 The 1940s writings extend Levinas’ innovations in ontology, always with recourse to interpretations of embodiment and against Heidegger’s philosophy of existence which, for Levinas, entails engagement with being as “participation” without  alterity.[9]  These writings inflect his notion of transcendence, away from the imagined transcendence of evasion and pleasure, toward eros and the promise of the birth of a  child.[10]  This requires he explore alterity, understood as the feminine other (EE: 86).