Khora Times

“The Chora is indeed a strange “space”: the rapidity and violence of the facilitations are localized at a point that absorbs them, and they return like a  boomerang to the invoking body, without however, signifying it as separate: they stop there, impart the jolt - laughter. Because it was bounded but not blocked, the rate of facilitation discards fight and bursts into a jolt of laughter.” (p. 284 Kristeva)
    “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect.Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe. So if I'm to tell the story of how it really came to be in this way, I'd also have to introduce the character of the Straying Cause-how it is its nature to set things adrift."-Plato Timeaus 48

    The swaying cause we see here is a haunted space of indeterminacy fundamental to the foundations of Western Metaphysics. The swaying cause is the casual space of indeterminacy, a third space. Time for Plato is not linked to space by reason, to create order of intellect, but a necessity, space is that which reason could not create and time is part of the rational ordering of necessity, but it is part of an illogical, or third cause. Plato proposed this differentiated notion of time in Timaeus. “[the Demiurge] began to think of making a  moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make  an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This, of course, is what we call “time.”Plato later begins to articulate the receptacle, chora. Khora is between being and becoming for Plato, a matrix, womb, the mother of time as opposed to the father of time chronos. First elucidated in Plato’s Timaeus, chora is referred to as a receptacle. After analyzing vision and its gift to humanity, to see the perfection of the Kosmos, he described a third swaying cause, which I will argue can be linked to his discourse on Chora. 


The discourse on 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” (52b) which could just as well deprive it of lucidity as confer upon it a  power of deviation. 
— Plato 
Does such a discourse derive, then from myth? Shall we gain access to the thought of  the khora by continuing to place our trust in the alternative logos/mythos? And what if  this thought called also for a third genus of discourse? And what if, perhaps as in the  case of the khora, this appeal to the third genre was only the moment of a detour in  order to signal toward a genre beyond genre? Beyond categories and above all beyond  categorial oppositions, which in the first place allow it to be approached or said?”
—Derrida (On The Name, 90)
Khora is a space, any space that can be occupied or has been occupied. Khora can be a  receptacle, a womb, a replicator, a creative holder, a holding of space. Khora is always outside  the polis, but potentially inhabited by it. Remember also that defining Khora, as Plato uses, is not  so simple, for it is indeed a bastard discourse that is unintelligible, un-sensible and undefinable.  
“Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,’ said Neville, ‘this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust.” Virginia Woolf. “The Waves (Oxford World's Classics).” Apple Books. 
Chora is often thought of as either a place outside the polis, or a void. But Plato’s analysis on Chora is not so simple, it is truly an illegitimate discourse. The birth of matter itself, comes to be via a swaying cause, that has not Chora has been a point for post structuralist feminist working to articulate a language and history for women’s place as subject within linguistic and historical context of Western thought. Julia Kristen (2002) uses her semiotic linguistic and psychoanalytic theory to analyze chora to describe the maternal body. Luce Irigaray (1985) reads Timaeus to show the ways in which woman as a concept and subject is linked to Western philosophy and is intertwined in our understanding of self and others. Irigaray 1985. Butler (1993) reads the Timaeus to deconstruct and reconstruct a genealogy of the ways in which matter has been integral to the creation of Western Philosophy and her ideas on the performative nature of gender. Gender is a construction tied to a linguistic heritage from Plato which places matter and the feminine in a binary man/woman, with woman on the bottom.  Elizabeth Grosz (1995) examines Irigaray’s connections between women and materiality, or space, articulating women as being in the role of the undefinable, or unthinkable spaces of being. Chora can also be described as something like space-time, a temporal differentiation, through combining hupodche and chora, Emanuela Bianchi describes a possibility of seeing the inter-subjective and causal relationship of space, boundary and movement, “Inviting in, receiving, holding, appropriating on the one hand, and opening out, providing space, giving, dispersing on the other.” (Bianci 2006). We are coming closer to the use of khora by chance, the possibility of creation through a creative space that is not form itself but a possibility of making matter matter. Heidegger hints at Chora as being where Plato starts to describe the third space between existent and  being. 
In Being and Time Heidegger begins his analysis by looking at Aristotle’s physics. He goes to Aristotle's analysis of Book 4 in Physics, Heidegger links temporality and space as key to our understanding of being. Aristotle attempts to describe khora using topos with empirical understanding, explaining that only Plato has attempted to speak of the essence of place itself. Heidegger says in his 1951 lecture, “Might not cho ̀ ra mean: that which separates itself from every particular, that which withdraws, and in this way admits and ‘makes room’ precisely for something else?” He states in Being and Time that khora defined as space, differing from topos because of Greek notions of space as being always occupied, are different from our forms of spatialization. The notion of empty space, a quantitative number separate in totality from the qualitative aspects of its essence, are foreign to the thinking of Plato and the Greeks. We are not articulating an empty receptacle, but a creative matrix of possibility. 
“A chance happening that defies calculation? Like a storm cloud that condenses tattered wisps  of material resistance. Shadow of bodies masking the limpid dryness of the air. Remains of  incarnations that still remain under the sun and flit randomly out to block the purity of the light. And how is one to take a position against such an enemy? Or flee the impalpable dilution of  revenge that fills the atmosphere and does not spare you according to the weather.” 
--Irigaray (Mariners p.  67) 


And what of khora? What is khora but a void, a receptacle, perhaps actually only a translation  that has been over read - over analyzed, over thought? A memory, an emotional attachment to  something quite useless and beyond or maybe before the moment of all that IS. To become,  One falls, from something, they suppose. Or perhaps one cannot understand kairos or chronos  absent a configuration. Exactly! So within a number of measurements exists a space. Amongst  points in a line, we well have a line, we may flatten such a line, give names to it - but as Einstein  pointed out, we really do have to account for such irregularities. There is something uncertain.  Just as deterministic models of mathematics began to explain the universe - truly and whole and  whole, hole, is key, as chance would have it, something uncertain appeared. and then we flew  back into a quandary that has befuddled us. 
Simultaneity is a temporal break from the strain of Chronos. But we are not looking at only  simultaneity but rather entangled states of becoming. Matrixial borderlands or birth, upon which  the horizon is cavernous rather than extended. It is only to be unfolded. 
To see space as “floating time” as Elie During writes it, time as opposed to duration or  becoming, we highlight the role of the framing device. One thinks of time as the great coordinator but duration is in the unfolding of things happening place to place. (Lecture 2013 EGS). If we  redefine topos or time as floating space to mean a purely situational experience of time, one can  see how astrology works. Or how it might unfold, time can be beyond temporal order, and its  repressive function shifts from linear folding toward simultaneity of relations.  
Floating time in Deleuze, deals with becoming animal (primordial), thereby non-measured time,  plurality of times to be consisted in a range of time. Bersonian figure. They place floating music,  machinic - opposed to Chronos' time of measure which creates a form and determines a  subject. Deleuze and Guatteri are trying to disfigure the subject as a general subject, the individual is specific, rhizomatic, emerging from the particular, but relating in multiple ways to the universal which is also individual.  We see here what one could call synchronization of heterogeneous durations within time itself. 
Plato introduces the Chora in Timaeus. Chora is described as a receptacle, a void, a place in which the matter is formed. The creation of matter within form is for Plato likened to a womb and the topic is taken up by Feminist Irigiray and Kristeva to call for a return to a maternal embodied understanding of subjectivity.
    Chora is used commonly in Greek texts to indicate place, often interchangeably with topos. At times it is clearly indicative of receptacle, or used for the placeholder in terms of a “cell” in the use of Arabic tables. Stoic philosophers distinguished between chora and void. For the Stoics, chora is a room within a room and the void is that which is outside the entire cosmos and surrounds it, it does not surround all objects, but only the edges of cosmic space and extends to infinity 
“The void subsists as a possible condition for place, where things abide: it constitutes the conditions and terms of place with none of the things that occupy or take up place. It is a pure extension to infinity. Void is thus considered independent of body, but also independent of mind or reason’s capacity to conceptualize it. It is an extracos-mic, independently subsisting infinity, an absolute particular incapable of generalization or universalization, extension in itself, orientation in itself, unbounded openness, the openness that enables bodies and their qualities to abide in place that is qualified by its bodies and that disposes bodies to be in certain relations with each other.” (Grosz 2017 p. 34)
    Essentially time is always an experience as such, a phenomenological experience, or a  certain sense of time is this. Time thus is experienced as Bergson says, the duration of time or  psychological time is the interior image of the experience of time. We understand its meaning from the familiar adage: a watched pot never boils.


The measurement of time demands chronological precision, measurements and apparatus,  but there is a connection between the measured exteriority of time and the interior experience of  time. There is possibly a space. Physics points us to space-time, and philosophy takes us  beyond space time. As Heidegger went beyond Bergson - to allude to an ancient notion of  becoming in time. It is always in a time that the totality of history must be seen. Heidegger’s  reading of Bergson acknowledges the contemporary vision and rapture or capture he had of the  moment. 


Agamben writes that the contemporary is to always be out of fashion, in relation to the  present, to thus be on the verge of benign out of time. You may quickly lose that moment, but  that is to be of fashion! To be on time, or in relation to the time of now, willing to be again out of  time. Classic and timeless, Heidegger wants to fall out of fashion with his contemporary, to go  beyond him. Perhaps to imagine a future time, a retro-fashion. To dig up the hauntings which  elude any discourse on time, there is quite simply a void. 


Althusser’s own aleatory materialism was only to give way to the later works which began to  touch towards the void we are currently occupying. Khora. Leaving behind or reimagining the  political philosophy of his work on Marx he begins to outline his next move, to articulate  philosophy of science as having no truth upon which it reflects, but only to be touching on the void. 


The birth ‘space’ of form khora, is an encounter or to take hold (Althusser) a moment a  HOLDING, “in order that this encounter 'take hold', that is to say, 'take form', at last give birth to Forms, and new Forms - just as water 'takes hold' when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, or mayonnaise when it emulsifies. Hence the primacy of 'nothing' over all 'form', and qf aleatory materialism over all journalism. In other words, not just anything can produce just anything, but only elements destined [voir] to encounter each other and, by virtue of their affinity, to 'take hold' one upon the other” (Althusser 1982 Encounter). 






Every conversation requires a space in which the conversation happens. “Conversation  disrupts the possibility of a simple history because it dispenses with a personal or universal  narrative in favor of what could happen to us between ourselves when we expose ourselves to  this space, which belongs to neither one nor the other.” (Ronnel p. xv Dictations on Haunted  Writing). Political philosophy describes the common space, rhetoric describes the kairotic  moment, the ethics of the speech, the noise is an interlude that may disrupt the communication,  but all communication is essentially in relation to another that can not be fully known and must  take place in time. But if time is both particular and universal, it also must exist within  something. And then without. The hole opens again. 

• Stoic conception of Chora as a room, which can be occupied differing from the void which exists at the edges of the universe and is the space from which all possibilities may come (void).

“Matter is not spread out in space and indifferent to time; it does not remain totally constant and totally inert in a uniform duration. Nor indeed does it live there like something that wears away and is dispersed. It is not just sensitive to rhythms but it exists, in the fullest sense of the term, on the level of rhythm. The time in which matter develops some of its fragile manifestations is a time that undulates like a wave that has but one uniform way of being: the regularity of its frequency. As soon as the different substantial powers of matter are studied in their detail, these powers present themselves as frequencies. In particular, as soon as we get down to the detail of exchanges of energy between different kinds of chemical matter, these exchanges are seen to take place in a rhythmic way, through the indispensable intermediary of radiations with specific frequencies. Energy that is looked at very generally may no doubt appear to lose its rhythms, letting go of what it has of undulating, wave time; it is thus seen as an overall result, as an overview in which time itself has lost its wave structure. We “it. Physicists have confidence though: the law of large numbers preserves its phenomena; the chances of there being a temporal accord between collisions have negligible probability. In a similar way, a kinetic theory of solids would show us that the most stable patterns owe their stability to rhythmic discord. They are the statistical patterns of a temporal disorder, and nothing more than this. Our houses are built with an anarchy of vibrations. We walk on an anarchy of vibrations. We sit down on an anarchy of vibrations. The pyramids of Egypt, whose function is to contemplate the unchanging centuries, are endless cacophonies. A magician who as the conductor of the orchestra of matter could bring material rhythms together, would make all these stones vanish into thin air. The fundamental nature of rhythm for matter is clearly shown by this possibility of there being a purely temporal explosion, due solely to an action that synchronises the superimposed times of the different elements.” (The Dialectic of Duration - Gaston Bachelard p. 175)