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January 6, 2009
In this review of Jeff Malpas' Heidegger’s Topology Miguel de Beistegui states that it is a book book about place, the place we ought to attribute to place as well as a book about the place we ought to attribute to place in the thought of Martin Heidegger. He says that it is a book that should be read and discussed by those who wonder about the difference between place and space, or between ontological locality and physical location.
I do, often. My assumption is that the question of place is essentially distinct from that of space and the concern for place is born of the essential placelessness or homelessness in which, for the most part, we find ourselves today in our globalised world. Hence the need for a return to place. In finding ourselves "in" the world, we find ourselves already"in" a place, already given over to and involved in things and persons, with our lives.
Malpas’ gives us a close reading of Heidegger’s complex treatment of the question of place structured around Heidegger’s claim that our technological age is characterized by the systematic elimination of place, and a planetary homelessness. My judgement is that Heidegger made made a significant contribution to the philosophical analysis of place in the 20th century, and that this was primarily on the basis of the later texts rather than the earlier. The categories of “clearing,” “way,” “dwelling,” and “homecoming” that comprise what Malpas calls Heidegger’s “topology,” are crucial ones in Heidegger's questioning of technology. de Beistegui says:
Malpas’ reading takes its clue from Heidegger’s later thought, and specifically from his claim that being be understood as disclosedness and clearing, and that the question of the meaning or the truth of being, initially understood as temporality, be now formulated as the question concerning the place of be-ing. With this clue or thread in hand, Malpas shows, most convincingly in my view, that the question of being is best formulated, and from the start, as a question of place, as the question, that is, concerning the way in which being is “there” or manifests itself. What Heidegger calls Dasein, and which Malpas insists we translate as being-there, is precisely an attempt to address the question of being from the point of view of its there, its locality or situation.
Malpas argues that Heidegger’s thought is not just helpful in elucidating place, but that place is at the root of Heidegger’ s philosophy of being. Being and place are inextricably bound together in that being emerges only through place; and place, through being. Malpas suggests that, for the latter Heidegger, “event” and “place” often mean the same; they are both the starting point for thinking and both offer possibilities for disclosure, appropriation, appearing, and gathering--categories that disclose being-in-place.
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