objective posit, a present-at-hand entity. As such—as categorial, or vorhanden in Heidegger’s nomenclature—it fails to capture what is specific to place, namely, the capacity to hold and situate things, to give them a local habitation. Such holding action proffers something ready-to-hand (zuhanden), something concretely palpable, to which attachment can be made. This palpability belongs properly to place and not to space.56
A deductive, relentless cosmologic is driven to presuppose an empty and boundless no-place—not yet named “space” in many mythic accounts—that is as abstract and barren of holding-locating properties as is space on the modern conception. To parry this cosmologism (whereby an entity is posited as cosmically necessary yet is unable to play any constructive role), the void is quickly filled with various places. Navajo cosmogony lays down places of emergence, “underworlds” that are both located (under the visible upperworld) and locating (of all that is on and in the upperworld). These sub-worlds are concrete holding environments that do what the void, taken by itself alone, cannot do: they offer palpable implacement to things. The advantage in this literally topocosmic move is that the role of place is made central and explicit from the beginning. It need not be inferred as something surreptitiously supposed. The transcendental deduction of space stands instructed by a cosmogonic espousal of place.
By interpreting the void as a scene of emergent implacement, we pursue a middle path, one that is neither covertly transcendental nor expressly mythical. This middle way regards the void as the scene of the becoming of place. To take up this view is neither to transform the strict void into infinite isotropic space nor to populate it in advance with determinate mythical places. Neither the indeterminate nor the determinate but the predeterminate is what is cosmogonically formative. The strict void is avoided by recognizing the void as already on the way to place. Such a void is not presupposed, much less deduced as cosmologically or epistemologically necessary. It is posited in the first place—not as the first place but as the first becoming of place itself. Just as the space posited in a transcendental deduction shows itself capable of providing particular places, the void of cosmogonic accounts is on its way to the determination of particular places. The void makes provision for places. It is place in its provisionally.
In pursuing this last line of thought, am I not papering over the abyss of the cosmogonic void by my own discursive considerations? If so, I shall not have been the first philosopher to have averted place-panic by proposing the massive preplacement of the world-in-the-making. In the next chapter, we shall witness Plato doing something similar. In the face of the void, and in the absence of the deducibility of space, recourse to place becomes tempting indeed.
Yet, even apart from concerted (and quite possibly defensive) steps to assure the abiding prepresence of place, in the end we may take a certain comfort in the very void itself. We have seen that even in the face of the utter void, of no-thingness itself, place is already prefigured. Place configures and situates the face of the dark Deep. Even a cosmogonically rigorous account that sets down no-place as a necessary beginning point—or one that discovers chaos at the origin—is never without the resources of place. At no place is such an account altogether destitute of these resources. Even the void yields place: if it is now bereft of body and place (i.e., is no-place for no-body), it promises to give way to both body and place then, after the work of creation has been done.
In fact, as we reflect on all the cosmogenetic moments in which place is of import (moments, however, not arranged in any strict chronological sequence), we begin to savor a different prospect. This is a prospect of an aboriginal preplacement, and an ongoing implacement, of the created world. Whether as nonbeing that exists, or as chaos on the way to cosmos, or as an orderly progression of stages of creation, cosmogenesis creates (or discovers) place at the origin, thereby becoming topogenesis. Cosmos and topos conjoin in the becoming of the topocosm.
Shuzanghu’s question to his wife, “How long must we live without a place to rest our feet?” was posed when “at first there was neither Earth nor Sky.” But once Earth and Sky have separated from each other—once creation has begun, as it always already has—the answer to Shuzanghu’s question is evident: there will be somewhere to rest your feet if only you will look in the right place—in the first place. As Aristotle assures us that “time will not fail,”57 so Shuzanghu can be certain that place will not lack.
2
Mastering the Matrix
The Enuma Elish and Plato’s Timaeus
That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?
—Ecclesiastes 7:24
[Marduk] crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above Apsu, that Apsu built by Nudimmud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
—Enuma Elish
Before that, all these kinds were without proportion or measure. . . . Such being their nature at the time when the ordering of the universe was taken in hand, the god then began by giving them a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers.
—Plato, Timaeus 53b
Everyone says that place is something; but [Plato] alone attempted to say what it was.
—Aristotle, Physics Book 4
I
Once we admit that the panic-producing idea of the void is always (in advance) a matter of place—and is thus not reducible to the daunting nothingness, the strict no-place, that occasions the panic—we must face a second major issue. This is the propensity not merely to fill the void as a way of allaying anxiety but, more especially, to master the void. To master is not to bring into being in the first place but to control and shape that which has already been brought into existence. It is still a matter of creation, at least in that sense of creation inherent in the Hebrew word bará used in I Genesis: a word whose cognate meanings include “to carve” (e.g., the tip of an arrow) or “to cut up” (e.g., a carcass).1 What is now at stake is not creation ex nihilo—an action we have discovered to be as rare as it is problematical—but creation ex datis, “out of the given.” Yet how is creation carried forward once we are willing to acknowledge that the void has content, that something is already given in and with (and even as) the void itself?
What is pregiven is usually considered to be material, a matter of matter. But in ancient and traditional cosmogonies, “matter” does not signify anything hard and fast—anything rigorously physical in the manner of determinate and resistant “material objects.” On the contrary: matter connotes matrix, one of its cognates and certainly something material (even if not something completely definite in its constitution). In its literal sense of “uterus” or “womb,” the matrix is the generatrix of created things: their mater or material precondition. As such, it is the formative phase of things—things that will become more fully determinate in the course of creation. Vis-à-vis the generative matrix, the task of creation becomes that of crafting and shaping, ultimately of controlling, what is unformed or preformed in the matrix itself. Creation becomes a matter of mastering matter.
Just as chaos has proved to be a place, so a cosmogonic matrix is a place as well. Beyond its strictly anatomical sense, matrix means “a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed,” “a place or point of origin and growth.” In the matter of the matrix, place remains primary. As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the definitions just cited are traceable to at least the middle of the sixteenth century A.D. But they are seen to possess a still more ancient lineage if we reflect that a text such as Genesis opens with the description of a state of affairs that is neither chaos nor void but a matrix: “Darkness was upon the face of the Deep.” As the initial moment of cosmogenesis,
