The metaphor that best captures the movement of Levinas's thinking is the one Derrida uses when he compares it to the crashing of a wave on a beach: always the 'same' wave returning and repeating its movement with deeper insistence. Regardless of what theme or motif we follow - the meaning of ethics, responsibility, the alterity of the other (autrui), subjectivity, substitution - there is a profound sense that the 'same' wave is crashing. This is just as true when we focus on those moments in philosophy that indicate that there is 'something' more (and 'something more important') than being and ontology. Levinas keeps returning to Plato's suggestion that the Good is beyond being, and to the moment in Descartes's Meditations when Descartes discovers that the ideatum of infinity positively exceeds its idea, that infinity transcends any idea of finite substances. Or to switch metaphors, no matter which of the many pathways we take - pathways that seem to lead off in radically different directions - we always end up in the 'same' place, the 'same' clearing. This is not the clearing of Being, but rather the 'place' where ethics ruptures Being. But even when the outlines of Levinas's thinking come into sharper focus, our perplexity and puzzlement increase. We want to know how he arrives at his radical and startling claims. What are the considerations and motivations that lead him to insist on our asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relation to the other, our infinite responsibility to and for the other? Some have suggested that the place to begin is with the influence of Heidegger on his thinking, with the way in which much of Levinas's thought can be viewed as a critical dialogue with Heidegger.