Malpas (2006:3-6) – ser e lugar

Grande parte do meu argumento poderia ser colocado em termos da ideia de que a questão do ser está de fato subjacente a uma "questão mais radical" — nomeadamente, a questão do lugar — de modo que, na terminologia de van Buren  , ser há que se entender como, poder-se-ia dizer, um "efeito" de lugar. Em rigor, porém, preferiria dizer que ser e lugar estão indissociavelmente ligados de uma forma que não permite que um seja visto apenas como "efeito" do outro, antes ser emerge apenas em e através de lugar. A questão do ser deve ser entendida a esta luz, de tal forma que a questão do ser se desdobra na questão do lugar. Para além disso, uma das características intrigantes do trabalho de van Buren é que, embora não tematize o conceito de lugar de forma significativa, não deixa de pintar um quadro do pensamento inicial de Heidegger em termos de uma proliferação de ideias e imagens de lugar, casa, situação e envolvimento — sugerindo mesmo, a certa altura, que "em 1921 Heidegger já usava o termo Dasein   no sentido de um sítio de ser".

Heidegger’s work is of special relevance to any place-oriented thinker. As Edward Casey   has so admirably set out in his The Fate of Place, [1] the history of place within the Western philosophical tradition   has generally been one in which place has increasingly been seen as secondary to space—typically to a particular notion of space as homogeneous, measurable extension— and so reduced to a notion of position, simple location, or else mere “site.” The way in which place relates to space, time, and other concepts and the manner in which these concepts are configured has seldom been the object of detailed philosophical exploration. Although Casey argues that place has reemerged in recent thought through the work of a number of writers, of whom he takes Heidegger to be one, the way in which place appears in Heidegger’s thought seems to me to be especially significant and also quite special. Unlike Casey, who views Heidegger as proceeding to place by “indirection,” [2] I take Heidegger to have attempted a thinking of being that is centrally oriented to the concept of place as such. In this respect, I concur with Joseph Fell   when he writes that, “The entirety of Heidegger’s thinking turned out to be a protracted effort at remembering the place in which all human experience—practical or theoretical, willed or reasoned, poetic or technical—has always come to pass.” [3] Indeed, I would argue that Heidegger’s work provides us with perhaps the most important and sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought.

In this latter respect, the significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place is evident, not   only in terms of the way in which spatial and topographic concepts figure in his own work, nor even the way in which he might be taken as a focus for exploration of some of the problematic aspects of these ideas, but in terms of the manner in which spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger’s work into that of other key thinkers over the last   sixty years or more, both through the reaction against those ideas, or against certain interpretations of them, as well as their positive   appropriation. This is an aspect of Heidegger’s work that is gradually being explored in more detail. Stuart Elden, for instance, has argued for a significant Heideggerian influence, specifically in relation to ideas of spatiality, on the work of Michel Foucault  ; [4] while if one accepts Casey’s claim that recent philosophy has seen something of a resurgence in the concept of place, much of that resurgence has to be seen as due to the pivotal influence of Heidegger’s thought and of Heidegger’s own focus, particularly in his later work, on notions of space and place. Understanding the way such notions figure in Heidegger’s work may thus be viewed as foundational to understanding a good deal of contemporary thinking, and recognition of this point seems to be evident in the appearance of a small but steady flow of works over the last few years that do indeed take up aspects of spatial and topological ideas in Heidegger’s work. Stuart Elden’s book on Heidegger and Foucault, referred to above, is one example of this, while Julian Young’s work has been especially important in tracing ideas of place and dwelling in Heidegger’s later thinking, particularly as these ideas arise in relation to Heidegger’s engagement with the early nineteenth-century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin  . [5]

Nevertheless, while there is an increasing recognition of the importance of space and place, it remains the case, especially so far as place itself is concerned, that there has been relatively little analysis of the way in which spatial and topological concepts operate in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole. [6] Undoubtedly, this is partly a result of the fact that Heidegger’s early thought has always tended to command more attention than the later, and in that early work, as I discuss further below (see chapter 3), space and place have a problematic status, while in Heidegger’s later thinking, in which topological notions are more explicitly to the fore, the focus on place comes as part of what has often been seen as an obscure and barely philosophical mysticism. At a more fundamental level, however, the apparent neglect of place in Heidegger’s work undoubtedly reflects the more general neglect of place that Casey brings to our attention and so the relative lack of analytical attention that has hitherto been paid to place as such. Although concepts of space and place have become commonplace in recent discussions across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, there have been few attempts to provide any detailed account of what these concepts actually involve. [7] This is true even of such influential thinkers of place and space such as Lefebvre and Foucault in whose works spatial notions, in particular, function as key analytic tools and yet are not themselves investigated in any detailed fashion. More generally, and especially in regard to place, the tendency is either to assume the notion, or to assume some specific reading of it, or else to view it as a secondary and derivative concept. Indeed, all too often, place is viewed as a function of human responsiveness or affectivity, [8] as a social or cultural “construction,” [9] or else as nothing other than a sort of neutral “site” (perhaps understood in terms of a more or less arbitrary region of physical space) that draws any qualities it might have from that which is located within it. [10] The neglect of place that is evident here can be seen, to some extent, as a result of the seeming “obscurity” that attaches to place as such—place seems an evanescent concept, disappearing in the face of any attempt to inquire into it [11]— we are thus easily led, no matter how persistently the concept may intrude into our thinking, to look to articulate place in other terms (within a Heideggerian frame, the “obscurity” that attaches to place may be seen to reflect the same “obscurity” that attaches to being as such). In some ways, in fact, this is a tendency to which Heidegger himself seems to succumb (at least around the period of Being and Time  ).

Yet what place is and how it ought to be understood is just what is in question—and while the obscurity of place may render answers to such questions all the more elusive, those questions are no less pressing or significant. Building on the foundations already laid in Place and Experience, the present book aims to go some way toward providing more of the analysis that seems to be needed here, and in doing so, to go a little further in establishing the centrality and necessity of place, not only in Heidegger, but in all philosophical inquiry. In attempting to address the question of place as such, the analysis advanced in the following pages should not be seen, any more or less than the analysis in Place and Experience that preceded it, as necessarily incompatible with those many other accounts that deploy spatial and topological notions in analysis and description from more specifically sociological, anthropological, geographical, political, economic, linguistic, literary, or cultural perspectives. [12] In this respect, the hope is that any general account of place will be complementary to the more specific accounts that arise within particular disciplinary approaches (which is not to say that it will be consistent with all such accounts or that it will be inconsistent with all of them either), providing a broader framework within which the analytic and descriptive use of spatial and topological notions can be guided and better understood. Certainly such a hope underpinned my own earlier work in Place and Experience, and the same is true of the investigations that are pursued here in more direct relation to Heidegger.

I have already noted the way in which spatial and topological notions have a problematic status in Heidegger’s early work, and there is no doubt that the idea   of topology emerges as an explicit and central idea for Heidegger quite late in his thinking. Yet the claim I will advance here is that what guides that thinking, if only implicitly, almost from the start, is a conception of philosophy as having its origin in a particular idea, problem, and, we may also say, experience: our finding ourselves already “there,” in the world, in “place.” The famous question of being that is so often referred to by Heidegger himself as the primary focus for his thought thus has to be understood as itself a question determined by this starting point. In his book on the young Heidegger, John van Buren writes that:

Heideggerians in their search for “Being” have for years been after the wrong thing. Despite Heidegger’s continued use of such phrases as “the question of being,” “being as being,” and “being itself,” right up until the unfinished introduction to his collected edition, his question was never really the question of being , but rather the more radical question of what gives or produces being as an effect. [13]

Much of my argument here could be put in terms of the idea that the question of being is indeed underlain by a “more radical question”—namely, the question of place—so that, in van Buren’s terminology, being has to be understood as, one might say, an “effect” of place. Strictly speaking, however, I would prefer to say that being and place are inextricably bound together in a way that does not allow one to be seen merely as an “effect” of the other, rather being emerges only in and through place. The question of being must be understood in this light, such that the question of being itself unfolds into the question of place. Moreover, one of the intriguing features of van Buren’s work is that, while he does not thematize the concept of place in any significant way, he nevertheless paints a picture of Heidegger’s early thinking in terms of a proliferation of ideas and images of place, home, situatedness, and involvement [14]—even suggesting, at one point, that “in 1921 Heidegger already used the term Dasein in the sense of a site of being.” [15]