Jorge Arjona
Department of Philosophy and Religious studies, FF UPCE
This paper aims to undertake the genealogy of a terminological entanglement that sits at the base of Western misogyny. Following continental feminist philosophies, I claim that the elements of this entanglement are already present in Plato’s Timaeus and serve as a violent foundation for what would become Western misogyny. Accordingly, in this paper I trace the textual evidence in the Timaeus that justifies or denies the existence of a specifically platonic rationale for the Western association of matter and femaleness. In the Timaeus Plato introduces an ontological principle as the mediating instance between the Forms and their instantiations (49a5-6), namely, the receptacle, the place where the inscription of the Model Forms on their sensible copies takes place. Even if Plato discourages the likening of the receptacle to any other body, he himself compares it to a nurse (49a6), a mother (50d3), the odorless liquids that are the basis of ointments (50e7), and the soft material out of which figures are molded (50e8), giving rise to possible interpretations of the receptacle as sexed – specifically female – matter. In this paper I argue that there is a circularity behind Plato’s comparison, which partly characterizes Western misogyny, and can be captured by the following question: is the receptacle female-like because of its malleability and matter-like character, or is it malleable and matter-like because of its female-like character? To some extent, this circularity would not matter had it not turned into a mutually deprecating entanglement. Hence the necessity of disarticulating this entanglement: its circularity sustains a misogynist figuration of femaleness. To challenge this figuration implies the genealogical struggle for different meaning out of the ruins of this deprecating circularity.
Keywords: Femaleness, Matter, Receptacle
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