 In the middle period essays, the partial transcendences of pleasure and desire, already sketched in 1935, receive fuller development and variations. The meaning of transcendence focuses on a new temporality promised by desire and “fecundity”, or the birth of the son (EE: 100; TO: 91–92). The son incarnates alterity in a curious way. He is, in a sense, his father and not his father. However, his birth opens a focus on the future. No longer conceived as one of open possibilities, as Heidegger had argued, the time opened by the son responds to two basic limitations on our understanding and representation: death and the other person. While not denying Heidegger’s intuition about death as the “possibility of impossibility”, Levinas repeats his earlier argument that we witness death only in the death of the other. But even as such it escapes everyday understanding. Hence Levinas will qualify death as an alterity as radical as that of the other human being who confronts me. 