Being Present

“Presence” has been subjected to withering attacks for decades, but Antonio Lopez ( Gift and the Unity of Being , 23-8) wants to rescue it. In his description, though, presence is virtually the opposite of what postmodernism claims it is.

To say that “being is presence” implies several things. First, it means that existence is irreducible to either the presenter or the one to whom it is presented. It is, in short, a way of speaking difference . Further, if being is present, it means that “it addresses the one who whom it comes. The coming into being of concrete singulars aims at man’s welcoming of the irreducible, inexhaustible alterity of the singular gift.”

Being as presence also means belonging: “To be present to someone is to be given to someone, and in a certain sense to belong to that person,” and this means that “gift, being as presence, is not a self-enclosed reality. It is always already with other beings.”

In short, the problem is not with presence, but with a particular thin and brittle conception of presence.