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145 4 Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus The question of beginning—the questionableness of beginning—has claimed Sallis’s thought . . . from its very beginning, from its inception. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s “Timaeus”1 (1999) must be regarded as a contemporary contemplation of this crucial matter, just as it is also a major contribution to Plato scholarship. In Being and Logos, the “and” in the title was no mere logical connective, any more than Being and Logos was a nominally descriptive title. The “and” named an anterior reciprocity, the nature of which that text everywhere unfolded. This is not the case withChorology. In a certain irremediable respect—if indeed the language of “remedy” is appropriate here—the chōra is what precisely resists being brought to logos. Thus, Sallis’s very title draws one into the question: what is to be thought by chorology? Prologue Sallis points out “a multiplicity of voices” in the Timaeus, generating “a play of echoes through which the dialogue, in the end, makes something manifest, yet without producing a simple univocity” (1). Shortly thereafter , he reiterates the need for attention to the dramatic structure of the dialogues and to the threefold mutual mirroring of speeches, myths, and deeds (logoi, muthoi, erga) that governed Being and Logos. However, Sallis characterizes the Timaeus as a “dialogue of strangeness,” and speaks of its “strange movement” (3). There are surely strange features: the strange silence of Socrates after his strange introduction; the conjunction of the putatively “non-mythical” speech of Critias with the lengthy and heterogeneous “likely account” of Timaeus; the comedies interwoven into the “serious” cosmological account. Strangest of all, however, is the elusive beginning of the dialogue. Quoting 54a, “If we intend to make a suitable beginning . . . [ei mellomen archesthai kata tropon . . .],” Sallis notes that while mellō can mean “intend,” it can also mean to “delay” or “defer” the beginning one is 146 S A L L I S ’ S P L A T O I N T E R P R E T A T I O N about to make (6). Recalling the first section of the Delimitations commentary on horismos and its “Eleven: Heidegger/Derrida—Presence,” mellō can also mean “to hover at the limit—assuming that limit (peras) is understood, not simply as the end of something, but as that from which something begins” (6). But why defer or delay the beginning? Does the beginning of a text “naturally” occur on its first page? Is a text, any text, natural? If so, can one determine its natural beginning? Do some texts require what Sallis calls a “retrospective activation by what comes later”? “Are there not texts that begin only after having already begun?” (6). These questions both prefigure Sallis’s Timaeus interpretation and suggest that we are being drawn into a further deepening of the question of beginning. This deepening is destined to take a direction that had not been marked out previously with any distinctness, but merely adumbrated with mention of “the receptacle” in Sallis’sRepublic interpretation.2 For the relation of the chōra to being will prove most difficult to get hold of: Sallis notes the “repeated occurrences of the word chalepon: severe, difficult, troublesome, even dangerous” (2). Chalepon does not function as an adjective describing its subject matter; rather chalepon belongs to its very nature. The arc of the Chorology commentary will ascend toward its third chapter, “The Chōra.” The commentary on the first two chapters of Chorology will prepare for the more extensive treatment of the third, and the final two chapters will trace out the consequences for thought of this most important chalepon chorology. Chapter 1, “Remembrance of the City” The first section, titled “Reception,” initially refers to the welcoming reception of Socrates by Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. It will come to indicate something more and other. Sallis sets the parameters for Chorology with the well-known opening words of the Timaeus: “One, two, three—.” “These three words, the words one, two, three, enact an operation that will be repeated at several decisive junctures and in several basic articulations in and of the dialogue” (7). The three words do not only denote numbers but enact a deed of counting. In the first of his discourses , Timaeus counts (1) being, (2) becoming, and (3) the blendings between them. In his second discourse such counting is repeated, but with a different result: (3) is not a blending at all, but the chōra—a kind...

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