The fact that the context of the Husserlian phenomenological problematic directs even the earliest Levinasian studies well-known. However, despite the familiar historical and textual evidence, the precise matters of the philosophical debt owes this tendency in the phenomenological tradition remains, to a certain extent, an open question-a question that requires that the reader seek the debt in Levinas's implicit as well as explicit criticisms of phenomenology. On first glance that is, with regard to the direct and explicit statements within Levinas's texts-the terms of the interpretation of this philosophical relation brings Levinas's identification of the radical transcendence commanded by the various manifestations of the notion of infinity-e.g., desire, the face of the Other, the intentionality of enjoyment, the transcendence of God, etc.-into focus. The transcendence manifest in this idea of infinity, in Levinas's view, lies outside the possible grasp of the phenomenological delimitation of the structured intentional relation. It precisely this state of affairs that has led to the widespread contention that, in one commentator's words, Levinas criticizes intentionality because it cannot account for the absolute transcendence that the idea of infinity requires.1 To be sure, such a rendering of the issue has a solid textual basis. In Totality and Infinity, for example, notes, and subsequently attempts to subvert, Husserl's so-called obsession with the representational mode of intentionality.2 The essence of this subversive strategy, with regard to the Husserlian conception of intentionality as the method of phenomenology, the identification of the transcendent intention that proper to the fundamental sense of the ethical (TI, 29) and therefore that which proper to the idea of infinity, an idea that, for Levinas, is preeminently non-adequation (TI, 27). In Levinas's view, this identification of a radical transcendence does not only undercut the putative primordiality of the noesis-noema correlation. Rather, that which overflows objectifying thought, disclosed by way of the forgotten experience that constitutes the very essence of the ethical, identified as that from which all theory and activity live, the common source (TI, 27-28). This movement toward, and aff irmation of, the idea of infinity would seem to form both the philosophical and the textual basis for a reading of that conceives his relation to Husserl to be primarily and for the most part critical. In distinction from this state of affairs, the present essay will endeavor to show the other side of Levinas's relation to Husserl, a task that insists on seeing Husserl as a vital philosophical resource for and therefore not simply as a foil. Specifically, with this task in view, the present essay seeks to explicate the significance of a conception of time that proper to the peculiar horizon within which the description of the phenomenal matters at issue in Levinas's enigmatic formulation of ethics carried out. The exposition of this problematic has as its aim the location of at least one aspect of Levinas's shift from the language of alterity in Totality and Infinity to that in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The locus of this discussion will be Levinas's rendering of the Husserlian phenomenological conception of the living-present. To begin this examination, I will situate the significance of the living-present, which will show the way in which for Levinas, as well as for Husserl, the living-present that horizon from and within which intentionality derives its vitality. Insofar as Levinas's conception of alterity necessarily entails a passage out of the evidential delimitations of the phenomenological conception of lived-experience (Erlebnis), the exposition of the centrality of the living-present in Levinas's articulation of alterity brings into relief both the phenomenal matters of that passage and the living resource finds in Husserl's thought for such a departure. …