Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being

Notes

Notes Introduction: The Thinking of Place 1. The inclusion of the Event (das Ereignis) here is deliberately provocative. I would argue, however, that it is impossible to think of the Event in a way that does not take seriously its more than temporal—its genuinely topological—character. 2. See chapter 11 below. 3. See Jeff Malpas, “Heidegger’s Topology of Being,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Galt Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 119–134. 4. One of the other key figures is surely Immanuel Kant—see Jeff Malpas and Günter Zöller, “Reading Kant Topographically: From Critical Philosophy to Empirical Geography ,” in New Essays in Kant Studies, ed. Adrian W. Moore, Graham Bird, and Roxana Baiasu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), in press—and another is Walter Benjamin (see chapter 3 below). 5. Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006)—of which the present book can be viewed as a continuation. 6. Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7. For a differently oriented discussion of the topology/topography that is at stake in these concepts, see my “Putting Space in Place: Philosophical Topography and Relational Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, forthcoming. 8. In the end, he misconstrues the “inward” aspect of topos in a way that severs it from spatiality (which comes to be associated with the outward aspect, with exteriority , but also with the merely “present”) and ties it instead to temporality alone. 9. Having said this, it should be noted that there is an underlying critique at work in the very espousal of a topological approach—what is presented is a mode of 270 Notes philosophy that is quite different from, and some would say, antithetical to, much of what passes for philosophy within contemporary academia. 1 The Topos of Thinking 1. See Heidegger, “Seminar in Le Thor 1968,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 41. 2. One of the few, perhaps the only, thinker to explicitly address the place of thinking is Hannah Arendt, but she does so in a way rather different from that proposed here. Arendt argues that because thinking is always concerned with the universal, and never the particular, so thinking has no proper place—it takes place nowhere. Arendt does focus, however, on thinking as having a mode of temporality that is proper to it, namely, that mode of the present that opens up into the infinite—see Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1978), vol. 1, chap. 4 (“Where Are We When We Think?”), pp.197–213 (see also Pierre Hadot’s exploration of the philosophical focus on the present moment in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp. 217–237]). In fact, if one recognizes that topos cannot be identified with the spatial alone—a point for which I argue in a number of places (see chapter 6 below, and also Heidegger’s Topology, p. 103, as well as my discussion in Place and Experience [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999], pp. 159–174)—then what Arendt seems to be intending here, in spite of her comments to the contrary, is precisely a mode of topos. 3. These latter two aspects might be said to correspond roughly to the idea of place as it is explored by Aristotle in Physics IV (see esp. 212a5–6), where Aristotle uses the term topos in a way that does indeed seem to connect with the idea of horizon, and with place as it is explored by Plato in the Timaeus (48e–53c), in which the term chora is the focus (often translated in English editions of Plato as “receptacle,” “womb,” or “matrix,” but also translated as “place” or “space”), and in which place is understood as sustaining origin or ground (see also my “Putting Space in Place,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, forthcoming). The three aspects distinguished here reappear elsewhere in my discussion throughout the essays collected here—most often in terms of the ideas of origin and ground. 4. In Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (a translation of Holzwege), trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–56—although even here Heidegger talks of the way in which the original even of “encounter,” of presencing, of “truth,” occurs in the ordinary...