In the fourteen years separating Existence and Existents and Time and the Other from Totality and Infinity, we see both continuities and differences. If Heidegger had begun what he conceived to be a hermeneutic deformalization of Husserl’s phenomenological consciousness, seeking what “lies hidden” beneath phenomena (he-BT: §7c), then Levinas extended this deformalizing gesture already in 1947, arguing that light itself is incipient meaning, suspending the opposition between the a priori and the