This chapter offers an account of the subject in Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, where genesis of the sense of self occurs through haptic-material ways of relating to the other or hetero-affection. Since subjectivity is constitutively affected by the other primarily through the sense of touch in the passive stages of the subject’s emergence, it is described as the impure self in contrast to the putatively pure self of caste. The caste-centric notion of purity is shown as hetero-aversion and an ethically indefensible betrayal of the subject’s originary responsibility toward the other. On the basis of this phenomenology of the self’s impure and haptic-material emergence, modern forms of persisting with purity-implicative dispositions and comportments are critically described and analyzed in the later parts of the chapter. The self that emerges through embodied practices of touching, giving, and being variously affected by the other, the chapter argues, is fittingly describable as casteless and impure.