In his review of Levinas' short essay 'On Escape,' (recently published with Jacques Rolland's introductory essay) Michael Purcell states that:

What Levinas undertakes in On Escape, then, is a phenomenological analysis of those existential experiences which can be interpreted as attempt to escape the burden of existence, experiences in which being, in its anonymity and indeterminacy, is recognized and determined. Levinas begins, like Heidegger, with an existential analytic of "the structure of this pure being"...But, unlike Heidegger, he asks how an excendence from it might be accomplished. In charting the escape from being to otherwise than being, Rolland draws attention to being as "there is" (il y a) in order to lay being bare. The il y a is bare being, but being which continues to bear upoupon an existent in its attempt to establish and position itself. Confronted with the there is, there is, as Rolland says, "the impossibility of being what one is".

The il y a as bare being? What does that mean? I find the concept of 'bare being' difficult to grasp.

One answer is that whereas Heidegger associates anxiety with death, Levinas interprets anxiety as the horror of Being. For him Being is a grim and menacing notion. Being-in-the-world is an experience of horror, fear and anxiety; a frightful occurrence of violent inhumanity; an anonymous and depersonalised existence. The phrase 'il y a', or there is, connotes an existence without existents, where existents is a personal subject who takes up a position towards there is. Existence without existents is consciousness stripped of subjectivity; or in more literary terms the dissolution of the subject in the darkness of the night. The implication of consciousness stripped of its subjectivity in a situation of horror is that there is no private existence. It is a terrifying state.

Does Levinas replace Heidegger's fundamental distinction between Being (Sein) and beings (Seindes) with there is (il y a) and existents?