Backman’s Complicated Presence advances a precise and audacious claim: the thread that binds Heidegger’s itinerary from his earliest lecture courses through the texts of the Kehre and the late meditations is a single, rigorously reworked question—how unity holds for being once the metaphysical will to a final ground, system, or identity has exhausted itself.
The book’s distinctive contribution is to reconstruct that through-line with conceptual economy and philological care, showing how changes in vocabulary and emphasis are neither breaks nor reconciliations, but staged modulations of one and the same problematic. Drawing on a wide arc of primary materials and framing them against the long history of Western contemplations of unity, Backman proposes a postmetaphysical unity of being: a unity immanent to presencing and withdrawal, articulated in the phenomena themselves, and secured only as a historically situated and finitizing coherence.
The result is both reassessment and intervention. It reconstructs Heidegger’s thought as a coherent response to the ancient problem of unity, while reformulating that problem in terms adequate to finitude, historicity, and the evental character of disclosure. Backman’s wager is exact: unity remains indispensable as a condition of intelligibility, yet only becomes thinkable as complicated presence—a unity immanent to presencing and withdrawal, articulated by the phenomena themselves, and sustained as a historically situated coherence rather than a transcendental fixity. Western metaphysics supplies the diagnostic horizon: from Presocratic search for an ordering principle through Aristotle’s ontological articulation and the systematic confidence of Hegelian idealism, the philosophical will to unity organizes knowledge, order, and being under an intelligible whole. The same will also produces a crisis once the dream of total merger falters; the modern experience of fragmentation renders unity suspect without making it dispensable. Backman locates Heidegger precisely here and shows, with both conceptual economy and philological care, how the itinerary from the early analytic to the late meditations repeatedly reworks the demand to speak coherence without subsumption and presence without erasing concealment.
The entry point is historical and diagnostic. Backman situates Heidegger at the juncture where the traditional philosophical impulse toward an ultimate unity—unity of knowledge, of order, of being—reaches both its most systematic confidence and its most acute unsettlement. A long arc extends from the Greek founding through classical metaphysics to absolute idealism, carrying an aspiration to gather the manifold under an intelligible whole. This arc establishes a style of thinking in which unity functions as the governing norm for intelligibility itself. The modern dissolution of this style, already inscribed in the nineteenth-century sense of fragmentation, plurality, and loss of ultimate measure, renders the very requirement of unity suspect without rendering it superfluous. Backman’s wager—textually secured at the level of Heidegger’s own self-descriptions and concept formation—is that Heidegger neither evacuates nor reinstates that requirement; he displaces it into a region where unity must be discovered as complicated presence, a unity of presencing that never contracts into sheer identity and never dissolves into mere dispersion.
Western metaphysics, from the earliest Presocratic attempts to identify a principle of order in the manifold of appearances to the systematic culmination of absolute idealism in Hegel, has always been animated by the question of unity—unity of knowledge, unity of order, unity of being. This unity was both epistemic and ontological: the impulse to comprehend all domains of thought and existence within a single framework converged with the conviction that reality itself bore a fundamental oneness. Yet this very unity that gave metaphysics its power also became its crisis, as the history of philosophy revealed the fragility, instability, and perhaps impossibility of such totalizing conglomerate.
The early project of fundamental ontology already sets the grammar of this response. Being and Time treats ecstatic temporality and finitude as the inner law by which a world holds together in the clearing opened by Dasein. The ontological difference functions as a guard: being is indicated as presencing rather than catalogued among present beings, and the coherence at issue concerns the clearing’s own articulation. Backman reads these moves as a first laboratory for a postmetaphysical unity. Ecstatic temporality binds the horizons of future, having-been, and present into an internally articulated togetherness; worldhood appears as the relational totality of significance; truth as aletheia names the jointure of unconcealment and reserve; care gives the binding form of existence. The unity that emerges is neither a superordinate identity nor an external cement: it is the coherence of disclosure itself. At the same time, the project strains against any anthropological grounding. The clearing is accessible only in and through existence, yet cannot be founded in a property of the human without relapse into regional ontology. Backman marks this dependence and excess as productive rather than defective, a pressure that drives the itinerary toward new diction while preserving the same problematic.
The unity that Backman attributes to Heidegger is not the rigid identity of metaphysics, nor the absolute synthesis of Hegel, but a unity that is differential and historical. It is a unity of presencing that cannot be abstracted from its contexts, a unity that is itself fractured, temporalized, and bound to finitude. In this sense, Heidegger’s project exemplifies what Backman calls a postmetaphysical unity of being: not a final ground but an ongoing negotiation of presence and absence, disclosure and concealment, openness and limitation. To grasp being in this way is to recognize that unity itself is always “complicated,” always bound up with difference and dissemination.
By providing this reading, Backman contributes not only to Heidegger scholarship but also to the broader philosophical discussion of unity, multiplicity, and the fate of metaphysics. His book situates Heidegger as a thinker who neither abandons the metaphysical question of unity nor answers it with a new doctrine, but transforms it into a radically different questioning. In doing so, Backman reveals how Heidegger’s thought continues to resonate with contemporary debates in ontology, phenomenology, and postmetaphysical philosophy, where the challenge is to think coherence without totality, relationality without subsumption, and presence without erasure of absence.
Backman situates Heidegger as a thinker of unity who nonetheless resists the metaphysical drive to reduce plurality to sameness. Rather, Heidegger’s thought of unity is a postmetaphysical one, immanent to beings rather than transcendent above them, a unity of presencing and withdrawal, of disclosure and concealment, of event and finitude. Heidegger’s early project of fundamental ontology, articulated in Being and Time, already indicates this double movement: the ecstatic structure of temporality that constitutes Dasein shows how being itself is a unified phenomenon only insofar as it manifests in the openness of time, which is itself a play of past, present, and future. The ontological difference—between being and beings—becomes not a separation but a tension that holds together the possibility of unity and the irreducibility of difference. Backman follows this thread across Heidegger’s career, showing how the Kehre, the so-called “turn” in Heidegger’s thought, is less a rupture than a transformation of this guiding concern, a continual attempt to think the unifying principle of being without collapsing it into metaphysical oneness.
The analysis goes through a reconstruction of Heidegger’s sustained dialogue with the tradition, especially with Parmenides and Aristotle, who mark decisive points in the articulation of unity. Parmenides’s injunction that “being is” posits an originary singularity that excludes multiplicity, while Aristotle’s ontology negotiates between being as one and being as said in many ways. Heidegger’s engagement with these thinkers, Backman shows, is not merely exegetical but constitutive: he attempts to radicalize their insights while displacing their metaphysical closures. Heidegger’s “complicated presence” is thus a thinking of unity as the dynamics of singularity and plurality, an always-situated coherence that does not transcend but rather arises within initial constellation around temporality, finitude, historicity, and the analytic of existence coagulates into the project of fundamental ontology, and around the question of how that project immediately strains against its own presuppositions, producing a sequence of self-transformations; and how the later lexicon—Ereignis (event of appropriation), Geviert (the fourfold), Gestell (enframing)—rearticulates earlier insights in non-foundational form. The outer framing is equally important: Heidegger’s persistent engagement with Parmenides and Aristotle provides both the historical scaffolding and the conceptual antagonist for the book’s central claim. Backman treats these engagements not as scholarly episodes but as heuristic engines for isolating the precise sense of unity that remains thinkable once the demand for ultimate identity has been relinquished.
In this historical-systematic frame, Parmenides’ injunction that being is functions as the earliest template for unity. Backman reads Heidegger’s repeated returns to the Fragmenta as an effort to recover an initial attunement in which what presences is gathered beforehand into a self-same appearing: unity as the strictness of uncontradicted presence. Yet the same returns disclose a fissure. If is names the insistence of appearing, it simultaneously forbids any sayable access to becoming and multiplicity; the original unity appears as a prohibition structure as much as a disclosure. This tension becomes productive when Aristotle’s ontology enters the scene. For Aristotle, being “is said in many ways,” and unity is not a separate highest genus but a way of belonging-together across categories. Heidegger makes these classical gestures carry a modern burden: unity is neither a super-concept nor the brute simplicity of sheer presence; it is a gathering that lets what is different stand together. Backman excavates this Aristotelian inheritance with care, aligning it with the recurring Heideggerian vocabulary of legein as gathering and physis as emerging-into-presence—terms that already intimate unity as a movement internal to appearing rather than an imposed identity.
This historiographic set-up grounds the book’s central interpretive movement: the early analytic of Dasein (human existence) is shown to be a conceptual laboratory in which the problem of a non-foundational unity is tested. Backman secures, by close reconstruction of the early writings, that the analytic of existence is motivated by an ontological stake rather than by an anthropological or epistemological agenda. The phenomenon of existence, defined by ecstatic temporality and finitude, provides a vantage from which the unity of being can be displayed without recourse to a highest concept or substance. Dasein’s self-understanding opens a clearing in which beings can appear as such; the unity at issue is the coherence of this clearing. Temporality—understood as the link between future, having-been, and present—operates here as the inner law of unification. The ecstatic structure allows the diverse moments of experience and world to be grasped as belonging to a single horizon of disclosure without presuming an external cement. Backman’s paraphrase is precise: the analytic assembles an internal articulation of unity through the phenomena of disclosure, care, and worldhood.
Yet the same analytic stages the limits of its own purview. To secure a unity that is neither sheer identity nor external order, the project of fundamental ontology must both depend on and exceed the structures it explicates. Backman’s interpretive strength lies in the patient way he shows this dependence and excess operating together. On the one hand, the unity of being is legible only within the clearing opened by existence; on the other, the clearing cannot be ontically grounded in the subject, the species, or any human property without falling back into a regional foundation. This double bind is not a failure of the early project; it is its productive motor. Backman makes this visible by charting a sequence of internal tensions: the necessity of an ontological difference between being and beings; the methodological priority of access through existence; the non-derivability of the clearing from any particular being; and the pressure to name the origin of this originless opening.
Here the interpretive narrative congeals into the book’s titular figure. Complicated presence indicates that unity shows itself only as a jointure of emergence and concealment. Presence is never simply givenness; it arrives as a rhythm in which letting-appear and holding-back are co-implicated. Backman reconstructs the early Heideggerian motifs—worldhood as the relational totality of significance, truth as aletheia (un-concealment), care as the binding form of existence—as a set of functional articulations of this jointure. When the analytic requires its own rearticulation, the later vocabulary is ready to be heard as a continuation rather than as a displacement of concerns. Ereignis names the way in which the clearing comes to be appropriate to human existence and existence to the clearing; Geviert gathers the elements—earth, sky, mortals, divinities—through which presencing stabilizes; Gestell diagnoses a configuration in which the gathering collapses into availability, and unity degrades into calculable order. The same problematic passes through each register: unity as a belonging-together that is never a fusion, and presence as an arrival that is never unshadowed.
If this is the conceptual spine, Backman’s handling of evidence and method is equally decisive. The book remains scrupulously internal to Heidegger’s corpus: lectures, essays, marginalia, and well-known texts are assembled not to support a thesis imported from elsewhere, but to display a native question as it works itself through multiple vocabularies. The result is a reconstruction in which interpretive claims are keyed to textual anchors while being offered as more than commentary. Backman’s own terms—complicated presence, postmetaphysical unity—are introduced as explanatory tools calibrated to Heidegger’s language. The calibration is careful: philosophical generality is never purchased at the expense of philological precision. Where the corpus is indeterminate, the argument marks its own status as inferential; where the texts license stronger claims, the argument tightens.
Backman’s reading of the ontological difference exemplifies this method. The difference between being and beings is not a subtraction of content; it is a formal indication that protects the phenomenon of presencing from reduction to present things. The unity that corresponds to this difference can neither be added to the manifold as one more item nor posited as a transcendent One. It must be articulated as the coherence of presencing itself. Early in the itinerary, this coherence is worked out through the interconnected analytic of world, truth, and temporality. Later, it becomes a matter of tracing how sense opens historically through languages, practices, and artworks, and how this opening can become distorted. Backman keeps these movements together: what changes is the scale and diction; what persists is the demand to say how there is a togetherness that holds without subsuming.
The long dialogue with Aristotle occupies a strategically central place. Unity (hen) and being (on) do not form a genus; their belonging is enacted in speech and praxis rather than secured by a highest predicate. Heidegger’s Aristotelianism—on Backman’s account—is less a set of theses than an apprenticeship in how to let phenomena gather themselves. The lexicon of logos as gathering, kinesis as enactedness, and energeia as at-work-presence furnishes Heidegger with resources to speak about unity as a performative structure of appearing. Backman traces this inheritance into the description of equipmental totalities and practical involvement, where the unity of a world is not a sum of objects but a Walten, a sway or governance, of meaningful relations. Here again the analytic demonstrates its own limit: the unity on display is not guaranteed; it is sustained by the very movements that can also undo it.
From this vantage, the Kehre appears neither as capitulation nor as recantation, but as a sharpening of what the earlier project exposed as necessary and insufficient. Backman’s narrative emphasizes composition: as Heidegger’s writing passes from the enunciation of existential structures to meditations on language, art, and technology, the place of unity also shifts. The task is no longer to analyze the structural preconditions for the disclosure of beings to a finite knower, but to learn how to hear the way presencing itself gathers and holds. Ereignis names the mutual appropriation by which there is a clearing at all; the Geviert names the elemental alignment through which concrete dwelling takes form; Gestell names the historical configuration in which the gathering is driven to treat everything as resource. Each term is shown to be a transformation of the initial demand: speak unity without positing an identity, show coherence without erecting a system.
Backman’s account of Ereignis is exemplary in its balance of restraint and reach. On the one hand, the texts authorize speaking of event as the enabling occurrence in which the clearing and human existence belong to one another. On the other, any suggestion that Ereignis functions as an ultimate ground would betray the very phenomenon it names. The interpretive claim is therefore double and measured. First, Ereignis articulates the unity of presencing as an occurring rather than as a substrate; second, it signals the withdrawal that accompanies all granting. Presence is complicated because the event that lets it be is inseparable from its concealment. The unity at stake is a unity of rhythm and reserve. Backman underscores how this formulation respects both the impulse to unity and the finite, historical conditions of any disclosure.
The treatment of the Geviert extends this rhythm into the domain of dwelling. The fourfold—the belonging-together of earth and sky, mortals and divinities—does not introduce extra entities; it names the axes along which presencing stabilizes into a world. Unity here is the gathered relation that allows each element to be what it is through the others. Earth bears and shelters, sky measures, mortals receive and await, divinities give the hint of exceeding measure. The conceptual point is not mythic; it is structural. A world coheres as these vectors interrelate. Backman shows how this description recasts earlier insights into worldhood: what the analytic had treated as networks of significance is redescribed in elemental terms that emphasize dependence, rhythm, and measure. The same demand—articulate unity as immanent to appearing—governs both registers.
By contrast, the analysis of Gestell reveals what happens when unity is forced into identity. Enframing is the historical dispensation in which the gathering that frees things into their own is replaced by a universal drive to bring everything under a regime of availability. The coherence that emerges here is not a world but a total grid, and the unity it instantiates is a coercive sameness. Backman carefully resists the temptation to present this as a lament for technology or as a nostalgia for origins. The point is diagnostic and structural: enframing displays a modal possibility inherent in presencing—the tendency of gathering to harden into control. This tendency is neither an accident nor a fate; it is a risk that belongs to the very project of seeking unity. In this sense, the diagnosis confirms the book’s thesis: unity must be thought as a complicated articulation that always includes its own possible distortion.
The sections on art and poetry consolidate this insight by exhibiting an alternative kind of binding. A great work does not represent a world; it founds one by setting into work the relationships that make a world cohere. In the work, conflict and accord are not resolved but held. Backman foregrounds the concept of Stiftung—founding—as the act through which the elements of a world are brought into a tensioned equilibrium. The unity founded by the work is neither deduced nor imposed; it takes place as a happening that both reveals and shelters. The methodological moral is clear: unity is achieved in and through practices that bind; it is enacted rather than posited. The philosophical moral follows: when unity is thought as enactment, the strict alternatives of either identity or fragmentation lose their grip.
Across these thematic reconstructions, Backman returns repeatedly to temporality as the inner law of unification. The early exposition of ecstatic time displayed how the horizons of future, having-been, and present articulate a coherence in which experiences belong together. Later reflections on history, language, and dwelling retain this temporality as their hidden key. If presencing is an event, it is an event that temporalizes. The unity of being is therefore also a unity of temporalization—a coherence that endures only as it renews itself through opening, measure, and response. Backman is precise in his paraphrase: this does not make time a highest principle; it identifies temporality as the mode in which unity can be experienced after metaphysics, that is, without the security of a final ground.
The book’s argumentative texture depends on a disciplined use of Heidegger’s own terms that might be mistaken for theoretical definitions—Sein, Wahrheit as unconcealment, Welt, Ereignis—are handled as directives for attention. Backman aligns this methodological restraint with the postmetaphysical demand that thinking neither construct nor deduce unity, but allow it to announce itself in the phenomena. The practice of reading that follows from this is anti-foundational without being skeptical: it tests claims against the way texts guide attention, and it accepts only those unities that can be shown to hold in concrete descriptions of appearing. This practice both organizes the book’s exposition and accounts for its critical edge. Where the corpus licenses ambitious formulations, Backman articulates them; where it counsels silence, he marks the boundary.
An essential part of the reconstruction concerns the composition sequence of Heidegger’s itinerary as Backman reads it. The early concentration on the structures of existence crystallizes the problem of a unity that is neither subjective nor objective; the subsequent engagement with the Greek inception supplies the historical and conceptual counterpoint necessary to keep the problem open; the turn toward language, art, and technology exhibits domains in which unity appears as gathered enactment; and the late meditations assemble these threads into an economy of presencing whose law is measure. Each stage is shown to be displaced by what it uncovers. The analytic of Dasein clears a path that its own categories cannot fully traverse, pressing thought toward event; the retrieval of the Greeks loosens allegiance to any modern scheme, pressing thought toward elemental belonging; the critique of enframing requires an account of granting, pressing thought toward grateful receptivity. Backman demonstrates how the later articulations grow out of these pressures rather than overriding them.
Two further claims, both textually grounded and interpretively generative, give the reconstruction its philosophical contour. First, the unity at stake is postmetaphysical because it neither recovers a lost origin nor erects a new totality. It is immanent to presencing as such and is graspable only in the historically particular ways presencing holds together a world. Second, this unity is complicated because it includes the play of concealment as intrinsic, not accidental. Any attempt to purify unity into full presence reinstates the very metaphysical demand that has been relinquished. Backman’s evidence for these claims is dispersed across the corpus: formulations of truth as unconcealment, descriptions of world as a fourfold gathering, analyses of technology’s essence, and meditations on the saying of language. The force of his presentation arises from the persistent alignment of these materials under a single intelligible arc.
At strategic junctures, Backman acknowledges indeterminacies and marks what must remain inferential. Where the corpus leaves open whether Ereignis may be interpreted as a quasi-transcendental structure or as a purely historical occurrence, he notes the tension and proposes a balanced reading: the event is historically particular in its configurations and non-derivative in its enabling function. Where the scope of the Geviert risks sliding into a cosmology, he retrieves the structural role of measure and limit to restrain speculative excess. Where the critique of enframing could harden into a total cultural diagnosis, he emphasizes the possibility—named within the texts—of other ways of gathering. These calibrations serve the book’s central argumentative ethics: the unity it seeks to articulate is always held within the constraints of what the texts allow.
The conceptual payoffs are cumulative. Unity is shown to be neither the identity of a substrate nor the closure of a system; it is the coherence of presencing as gathering. The appetites of metaphysics—completeness, final explanation, deduction—reappear in transposed form as patience, description, and responsiveness. The impulse to explain how the many are one transforms into a practice of letting the many hold together without coercion. The ontological difference functions not as a split, but as a guard that keeps the phenomenon of presencing from being devoured by the inventory of entities. Temporality supplies the grammar of this guard by preventing any moment of presence from claiming ultimacy. Language, art, and dwelling bind these grammars into concrete stabilizations of world. Technology threatens them not from outside but as an internal temptation to convert gathering into control. Measure and gratitude emerge as the late names for resisting that temptation.
To call this reconstruction interventionist is to register how it reframes disputes internal to Heidegger scholarship. Backman’s emphasis on unity as the keynote of the itinerary resists familiar periodizations that separate youthful existential analysis from mature meditations on language and art. It also disciplines exuberant readings that elevate any single motif to governing principle. The payoff is methodological and substantive. Methodologically, unity is treated as a question to be held open rather than as a result to be proclaimed. Substantively, the book offers a way to speak of coherence in a philosophical landscape suspicious of totals. The postmetaphysical unity of being is neither an evasion of plurality nor a relapse into system; it is the name for a rigorously described phenomenon.
The book’s closing clarifications—explicit in posture even where implicit in wording—return to the stake declared at the outset. If the history of metaphysics made unity the test of intelligibility, and if modernity rendered such tests untenable as final norms, the options seem polarized: either renounce unity and accept dispersion, or smuggle unity back under new auspices. Backman’s reading of Heidegger invents a third posture by elevating description to the dignity of principle. To describe presencing as a gathering that holds while withdrawing is to affirm unity without commanding it. To situate that gathering historically is to accept finitude without surrendering to arbitrariness. To receive the work of art as founding, language as saying, dwelling as measure, is to find in practices the enactments that metaphysics dreamed of as grounds.
The contribution is thus twofold. For Heidegger studies, the book maps a pathway through the corpus that makes legible a persistent problematic beneath shifting idioms and emphases; it shows how early and late are mutually explanatory once unity is taken as the watchword. For philosophy more broadly, it models how to think coherence after the age of ultimate principles. The wager is that unity remains necessary as a condition of intelligibility and shared world, and that it can be articulated with rigor without recourse to the apparatus of foundations. Backman’s idiom—cool, philological, exacting—keeps that wager honest. Where the texts underdetermine bold claims, he slows down; where they carry force, he moves decisively. The result is a description with argumentative momentum: an essay that reads like a system where systems are no longer on offer.
The long dialogue with the Greek inception furnishes both historical scaffolding and conceptual traction. Parmenides’ injunction that being is offers an originary template for unity as the strictness of uncontradicted presence; Heidegger’s returns to this insight expose a prohibition alongside the disclosure, since such strictness seems to foreclose the sayability of becoming and plurality. Aristotle’s ontology, by contrast, articulates unity as a belonging-together enacted across what is said “in many ways”: logos gathers, physis emerges into presence, and unity operates as a way of letting what differs stand together without subsuming differences under a highest genus. Backman shows how Heidegger radicalizes this inheritance into a performative account of unity as gathering—legein as the very letting-gather through which presencing stabilizes—thereby resituating the classical demand for the One within the movement of appearing itself. This historiographic matrix secures the book’s central claim: the question of unity persists as the question of how presencing coheres, once the requirement of identity has been relinquished.
In its breadth and detail, Complicated Presence is both an interpretive synthesis and a philosophical intervention. It maps Heidegger’s path of thinking as a sustained struggle with the question of unity, demonstrating how concepts that may appear fragmentary or disparate are in fact deeply interconnected. It also advances the claim that the unity of being, far from being a discarded metaphysical relic, remains a vital question—one that can only be approached through a postmetaphysical framework attentive to finitude, historicity, and the evental nature of presence. The result is a book that illuminates Heidegger’s thought in its continuity and complexity, while at the same time pressing forward a new understanding of what it means to think unity after metaphysics.
Simon Gros 
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