The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris
China Media Research, 13(4), 2017 http://www.chinamediaresearch.net The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris Janell Watson Virginia Tech, USA Abstract: Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres challenge the binary logic of Western philosophy very differently, Derrida through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a philosophy of things. Serres has begun to draw more international readers thanks to a recent shift in critical emphasis from words to things. The difference between deconstruction’s word-orientated acosmism and the newer versions of thing-oriented cosmism can be fruitfully explored by comparing Derrida to Serres on the basis of their readings of Plato’s cosmogony, focused on the figure of chora in Timaeus. [Janell Watson. The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris. China Media Research 2017; 13(4): 28-37]. 4 Keywords: Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Peter Eisenman, Plato, chora Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres share the critical concern about human-nonhuman relations ambition of overcoming the dualist, binary logic of non- manifests itself in ecocriticism, new materialism, contradiction which, they complain, has dominated animal studies, posthumanism, anthropocene studies, Western philosophy since Plato. However, they object-oriented continental philosophy, the challenge non-contradiction very differently, Derrida architecture of the fold, actor-network theory, and the through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a concept of vibrant matter. Once again, matter matters. philosophy of things. These two thinkers, both born in As Serres puts it in his recently translated Geometry, 1930, overlapped at the École normale supérieure in the cosmos has returned as “philosophy’s paradigm, Paris, and thus come from the same intellectual time and its real model,” as in the time of the ancients, but with place.
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