Chiasmus in chorology – encounter in the interval.

A Choral Interface of Heuristic Coincidence and Transparency

Abstract

This article argues for a chorological reinscription of the fathomless Platonic chôra in what I call the field of contemporary ‘cultural intersectionality’. It aims to define a dynamic and generative space of heuristic coincidence and transparency to address important intercultural issues or emerging tasks in the contemporary.

According to Agamben, the full meaning of chorology is revealed in the medial position (metaxú) of chôra as «three in three forms» (tria triché). If the chôra is a third genre (genos) and the medium (medio) that holds together the intelligible and the sensible, there should inevitably result a ‘fourth’ from this union, argues Agamben. This fourth has the structure of chiasmus. Although Agamben does not develop further the implication of the chiastic disposition in chorology, his introduction of chiasmus as the fourth term is crucial as rooted in the chôra. The term helps refine his reading of the specificity of ‘coincidence’ between the apparently split categories; it is a response to their division (chorismos). The mediality of the chôra allows Agamben to define «the thing in the medium of its knowability» and to admit that politics cannot be anything other than chorology. «True philosophy, like true politics, is a chorology».

The contribution of this paper resides in that it takes further to explore chiasmus in chorology as a generative dynamic principle. It postulates that the chiastic coincidence between the intelligible and the sensible detected by Agamben could be imagined as a point of intersection that prefigures the potentiality of convergence of ideas that would bring together a world of division and create a bridge of tolerance and reconciliation. Taking further Anca Vasiliu’s view of the middle point of chiasmus as «an encounter in the interval», this paper proposes that chiasmus could become the auspicious ground or interval (metaxú) for a chorological encounter to reveal, through the transparency/diaphaneity of its discourse, how the things are «in their own chôra», thus reaffirming what scholars, since Plato, problematized how to look at the ultimate vision and see the thing not in its appearance, but as «the thing itself in its own chôra». As it came out, our view, as well as Agamben’s, joined John Sallis’s view, as well as Anca Vasiliu’s stand, especially when she claims that chiasmus can be regarded as a double event that marked once the birth of the World Soul, as well as the birth of the visible. In promoting chiasmus in chorology, we dedicate this encounter in the interval to the Other and Othering as fundamentally distinct, unique, and even sometimes opposing.