of the primal site. It would show how the ‘sojourn’ or the mode of being-in [In-Seins] at a specific site was able to become a motive and ground for the clearing of Being and thereby for the hominization of the pre-hominid. The expectations regarding the investigation of such a primordial bursting site are high, because it must correspond to the state of the art on both sides, the ontological as well as the anthropological. The analytic of the house before the house is the proving ground for the new constellation of ‘Being and Space.’
The concept of space that comes into play here is obviously neither trivial nor that of physics or geometry, because, as Heidegger’s obscure remark shows, it must be older than all ordinary dimensionality, older in particular than the trusty three-dimensionality by which geometry represents the relations of spatial measurement in a system of places. Like the Platonic chōra—to which Derrida has devoted a noteworthy commentary27—it must be a space that can provide a matrix for dimensions in general and to this extent be the “nurse of becoming,” to recall Plato’s metaphor for ‘space’ as the ‘where’ which harbors what is able to be. I have suggested the expression ‘sphere’ for this non-trivial space and attempted to show how in it the primordial stretching out of dimensionality is to be thought. Spheres can be described as places of inter-animal and interpersonal resonance, where the way in which living beings are together achieves a plastic power. This reaches a point where the form of coexistence physiologically changes the ones coexisting. This can be strikingly illustrated in the facialization of Homo sapiens: in spherical resonances, human faciality is released from the animal’s snout.28 These spherical localities, in the beginning mere inner spaces for groups of animals, are most readily comparable with greenhouses, in which living beings flourish under particular self-effected climatic conditions. In our case, the greenhouse effect extends to ontological consequences: one can plausibly show how a human Being-in-the-world was able to come about from an animal Being-in-the-greenhouse-environment.
With the concept of spheres a gap, hitherto unnoticed by and large, in the field of theories of space is mended, one which yawned between the concept of environment and the concept of world. If having-an-environment can be ontologically understood as being enclosed by a ring of relevant circumstances and co-conditions for organic life—above all by ‘phenomena’ with the sense of nourishment, copulation, and danger—and if Being-in-the-world, in contrast, is to be interpreted as an ecstatic towering up into that which is open and cleared, then one must assume that there is a mid-world-position or a between that is neither inclusion in the environmental cage nor the pure terror of being held out into the
27 Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130.
28 Cf. my Bubbles: Spheres, vol. 1: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), chapter 2, “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere,” 139–206.