Finally, it is necessary to disrupt a web of assumptions that I have left undisturbed hitherto, most pointedly, the assumption that in asking about the meaning of presence one is asking simply for one or several positive senses. It is necessary to disrupt this assumption of straightforwardness because meaning "has never been conceivable, within the history of metaphysics, otherwise than on the basis of presence and as presence" (Marges de la philosophie 58; Tr.: 51)-as, to take the exceptionally revealing Husserlian case, presence to eidetic intuition. To ask straightforwardly about the meaning of presence is already to assume what presence means, to assume it in the very question of meaning.

But then, is not the Heideggerian question itself caught in this web of assumptions and as a result held firmly within the closure of metaphysics? If the question of Being is determined as a question of meaning, as the question of the meaning of Being, then is it not in its very formulation a question of presence, a question directed toward a recovery of presence? Indeed this would be so, were it not the case that the Heideggerian text, from Being and Time on, engages ceaselessly in a deconstructive reduction, a delimitation, of meaning, its reduction to the woraufhin des Entwurfs (Sein und Zeit, 151), its referral to world, i.e., signification, and eventually to ἀληθεια. Meaning as presence becomes, is reduced to, the meaning of presence, the latter taken not straightforwardly, but as that which delimits presence. The Heideggerian text, thus releasing the torsion in the question of the meaning of presence, twists it free of metaphysical closure.

¶ 8:54 AM