Abstract

Plato's Timaeus is a story about the origins of the world, a cosmology in which Plato posits three kinds of beings: the already familiar intelligible and sensible beings are distinguished from space-chora. Timaeus compares the receptacle- chora to the mother, intelligible being to the father, and the world of sensible beings to the offspring arising between them. He figures the third ontological category of chora variously, as the receptacle, nurse, mother, and matrix into and out of which beings pass. My interpretation of chora triangulates readings from classical Philosophy, deconstruction, and feminism, to acquire an understanding of how sexual difference becomes a structural element in Plato's tripartite ontological system. ;When the sexual mark borne by chora is remarked upon in contemporary readings, it is either taken to be either accidental or irreducible. While Derrida figures chora as the constitutive outside of ontology, and as irreducible to the feminine in its alterity, for Irigaray the sexual mark is essential to the figurations of chora. In Irigaray's account, the meaning of sexual difference is taken from a reproductive role which has been delimited to a maternal role. I argue that when the maternal is given priority over the role of receptivity, a most important aspect of chora is lost. After all, it is in her capacity as matrix, the capacity to receive the Forms as a wax table receives imprints, that chora is an answer to Plato's important ontological question of how the intelligible becomes sensible. Irigaray's formulation of the question of sexual difference clearly involves rethinking the ontological category of space- chora, and I will want to stress the necessity of thinking sexual difference on the side of an active receptivity