Nelson Maldonado-Torres presents his ‘coloniality of being’ thesis as a further radicalization of Emmanuel Lévinas’ critique of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. But Levinas’ theory of the primordial, meaning-constituting encounter with The Other simply adds a basement beneath the ground floor of Heidegger’s a priori conclusions about being-in-the-world: it says there is a further, even more fundamental, condition on the possibility of any given lived experience (Erlebnis) which Heidegger had missed. Maldonado-Torres’ theory, on the other hand, bulldozes the house: it says there are no universal, a priori knowable, fundamental structures of being-in-the-world, and instead every Dasein is contingent facticity all the way down.