John Sallis

Continuing from the last post, I also recall Balder introducing Sallis into the OOO discussion here. Here are some of my comments following that post relevant to the recent twist above.

"One can detect residues of Sallis' entire oeuvre, perhaps the clearest attempt to articulate a 'third kind' [the chora] begun in Chorology" reminiscent of my musings on Derrida's khora. Here's more that supports it.

"What is needed is a logic that addresses the originary openings in which things first come to show themselves, a logic of schemata, spacing, and imagining.[...] Sallis identifies several schemata (spatio-temporal determinations) such as simultaneity and spatial proximity that correspond to various logical categories. In each case the key feature is the yoking together of contradictory terms in a unity that neither destroys the terms nor cancels either of them."

Chapter 5 is on Schematicism, lending more support:


"Elementals are neither things nor properties thus "the law [traditional logic] that would govern the belonging of properties to things has no bearing" (151). Instead elementals provide jointures and horizons of things, disclosing their fundamental event-like nature. Thus the elementals and imagination share a special bond, as the imagination gathers and holds together the spatio-temporal dynamics of the elementals."

The 'excess' and the 'withdrawn' are also addressed in the review, two common themes in the thread.

"As Timaeus says, only if khora is radically indeterminate and formless -- only if it escapes the order of property and propriety -- can khora receive the properties and formal determinations that first makes the kosmos possible. Khora hovers on the very edge of nothingness, never showing itself as itself, but only in conjunction with the presence of the elemental bodies, as a trace of 'something,' which can never itself be made present. It is thus 'something' very much like what Derrida named différance: an originary spacing and 'differencing' that presence presupposes and that, as a condition for the possibility (and paradoxically the impossibility) of presence, can never itself be present."