Khōra
At the same time, affecting to rank himself on the side of this ethnos or of this genos. Socrates confesses that he too is incapable of going outside, by himself and of himself, of his mythomimeticographic dream in order to give life and movement to the city. ("I know myself well enough to know that I will never be capable of celebrating as one should this city and its citizens [in war, negotiation, and movement]. My incapacity is not surprising; but I have formed the same judgment about the poets." 19d.)
A supplementary irony: Socrates is not content to side for a moment with the men of the zoographic simulacrum; he declares that he does not despise their genos or their ethnos. This confers on me play between the text and the theme. betWeen what is done and what is declared. as between me successive inclusions of the "receptacles" for themes and theses, a structure without an indivisible origin.
In this theatre of irony, where the scenes interlock in a series of receptacles without end and without bottom. how can one isolate a thesis or a theme mat could be attributed calmly to the "philosophy-of-Plato," indeed to philosophy as the Platonic thing? This would be to misrecognize or violently deny the structure of the textual scene, to regard as resolved all the questions of topology in general, including that of the places of rhetoric, and to think one understood what it means to receive, that is, to understand. It's a little early. As always.
IV
Should one henceforth forbid oneself to speak of the philosophy of Plato, of the ontology of Plato, or even of Platonism? Not at all, and there would undoubtedly be no error of principle in so speaking, merely an inevitable abstraction. Platonism would mean, in these conditions, the thesis or the theme which one has extracted by artifice, misprision. and abstraction from the text. torn out of the written fiction of "Plato." Once this abstraction has been supercharged and deployed. it will be extended over all the folds of the text, of its ruses, overdeterminations, and reserves, which the