be an "ethical" category for the most part. The comprehension, which is also self-identification, produces an effect of inevitable lack of "sense", turning into the returning of the senseless il y a. Nonetheless, this absence of "sense", which is constitutive for self-identification in general, shows itself as a trace of the other - "ethical" - dimension of language, which is the very root of "sense" as well. That is language beyond community - immediate relation of one singularity to the other, or the "contact". However, this sublime edge of language seems to be in dangerous proximity to the linguistic drone of il y a. But maybe this is the paradox, which constitutes the profound intrigue of Levinas' ethics.
