In 2004 I attended a conference in Heidegger’s hometown of Meßkirch. The conference was held in the town’s Schloß which had a Heidegger-museum in the basement, his grave was in the local cemetery and there were signs for the Martin-Heidegger-Weg that would take you on the route he used to walk out into the surrounding countryside. Much of this had become housing, but if you walked far enough you came to a tree with a bench that said this was where Heidegger used to sit as a young man and read the great philosophers. Heidegger’s critique of objects for consumption by the tourist industry clearly hasn’t been heeded.

The conference itself was on Heidegger and Nietzsche, and was very good. It was tri-lingual between English, French and German. A conference proceedings has long been promised, and it is now, finally listed. I have a piece in there entitled ‘A Thousand Year Conclusion? Machination and Calculation in the Nietzsche lectures’, which feels like a piece from a really different time in my career. It was written around the same time as Speaking Against Number, and there is some overlap of material. The delays in publication made me think this wasn’t actually ever going to appear, but it seems I was wrong. Amazon has it listed for today’s date. Shame about the prohibitive price.