Humberto González Núñez
The University of Texas at Dallas
Volume 16, 2024
I. Introduction
The question of khōra seems indissociably linked to the question of legacies and the possibility of the future. To illustrate this point, we need only remember that Derrida’s essay “Khōra” operates within the difference between the Platonic text and the hegemonic legacy of the meta-textual effect called Platonism. Derrida defines Platonism in this text as “the thesis or the theme which one has extracted by artifice, miscomprehension, and abstraction from the text, torn out of the written fiction of “Plato.”” (On the Name, 119). According to this approach, the legacy of the Platonic text has been foreclosed by the censoring effects of the restricted economy of Platonism, which has wanted to erase or occlude the various aporiai that appear under the signature “Plato.” In both “Plato’s Pharmacy” and “Khōra,” Derrida invites us to read the Platonic text against the grain of Platonism in the hopes of retrieving an unforeseen, unsuspected, hidden, and suppressed possibility, which resounds in the opening line of his 1993 text— “Khôra nous arrive.” (89).
II. Toward an Infrapolitical Interpretation of Khōra
Let us begin by marking one of the decisive moments in which Derrida anticipates what I am referring to here as the infrapolitical dimension of khōra:
Is it insignificant that this mise en abyme affects the forms of a discourse on places [places], notably political places, a politics of place entirely commanded by the consideration of sites [lieux] (jobs in the society, region, territory, country), as sites assigned to types or forms of discourse?
(On the Name, 104)
In this passage, khōra appears as a possible abyss marking the withdrawal from a politics of place prior to making space for a possible politics or a politics to come. Khōra is a name for the solicitation of all attempts to produce a ground for politics in the form of place. Khōra’s destabilization of the political logic of place redoubles the problems of translation understood in both senses of the term (i.e., what we might call the linguistic translation of khōra as “place” and its political translation in the form of a politics to come). When it comes to khōra, this twofold problem of translation is always at stake and Derrida was aware of the possible political implications of the discussion of khōra.
Let us illustrate this point concerning politics, translation, and khōra by turning to two brief yet crucial comments on khōra in Heidegger’s work, which Derrida almost certainly had in mind as he developed his interpretation. These comments appear in two crucial texts, which are Introduction to Metaphysics and What is Called Thinking?4 In the 1935 text, Heidegger begins by recalling the potential misinterpretation of khōra through its reduction to “space” [»Raum«]. According to Heidegger, the Greeks did not have a word for “space” because “they do not experience the spatial according to extensio but instead according to place (topos) as chōra, which means neither place [Ort] nor space [Raum] but what is taken up and occupied by what stands there.” (GA 40, 69/70). This passage already introduces us to the insightful yet perplexing dimension of Heidegger’s remarks on khōra. On the one hand, Heidegger correctly avoids reducing khōra to space. But, on the other hand, this spatial dimension of khōra is reintroduced as soon as Heidegger translates the term as place [Ort]. Heidegger’s interpretation proceeds to intensify the reinscription of khōra into the logic of place in the following passage:
Might not chōra mean: that which separates itself from every particular [sich absondernde von jedem Besonderen], that which withdraws, and in this way admits and “makes room” [»Platz macht«] precisely for something else?
(GA 40, 70-71)
While the wordplay between absondernde and Besonderen approximates the double movement through which khōra exceeds and withdraws from all determination, Heidegger’s use of Platz is revealing of his broader predisposition for thinking khōra according to place, which seems to be almost definitively resolved in the later 1951-52 text where he writes, “ἡ χώρα is called place [Ort].” (GA 8, 227/174).1
Heidegger’s approach to khōra as place is only further compounded if we turn to the highly relevant 1942-43 Parmenides seminar. (GA 54, 132). In this seminar, Heidegger begins his discussion of the polis by recalling a series of crucial etymological connections, which are pertinent to our present purposes: “Πόλις is the πόλος, the pole, the place [der Ort] around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way.” (GA 54, 89/132). Heidegger’s connection between polis and place in this seminar is crucial and will guide the entirety of his discussion, as illustrated by the following passage: “The πόλις is the essence of the place [Ort], or, as we say, it is the settlement [Ort-schaft] of the historical dwelling of Greek humanity.”(GA 54, 90/133). One cannot help but question Heidegger’s decision to think the essence of the polis through the notion of place and settlement/placement [Ort und Ort-schaft]. Bringing these two moments of Heidegger’s reflections on khōra and place, we can see that the two tendencies in his thought are marked by a tension. On the one hand, Heidegger’s reflections on khōra provide us with a possible retrieval of an unheard meaning of the term. But, on the other hand, his insistence on reducing it to place and to the political logic of place reveals a relative lack in his thought to develop the consequences of his solicitation of politics.
In Infrapolitics: A Handbook, Alberto Moreiras elucidates the role of Heidegger’s differentiation between polis and politics as a way of outlining what he calls a “genealogy of infrapolitical reflection.” (50). While Moreiras focuses primarily on Heidegger’s interpretation of the first choral ode of Sophocles’ Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics and his 1942 seminar, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” one can see that the same idea of distance between politics and the political is at stake in the Parmenides seminar. Moreiras describes these Heideggerian comments on the distance between politics and the polis as “fateful words we must think through” since what is at stake is an important solicitation of our political thinking. While Heidegger’s gloss on the notion of the polis as the place where exchange happens seems relatively uncontroversial, it is the second statement, namely, that this site cannot be determined politically that proves to be the more challenging one. For Moreiras, this second movement introduces what he calls “infrapolitical distance, which is the absolute limit of the place where politics narrativizes into its logic, invokes a nearness to something without which life would be unlivable, hence an absolute condition of politics.” (53). The challenge of Heidegger’s text, according to Moreiras, is nothing other than having obscurely anticipated this difference between politics and the polis, which goes by the name of infrapolitics.
With this in mind, let us recall the political context of Plato’s Timaeus. The dialogue begins by Socrates and his interlocutors recalling the speech from the day before, which, as we learn, dealt with politeias (i.e., with the events depicted in the Republic). (Timaeus, 17c). While this dramatic prologue is often read by the sentinels of Platonism as an unnecessary appendage, we should note, following Derrida and Sallis, how this political context already contaminates and influences the cosmological content of the Timaeus. I claim that we should take a step further in reflecting on the political background of the Timaeus by interpreting it as an illustration of how this oblique form of politics becomes infrapolitically charged. This is perhaps best illustrated by how the Platonic text introduces and withdraws this political context and it remains as an obscure undercurrent of the text, which is not unlike the simultaneously withdrawing and bestowing movement of khōra herself. According to Platonism, the reference to politics in the Timaeus is not really a politics. Perhaps they are right. However, they do not know what they mean. Perhaps the politics of khōra in the Timaeus is not a politics in the sense that the connection between these two terms can only be understood according to a disruptive form of logic that exceeds our understanding of them. Perhaps we are no longer dealing with politics in any conventional sense of the term, but instead with something like “the politics of politics” as suggested by Geoffrey Bennington in Scatter 1.2 Perhaps the chorology of the Timaeus, to borrow an expression from Sallis, offers us the possibility of a yet unheard-of “infrapolitical cosmology.”
Sallis approximates this infrapolitical dimension of khōra in his interpretation of Plato in Chorology, especially when he recalls the other appearances of the term throughout the Platonic corpus (especially, the Republic and the Laws). What is interesting about these other occurrences of khōra is that they primarily appear in their pre-philosophical meaning, which would usually be translated as “country.” Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Sallis’ analysis is his suggestion that “more often what is prominent when it is used in this general sense is its distinction from the πόλις: the country in distinction from the city.”(Chorology, 116). If the polis must be understood in its difference from our modern understanding of politics, then the introduction of khōra as being at a distance from the polis invites us to re-double this difference. Put otherwise, if, following Moreiras, we could suggest that khōra exacerbates the infrapolitical distance between the polis and politics by pointing to an elsewhere that is always already involved in what takes place under the name of “the political,” then khōra is another word in the nonequivalent chain of metaphors indicating something like infrapolitics. I argue that the discourse on khōra not only intensifies this infrapolitical distance, but also points toward the possibility for another beginning, which becomes manifest as a retrieved image of an older site.
We can begin to think through this older site toward by returning to Sallis’ discussion of the pre-philosophical meaning of the Greek term as “land” in the sense of earth. Sallis’ attempts to recover the earthly dimension of khōra prove thought-provoking, especially within the context of contemporary debates on the Anthropocene. In an essay entitled, “The Politics of the Χώρα,” Sallis goes even further in his interpretation of the political (or, in my own terms, infrapolitical) register of khōra by suggesting that the chorology can be understood in general as a critique of making and production (i.e., poiesis). Drawing attention to the parallel between the Timaeus and the Republic, Sallis suggests that the common thread between the two dialogues is their comedic representation of the disastrous consequences of thinking politics on the model of poiesis. Thus, the seemingly absurd scenarios represented in the Republic are meant, according to Sallis, as a cautionary tale of “the difference between a city built in λόγος and an actual city formed in the image of the paradigm.” (Platonic Legacies, 42). By making apparent the distance between the logical city and its instantiation, the chorology allows one to enter the infrapolitical space that destabilizes all forms of political activity. Hence, infrapolitics names a spacing or interval (understood now as a possible translation of khōra) that not only troubles any existing politics but is also the obscure path through which any politics to come might arrive.
III. Conclusion
“What of a politics of the χώρα today?” (Platonic Legacies, 43). I would like to read Sallis’ provocative question as a possible call to think the relevance of khōra for thinking through the challenges and issues brought forth by the Anthropocene and the possibility of extinction. It has become commonplace to respond to climate catastrophe in the form of a call to politics. We hear the imperatives everywhere: “We need a new politics!” “Let us invent a new politics!” However, if the chorology has taught us anything, then this politics can only arise from a serious grappling with the consequences of the infrapolitical distance from the political logic of place. Khōra, understood as another site of infrapolitical reflection, requires an intensification of the infra of infrapolitics, which, as Gareth Williams notes in Infrapolitical Passages, indicates “the necessity of an engagement with the horizon and materiality of ruination, perishing, finitude, and death.” (Infrapolitical Passages, 98). As Sallis puts it toward the end of his Chorology, “Would one not need to think the constitution of the political not only as a distinctive place but also as taking place in a distinctive way?” (Platonic Legacies, 44) Such a question serves as a helpful reminder and illustration of the fact that, as Sallis rightly notes, “a politics of the χώρα will never be a simple linear discourse.” (Platonic Legacies, 44) As I hope to have shown, the radically deconstructive force of the chorology prevents us from ever being sure that a discourse on khōra will take the recognizable form of what we understand either by discourse or politics. Khōra resists its instrumentalization and transformation into a political device with the goal of producing the right kind of politics. As Sallis puts it, “a politics of the χώρα will never provide a prescription for making or remaking the πόλις.” (Platonic Legacies, 44) Khōra is non-prescriptive. It reveals the laughable [geloion] quality of any attempt to produce and manufacture a polis according to poiêsis and production, as suggested by the dystopian picture of the city of luxury represented in the Republic. Rather than looking to khōra as the advent of a salvational politics, one should think of a possible politics of the khōra by understanding it as introducing a limit to every maximization of poiesis and freeing up some other form of dwelling (Platonic Legacies, 45).
Allow me to conclude by drawing attention to the couple of passages where Derrida began to bring together the intuition of an infrapolitical interpretation of khōra and the possibility of a politics to come. The first passage appears in a solitary sentence in Rogues where Derrida suggests that “the democracy to come would be like the khōra of the political.” (82). The second passage occurs within the context of an even more obscure context in Specters of Marx where Derrida claims that the messianism without messianism he is trying to develop can be described as “a materialism of the khôra for a despairing [désespérant] “messianism.”” (212). This messianisme désespérant would revolve around both a sense of hopelessness and urgency, which has become our own lot concerning the Anthropocene. Perhaps the only thing that might save us is this impossible dream signaled to us by the khōra.
Notes
- Trans. modified. As an interesting aside, I should mention that Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray include site and locus alongside place as possible translation for the German Ort. While this decision is clearly done to allow the reader to obtain a broader sense of Heidegger’s use of the Ort, I cannot help but note how all three translations fall into the reduction of khōra mentioned by Sallis in the Chorology, which is perhaps a symptom of Heidegger’s insufficient attention to the ancient Greek term. ↩︎
- The present infrapolitical interpretation of khōra is quite close to the deconstructive gesture at work in Bennington’s account of “the politics of politics” throughout Scatter. For more on the affinities between infrapolitics and “the politics of politics,” cf. Humberto González Núñez, “The Undecidability of the Politics of Politics: On Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter 1,” Política Común 12 (2017); Alberto Moreiras and Geoffrey Bennington, “On Scatter, the Trace Structure, and the Opening of Politics: An Interview with Geoffrey Bennington,” Diacritics 45, no. 2 (2018): 34–51. As an aside, it’s interesting that Bennington does not, as far as I know, engage in a discussion of khōra in either volumes of Scatter, which is perplexing since, as I aim to show in this presentation, there is an important affinity between what he calls “the politics of politics,” what Sallis refers to as “the politics of χώρα,” and what Moreiras and I are calling “infrapolitics.” ↩︎
Works Cited
- Bennington, Geoffrey. Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
- Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- —. On the Name. Trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
- —. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
- Heidegger, Martin. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. GA 40.
- —. Was heisst Denken?, ed. Paola- Ludovika Coriando. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. GA 8.
- —. Parmenides, ed. M. S. Frings. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992. GA 54.
- Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolitics: A Handbook. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
- Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.
- Sallis, John. Platonic Legacies. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004.
- —. Chorology. On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.
- Williams, Gareth. Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
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