(Non-Philosophical) Chora

by François Laruelle

Sense (of) identity of supposedly Real philosophical faith when the vision-in-One transforms it into its correlate (unilate) or gives it its sense (of) identity. The chora is the site through unilateralization that philosophy has become (as identity) by wanting to be equal to the Real (still not as transcendental unity). It is the phenomenon or given-without-givenness (of) this real hallucination.

Chora designates the spatial emplacement, or better yet the receptacle, indeed the prima materia through which it ends up being confused with Chaos, thus generating the dialectic of the One and the Multiple developed from that of the One and Being. Chora is the site of a pure multiplication: after its idealist reduction, when chaos becomes sensible diversity, the chora becomes its transcendental condition as spatiality, indeed, for certain philosophers, a name for a particular mixture of the transcendental and empirical, the…feminine.

​The vision-in-One is the Given, it gives-without-givenness. Its first correlate (it should be said: its first uni-late) is that which it extracts or manifests from the first object to which it is opposed and which is philosophy: not as doctrine or system, but as faith-in-the-real that finally supposes itself to be the Real. Philosophy is not the only site of its doctrines and all existents, a universal site, it is the total site, that which envelops itself and which can thus only believe itself to be the Real or the absolute Site, including its self-knowledge. The vision-in-One can only exclude this belief or more precisely back up its supposed validity. But it gives it also without givenness under the form it extracts, that of an identity or a sense (of) identity which is that (of) this Site. The theoretical illusion, the supposed validity is supported but not the materiality of this belief consubstantial with philosophy. We shall call chora not this Site spontaneously aware of itself, but that which the vision-in-One sees of this pretention, including the reduced identity (of the) philosophical Site. This chora is not an emplacement of the spatial order in the manner of the philosophical imagination. It is the instance which, in the order of the sense (of) identity (of the “noema”), determines-in-the-last-instance the other philosophical contents (more specific and constituting the structure of the philosophical Decision) as at least given-in-One and reduced to their sense (of) identity. The One thus determines through its acting a more originary or more transcendental site equally foreign to every topo-logy, where the World and its contents, the Authorities, and the philosophical Decisions themselves come to be emplaced.

As an expression of being-separated/given from the One, the chora is “unilateralized,” it is a non-self-positional position (of) the World, impossible to be dialectized or topologized, to be scanned by a transversal gaze. The One is in effect indifferent to what it determines due to the fact that it determines it in-the-last-instance and through its being-foreclosed. The chora is the absence of every reciprocal determination, every unitary correlation of contraries, every sufficient philosophy. It is more than an a priori: if the Real is nowhere, utopic, it finally gives a real Site (in-the-last-instance…) to philosophy which no longer magically springs from the head of the latter but where it finds its emplacement. Instead of constituting an (anti-)thetic a priori susceptible to being-coupled, which would only be at the price of some “infinite task” or “différance” with its philosophical contrary within some unitary dyad of the One and the Other, the chora is the extreme counterpart of the Vision-in-One, that which, without forming a relation or correlation but a unilation, “faces” it after philosophical faith. It defines the object of the world par excellence; it is even its first determination.