 Levinas’ first original essay, On Escape (De l’évasion, 1935), examined the relationship between the embodied (sentient) self and the intentional  ego[4]  from the perspectives of physical and affective states including need, pleasure, shame, and nausea. In this succinct philosophical work, Levinas was less concerned than was Heidegger with the question of existence as it opens up before us when we experience the dissolving of things in the world in anxiety (he-BT:  §40).[5]  Levinas’ question was not: “Why is there being instead of simply nothing?” His concern was to approach existence differently, through the (human) being as Heidegger had also done, but in light of more embodied experiences like the above-mentioned ones (OE: §6). Enlarging Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being-in-the-world, Levinas gave priority to lived moods and physical states that revealed existence as oppressive and indeterminate. Indeed, in escapism and its various aesthetic expressions, we discover humans’ failed attempts to get away from the being that they themselves are. “Escape”, he wrote, 