In Plato’s Greek, the word “χώρα” has two meanings. The first, in the common lexicon, refers to country or countryside, the landscape attached to the polis but outside of the city proper. The second is a meaning/association Plato creates in the Timaeus, a dialogue which serves as Plato’s contribution to the world’s genesis narratives. Χώρα carries a meaning that gives voice to the holding spaces of creation. Plato defines the χώρα in opposition to both the eternal and the temporal (sometimes understood as the dichotomy of being and becoming), as a third category “which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen” (49a). “It is a receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation” (49b). “The χώρα is “an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible” (51b).

In a small tome on Plato’s chorology, John Sallis (1999) elaborates on this second meaning of the χώρα: before the generation of heaven, fire (and the other elements) were ‘not quite themselves.’ When the logos touches them, they ‘take flight.’ “And it is precisely their flight that points to a third kind that would harbor them outside the twofold. One could even say that the very flight of fire and the others traces a way beyond the twofold, that these traces (as Timaeus will soon call them) mark a passage toward the receptacle in which they would be held, nurtured, sheltered.” (Sallis, p. 106) Timaeus refers to the χώρα as an invisible eidos, a matrix with no independent meaning, but which takes on the form of that which it comes to hold (Sallis, pp. 109-111).

For Sallis, and perhaps Plato (if Sallis’ Chorology thesis and exegesis of the Timaeus is to be accepted), boundary spaces are elucidated through the concept of χώρα: represented symbolically as the archaic, eidetic city, the χώρα is “neither paradigm nor image,” (p. 41) but a third category that disrupts the duality of the ideal and the real. It is the space between the two, the origin space that contains the seeds of both, and comes to existence only through that which it holds: “…one could call it, rather, a ghost scene that, enshrouding precisely in letting appear, endows the fleeting specters with whatever trace of being they might enjoy… χώρα is both origin and abyss…” (p. 123). Sallis explores the treatment of the χώρα in the Timaeus as a metaphor for this third category that shows up in countless works to follow: “The χώρα is the force as errancy: a hindering, diverting, leading astray the work of νοῦς, as installing indeterminacy into what νοῦς would otherwise render determinate ” (p. 132). 

This series is seeking traces of the χώρα, beginning with this question: what universals might yet remain (immanently, contingently) when we work to collapse the European colonial onto-epistemological scaffolding of reality that defines “Western” as “universal”?

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Plato. Timaeus.
Sallis, John. (1999). Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Indiana University Press.