Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (review)

The exclusive focus on the who-question ("who am I?") has often made philosophy forget the correlate where-question. All the answers given to the first question describe a man who is essentially nowhere. Place is never taken into account as part of one's identity and this implies nothing less than the exclusion of the body, for belongingness to place is proper to our bodies. Like the infamous character of Chamisso's tale who sells his shadow to the devil or like Peter Pan in J. M. Barnie's novel, the philosopher has lost his shadow and together with it, his or her sense of belongingness. The shadowless man is someone who is localized nowhere, lacks embodiment and place—he doesn't "take" place, that is, someone un-real. In Plato's language, he is atopos.

It is against such an a-topic trend that a number of recent studies in continental philosophy have argued. The work of Ed Casey and John Sallis comes to mind. Jeff Malpas's Heidegger's Topology is another good example of such an attempt to render to place its rightful place. Malpas follows with great attention the various transformations of the concept of topos (as being, place, world, clearing, the open and the Event) through Heidegger's work, from the early lectures in 1919 to the last seminar in 1972.

Although primarily a historical study, Malpas's Topology not only follows Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of dwelling, belonging, and being-there, but also undertakes some very lucid analyses of its own to illustrate the centrality of topology in Heidegger's thought and for philosophy generally.

The reader will be pleasantly surprised by Malpas's dexterity in tackling Heidegger's notoriously dense and difficult language with clarity but also with respect to the thinker's idiom (that is, Malpas writes about Heidegger while avoiding writing like him). Evidently, the author is at home with this material; both topology and Heidegger have been long-term projects of his and it is only natural to see them coming together in a single study.

Malpas's research—thorough and well-documented—is by no means limited to primary sources. He takes into account the work of his peers in the field (in fact, he is very generous in citing their work), and even when his reading takes a different direction than theirs, Malpas takes the trouble to explain to the reader why he believes it must—though his explanations can be a bit repetitive.

One of the central thoughts that permeates Malpas's treatment of topology is the differentiation between space and place. The phenomenological distinction of these two concepts appears already in the first chapter but it receives a more robust analysis in the last ("The Poetry that Thinks")—by far the longest chapter in the book. The world is more than a container in which man finds himself as a fish finds itself in an aquarium. Our everyday being-in-the-world, that is, the totality of our lived experiences, make the world more than a space, they make it our place. The spatial understanding of the world is itself an artificial attitude, as it can be reached only once we detach ourselves from our experience of the world as place, through disentanglement from our relations with the world: the world is nothing else but this entanglement. We are always involved in the world such that there is no world without or apart from these involvements. This is an idea Heidegger develops from the equipmentality of things in Being and Time to the idea of the fourfold (Geviert) in his later thought, according to which the jug that pours wine in a religious festival is what it is by being inscribed into a nexus of references to earth, sky, mortals, and gods.

Malpas, however, takes this a step further: he is willing to apply the fourfold not only to artefacts but also to nature. But are trees, mountains, or...