5.1 The Choreographic Project of Modernity

THE KERNEL OF Diotima's second summons is an account of representation, participation, and communication (Mitteilung) as division in alternation. This is not simply, and indeed not principally, an aesthetic doctrine. Rather, it gestures toward a way of existing, not just individually but above all politically, that, by challenging central presuppositions of Western metaphysics and political thought, offers a new approach to a fundamental philosophical question: the nature of the relation between the opposed terms (ideal and sensate; form and matter; infinite and finite; concept and intuition; freedom and nature; absolute and relative; or even … Being and beings), since the peculiar virtue and virtuosity of philosophy, in contrast to mathematics and the natural sciences, is to move fluidly and fluently across the differences that structure thought. Participation and communication in this radical sense involve “unfolding” the more temporal into the more timeless and the more timeless into the more temporal. Nor does this just involve the analysis of a confused content into its moments, since this would imply that there is a continuous relation between all these different levels of analysis, such that ultimately the changing reality of the universe would be reduced to the temporal image of eternity. Instead, participation or communication involves the inscription of this relation of folding and unfolding into two sets of events that themselves belong to different levels. No dialectical necessity justifies this inscription; there is no “principle of sufficient reason” orchestrating the relation between the two sets of events but only the act of choreography itself.

In this way Diotima's second summons answers to the problem of hyperbole—the experience of an extreme absence of every external measure. Lacking reference to anything outside itself that would organize or regulate its excess, language gives way to pure hype. In response to this crisis, Diotima does not propose to restore an external measure but instead gestures toward a new kind of measure, one that, rather than having the chaos of matter measure up to a form beyond itself, finds measure, balance, and equilibrium within itself; becoming open to measure from within.