§2. Theory of the Texts
After Being and Time, [my] thinking replaced the expression 'meaning of being' with 'truth of being'. And so as to avoid any misapprehension about truth, so as to exclude its being understood as conformity, 'truth of being' has been elucidated as 'locality of being'—truth as the locus-character of being. That presupposes, however, an understanding of what a locus is. Hence the expression topology of being.
Seminar in Le Thor, 196917
These lines indicate how Heidegger should be read.
Only in his last writings does he raise the question of presencing as that of "loci." These loci are the historical economies. In each moment they constitute a field of presencing. Across the epochs presencing articulates itself differently, sets itself to work (ποιεῖν) differently. The 'poietic' character of presencing is what Heidegger calls Dichtung, "poetry." "Poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of being." Needless to say, this has nothing to do with the art of composing verse, or even with human language. "The poietic character of thinking"18 is only the echo, the reverberation of presencing and its poietic character. Presencing crystallizes (dichten means "to thicken," to render dense) into successive orders. Conversely, these epochal crystallizations determine the kind of words we speak and write in. The self-ordering of presencing thus must be understood as the primordial language. Throughout his texts, the essential concern of Heidegger's thinking remains the same: to understand 'being' phenomenologically as presencing, and to understand it through the manifold modes that entities have of rendering themselves "dense," of ordering themselves, of constituting a text or 'poem'. When the guiding idea of Heideggerian phenomenology is "the meaning of being," this manifold is one of regions: entities 'given for handling', entities 'given as objects', and 'being-there'. When its guiding idea is "the truth of being," the manifold is one of epochs: Greek, Latin, Modern, Technological. Finally, when the guiding idea is "the topology of' being," the manifold is no longer a matter of regions or epochs, but is the "coming-to-presence" itself: an event of multiple origination which, as a transcendental condition, renders the spatial, temporal, linguistic, and cultural "loci" possible.
Only with this last form of multiplicity does the thrust of the problematic appear which has moved Heidegger throughout the trajectory of his polymorphic writings with their shifting vocabularies: to grasp presencing as a force of plurification and of dissolution. From the genealogical perspective, the historical constellations of entities appear as orders arranged under an