In Khôra, Derrida offers his reading of one of Plato's most fascinating and problematic texts. The Timaeus is central to the history of western thought and wildly eccentric. Translated into Latin by Cicero and later by Chalcidius, it was for many centuries the only Platonic text available in the west. Its metaphysical speculations as interpreted through the lens of Augustinian neo-Platonism came to pass for Platonism tout court and were refined and elaborated by the monks at Chartres (Rivaud 1963: 3–5). Yet in point of fact the text is anything but typical of the Platonic corpus, consisting as it does of an introductory dialogue (17a–27b) followed by a long speech in which Timaeus of Locris, a presumed Pythagorean, tells the tale of how the Demiurge or divine craftsman created the universe through imitating a set of pre-existing eternal essences or forms (27c–92c). Halfway through, however, the speech of Timaeus encounters a hiccup and our speaker must pause and begin again (47e). If the divine Demiurge creates perfect copies of the intelligible essences in the world of sense, then how would those imitations differ from the originals, and if they were indeed perfect copies—and why would a divine craftsman produce anything less?—then how are we to explain the manifest change and corruption of the world of our experience? Surely, these copies are not part of the world of intelligibles, which belong to the realm of being rather than that of becoming. A new beginning must be made, which accounts for this “wandering cause” (πλανωμένης … αἰτίας) that limits and at the same times makes possible the Demiurge's labor of reproducing the intelligible order in the world of sense (Sallis 1999: 70; McCabe 1994: 175, 180–81). This “cause” is the famous Khōra, the mother or receptacle of creation (50a–51b). A second story of how the world was fashioned then follows and the dialogue ends.

Any reader of the Platonic dialogues will note that one element we have come to associate with the Platonic text is missing from the summary given above: Socrates. Now this absence is neither unique nor total.