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11 Proceeding to Place by Indirection Heidegger I do not want to be absolutely dogmatic by asserting that one cannot conceive Being except on the basis of time. Perhaps someday a new possibility will be discovered. -Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit The bare space is still veiled over. Space has been split up into places. -Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 22 Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be conceived. -Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 24 What, on Freud's view, dreams provide for an understanding of the unconscious mind-a via regia, a "royal road"-the body has provided for place, which by the end of the nineteenth century had come to be as repressed as the libidinal contents of the unconscious mind. Nevertheless, promising and productive as bodily inroads into place have shown themselves to be, they do not exhaust the modes of effective reentry to the place-world. In this chapter we shall consider the contributions of someone who neglected the role of the body in implacement but who managed to find other means of access to place as a subject of renewed philosophical importance. Indeed, it could even be claimed that it was precisely by his deliberate refusal to invoke the bodyalong with consciousness, its incongruent counterpart-that Heidegger made his own way to place.1 Heidegger's way back to place is a middle way, a via 243 244 The Reappearance of Place media between body and mind, both of which are set aside in order to concentrate on what happens between them. In exploring this open between-this between of the Open-Heidegger was drawn into detours that, despite their digressive character, allowed him to glimpse aspects of place overlooked by other thinkers, ancient as well as modern. This is so in spite of the fact that these same detours are described in a vocabulary that is highly idiosyncratic and that, at least at first glance, seems to make little connection with previous descriptions of place. Heidegger came to a full acknowledgment of the power of place only belatedly . In earlier phases of his thought, place was important not for its own sake but because of its usefulness in such disparate contexts as the work world, the work of art, and politics. Even when Heidegger abandoned an instrumental interpretation of place in his middle period, he still did not single out place as such. Yet in later writings place (along with region and other related terms) emerged as an increasing preoccupation. Heidegger himself underlined this slow but decisive augmentation of place in his evolving thought when, in a seminar at Le Thor in 1969, he maintained that his thinking had traversed three periods, each with its own leading theme: Meaning, Truth, and Place. Heidegger gets back into place, then, not as "the first of all things" to be considered (as certain ancient thinkers had assumed), or in reactive flight before infinite space (a flight taken by many modern thinkers), but by indirection : by traveling through diverse "forest paths" (Holzwege), as he liked to put it. To begin with, he returns to place not through but despite the body's involvement in placiality: as if place could be reached around and outside the body itself. Still more tellingly, he returns to place despite his own obsession with inaugurating a postmetaphysical era in philosophy-an era in which one might well imagine place to be a dispensable item, given its preeminent position in classical metaphysical thinking from Plato through Philoponus, and continuing into the Middle Ages. Yet just as place emerges in the Cartesian abyss between consciousness and body, so it rises, Phoenixlike, from the ashes of metaphysical thought as deconstructed by Heidegger. Thanks to such features as gathering and nearness, place becomes for him the very scene of Being's disclosure and of the openness of the Open in which truth is unconcealed . In the end, place figures as the setting for the postmetaphysical event ofAppropriation (Ereignis). Still another mode of indirection is found in the fact that Heidegger takes place seriously despite his early emphasis on the primacy of temporality. Being and Time and other texts of the 1920S (most notably, The History of the Concept of Time) insist on temporality as uniquely capable of unifying the Proceeding to Place by Indirection 245 care-structure of Dasein, or human being-temporality is said to be "the ontological meaning of care"-and the same writings point to the...

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