the world to its own will. It is thus that Heidegger, in his Nietzsche lectures from 1936 to 1940, developed his own critique of Nazism as the contemporary instantiation of what he saw as the Nietzschean “will to power” (a critique that might also be thought to be relevant to tendencies within his own earlier thinking).40 Indeed, one might argue that in Nazism one finds a version of the “subjectivism” that is present in von Uexküll now developed into a determinate political form—the geographical becoming itself subject to the racial and the psychological. Moreover, the subjectivist character of such a development is not accidental, nor does it always remain implicit. Within German geopolitical thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, the geographer Otto Maull embraced just such a subjectivism as a direct response to the problem apparently presented by Ratzelian thinking. Discussing the 1941 edition of Maull's Das Wesen der Geopolitik (The Essence of Geopolitics), Mark Bassin writes:
Maull now categorically rejected geographical determinism as “materialist,: insisting that true Geopolitik was “idealist” in its inspiration and that it identified the rooted Völkisch “spirit” itself as “the cause of all political developments.” ... The Volk [People] itself now became the “quintessential agent of activity and determination” to which the natural-geographical milieu was correspondingly subordinated and by which it was instrumentalized as nothing more than “a task, a goal and a purpose.” Far from being constrained by the natural conditions in which it exists, a Volk demonstrates its worthiness through its success in an endless struggle to overcome, and, eventually, to conquer them.41
As it is the Volk—the People as determined by their racial character—who are given priority here, so too are the geographical, the topological and the spatial correspondingly deemphasized. Moreover, in giving priority to the Volk as the active principle in the formation of the world, so too is a form of subjectivism, and as the later Heidegger would argue, of a modernistic nihilism, also enacted.
The “Uncanniness” of Place
It is often claimed that to take human being as standing in an important relation to place or geographic space is already to presuppose a homogeneity of culture and identity in relation to that place, as well as to exclude others from it. This is the core of the argument that is often used to demonstrate the supposed politically dangerous character of place-oriented or “geographic” thinking (an argument that appears, for instance, in Levinas,42 but is also assumed, apparently as self-evident, in many other writers). Yet