straightforward—it is a direct translation of the German term “Topologie.” The connotations that attach to the English term are also more or less identical to those that attach to the German. Both “topology” and “Topologie” have a specific technical sense that refers to a branch of mathematical geometry that studies the nature of surfaces. Heidegger, however, drawing on the Greek roots that lie embedded in the term—topos and logos—takes it in the sense of a “saying of place” (Ort-reden). The real question—one might say that it is one of the central questions that concerns my project here—is what does it mean to talk of, and to attempt, such a “saying of place”? For the moment, all I can do is sketch out some of the background to this idea, before we move on to explore what might be at issue in more detail as it emerges through the larger analysis undertaken in the pages that follow.
Heidegger uses the term “Topologie” in only a very few places: in the Le Thor Seminar from 1969;89 in a poem from 1947 (the line that stands at the head of this chapter);90 and in his exchange with Ernst Jünger, “On the Question of Being” (originally “Concerning the Line”).91 However, the idea of topology is clearly very closely connected with the later Heidegger’s explicit focus on notions of place and particularly with the idea of his work as concerned to speak or articulate “the place of being” (die Ortschaft des Seyns). Indeed, Heidegger makes just this connection in the key passage from the Le Thor Seminar that I mentioned above. There he provides a brief summary of the passage of his thinking in a way that also suggests that this is a passage through which all thinking must go:
With Being and Time . . . the “question of Being” . . . concerns the question of being qua being. It becomes thematic in Being and Time under the name of “the question of the meaning [Sinn] of being.” Later this formulation was given up in favor of that of “the question of the truth of being,” and finally in favor of that of “the question concerning the place or location of being” [Ortschaft des Seins], from which the name topology of being arose [Topologie des Seins]. Three terms which succeed one another and at the same time indicate three steps along the way of thinking: MEANING—TRUTH—PLACE (τοποσ).92
This passage is a crucial one for my project here since not only does it bring together certain central concepts, but it also provides the outlines of the pathway that I aim to sketch out in more detail in the chapters to come.
One of the few places in which Heidegger’s idea of topology has been explicitly addressed is in the work of Otto Pöggeler, and especially in his book Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking. There Pöggeler writes that “Topology is the Saying (λο´γοσ) of the abode (το´ ποσ) in which truth as