 Commentators have differed on the comparative importance of Levinas’ major works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. Some have urged that we see in them two sides of a single coin: that of responsibility experienced in the face-to-face encounter and that of the insistence of an affective trace that interrupts flowing time as conceived by classical phenomenology (Peperzak 1993: 7). Other commentators have argued that Otherwise than Being is Levinas’ magnum  opus,[50]  a study on the intersubjective pre-conditions of language indebted to, yet diverging from, Heidegger’s investigations of the poetic logos (in which man dwells and being is intimated; Heidegger he-EHP: 59–64). As we have seen, Derrida called Totality and Infinity a “treatise on hospitality” (see  §2.4.1 above)  and devoted, in sum, more attention to it than to Otherwise than Being, although the latter work was in part a response to Derrida’s criticisms in “Violence and Metaphysics” (Derrida 1964 [1978]). There is little question that the novelty of Otherwise than Being lies in its three innovations: (1) the analyses and tropes for transcendence-in-immanence (recurrence, proximity, obsession, persecution, and substitution); (2) the deconstruction of language understood as the site in which existence is said and explained, and (3) Levinas’ “wager” of stepping out of philosophical reasoning into a performative register that both “says” and “unsays” itself by turns (OBBE: 167).