The idea that the Heideggerian response to the nihilism of modernity is indeed to be understood in terms of a turn to the topological might seem an unsurprising claim, and to be characteristic of a whole series of “antimodernist” reactions that emphasize place, rootedness, and community, of which Heidegger's is merely one, albeit highly influential, example. On such an view, the turn to topos is also entirely consistent with Heidegger's political entanglement with Nazism in the 1930s — Nazism being understood as itself drawing heavily on a conception of German identity as rooted in “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden), in Heimat and Fatherland, and thereby standing opposed to the decadent excesses of a nihilistic and cosmopolitan modernity.
In fact, the thematization of topos in Heidegger’s thought, and the emphasis on Hölderlin as opposed to Nietzsche (and so on the resistance to nihilism rather than merely its proclamation), is increasingly explicit as Heidegger moves away from, rather than toward, the engagement with Nazism. Moreover, the Heideggerian critique of nihilism, especially as it develops in the 1930s and early 1940s around the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and which is there articulated in terms of a critique both of “subjectivism” and of metaphysics, is itself directed at what also appear as potential tendencies in Heidegger's own previous thinking, including the thinking that moves Heidegger in the direction of Nazism.2 Rather than simply a form of reactionary romanticism, then, the Heideggerian turn to topology can be taken as constituting a critical response to a destitution and nihilism at the very heart of modernity — a nihilism and destitution that is not marked by any single political ideology of the right or the left, and that Heidegger saw as exemplifi ed in Nazism,3 but which, today, is perhaps more clearly evident in the worldwide dominance of a technological-bureaucratic, corporatized “economism.”4
The exploration of the interrelation between the themes of nihilism and topology in Heidegger's thought, with respect to which I will address only one small part here, cannot be separated from the shifts in the development of Heidegger's thinking both in terms of his engagement with the philosophical tradition (and the larger history of the West of which it is a part) and in terms of certain problematic elements within his own thinking. This is not an engagement that is ever finally settled, however, but one that always remains unstable and to some extent uncertain. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, 5 Heidegger's thinking can be understood, in topological terms, as a constant turning to place that is also a turning in and of place.
The issues that are at stake in Heidegger's thinking of nihilism, and of modernity in general, as it connects with his thinking of place (and less