 It bears recalling that, in phenomenology, light plays figurative and literal roles, from Husserl’s daylight as the condition for optimal perception (Ideas II §18) to his metaphor for the intentional “ray” directed like a spotlight upon an object, to Heidegger’s lighted opening that is Da-sein itself (he-BT: 171). Levinas in turn underscores the ‘work’ of light as able to suspend, phenomenologically, the traditional distinction between subjective and objective: “due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it” (EE: 41). Consequently, intelligibility is well figured by light. Phenomenological evidence is guaranteed by lighted circumstances—albeit for someone. Whereas Heidegger defined Da-sein almost operationally (“by its very nature, Dasein brings its ‘there’ along with it” [he-BT: 171]), Levinas returns to the Moderns’ principle “every object presupposes a subject”. Moreover, while the being of Da-sein is itself light and “disclosedness” (he-BT: 171), the being of Levinas’ hypostasis is characterized by its living cycle of drowsing, sleeping, waking, and acting. Thus, if being is equated with illumination, for Levinas it must also include the dark anonymity of night (EE: 54). It is both gift (Heidegger’s es gibt) and “there is” (Blanchot’s il y a, as taken up by Levinas). Consequently, the question that inaugurates fundamental ontology: Why is there being instead of simply nothing? is not Levinas’ primary concern. Nothingness, understood as pure absence, may be thinkable, but it cannot be experienced. Indeterminate, nocturnal being remains ‘something’. As the “there is”, being fills in all spatial and temporal intervals, whereas consciousness arises out of it thanks to its self-originating awakening and focus. This is Levinas’ first comprehensive sketch of being as a totality, in which the self-ego dyad appears as the limited transcendence of neutral being. Over the course of his analyses, this self-ego will hearken to a call. However, the call comes not from being but from an alterity that Levinas compares with death itself. “Just as with death, I am not concerned with an existent, but with the event of alterity” (TO: 87, emph. added). With “the event of alterity”, however, there is the call of the other person, notably female, experienced as desire, need, even  generosity.[14]  These works set the stage for later descriptions of world, facticity, time as now-moment, transcendence in immanence, and transcendence toward a future fecundity in the family. They constitute the core of Levinas’ first major work, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 