KHORA
khora [pdf]
INTRO
It is well known: what Plato in the Timaeus designates by the name of khora seems to defy that ‘logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers’ of which Vernant speaks, that logic ‘of binarity, of the yes or no’.
The Khora, which is neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’, belongs to a ‘third genus’.
One cannot even say of it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that.
[…] this alteration between the logic of exclusion and that of participation […] stems perhaps only from a provisional appearance and from the constraints of rhetoric, even from some incapacity for naming.
Let us recall once more […] that the discourse on the khora, as it is presented, does not proceed from the natural or legitimate logos, but rather from a hybrid, bastard, or even corrupted reasoning (logismo notho). It comes ‘as in a dream’ […]
[…] what if this appeal to the third genre [nor mythos/logos] was only the moment of a detour in order to signal toward a genre beyond genre?
[nb. ref here to Jean-Pierre Vernant ‘Raisons du mythe’ and Ambiguite et renversement]
[…] how are we to think that which, while going outside the regularity of the logos, its law, its natural or legitimate genealogy, nevertheless does not belong, strict sensu, to mythos?
Beyond the retarded […] opposition of logos and mythos, how is one to think the necessity of that which, while giving place to that opposition as to so many others, seems sometimes to be itself no longer subject to the law of the very thing which it situates? What of this place? Is it nameable? And wouldn’t it have some impossible relation to the possibility of naming?
rhetoric / anachrony / structural chasm
Now the discourse on the khora is also a discourse on genre/type (genos) and on different types of type.
Timeeus speaks of ‘mother’ and ‘nurse’ in regard to this subject. […] Almost all the interpreters if the Timaeus gamble here on the resources of rhetoric without ever wondering about them. They speak tranquilly about metaphors, images, similes. They ask themselves no questions about this tradition of rhetoric which places at their disposal a reserve of concepts which are very useful but which are all built upon this distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, which is precisely what the thought of the khora can no longer get along with […]
[on metaphorics (+ khora), here]
This problem of rhetoric – particularly of the possibility of naming – is, here, no mere side issue. […] We shall be content for the moment with indicating it, and situating it, but it is already clear that, just like the khora and with just as much necessity, it cannot easily be situated, assigned to a residence: it is more situating than situated […]
We shall not speak of metaphor, but not in order to hear, for example, that the khora is properly a mother, a nurse, a receptacle, a bearer of imprints or gold. It is perhaps because its scope goes beyond or falls short of the polarity of metaphorical sense versus proper sense that the thought of the khora exceeds the polarity, no doubt analogous, of the mythos and the logos.
[…]
with these two polarities, the thought of the khora would trouble the very order of polarity, of polarity in general […]
[…]
in carrying beyond the polarity of sense (metaphorical or proper), it would no longer belong to the horizon of sense, nor to that of meaning as the meaning of being.
[nb. nancy on sense and globalisation, here]
[…]
Not having an essence, how could the khora be beyond its name? The khora is anachronistic; it ‘is’ the anachrony within being, or better: the anachrony of being. It anachronises being.
[…] if Timaeus names it as recepticle (dekhomenon) or place (khora), these names do not designate an essence, the stable being of an eidos, since khora is neither of the order of the eidos nor of mimemes, that is, of images of the eidos which would come to imprint themselves in it – which this is not and does not belong to the known or recognised genera of being. It is not, and this nonbeing cannot be declared, that is, be caught or conceived, via the anthropomorphic schemas of the verb to receive and the verb to give.
Khora is not, is above all not, is anything but a support or a subject which would give place by receiving or by conceiving, or indeed by letting itself be conceived.
How could one deny it this essential significance as a receptacle, given that this very name is given to it by Plato? It is difficult indeed, but perhaps we have not yet thought through what is meant by to receive […] Perhaps it is from khora that we are beginning to learn it – to receive it […]
What is said about khora is that this name does not designate any of the known or recognised or, if you like, received types of existent, received by philosophical discourse, that is, by the ontological logos which lays down the law in the Timaeus: khora is neither sensible nor intelligible.
There is khora […] but what there is, there, is not.
[…] the referent or this referent does not exist. It does not have the characteristics of an existent, by which we mean an existent that would be receivable in the ontologic, that is, those of an intelligible or sensible existent.
Everything happens as if the yet-to-come history of the interpretations of khora were written or even prescribed in advance, in advance reproduced and reflected in a few pages of the Timaeus ‘on the subject’ of khora ‘herself’ (‘itself’)
In saying, in short, ‘this is how one can glimpse khora – in a difficult, aporetical way as if in a dream -‘, someone (Timaeus, Plato, etc.) would have said: this is what henceforth all the interpretations, for all eternity, of what I say here will look like. They will resemble what I am saying about khora; and hence what I am saying about khora gives a commentary, in advance, and describes the law of the whole history of the hermeneutics and the institutions which will be constructed on this subject, over this subject.
According to Hegel, philosophy becomes serious […] only from the moment when it enters into the sure path of logic: that is, after having abandoned, or let us rather say sublated, its mythic form: after Plato, with Plato. Philosophical logic comes to its senses when the concept wakes up from its mythological slumber.
The mytheme will have been only a prephilosopheme offered and promised to a dialectical Aufhebung.
[…] if khora has no meaning or essence, if she is not a philosopheme and if, nevertheless, he is neither the object nor the form of a fable of a mythic type, where can she be situated in this [Hegel’s] schema?
[…] half way through the cycle [of the cosmogony of the Timaeus], won’t the discourse on khora have opened, between the sensible and the intelligible, belonging neither to one nor to the other, hence neither to the cosmos as sensible god not to the intelligible god, an apparently empty space – even though it is no doubt not emptiness? Didn’t it name a gaping opening, an abyss or a chasm?
Isn’t it starting out from this chasm, ‘in’ it, that the cleavage between the sensible and the intelligible, indeed, between body and soul, can have place and take place?
The ontologico-encyclopedic conclusion of the Timaeus seems to cover over the open chasm in the middle of the book.
If there is indeed a chasm in the middle of the book […] the opening of a place ‘in’ which everything would, at the same time, come to take place and be reflected (for these are images which are inscribed there), is it insignificant that a mise en abyme regulates a certain order of composition of the discourse?
[…] Is it insignificant that this mise en abyme affects the forms of a discourse on places, notably political places, a politics of place entirely commanded by the consideration of sites (jobs in the society, region, territory, country), as sites assigned to types or forms of discourse?
khora as place (non-place) spaital (non)origin
Mise en abyme of the discourse on khora, site [lieu] of politics, politics of sites, such would be, then, the structure of an overprinting without base.
Still at the opening of the Timaeus, there is recalled an earlier conversation, a discourse (logos) of Socrates on the politeia and on its better government. Socrates sums it up […]. In passing he uses the word khora.
[…]
Although the word was already uttered (19a), the question of khora as a general place or total receptacle is, of course, not yet posed. But if it is not posed as such, it gestures and points already.
On the one hand, the ordered polysemy of the word always includes the sense of political place or, more generally, of invested place, by opposition to abstract space.
Khora ‘means’: place occupied by someone, country, inhabited place, marked place, rank, post, assigned position, territory, or region. And in fact, khora will always already be occupied, invested, even as a general place, and even when it is distinguished from everything that takes place in it.
Whence the difficulty – we shall come to it – of treating it as an empty or geometric space, or even, and this is what Heidegger will say of it, as that which ‘prepares’ the Cartesian space, the extension of the res extensa.
If Socrates pretends to include himself among those whose genus is to have no place, he does not assimilate himself to them, he says he resembles them. Hence he holds himself in a third genus, in a way, neither that of the sophists, poets and other imitators (of whom he speaks), nor that of the philosopher-politicians (to whom he speaks, proposing only to listen to them). His speech is neither his address nor what it addresses. His speech occurs in a third genus and in the neutral space or a place without place, a place where everything is marked but which would be ‘in itself’ unmarked.
Doesn’t he resemble what others, later, those very ones to whom he gives the word, will call a khora?
Socrates is not khora, but he would look a lot like it/her if it/she were someone or something.
In any case, he puts himself in its/her place, which is not just a place among others, but perhaps place itself, the irreplaceable place.
What is place? To what and to whom does it give place? What takes place under these names? Who are you, Khora?
receptacles in receptacles (thinking of david lynch)
If the cosmo-ontologic encyclopedia of the Timaeus presents itself as a ‘probable myth’, a tale ordered by the hierarchised opposition of the sensible and the intelligible, of the image in the course of becoming and of eternal being, how can one inscribe therein or situate therein the discourse on the khora?
On the one hand, by resembling and oneiric and bastard reasoning, this discourse reminds us of a sort of myth within the myth, of an open abyss in the general myth.
But on the other hand, in giving to be thought that which belongs neither to sensory being nor to intelligible being, neither to becoming nor to eternity, the discourse on khora is no longer a discourse on being, it is neither true nor probable and appears thus to be heterogeneous to myth, at least to mytho-logic,to this philosopho-mytheme which orders myth to its philosophical telos.
[…] a series of mythic fictions embedded mutually in each other.
In truth, each narrative content – fabulous, fictive, legendary, or mythic, it doesn’t matter for the moment – becomes in its turn the content of a different tale. Each tale is thus the receptacle of another. There is nothing but receptacles of narrative receptacles, or narrative receptacles of receptacles. Let us not forget that receptacle, place of reception or harbouring/lodging (hypodokhe), is the most instant determination (let us not say ‘essential’, for reasons which must already be obvious) of khora.
But if khora is a receptacle, if it/she gives place to all the stories, ontologic or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what she receives and even of what she resembles but which in fact takes place in her, khora herself, so to speak, does not become the object of any tale, whether true or fabled. A secret without secret remains forever impenetrable on the subject of it/her.
[David Lynch’s Inland Empire has an embedded narrative structure. it could be seen as a meditation on reception – the technological reception of recording devices]
In that fiction which is the written ensemble of the dialogue entitled Timaeus, someone speaks at first of a dialogue which I said to have taken place ‘last night’. This second fiction (F2) has a content, the fictive model of an ideal city, which is described in a narrative mode. A structure of inclusion which makes of the included fiction, in a sense the theme of the prior fiction, which is its including form, its capable container, let us say its receptacle.
[…]
In this theatre of irony, where the scenes interlock in a series of receptacles without end and without bottom, how can one isolate a thesis or a theme that could be attributed calmly to the ‘philosophy of Plato’, indeed to philosophy as the Platonic thing?
This would be to misrecognise or violently deny the structure of the textual scene, to regard as resolved all the questions of topology in general, including that of the places of rhetoric, and to think one understood what it means to receive, that is, to understand.
[analytical project – to take up the two films of DL (Mulholland Drive & Inland Empire) that deal with reception (indicated above) and to try to analyse their structure with reference to this work by Derrida, but also Dissemination and the Truth in Painting. It would constitute an extended reading of these works and be a deep dive into Lynch. One book would probably not be enough]
IV
Platonism (neutralising the text)
Should one henceforth forbid oneself to speak of the philosophy of Plato, of the ontology of Plato, or even of Platonism? Not at all, and there would undoubtedly be no error of principle in so speaking, merely an inevitable abstraction. Platonism would mean, in these conditions, the thesis or theme which one has abstracted by artifice, misprision, and abstraction from the text, torn out of the written fiction of ‘Plato’.
Once this abstraction has been supercharged and deployed, it will be extended over all the folds of the text, of its ruses, overdeterminations, and reserves, which the abstraction will come to cover up and dissimulate.
This will be called Platonism or the philosophy of Plato […]
It works and presents itself precisely under the name of philosophy.
[…] its arbitrary violence, its abstraction, consists in making the law, up to a point and for a while, in dominating, according to a mode which is precisely all of philosophy, other motifs of thought which are also at work in the text: for example, those which interest us here […]
‘Platonism’ is thus certainly one of the effects of the text signed by Plato, for a long time, and for necessary reasons, the dominant effect, but this effect is always turned back against the text.
[…]
The violent reversion of which we have just spoken is always interested and interesting.
It is naturally at work in this ensemble without limit which we call here the text. In constructing itself, in being posed in its dominant form at a given moment (here that of the Platonic thesis, philosophy, ontology), the text is neutralised in it, numbed, self-destructed or dissimulated: unequally, partially, provisionally.
The forces that are thus inhibited continue to maintain a certain disorder, some potential incoherence, and some heterogeneity in the organisation of the theses.
‘Platonism’ is not only an example of this movement, the first ‘in’ the whole history of philosophy. It commands it, it commands this whole history.
A philosophy as such would henceforth always be ‘Platonic’.
[…]
At this point […] three instances of textual fiction are mutually included in one another, each as content given form in the receptacle of another: F1, the Timaeus itself, a unit(y) that is already difficult to cut up; F2, the conversation on the evening before (The Republic, Politeia? This debate is well known); and F3, its present resume, the description of the ideal politeia.
But this is merely to begin. In front of the dead picture [tableau mort] Socrates thus demands that one pass on to life, to movement and to reality, in order to speak at last of philosophy and politics, those things that the mimetikon ethnos, the poietikon genos, and the ton sophiston genos are, somewhat like Socrates, incapable of.
So young Critias accepts (F4) to recount a tale which he had already told the night before, on the road, according to old oral traditions […]. In the course of this tale, which, the night before, already repeated an old and ill-determined tradition, young Critias recounts another tale (F5), which old Critias, his ancestor, had told him of a conversation which he (said he) had with Solon, a conversation in the course of which the latter relates (F6) in his turn a conversation which he (said he) had with an Egyptian priest and in the course of which the latter relates (F7) in his turn the origin of Athens: according to Egyptian scriptures.
[…]
So it is Athens or its people who, as the apparent addressees or receptacles of the tale, would thus be, according to the priest himself, its utterers, producers, or inspirers, its informers.
In fiction F1 – itself written, let us never forget that – there is thus developed a theory or a procession of writing referring, in writing, to an origin older than itself (F7).
In the centre, between F3 and F4, is a sort of reversal, an apparent catastrophe, and the appearance is that we think we’re passing then at last into reality, exiting from the simulacrum. In truth, everything still remains confined in the space of the zoographic fiction.
[…] From one telling to the next, the author gets farther and farther away. So the mythic saying resembles a discourse without a legitimate father. Orphan or bastard, it is distinguished from the philosophical logos, which, as is said in the Phaedrus, must have a father to answer for it and about it.
[see dissemination]
This familial schema by which one situates a discourse will be found again at work at the moment of situating, if we can still say this, the place [lieu] of and site [site], namely khora.
On the one hand, khora would be the ‘receptacle – as it were, the nurse -of any birth’.
She is a third gender/genus; she does not belong to an oppositional couple, for example, to that which the intelligible paradigm forms with the sensible becoming and which looks rather like a father/son couple.
She does not belong to the ‘race of women’.
Khora marks a place apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetrical relation to all that which, ‘in herself’, beside or in addition to herself, seems to make a couple with her.
In this couple outside of the couple, this strange mother who gives place without engendering can no longer be considered as an origin.
She/it eludes all anthropo-theological schemas, all history, all revelation, and all truth.
Preoriginary, before and outside of all generation, she no longer even has the meaning of a past, of a present that is past.
Before signals no temporal anteriority. The relation of independence, the nonrelation, looks more like the relation of the interval or the spacing to what is lodged in it to be received in it.
[…]
Let us take things up again from further back, which can be translated this: let us go back behind and below the assured discourse of philosophy, which proceeds by oppositions of principle and counts on the origin as on a normal couple.
We must go back toward a preorigin which deprives us of this assurance and requires at the same time an impure philosophical discourse […]
The bold stroke consists here in going back behind and below the origin, and also the birth, toward a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, ‘precedes’ (prior to the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and ‘receives’ the effect, here the image of oppositions (intelligible and sensible): philosophy. This necessity (khora is its sur-name) seems so virginal that it does not even have the figure of a virgin any longer.
[…]
Philosophy cannot speak directly, whether in the mode of vigilance or of truth (true or probable), about what these figures approach. The dream is between the two, neither one nor the other.
Philosophy cannot speak philosophically of that which looks like its ‘mother’, its ‘nurse’, its ‘receptacle’, or its ‘imprint-bearer.’ As such, it speaks only of the father and the son, as if the father engendered it all on his own.
[…] in order to think khora, it is necessary to go back to a beginning that is older than the beginning, namely the birth of the cosmos, just as the origin of Athenians must be recalled to them from beyond their own memory.