Abstract
In Timaeus, Plato’s third kind introduces an ambiguous borderland space that is neither of the categories that it separates and unites, but somehow partakes of both. In the cosmology of the Timaeus, Plato uses the model of the family as the foundation for his description of the cosmos’ birth; he consistently identifies the male as active and the female as passive, grounding these binary categories in such a way that renders only male subjects as autonomous beings. Using the models of sexual reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and her Xenogenesis series, Decker argues that the third kind disrupts the binary models of sexual difference that Plato’s dualistic system attempts to ground.
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- 1.
Luce Irigaray , This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 78. “The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.”
- 2.
Plato, Timaeus , trans. R.G. Bury (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1929), 49a. Bianchi has pointed out the suggestive maternal connotations of hypodoche : “the verbal form hypodechomai more strongly indicates the hospitality of entertaining or welcoming under one’s roof, and, said of a woman , also means to conceive or become pregnant.” Emanuela Bianchi , The Feminine Symptom : Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 97. Plato uses several different names for the third kind throughout Timaeus , including mother, nurse of all Becoming, and space (khora ).
- 3.
At Timaeus 31c, “but it’s not possible for two things alone to be beautifully combined apart from some third: some bond must get in the middle and bring them both together”; and at Timaeus 49a: “Two kinds were sufficient for what was said before: one set down as the form of a model—intelligible and always in the self-same condition—and the second, an imitation of a model, having birth and visible. A third kind we didn’t distinguish at that time, since we deemed that the two would be sufficient; but now the account seems to make it necessary that we try to bring to light in speeches a form difficult and obscure.”
- 4.
Cynthia Hampton, “Overcoming Dualism: The Importance of the Intermediate in Plato’s Philebus ” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato ed. Nancy Tuana (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994): 223.
- 5.
Jill Gordon , Plato’s Erotic World : From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 6.
At Timaeus 50b Plato describes the three kinds as follows: “that in which it comes to be, and that from which it comes to be…and what’s more, it’s fitting to liken the receiver to a mother, the from which to a father, and the nature between these two to an offspring.”
- 7.
Plato calls khora ‘ekmageion’ at Timaeus 50c, the full passage is cited later in this article.
- 8.
Emanuela Bianchi , “Receptacle/Chora: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s Timaeus .” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (2006): 125.
- 9.
Judith Butler , Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993): 23.
- 10.
Plato, Timaeus , 17a.
- 11.
The lottery is rigged because the guardian class would match good with good and bad with bad, though the people would believe it was decided by chance, “in order that they might become, to the best of our power, as good as possible in their natures right from the start, don’t we remember how we said that the rulers, male and female, had to contrive some sort of lottery by secret ballots for marital coupling so that the separate classes of bad and good men will respectively be mated by lot with women who are like them; and that no hatred would arise among them on this score since they’d believe that the cause of the allotment was chance.” Ibid., 18c.
- 12.
At Timaeus 21a, Critias says that the speakers will “praise the goddess on her feast-day by singing, as it were, in a manner both just and true.” As Kalkavadge explains in a footnote, “the feast to which Critias refers is probably the Greater Panathenaea, the celebration of Athena’s birthday,” 51. The prominence of Athena’s presence in this dialogue is reflected in the war stories told by Critias, and underscores Socrates’ desire to see the animals engaging in some struggle or conflict.
- 13.
Ibid., 19a.
- 14.
Kalkavadge, Plato’s Timaeus : Translation, Glossary, Appendices and Introductory Essay (Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2001), 9.
- 15.
Plato, Timaeus , 19c.
- 16.
Plato, Timaeus , 19e.
- 17.
Ibid., 19e–20a.
- 18.
Jacques Derrida , On the Name , trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89.
- 19.
Plato is well aware of this reading of Heraclitus , as he refers to Heraclitus repeatedly in the Cratylus, where Socrates and his interlocuters interrogate the problem of names and naming. As Jill Gordon notes, “Heraclitus is referred to no fewer than eight times: 401d; 402a–b; 410a; 411b–c; 420a; 439b–c; 440c; 440e. One concern Socrates has is how meaning can emerge if there are two names that refer to the same thing. The first examples Socrates uses is the name of the river, called Xanthus by the gods but Scamander by men; one might argue that this pointed example of a river…may itself be an oblique reference to Heraclitus ,” Plato’s Erotic World , 56.
- 20.
Heraclitus , DK 51. All fragments of Heraclitus use the standard Diels-Kranz numbering, and translations are Charles H. Kahns’ unless otherwise specified, from The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
- 21.
Jacques Derrida , “Diffèrance ,” In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
- 22.
Derrida , On the Name , 99.
- 23.
Lynn Huffer , Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Questions of Difference (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 83.
- 24.
Bianchi , The Feminine Symptom : Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos.
- 25.
Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World , 2.
- 26.
Ibid., 121.
- 27.
Plato, Symposium 202e.
- 28.
Plato, Symposium 202e.
- 29.
This movement from the sensible world of the body to the intelligible world of the Forms is most apparent at the end of Diotima’s speech, where she describes the “ladder of love” ( Symposium 211a–212c).
- 30.
Plato, Symposium 207a.
- 31.
Diotima’s discussion of the two types of pregnancy begins at Symposium 206c.
- 32.
Anne Carson’s translation from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 265.
- 33.
For discussion of the meaning of amechania in Parmenides’ poem, see Peter Kingsley , Reality (Inverness: Golden Sufi Press, 2003), 91 and 565.
- 34.
See E.R. Dodds , The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) for a detailed discussion of the daemonic in the psychological life of Ancient Greece.
- 35.
Dodds , The Greeks and the Irrational, 41. While the question of free will was not schematized as a philosophical problem in Ancient Greek thought, the problem of agency was a frequent theme in myths and tragedies. As Vernant has suggested, “the category of the will is portrayed in tragedy as an anxious question concerning the relationship of man to his actions: To what extent is man really the source of his actions?” Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Without the Complex” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 89.
- 36.
Plato, Symposium 186c–d.
- 37.
Plato, Symposium 218b; Socrates as “sober and temperate” 216d.
- 38.
Plato, Theaetetus 149d, cited in Gordon , Plato’s Erotic World , 132.
- 39.
Plato, Symposium 187c.
- 40.
Heraclitus, DK 51.
- 41.
Plato, Symposium 187a–b.
- 42.
Eryximachus’ claim can be refuted simply by recalling Heraclitus’ fragment DK 10: “Syllapsis: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.”
- 43.
Plato, Timaeus 30a: “for since he wanted all things to be good, and to the best of his power, nothing to be shoddy, the god thus took over all that was visible, and, since it did not keep its peace but moved unmusically and without order (kinoumenon plemmelos kai ataktos), he brought it into order from disorder, since he regarded the former to be in all ways better than the latter.” Cited in Bianchi , “Receptacle/Chora,” 135.
- 44.
Plato, Timaeus 29e.
- 45.
Ibid., 35a–b.
- 46.
Ibid., 48a.
- 47.
Brill , “Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus ” in Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts, ed. Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 163.
- 48.
Plato, Timaeus 18a.
- 49.
Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World , 36.
- 50.
In Iliad 14.198–9, Hera addresses Aphrodite by saying, “give me now love and desire, with which you subdue all immortals and mortal men.” Cited in Kingsley , Reality, 378.
- 51.
Empedocles DK 25, Brad Inwood’s translation in The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an Introduction by Brad Inwood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 225.
- 52.
Empedocles DK 61, Kingsley’s translation in Reality.
- 53.
Kingsley , Reality, 377.
- 54.
Laura Gemelli Marciano, “Images and Experience in Parmenides’ Aletheia,” Ancient Philosophy 28, (2008): 14.
- 55.
Octavia Butler, Wild Seed (New York: Warner Books, 1980), 13.
- 56.
Ibid., 20.
- 57.
Ellen Greene, “Apostrophe and Women’s Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho ,” in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 234.
- 58.
Sappho’s model of eros diverges significantly from the patriarchal model because she is describing love between women , where there is no difference in social status between them. In the patriarchal practice of pederasty, the older man (lover, erastes) had superior status and authority over the young man (beloved, eromenos). See Greene, “Apostrophe and Women’s Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho ” for detailed discussion of these differing models of eros .
- 59.
Butler, Wild Seed , 87.
- 60.
Ibid., 89–94.
- 61.
Anyanwu tells Issac, in explaining her ability, “my body reads it—reads everything.” Ibid., 87.
- 62.
Stacy Alaimo, “Skin Dreaming: The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 129.
- 63.
Plato, Timaeus 29e.
- 64.
Gregory Jerome Hampton, Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), 29.
- 65.
He tells Lillith, “we do what you would call genetic engineering. We know you had begun to do it yourselves a little, but it’s foreign to you. We do it naturally. We must do it. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species.” Butler, Lillith’s Brood, 40.
- 66.
Ibid., 39.
- 67.
Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas, 2006): 236.
- 68.
Butler, Lillith’s Brood, 49.
- 69.
Ibid., 89.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid., 43.
- 72.
Ibid., 43.
- 73.
This is first explained to Lillith by the mature ooloi Kahguyaht: “humans and Oankali tend to bond to one ooloi….the bond is chemical.” Ibid., 110.
- 74.
Alaimo, “Skin Dreaming,” 130.
- 75.
Oankali children, and the human-Oankali construct children, are not born male or female, but “eka” (androgynous), until they reach metamorphosis and are drawn to one or the other sex. During the transformational period of metamorphosis, their bodies become male, female, or in the case of Jodahs, human-ooloi.
- 76.
Butler, Lillith’s Brood, 612.
- 77.
Ibid., 612.
- 78.
Melzer, Alien Constructions, 240.
- 79.
Butler, Lillith’s Brood, 523.
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Elbert Decker, J. (2017). Borderland Spaces of the Third Kind: Erotic Agency in Plato and Octavia Butler. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_10
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