Pe | HEIDEGGER’S TOPOLOGY Being, Place, World JEFF MALPASHeidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World Jeff Malpas The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, EnglandFirst MIT Press paperback edition, 2008 © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, SS Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malpas, J. E. Heidegger's topology : being, place, world / by Jeff Malpas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-13470-5 (he : alk. paper)—978-0-262-63368-0 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 2. Place (Philosophy). I. Title. B3279.H49M272 2007 111,092—de22, 2006046709 1098765432Contents ‘Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Heidegger, Place, and Topology 1 Beginning in Place 39 The Ontology of Existence: Meaning and Temporality 65 The Turning of Thought: Truth and World 147 The Poetry That Thinks: Place and “Event” 211 CC ae) Conclusion: Returning to Place 305 Notes 317 Select Bibliography 389 Index 405Things exist rooted in the flesh, Stone, tree and flower. ... Space and time Are not the mathematics that your will Imposes, but a green calendar Your heart observes; how else could you Find your way home or know when to die. .. —R. $. Thomas, “Green Categories”Acknowledgments This book has taken rather longer to write than I ever anticipated. Indeed, it is a book for which a partial version already existed at the beginning of 1999. Administrative and other duties prevented me from pursuing the project, however, and the final version actually represents a major rework- ing and rewriting of the original material—indeed, there is very little of the original that remains. Although a considerable amount of work had thus already been undertaken beforehand, the core elements in the book were actually developed in a series of articles published between 2001 and 2004 and in the reworking of that material between the end of 2003 and the middle of 2004. Over this period the research was supported by the School of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, by a Large Grant from the Australian Research Council (from 2001-2003), and by a six-month stay, from May to October of 2004, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, where I was fortunate enough to be able to resume the Humboldt Fellowship that I had originally held at the University of Heidelberg in 1998-1999. I would like to thank the University of Tasmania and Ludwig- Maximilians-Universitat Munich, as well the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the support they have given this project. Special thanks are also due to a number of individuals: Andrew Benjamin, Ed Casey, Bert Dreyfus, Stuart Elden, Joseph Fell, Karl Homann (my host in Munich), Marcelo Stamm (who deserves special thanks and acknowledgment for his generosity in allowing my wife and myself to use his Munich apartment during the time this book was written), Peter Steiner, Reinhard Steiner, James Phillips (for being ‘one of my best-ever postgraduate students and also for assisting with the final corrections and revisions), and Julian Young (for many long dis- cussions on dwelling and other topics over the years and for much else besides).x Acknowledgments A note on referencing: Except in a few cases in which the English text appears in a dual English/German edition, all references in the text to English translations of Heidegger's works are followed by a reference to the original German source in parentheses—where the relevant volume appears in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), the reference is given as GA followed by volume number and page number, for example: (GA, 13:84).1 Introduction: Heidegger, Place, and Topology But poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. . .. —Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet” This book has its origins in two ideas: first, that a central, if neglected, concept at the heart of philosophical inquiry is that of place; and, second, that the concept of place is also central to the thinking of the key twenti- eth-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Originally the material dealt with in these pages was intended to form part of a single investigation into the nature and significance of place. As work on that volume proceeded, however, it soon became obvious that it would be difficult to deal with the Heidegger material in a way that did justice to it while also allowing the development of the broader inquiry into place as such. As a result, the volume that appeared with Cambridge University Press in 1999, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, while it included some brief discus- sion of Heidegger, was focused on the task of establishing the philosoph- ical nature and significance of place, leaving the main investigation of the role of place in Heidegger for another work—a work that was projected in the pages of Place and Experience under the title “Heidegger's Topology of Being.” ‘The title may have changed slightly, but the present volume aims to make good on that original commitment and can be regarded as some- thing of a companion volume to Place and Experience (in fact, since 1 am now working on a third volume, Triangulating Davidson, that will develop a place-oriented reading of Donald Davidson’s work on language, mind, and understanding, the original project now seems to have turned into a trilogy of works). Moreover, while Heidegger is a central focus here, and the work aims to provide an account of the role and significance of place in relation to Heidegger, the book also contains material that can be viewed as expanding and supplementing elements of the original analysis in Place2 Chapter 1 and Experience. This is especially so as regards a number of methodological issues surrounding the idea of what I have called “topography” and that appears in Heidegger as “topology.” In this respect, Heidegger's Topology can be viewed as providing, not only a particular way of reading Heidegger's thought in its entirety, but also a more detailed investigation of the way in which the concept of place relates to certain core philosophical issues such as the nature of ground, of the transcendental, and of concepts of unity, limit, and bound, as well as a further defense of the philosophical significance and legitimacy of place. In taking place as the central concept in Heidegger's thought, the aim is to be able to arrive at a more basic and, one hopes, more illuminating understanding of that thought and so also, perhaps, a more basic and illu- minating appropriation of it into an English-speaking context—an under- standing, moreover, that shows how that thought originates, not in some peculiar and special “intuition” of being, but rather in the simple and immediate grasp of being in our own “being-in” the open-ness of place. In this respect, what I offer here is a very specific “reading” of Heidegger, one that aims to understand him as responding to a particular problem or set of problems and that aims to bring to the fore an issue that is other- wise not always directly apparent in Heidegger's thinking either as he himself formulates it or as it is interpreted by others, but which is never- theless foundational to that thinking. The aim, in fact, is to bring to light something in Heidegger's thinking that perhaps he could not have himself fully articulated and that indeed remains, to some extent, to be “tecov- ered” from that work. That the task of reading Heidegger will indeed involve a certain “struggle” both with Heidegger, and sometimes even against him, seems to me an inevitable result of any attempt to engage with Heidegger as a “live” thinker rather than a mere “text.” It also means, however, that my account may be viewed as simply putting too much stress on certain elements at the expense of others. This is a criticism that 1am happy to accept, although I leave it up to the reader to judge whether the way of reading proposed does not bring certain advantages with it— not least in terms of advancing the understanding of the underlying con- cepts and problems that seem to be at issue here. The plan of the book is fairly simple inasmuch as it follows the devel- opment of Heidegger's topology through three main stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s (up to and including Being and Time) cen- tered on the “meaning of being” (chapters 2 and 3); the middle period of the 1930s and extending into the 1940s, centered on the “truth of being” (chapter 4);? and the late period from the mid-1940s onwards in which the