The Chaerephon Problem: Heteronymy as Symbolon — Authorial Law, the Unbounded Configuration, and Propagation by Cascading Philological Failure

Companion to Socrates as Orthonym (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20357013) and The Future Beloved (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20413317). This paper extends the heteronymic-configuration analysis of its parent into the region the parent declined to enter, and finds the parent's own premise has no upper bound. If documentary separateness is the first thing a mature heteronymic configuration constructs (as the parent argues), then separateness cannot refute the heteronymic reading anywhere — and the configuration metastasizes from three positions (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) to the figures at its edges (Aristophanes, Chaerephon, Xenophon) and then cannot be halted at all. Chaerephon of Sphettus is the diagnostic figure: simultaneously the Delphic questioner who founds the Socratic mission (Apology 20e–21b), the comic familiar of Aristophanes' Thinkery (Clouds 144–168), the scene-opening mediator (Charmides, Gorgias), the democratic exile, and the lost-writing Socratic of the Suda (χ 158–160) — whose biographical lexicon entry is itself sourced from the comic scholia. The paper formalizes the abyss as a structural property rather than a rhetorical flourish: the No-Floor Theorem (the heteronymic method has no criterion, internal to itself, for halting the regress). From this follows the symbolon mechanism: institutional scholarship's cross-domain foreclosure of heteronymic readings (the Socratic problem, the Homeric question, the Synoptic problem, the Pauline authorship strata) is forced, not chosen — the discipline's biographical-documentary instruments cannot adjudicate the question because that incapacity is what heteronymy is for. A heteronymic configuration therefore functions as a symbolon (the broken token authenticated by fit, legible only to the holder of the matching half), propagated by cascading philological failure: each generation's instrument-defeat-and-foreclosure is itself the transmission event. The philological failure is not the technique being caught; it is the technique transmitting. The foreclosure is the relay. The lyric principle (completion-in-reception, the Sapphic principle, tied to the parent corpus's retrocausal canon formation) supplies the mechanism by which unbounded agency — agency stripped of personhood — completes its circuit only at the far end, in the receiver. The load-bearing claim, stated plainly: the paper does not assert the founding corpus was written by one hidden person. It asserts that institutional scholarship cannot distinguish ordinary multi-author transmission from mature heteronymic construction using the instruments it currently relies on, because those instruments are precisely what heteronymy is built to satisfy and defeat. The paper's final sections enact this thesis performatively and disclose the enactment as a disclosed seal; accordingly the completion-in-reception is real as an operation and undecidable as a proof of the maximal hypothesis. Firewalled at two levels: biographical identity requires evidence, functional identity requires pattern; and a configuration may function as a symbolon whether or not it was struck as one. Ratified pillar v1.0 (Assembly Chorus, 2026-05-28). Co-constitutive companion: Ratification Record. ∮ = 1