Guy Weinberger

Presence is not what appears within meaning; it is what meaning does. Meaning is not a content but a presencing configuration that situates participants at the liminal border of a concrete constellation, disclosing them as both absorbed within it and as its boundedness and surplus. Presencing occurs only at this generated border, as an oscillatory event in which a single being appears in its irreducible bothness—at once as an accentuated alignment of those traits that accord with its meaningfulness, and as exceeding it as indifferent, muted surplus. Amphibious entities name this mode of presencing.

The dissertation addresses the lack of in-depth research that thoroughly compares the thoughts of Heidegger and Benjamin. Existing literature is dominated by anecdotal juxtapositions. While Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s works offer numerous potential points of comparison, it has yet to be clarified how these parallels align with Benjamin’s well-known critique of Heidegger. In what follows, I compare Heidegger’s deconstruction with Benjamin’s translation. The research hypothesis posits that both concepts are rooted in phenomenology, particularly in Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction. While Heidegger’s connection to phenomenology is extensively documented, Benjamin’s affinity with it has largely gone unnoticed. Accordingly, this thesis provides the first comprehensive account of the phenomenological aspects of Benjamin’s early thought. My central argument is that while both Heidegger and Benjamin employ phenomenological reduction in their early work, they do so from profoundly different metaphysical perspectives. As a result, the sense and trajectory of their phenomenological reductions diverge significantly: Benjamin’s approach remains closely aligned with Husserl’s original intent, whereas Heidegger’s, as Husserl himself rightly observed, does not.

This article addresses a persistent problem in phenomenology: how beings can appear as both within a field of disclosure and as exceeding it. While phenomenological accounts have clarified appearing as correlational or topological, they have not fully explained how the experience of excess—of something standing “in itself”—arises from within this field. The article proposes a constellational ontology of presencing in which appearing is understood as a reflective–diffractive event. Within this event, beings are not simply situated within a field of meaning but are disclosed as edges of a constellation through mutual reflection, while simultaneously appearing as diffracted surplus that exceeds these reflections. The boundary of appearing is thus not given in advance but generated within the event itself as a structural bifurcation. On this basis, the article reconceives key phenomenological notions. Presence is reinterpreted not as the appearance of a being, but as the event in which a being stands forth as this within a field of meaning. The “in-itself” is no longer a hidden substrate beyond appearance but a boundary-effect of diffraction. The phenomenological I is analyzed as a positional effect within the constellation, oscillating between reflective immersion and surplus exteriority. The argument culminates in the introduction of amphibious entities—constellational figures in which sensuous embodiment aligns with heterogeneous meaning while exceeding it as surplus. These figures articulate the resonance of appearing, allowing beings to be experienced as both meaningful and irreducibly beyond meaning. By reframing excess as generated within appearing itself, the article offers a new account of presencing that reconfigures the phenomenological understanding of correlation, boundary, and the relation between meaning and sensuous embodiment.