Abstract

The project consists of a reading of Plato's Timaeus, uncovering the theoretical domination of TECHNE and the corresponding subordination of TIKTO . The tension between producing and reproducing undermines metaphysics; the domination of TECHNE is threatened by erotic, procreative, and bodily production. Generation, reproduction, and birth disrupt technical discourse, interrupting its orderly flow. At the same time, the philosopher institutes a derisive discourse regarding woman, the reminder of birth and begetting. ;Philosophy finds itself aligned with both the technical project, which looks to the paradigm, as well as erotics. The paradox of the philosopher-king who loves wisdom embodies this tension. The dissertation recalls, along with Timaeus, the main parts of Republic to inquire what cannot be remembered by and included in the city. The erotic disruption of the technical order is a threat the city attributes to the poets. Their subsequent exile offers suggestions as to what the Timaean cosmos will exclude. The dissertation asks whether another history of being, not merely belonging to the technical order, might be suggested by poetics. ;Timaeus begins by articulating the protometaphysical distinction: Being/generation. He finds his discourse compelled to turn to a "Third Kind" --a space for thinking the possibility of opposition. To think CHORA as the possibility of the impossibility of the fundamental opposition of western thought, is to question its foundations from out of its own resources. CHORA appears in the dialogue as mother, nurse, receptacle, bowel, and matrix. This litany of female names and parts calls, after two millennia, for a feminist philosophical reading of the Timaeus; it links the possibility of philosophical discourse to the question of the feminine figure. We must recall why it becomes impossible to speak the feminine, and for the feminine to speak in philosophy. It is necessary, if we are to engage in feminist theorizing at all, to trace how Timaeus' protometaphysical discourse will come to debase woman and the female body. This cosmology grounds not only the history of being but also the history of sexism founded in it