There are two senses of the term 'presence' which can be distinguished. In one of them, 'presence to me' the object is present while the subject, 'me', is absent. In this sense presence is always accompanied by, indeed preceded by, its mysterious matrix or hypokeimenon, that out of which it arises and which by definition can never itself be present. In this sense 'I' - understood as the name for the subject, and not the empirical self - am not present since I am no sort of object, but may be erroneously believed to be so - a belief that can be dissolved by investigation. The second sense of 'presence' is as an alternative name for 'what is', the totality of being, and since the subject must possess some kind of being it is included in presence, to the point that, via a pre-reflective 'cogito', nothing is more evident than the presence of the subject, even if it cannot be known further. Think of these as two topological figures of thought, they are not the same thing, not equivalent via some sort of twisting and stretching, but are they perhaps different projections of the same inconceivable reality? In either case they seem to point to a deficiency in the principle of identity, in the axiom that 'A = A', or in the notion that presence is present. In the first case this deficiency is located in the object and in the second in the subject. But surely whatever is meant by being, with a capital 'B' if you like, is precisely that which can suffer no deficiency whatsoever?