“Something remains to be said”: On the Metonymic Ontology of Platonic Chora

Abstract

The concept of chora stands in the Platonic corpus as a peculiar philosophical puzzle: introduced in the Timaeus in order to account for the elements’ cycles of transformation, it seems to represent a hybrid nature, combining the notions of space and that matter. Most scholars have tried to solve the chora’s riddle by translating its indistinct character in a well-defined philosophical concept – or a set of concepts logically bound to each other. Using some of the conceptual tools developed by the thought of difference, this research aims instead at analysing it as a function, more specifically as an onto-linguistic one, outlining a procedure for weaving a reality able to compete with the one carried out by the ideas and the logos. In so doing, the article also tries to identify, along the lines of the Platonic text, the terms of a series that differs from the traditional one of episteme-logos-eidos, and which is engrained in the linguistic mechanism of syntactic combination, in the peculiar ontology outlined by the chora, and in the aesthetic nature of this onto-linguistic composition.