Reported by a male, one of Diotima’s thesis seems rather surprising: men’ desire is to become pregnant. Scholars have pretended that kuèsis applied to males must be interpreted in a metaphorical sense, but this prohibits understanding why Diotima chooses this metaphor rather than another. In the light of the mythological traditions going back to Hesiod, Orpheus, and the New Musicians who emphasize the novelty of their music while considering themselves as begetting a newborn child, it seems reasonable to assume that (...) Diotima means that creation can’t reduce itself to the begetting of novelty, but takes time as does a maternal gestation. (shrink)

The Platonic chora, as the third, intermediating term, has been left in a state of virtual dereliction in the West. Its ternary logic transmutes oppositional logics of binarity, including the oppositions of interior and exterior, psyche and cosmos, human and divine. In this article I analyse the mytho-philosophical trajectory of the chora from Plato’s Timaeus, and Diotimaic love found in Plato’s Symposium. I argue that both the disruptive force of Diotimaic love, and the subversive chora with its ‘bastard reasoning’1 are (...) indicative of Plato’s efforts to resolve an internalized conflict which mirrored a larger conflict found in his cultural epoch, a time in which abstracted self-consciousness was on the horizon and chthonic-participatory consciousness was receding. In membering the chora I find a fecund space-time, an enabling field, for human participatory becoming-with the cosmos. (shrink)