Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus

Reinscriptions

146 CHOROLOGY 5 Reinscriptions F O R G E R Y Would anything ever have escaped the tracings of the c»ra? Would its errancy ever have ceased to bring about the indetermining operation that inexorably unsettles from below, as it were, everything that would be established in full integrity from above? Would anything ever have been spared the almost invisible—and thereby most dangerous—¤ssures that it seems to trace everywhere while itself remaining utterly and persistently out of sight? Precisely because it operates always under cover, by stealth, there would seem to be no defense to prevent its overtaking all things. Can even the intelligible remain aloof from the operation of the c»ra? Can the exclusion of this operation from the intelligible be guaranteed once and for all and even beyond the defense erected by the Platonic text? Or is its shadow not already cast across that establishment, even if still almost indiscernibly? Is that shadow not already engaged precisely in the establishment? For the very integrity of each intelligible e†doV is constituted by an absolute negation of reception, of reception in either direction: an intelligible e†doV can neither receive nor be received into any other being. And yet, is it possible for negation to be absolute in every respect and thus to absolve totally what it sets apart, to absolve it completely from that which is negated? Or must negation not also determine, that is, set apart only by also setting into relation? Is the negation of reception nothing but pure singular integrity? Or is the negation of a certain spacing not itself another spacing? One would call this another kind of spacing, were it not the very integrity of kinds that is put in question by the determinacy of negation. Is it not in view of such an other spacing that the question of the community (koinwnÖa) of kinds can be broached (see Soph. 251a–252e)? And would it be completely out of the question to wonder whether Reinscriptions 147 Socrates is alluding to such a spacing of the intelligible when, in Book 7 of the Republic, he tells how the escaped prisoner comes ¤nally to look upon “the sun itself by itself in its own c»ra” (Rep. 516b)?1 Yet, if a certain defense tends to limit—perhaps even must limit—the vertical reach of its tracings, there is little to limit its horizontal extension, to prevent it from installing even in the lineage of philosophy itself the indetermining operation of what could be called, literally, its nonsense. For instance, in the reception and reinscription of texts, an operation that belongs to and in an essential way punctuates that lineage, the workings of errancy will not have been lacking. Hence, for this reason, and not only because it is a question of reception, the question of the Postplatonic reception and reinscription of the Timaeus and especially of the chorology is not simply extrinsic to all that is in question in the chorology itself. It is not certain who invented the story, perhaps not even entirely certain that it was simply invented, for instance, by someone such as Aristoxenus who was maliciously intent on discrediting Plato.2 In any case it is a story of which there are several variant versions, all bearing on Plato’s authorship of the Timaeus. Iamblicus is perhaps most discreet. In his Life of Pythagoras he tells the story in the course of a discussion of the careful secrecy by which the Pythagoreans preserved the mystery of their writings. He observes that for a long time no Pythagorean writings appeared publicly and that it was only with Philolaus that the secrecy was betrayed: “Philolaus ¤rst published those three celebrated books that, at the request of Plato, Dion of Syracuse is said to have bought for a hundred minae.”3 Diogenes Laertius also writes of this purchase. Referring to “Philolaus of Croton, a Pythagorean,” he continues: “It was from him that Plato, in a letter, told Dion to buy the Pythagorean books.” But Diogenes Laertius’ version of the story goes on to make it explicit that it was a matter not only of reading the Pythagorean books but of reinscribing at least one of them, one that Philolaus, it seems, had actually composed. In Diogenes Laertius’ version: “Hermippus says that according to one writer the philosopher Plato went to Sicily, to the court of Dionysius, bought this book from Philolaus’ relatives for forty Alexandrian minae, and from...