Judith Butler

"...the necessity of 'reopening'the figures of philosophical discourse...One way is to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced, whatever it may say about these conditions in discourse. For example the 'matter' from which the speaking subjecct draws nourishment in order to produce itself, to reporduce itself; the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosphy, that is, the architectonics of its theater, its framing in space-time, its geometric organizations, its props, its actors, their repsetive positions, their dialogues, indeed their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself. All these are interventions on the scene; they ensure its coherene so long as they remain uninterpreted. Thus they have to be reenacted in each figure of discourse away from its mooring in the value of 'presence' For each philsopher, beginning with those whose names define some age in the history of philosophy, we have to point out how the break with matterial contiguity is made, how the system is put together. --Luce Irigaray "The Power of Discourse"

Surely it must be possible both to use the term, Chora, to use it tactically even as one is, as it were, used and positioned by it, and also to subject the term to a critique which interrogates the rhetorical operations and differential power-relations.

Here it is necessary to state that the options for theory are not exhausted by either agreeing with discourse on the Chora thus far or by negating it. It is my purpose to do neither of these things. To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it; rather, it is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand what interests were secured in and by that metaphysical placing and thereby to permit the term to occupy and to serve very different aims.[MUCKELBAUER] To problematize the Chora may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty, but a loss of certainty is not the same as nihilism. On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in thinking, in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. This unsettling Chora can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways of thinking about the space in which rhetoric operates.

[Can language simply refer to the Chora or is language also the very condition under which the Chora may be said to appear?]

Judith Butler, in Bodies that Matter, writes that "to speak of bodies that matter is not an idle pun, for to be material means to materialize, where the principle of that materialization is precisely what "matters" about that body, its very intelligibility. In this sense to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where "to matter" means at once "to materialize" and "to mean" (32).

[FACEBOOK] Butler, in her reading of Irigaray, asks "How can one read a text for what does NOT appear within its own terms, but which nevertheless constitutes the illegible conditions of its own legibility? Indeed how can one read a text for the movement of that disappearing by which the textual "inside" and "outside" are constituted?" (37)

"For Irigaray only in catachresis, that is in those figures that function improperly, as an improper transfer of sense, the use of a proper name to describe that which does not properly belong to it, and that return to haunt and coopt the very language which the feminine is excluded explains the radical citational practice of Irigaray" (37)

"For Derrida and Irigaray, what is excluded from the dialectical is also produced by it in the mode of exclusion and has no separable or fully independent existence as an absolute outside. A constitutive or relative outside is, of course, composed of a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system of its own nothematizable necessity. It emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity" (39)

"As a topos of the mataphysical tradition, this inscriptional space makes its appearance in Plato's Timaeus as the receptacle which is also described as the chora. Although extensive readings of the chora have been offered by Derrida and Irigaray, I want to refer here to only one passage which is about the very problem of passage: namely, that passage by which a form can be said to generate its own sensible representation. We know that for Plato any material object comes into being only through participating in a Form which is its necessary precondtion. As a result, materia objects are copies o FOrms and exist only to the extent taht they instantiate Forms. And yet, where does this instantiation take place? Is there a place ,a site, where this reproduction occurs, a medium through which the transformation from form to sensible object occurs? "

Butler offers a way of talking about Chora as embodiment instead of practicality.