Francesca Greco - Panel 4 ENOJP Paris
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 2018-01-05

“The Possibility of Spatial Origins: A Cross-Cultural Approach
to the Platonic χώρα.”

— Francesca Greco, Universität Hildesheim

The aim of my proposal is to display how the chōratical myth
of creation supports an understanding of the concept of ‘origin’
that distinguishes it from a distant moment in time, from
when something began. Through a cross-cultural approach, I
intend to underline the spatial and relational character of the
emergence of things. Returning to the confrontation and to
the different answers given from Nishida and Derrida to the
question of the Platonic χώρα, I propose a phenomenological
re- conceptualization of the notion of the origin in the context
of an encounter between Japanese and traditional European
philosophy.
In order to free the dawning of things from the irreversible
authority of time we need to move to a conception of spatiality
that does not conceive of itself as counter-posed to, dependent
on or even derived from time. Since χώρα serves as a
third category (Tim. 48e) between ideas and sensibility, any
temporal-spatial interpretation of the concept tends to lead erroneously to either anachronism or materialism. Χώρα is
not the kind of mother (Tim. 50c) that despotically give birth
to things and holds them under her unavoidable control. She
can also lead to death, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus,
but cannot be seen or perceived by the senses. When she is
discovered, she has already vanished, and her posthumous
showing up makes us rethink possibilities (circumstances) of
origina- tion, conception and construction.
Inscribed in the Derridean critic of substantialism, χώρα
does not represent an ἀρχή from which things result and are
organized; properly speaking she is not representable, as I
will make clear through several examples taken from the contemporary
performance arts. For Derrida, χώρα chal- lenges
classical ontology and hermeneutics and I argue that with her
peculiar spatiality she is also challenging the temporal origin
of things in order to inscribe it in a spatial-relational context.
One of the consequences of this new frame is the strongly relational,
but not relative, character of things situated in χώρα:
they are not substantial, as Nishida underlines in the recasting
of χώρα as 絶対無の場所. Χώρα cannot stand for a substratum
of all things, because in her particular way of creation she is
also affecting herself, that is, she is making things possible by
disappearing. In following Nishida I claim that her function is
to bridge and re-locate.
The purpose of the comparison between Nishida’s and
Derrida’s analyses and between these anal- yses and the development
of this ancient idea of generation is to provide a
breeding ground for new ideas regarding origin and origination
in a phenomenological comprehension of spatiality.

This talk took place at the 3rd Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy in Paris, Université Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris 1) and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) from November 2-4, 2017.

For more informations:
http://enojp.org/
http://chisokudopublications.com/

Art Direction: Choplair (CC-BY 3.0)