Abstract

The last discussion I had with Reiner Schürmann concerned Platonism. The discussion was occasioned by a lecture here at the New School in which I undertook to show how certain Platonic texts inscribe a kind of limit that would be precisely a limit of kinds, hence of the metaphysics of selfsame kinds that one otherwise takes these texts simply to have founded. The operation of such a limit has the effect of exposing Platonic thought to a primal contamination, opening it to an unassimilable alterity at the very moment when, founding what will be called metaphysics, it would declare the hegemony of the same, of what is one and the same. Such alterity is thought in the Timaeus as what is called the third kind, though it would be, of necessity, a kind of kind beyond kinds: Timaeus’s name for it is χώρα.