III
In the Enuma Elish as well creation consists in the production of particular places out of preexisting regions, even if it is true that the kind of particularity differs in the two cases: in the Sumerian epic the particularity belongs to architectural and civic entities, not to simple physical bodies. Where the Enuma Elish is resolutely finite and historical—being finally about the founding of Babylon—the Timaeus purports to be transfinite and nonhistorical. Moreover, the kind of generality varies in the two accounts: the down-to-earth materiality of the precosmic regions (e.g., sweet and bitter waters) posited in the earlier text is superseded by the purely receptive regions of the Greek tale of creation. Yet the overall movement from diffuseness of region to concision of place is found in both stories—as is the root notion of matrix, which characterizes the notion of region in each case.
The deeper difference between the two epics, one composed before the second millennium and the other in the fourth century B.C., is found elsewhere: the transition from cosmogony to cosmology. Where genesis is the constant concern of a cosmogonic text such as the Enuma Elish, “becoming” (by which one may translate genesis) is only one of three main concerns in the Timaeus. Put most pithily, these concerns are “Being, Space, Becoming—three distinct things” (52d). A thing that becomes (to gignomenon) is distinguishable from that in which it becomes (to en hō gignetai), that is, Space; and both in turn are distinguishable from the Form that supplies the timeless pattern of the becoming-thing. While sensible things are perishable and Space is “everlasting,”60 Forms are eternal. The mere fact that Forms are expressly considered as equiprimordial with Space and Becoming indicates that we have now entered the domain of cosmology, moving from muthos to logos. For the created cosmos is what it is only insofar as it is permeated by a logos, a permanent structure; and the proper account of such a cosmos is a “rational account” (another of the basic meanings of logos). Philosophy furnishes such an account, and it is in this respect that it differs most markedly from myth. Even if Plato himself considered the Timaeus as no more than a “likely story” (29a), and even if contemporary philosophers may take him at his word and despair over the status of such a story,61 it remains undeniable that with the Timaeus we have taken a fateful step into cosmology. What is merely “likely” (eikos) about the account is precisely what survives within it of the cosmogonic: for example, the matricial status of the Receptacle, the role and actions of the creator, the quasi-narrative ordering of the tale, the stress on material qualities. When we read that the Receptacle “was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn” (52e), we can almost imagine this to be a description of Tiamat herself (especially in her monstrous, sea-serpent phase). But the lack of proper names—the fiercesome “Marduk” has been replaced by a faceless “Demiurge”—is a sign that we are in a different genre of discourse with different aims and different stakes. If the Receptacle is said to be, much like Tiamat herself, “watery and fiery,” still the Receptacle only receives these qualities and reflects them: not actually characterized by the qualities it receives, the receptacle is not what it appears to be. Since it is the prelogical collocation of regions where such qualities appear, the Receptacle certainly can seem monstrous and chaotic, a matter of wild sensibility; but it is not sensible, indeed it is not even matter. As Derrida remarks, “Chōra receives all the determinations, so as to give [a] place [to them], but it does not possess any of them properly. It possesses them, it has them (since it receives them), but it does not possess them as properties, it possesses nothing properly.”62
What then is the Receptacle in the end? Hupodochē, one of its names in Greek (besides dechomenon, literally “the recipient”), gives a crucial clue. The Receptacle is what lies under (hupo) that which appears in the physical world. It is an underlying “region of regions”—to borrow a concept from Husserl (who, however, applied it to consciousness, not to the material world).63 Not being that “out of which” (ex hou) things are made (as is Tiamat), it is the “in which” (en hō) on which things (qualities, powers, motions: ultimately perceptible things) come to appearance, exchange positions, and gain their place. Not strictly heterogeneous itself (for it is not material enough to be diverse), it nevertheless underlies the heterogeneity of the physical universe and makes this heterogeneity possible. Its violent rocking guarantees that its occupants will be changing places continually.
All are changing the direction of their movement, this way and that, towards their own regions; for each [primary body], in changing its size, changes also the situation of its region. In this way, then, and by these means there is a perpetual safeguard for the occurrence of that heterogeneity which provides that the perpetual motion of these bodies is and shall be without cessation.64
This passage makes it clear that even the primal regions of the Receptacle are by no means stationary or secure. For the region of a given kind of body cannot be considered a fixed sector to which it adverts as to something settled: “There [is] no equipoise in any region of it.”65 In fact, both the generic region and the particular place of a given body are in a state of ongoing mutation. This is due to the character of the Receptacle as “all-receiving (pandeches)” (51a), that is, reflecting every kind of change: changes in motion, quality, quantity, and so on.
The Receptacle is accordingly the bearer (but not the begetter) of all that occurs in the sensible world.66 It bears up (under) all that is located in (elemental) regions and (particular) places, thereby “providing a situation for all things that come into being” (52b). But despite its considerable locatory power, the Receptacle remains the referent of a bare cosmological “this.” There is, after all, no Form of Space.67
A strange beast, a half-bred hybrid, this Receptacle. It is at once locatory and yet not itself located, permanent and yet invisible, underlying and yet nonsubstantial. Plato avers that it is “apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning, and [is] hardly an object of belief” (52b), and he analogizes its perception to that of a dream.68 The Receptacle is also a hybrid entity in another, still more encompassing, sense. It stands between, even as it combines, myth and science. In particular, it stands between the Enuma Elish and Aristotle’s Physics. It has too much “reasoning” and too little “belief” for the Sumerian epic, and yet exhibits too desultory a form of thinking and possesses too little materiality for the Aristotelian treatise. If Tiamat gives way to chōra in the Timaeus, chōra will cede place to Topos in the Physics. The Platonic cosmology of regionalized Place precariously and provocatively straddles the tenebrous middle realm between the mythics of elemental matrices and the physics of pinpointed places.
IV
Imagine the shock of the Demiurge, that eminently rational creator who intends to model the world on the pattern of an unchanging Form, when he confronts the crazy-quilt, irregular motions of the Receptacle: motions generated by “errant causes” (48a). Given his wish “to make this world most nearly like that intelligible thing which is best and in every way complete” (30d)—that is, a Form—he cannot but be chagrined by the tumultuous spectacle, indeed threatened by it in ways that recall the disorientation and fear that an angry and defiant Tiamat occasioned in the objects of her wrath. In the Mesopotamian legend, Tiamat had to be killed and her carcass transmuted before ordering could begin. In the Platonic tale, however, persuasion rather than physical force is invoked to bring the unruly Receptacle into rationally regulated behavior: “Reason overruled Necessity by persuading her to guide the greatest part of the things that become towards what is best” (48a). The mastery of the matrix arises from the rule of reason rather than by the application of brute force.
It was just because of the nondistinction between primordial space and material body—between Tiamat-as-place and Tiamat-as-body—that her body had to be destroyed, physically obliterated, in order to make way for a world-ordering use of space such as Marduk instituted in building Babylon. Insofar as chōra and the sensible qualities appearing in it are distinguished in the Timaeus from the start, there can be an ordering of these qualities without recourse to acts of outright obliteration. Furthermore, even before