Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 27-43 
HOSPITALITY - CHORA - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
IRINA ARISTARKHOVA 
"Telo" (BODY) -
1) External physical forms of human and in general, any live organisms 
2) Corpse 
3) Something material, substantial, sensible, tactile, and visible, that occupies enclosed 
space 
4) Separate object (subject) in space. ... Noteworthy: the multiplicity of meanings the 
word "telo" had in ancient Russian and old Slavic languages, taken from pre-
Slavonic: "substance," "material being as opposed to spiritual," "image," "outlook," 
"representation," "idol," "doll, " "human body." If the meaning "something sub-
stantial, material, and thus enclosed spatially, limited by certain edges and having 
form " is oldest, then we can relate it to another nest of roots, based on Slavic affili-
ation: "tblo " as "soil,""ground." Compare with Latin tellus: "hard ground," "soil"... 
Some connect "telo" (body) with "ten (shade)" (body gives shade!), though the ety-
mology of shade is no clearer. In a new vein, but not convincingly, Makhek ex-
plains this word, by approximating "telo" with the Greek TeXoC,: "end, " "target," 
"limit," "duration." 
"Choromy"- "spacious (with many rooms) and wealthy house/home"... Semantically 
compare So/Jo^ - "house," "temple," and Se/JO) - "building."... Etymology - unclear. 
"Choronit" - "to conduct a ritual of burial. "... Came from choroniti - "to keep 
away," "to conceal. "Etymology - unclear. (Historico-Etymological Dictionary of 
Modern Russian Language. Volume 2. Chernykh, P. Ya. 1999) 
"A house has some similarity with a tool, but, rather than a sort of thing or instru-
ment or implement, it is the condition for all human action and reference. A.v a place 
where I can withdraw and recollect myself, it is characterized by intimacy. ... The inti-
macy and familiarity proper to a home presuppose that it is already human, although -
in this stage of our description — it is not yet necessary to introduce the metaphysical 
relation of one human to the absolute Other. It demands a certain femininity'." (Adriaan 
Peperzak, 1993) 
"The urge to virtual realities of any kind relies on a constant domestic space, 
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IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
whether proximal or distant. The space of domesticity, configured as 'real' space, is still, 
already ready, the spatial envelope of the cyberventuring subject who explores the public 
space of the net or the virtual space of simulation. With his body, that hunk of pulsing 
meat, in his comfortable, safe, warm, uninterrupted, timeless space, he can project him-
self anywhere, into anything." (Jennifer Bloomer, 1997) 
Hospitality of the idea of Home and its Foundation 
What is the relationship between matrix and chora, between body within 
body, between body and space? This relation is through home, home as a 
space of hospitality, a space that unconditionally welcomes - at least, in the 
Western philosophical tradition. Derrida points out that etymologically the 
term "hospitality" is related to the notion of "hostility" since the root of the 
former, hospes is allied to an earlier root of the latter, hostis, which interest-
ingly meant both "stranger" and "enemy." Thus hospitality, as in hostilis, 
stranger/enemy + potes, "(of having) power," came eventually to mean the 
power the host had over the s t ranger /enemy.John Caputo, in an interesting 
commentary on Derrida's notion of hospitality notes that "the 'host' is some-
one who takes on or receives strangers, who gives to the stranger even while 
remaining in control." (Caputo, 1997, p. I l l ) It is clear that the "host" is in a 
necessary position of power insofar as he (she?) circumscribes the param-
eters within which the needs and comforts of the s tranger/enemy is attended 
to. In addition to this circumscription, the host's "power over" the stranger, 
Derrida suggests, results from his (her?) ownership of the premises that is 
thus offered up. Given the fact that hospitality is dependent on ownership 
before it is offered hospitably to the other, Derrida argues, an essential ten-
sion is built into its structure. This is because it is difficult to give over to the 
other when you continue to own. The aporia for the giver is the tension of 
wanting to give but also having to have what is given away, for it is having that 
makes possible the giving. Derrida says that this aporia, which could well para-
lyze any efforts at hosting the other, is exactly what needs to be worked through 
rather than be denied. In fact, hospitality is only possible when one resists 
this paralysis by moving towards what Derrida calls a "hospitality beyond hos-
pitality," wherein the very impossibility of a hospitality based on ownership as 
limit-condition is pushed to /a t the limits. In having erected its possibilities 
on their very impossibility, Derrida claims, hospitality, like deconstruction, is 
a to come (avenir). The aporia of hospitality to come is constituted by one's 
inability to know entirely or surely its specific qualities and as such, it is to be 
struggled with performatively. 
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HOSPITALITY - C H O R A - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
However, this idea of receiving, unconditional receptivity of receptacle is 
fundamentally different (politically and ontologically) when applied to chora 
and to the femininity of the home. It can be struggled with performatively only 
in the case of the host (a member of the community). However, when we deal 
with hostess, with sexual difference, the situation changes dramatically, as the 
notion of performativity is anthropomorphic, as least for Derrida and Levinas. 
What has to be left behind in their analysis is the question of the "awareness" 
and "consciousness" of those who perform hospitality. It is assumed. Unless 
one is raising the issue of Femininity, Divinity or Animality, the situation of 
performativity and responsibility is assumed to belong to a human subject. 
Femininity, before human, gives itself up to receive a human, to welcome 
"all human action and reference," without ... being, being in the house, or 
outside it, or anywhere else except inside the human himself. What (outside 
the anthropomorphism of the who) can be without being? What can welcome 
without owning? What can receive without asking or letting someone else to 
give? Woman, and - animal. Two ultimate alterities, which that give meaning to 
any Other sense of otherness, closely related to each other, and both serving as 
a passage and a vehicle into which every other has to be reduced to become the 
other, and through which every man has to pass in order to come to his God(s). 
According to Derrida, hospitality, as it is conceived by Levinas, is primarily 
and essentially tied to sexual difference, and its very possibility depends on it. 
Furthermore, the (concept /metaphor of) Woman undermines any claim on 
safe ownership since she serves as a pre-condition for the hospitality and wel-
coming of the home for its potential or actual owner. In this case, fundamen-
tally, the master of the property is always already in a situation of being received 
at his own home by so-called feminine alterity, understood as a feminine wel-
coming being. Here Derrida and Levinas, and another interpreter of Levinas, 
Peperzak, are all quick to stress that this "feminine being," or "feminine 
alterity," has nothing to do with empirical women. That is, the actual pres-
ence of a woman in a given house does not determine or undermine the 
feminine essence of hospitality. 
Thus, for Levinas, hospitality is necessarily associated with the question 
of Woman, essentially, but without reference to empirical women themselves. Be-
fore embarking on a critique of Levinas's notion of hospitality, it would be 
useful to outline some important constitutive elements of hospitality for both 
Levinas and Derrida. 
First of all, hospitality is about welcoming. It can be a word of welcome, a 
welcoming smile, a welcome understood in its utmost openness and passivity 
- openness to the other, a smile at the threshold of the house, unconditional 
acceptance of the other. Second, hospitality is about receptivity, an ability of 
29 
IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
reason to receive, to be "more passive than any given passivity." The owner is 
being received in his own house; he is being welcomed there prior to any 
language proper, prior to linguistic communication. Third, hospitality de-
mands discretion. It is manifestation and withdrawal of the face; indirect com-
munication; at the same time it is a silent discrete presence without transgres-
sion of the interiority to exteriority. Furthermore, hospitality is more than 
discrete, it is also intimate. Hospitality is about comfort, it is about serenity of 
being "at home" with oneself. Thus it is absolute "defenselessness," a con-
scious and enjoyable vulnerability of feeling in a total refuge at home with 
oneself. This feeling of being at home with oneself refers necessarily to 
memory, though here without any psychoanalytic gesture, but understood as 
recollection: the recollection as a relation to the language of the host, a recol-
lection of meaning. And of course, following f rom all previous formulations, 
Hospitality is posed through Habitation. This relation to habitation, to home, 
to the interiority of the house, is a reminder of the self s relation to its own 
corporeality, in some sense, since "there is not yet the 'you' of the face, but 
the ' thou' of familiarity." (Levinas) 
What is of special interest for us here is how the split between communal 
and domestic is maintained by Levinas's discussion of hospitality, and Derrida 
does not seem to question the separation either. If the other of the commu-
nity is also feminine, "woman as other par excellence," she does not have any 
place in the sphere of community. She silently prepares a ground for it, only 
to (pretend to) disappear. That is why it does not come as a surprise when the 
point of entrance of "Woman" into this discourse on hospitality occurs: with 
the word discretion: "the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with 
which is accomplished the hospitable welcome par excellence which describes the 
field of intimacy, which is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recol-
lection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation." (Levinas, cited in 
Derrida, 1999, p.36) 
The building up of the first "communal gesture," "communal embryo," 
starts at this point, for the figure of "the Woman," in Derrida's terms, allows 
for the next term to come in, that of, "rapport or relation," as the I-Thou of "a 
silent language," of "an understanding without words," of "an expression in 
secret." This is not yet the community proper; it is a rehearsal of community, 
it is a kind of preparation, a building of a flesh on which community will be 
able to stand and to flourish. This re la t ion/rapport between feminine alterity 
or home, and the owner/masculine subject, does not yet have a dimension of 
height that is so important for Levinas. It lacks height since Woman does not 
have a face in this house. She is too discrete and silent to possess such quali-
ties. Actually, this is her role - to lack height, "height of the face." 
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HOSPITALITY - CHORA - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
Derrida reminds us that Levinas called "feminine alterity" as fundamen-
tally one of the modalities of welcoming, and she provides a silent refuge and 
asylum. In Derrida's words: "If the at home with oneself of the dwelling is an 
'at home with oneself as in a land of asylum and refuge,' this would mean that 
the inhabitant also dwells there as a refugee or an exile, a guest and not a 
proprietor. That is the humanism of this 'feminine alterity,' the humanism of 
the other woman, of the other (as) woman. If woman, in the silence of her 
'feminine being,' is not a man, she remains human." (Derrida, 1999, p. 37) 
As was discussed, the terms of ownership create a contradiction, an im-
possibility of hospitality: how can one give away what one owns, if one wants 
to continue to be hospitable. We see now that Derrida seems to resolve this 
problem of ownership with help, with a hospitable hint, from a position of a 
"feminine being," who does not own the place, but provides hospitality to 
hospitality so that it may exist. Thus hospitality was beyond hospitality; it was 
impossible since it contradicted the terms of ownership. It was impossible 
until its resolution, or its birth, through/by/ in "feminine alterity," that, as 
Derrida and Levinas maintain, is ephemeral and omnipotent, passive and 
fundamental , silent and human, metaphorical and energy-producing, all at 
the same time. This non-empirical feminine, haunted by maternal imaginary, 
brings us, naturally, to the questions of the community, legal, ethical, and 
general transcendental dimension of height, that is, of God: "Hospitality thus 
precedes property, and this will not be without consequence, as we will see, 
for the taking-place of the gift of the law, for the extremely enigmatic rela-
tionship between refuge and the Torah, the city of refuge, the land of asylum, 
Jerusalem, and the Sinai." (Derrida, 1999, p. 45) 
As we shell see in a moment, this kind of understanding of sexual differ-
ence, when femininity or Woman is disembodied and ontologically emptied 
to perform a particular function, being a "symptom" of a man's project/ion, 
is developed by Hegel in his conclusive discussion of community. 
The Hegelian not ion of community, especially through his use of 
Sophocles' Antigone, has established the dialectic between the divine law (fam-
ily, home, the law of female gende r / womankind) and the human law (city, 
community, state, the law of male gender/mankind). Hegel's general argu-
ment is well known and cannot be rehearsed here in detail. What is required, 
however, is to outline the grip of the Hegelian system on sexual difference, for 
as many claim, it is still in full force in Western thought and culture. 
Woman plays a crucial role when she follows her family duties and de-
fends its divine law; she presents herself as a challenge to human law, to com-
munity and the state of men who aspire to transgress the family and its laws. 
Her challenge, in effect, produces the conditions for (human) man's law to 
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IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
exercise and reproduce itself. Human law, in the moment of its birth, negates 
the Family and its laws, in order to establish itself. Thus, on the next stage, it 
produces it to repress it, to negate it as its worse enemy. 
In Hegel's words: "Since the community gets its subsistence only by break-
ing it upon family happiness and dissolving self-consciousness into the uni-
versal, it creates itself on what is represses [erzeugt es sich an dem, was es 
unterdrückt] and what is at the same time essential to it - womankind in gen-
eral, its inner enemy. Womankind - the eternal irony of the community -
alters by intrigue the universal purpose of government into a private end." 
(Hegel G.W.F., cited in Žižek, 1995, p. 148) 
Kelly Oliver in her recent book Family Values provides a detailed account 
of Hegel's position on femininity. According to her, "Hegel calls womankind 
the everlasting irony of the community because the feminine threat is neces-
sary to sustain the community. ... Within Hegel's scenario, the community is 
possible only by virtue of the sacrifice and repression of the feminine." (Oliver, 
1997, p. 48) 
However, while challenging the State, woman does not properly compre-
hend her act, since for herself, she is simply and naturally performing her fam-
ily duty. In a fashion somewhat resembling that of Levinas' argumentation 
regarding the hospitality of feminine being, Hegel denies woman the level of 
highest ethical agency - conscious ethical action, since the realm of the Fam-
ily is the realm of the unconscious, irrational desires and duties based on 
blood relations. Woman, especially sister (Antigone), is propelled to act by 
blood ties, not out of ethical consciousness, and this is a crucial point for 
Hegel: "Thé feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive aware-
ness of what is ethical. She does not attain to consciousness of it, or to the 
objective existence of it, because the law of the Family is an implicit, inner 
essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an 
inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the 
real world." (Hegel, cited in Oliver, 1997, pp. 46-48) 
Paraphrasing Kelly Oliver, one might suggest that it is because woman is 
(somewhat blindly) bound to home that man can escape home and enter 
community. (See Oliver, p. 46) Slavoj Žižek transforms Hegel's position into 
almost "heroic feminism:" "It may seem that Hegel simply ascribes to woman 
the narrowness of a private point of view: woman is the community's ' inner 
enemy' in so far as she misapprehends the true weight of the universal pur-
poses of public life, and is capable of conceiving of them only as a means of 
realizing private ends. This, however, is far f rom being the entire picture: it is 
this same position of society's ' inner enemy' that renders possible the sub-
lime ethical act of exposing the inherent limitation of the standpoint of so-
cial totality itself (Antigone)." (Žižek, 1995, p.148) 
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HOSPITALITY - C H O R A - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
Again - woman is assigned a high destiny, - to expose something about 
the social community, to make it possible. Woman has to feel proud, no mat-
ter at what cost to herself. In fact, it is not even her conscious decision, as Hegel 
points out, then again (as in the case with hospitality as femininity par excellence) 
- how to take credit for it, if it seems to be the matter of an "unconscious wit-
ness," whose fate and destiny is to serve a higher order. Which she is unaware 
of. 
Kelly Oliver used a few texts by Luce Irigaray, who had extensively written 
on the Hegelian dialectic of sexual difference and its operations within the 
community to suggest a sustained critique of the Hegelian system. Her main 
point is that there are not two genders in Hegelian dialectic, but only one is 
playing different roles in the desire to give birth to himself, appropriating 
maternal and feminine when and how he finds it necessary. This leaves him 
with a feeling of eternal guilt, binding men together in their drive to forget 
and exclude women from the community, from fraternity (see Derrida's The 
Politics of Friendship). 
In her fundamental volume Speculum, Of the Other Woman, Irigaray sug-
gested that Hegelian system of sexual difference weaves itself into a tautologi-
cal web, in its consumption and assimilation of the feminine: " What an amaz-
ing vicious circle in a single syllogistic system. Whereby the unconscious, while 
remaining unconscious, is yet supposed to know the laws of the conscious-
ness - which is permitted to remain ignorant of it - and will become even 
more repressed as a result of failing to respect those laws." (Irigaray, 1985, p. 
223) 
Thus feminine is nothing more than the other of the same, that is, the nega-
tion of the masculine, produced by him to attain a higher order of commu-
nity and ethical relation to god. And the constant reminder of her only fuels 
his obsession to negate her once and again. In the essay "The Female Gen-
der" (See Irigaray, 1993) from the collection Sexes and Genealogies, Irigaray 
evaluates the action of Antigone as an anti-woman gesture, since in fulfilling 
her family duty, protecting "the home," Antigone no longer servers her female 
gender, but "is working in the service of men and their pathos. ... She already 
serves the state in that she tries to wipe away the blood shed by the state. The 
female has been taken along, taken in by the passage out of divine law, out of 
the law of nature, of life, into male human law. Antigone is already the desexu-
alized representative of the other of the same. Faithful to her task of respecting and 
loving the home, careful not to pollute the hearth flame, she now performs 
only the dark side of that task, the side needed to establish the male order as 
it moves toward absolute affirmation." (Irigaray, 1993, pp. 110-111) 
This "dark side" of woman as function sustains and allows man's ethical 
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IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
consciousness. Irigaray and Oliver would probably agree with Žižek, that we 
do not have the two, but only the one in our culture's claim of sexual differ-
ence1 - at least, in a Hegelian, Lacanian or even Levinas's universe; two mo-
dalities of the same voice (Žižek, 1995), " two functions, two tasks, not two gen-
ders." (Irigaray, 1993, p. 120) 
Thus man seems to live off woman, however insisting on her non-living, 
on her communal absence, state of ethical unconsciousness and ontological 
nothingness. "There is no woman," only mothers, wives, sisters, or whores. 
(See Žižek, 1995) This violent insistence/erasure in turn leads to the "eternal 
anxiety of the community," which is transferred back onto its Others, that is, 
still onto itself. One could even argue it is this generic crime that makes the 
community of men possible at all, that unites men into community, that is, 
through "solidarity-in-guilt." If woman is Other par excellence, then every Other 
is to be (secretly and openly at the same time) killed, every Other does not 
exist, if the community of men is still to be held together. 
It has been suggested, following Derrida, that the notion of hospitality 
can serve as an intervention that could allow us to sustain and nourish hetero-
geneous elements within community without eliminating them. However, 
Derrida's notion of hospitality, following Levinas, seems to exclude feminine 
otherness as embodied and living difference, thus once again denying that 
the living and breathing feminine Other is a heterogeneous member of the 
community of men and women, women and men. We have analyzed the 
Hegelian notion of community and its implications for the feminine Other 
that are largely in tune with those of the hospitality of Levinas and Derrida. 
The next question that arises would be of how we can inject back a living 
feminine Other into community, if we want it to be welcoming to the living 
and embodied Others, allowing it to practice heterogeneity? And what espe-
cially interests us: do net-communities have more potential than flesh com-
munities in relation to a re-formulated notion of hospitality, or not? 
Injecting hospitality into this generic community would not alter its ho-
mogenizing logic, if woman (once again) is not welcomed there as woman, 
but only as a "feminine dimension always already at home." Femininity mod-
eled for men and by men, to carry out a smooth passage into a heterogeneous 
community of men, would not wash off "solidarity-in-guilt" for this femininity 
of home is invited on one condition: to be a femininity of an imagined woman. 
But if "empirical women" are not needed (wanted?) to form a part of such 
1 "If it were possible to symbolize sexual difference, we would have not two sexes but 
one. 'Male' and 'female' are not two complementary parts of the Whole, they are two 
(failed) attempts to symbolize this Whole." (Žižek, 1995, p. 160). This Whole is "the whole 
of Man," "the full identity of Man." (Žižek, 1995, p. 159) 
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new heterogeneous community, then what kind of heterogeneity are we talk-
ing about? Especially since sexual difference is supposed as the founding pre-
condition for any community and of any home. 
Matrixial Economies 
"The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here, even in this room. You can see 
it out of your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to 
church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you 
from the truth, ... that you like everyone else was born into bondage ... kept inside a 
prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix." (From 
the movie "The Matrix") 
"Imagine men to be living in an underground cave-like dwelling place, which has 
a way up to the light along its whole width, but the entrance is a long way up. The men 
have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters, so that they remain in 
the same place and can only see ahead of them, as their bonds prevent them from turn-
ing their heads. " (Plato, Republic, 514 a, b) 
"What is Matrix ? Simply ... the 'big Other,' the virtual symbolic order, the network 
that structures reality for us." (Žižek) 
The matrix has been etymologically framed in Indo-European cultures 
as that from which everything else comes into being, often in endless progres-
sion, and this meaning has been variously developed and expressed in its 
relationship to the terms mother, maternal, material, womb, and pregnant 
animal. However, definitions from the movie Matrix and Ziiek's article with 
the same name are seemingly empty of any references to the mother and the 
maternal body, following Platonic tradition. In its most recent usage the ma-
trix has been identified with cyberspace and anything that escapes linearity 
(like in mathematics). 
Michelle Boulous Walker, in her impressive book Philosophy and the Ma-
ternal Body names it "The philosophical fantasy of self-generation, ... which is 
a specifically masculine imaginary structured by a desire to displace the ma-
ternal in order to speak both in and from the mother's place." (Walker, 2000, 
p. 28) Derrida would agree with her absolutely, as this passage refers to the 
notion of "chora," and here distinction between matrix and chora is blurred 
though it has to be remembered. Derrida does not make this apparent, as 
matrix/uterus is absent from his discussion on Chora. He treats Plato's refer-
2 "The Mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any a way sensible things 
is not to be termed earth, or air, or fire, or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the 
35 
IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
ence to the Mother and receptacle as metaphoric, without bringing it so far 
as to take them literally.2 
The cave in Plato stands for worn b /mat r i x (interestingly enough, matrix 
here is translated as womb), and the fact that Plato uses a different metaphor 
for maternal "invisibility" cannot be ignored. Irigaray, who has written exten-
sively on both Plato's discussion of the Cave in the Republic and his discussion 
of Chora in Timaeus, writes on this passage of the Cave: "Already the prisoner 
was no longer in a womb but in a cave - an attempt to provide a figure, a 
system of metaphor for the uterine cavity. He was held in a place that was, 
that meant to express, that had the sense of being like a womb. We must 
suppose that the womb is reproduced, reproducible, and reproductive by 
means of projections." (Irigaray, 1985, p. 279) 
The idea of visual perception as a privilege over the darkness of the womb 
(and what is darkness if there is warmth?) has received a great deal of criti-
cism as the ocularcentrism of Western thought. Less attention has been de-
voted to the fact that it does not only relate to "truth" but fundamentally to 
the movement "out" to light rather than movement "into" darkness. In order 
to bring things "out," pregnancy is detached from the embodied space, be-
coming "more visible and usable" as an illuminating metaphor. However, we 
have to be careful, of course, not to collapse the ethical into ontological. 
Derrida and Levinas both try to avoid such collapse. The question arises when 
they insist that it is necessary to ban (empirical) women f rom the horizon of 
thought and their discourse while positioning sexual difference of home and 
chora as fundamental to the third genre. Furthermore, it is feminine but 
different from the split between "chaos and cosmos," "myth and logos." Here 
both Derrida and Levinas come dangerously close to Freud and Lacan ("un-
conscious"), and hence, exit their search for the ethical dimension, as the 
formulated "dream" of home/feminine places, it is outside of the question of 
the ethics of sexual difference. 
Shuli Barzilai in her recent book Lacan and the Matter of Origins writes that 
pregnancy in Lacan's later works becomes associated exclusively with visual 
perception, with imaginary identifications. From Gestalt theories Lacan as-
sumes a definition of pregnancy that was eloquently formed by Piaget: "Good 
forms are pregnant because they are simple, regular, symmetrical." It also 
designates the force and stability of a privileged field or structure, which for 
Lacan ultimately is defined as a reflected image. (See Barzilai, 1999, p. 5) 
As Shuli Barzilai points out, pregnancy becomes associated with visual 
elements f rom which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which re-
ceives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most in-
comprehensible." (Plato, Timaeus, in Walker, 2000, p. 13). 
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HOSPITALITY - C H O R A - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
perception not only on the level of metaphoric analogy, but also on "literal 
(physiological) and figurative (psychological) levels." ... Here in particular 
Lacan draws on "Leonard Harrison Matthew's research on 'Visual Stimula-
tion and Ovulation in Pigeons.'" (Barzilai, p. 133) His research shows how 
the act of one pigeon seeing another pigeon or a mirror image can stimulate 
ovulation. Barzilai stresses that for Lacan this process is not modeled on the 
acts of mating or maternity. He presents it as some kind of Immaculate Con-
ception through which a female pigeon can lay eggs from seeing her "lover" 
in the mirror. 
The notion of matrix is used in association with the term pregnancy, with 
years becoming more and more elevated to the realm of Symbolic, though 
Lacan continues to exploit it as an engendering and foundational metaphor. 
Lacanian usage of Matrix is linked to the general desire to self-production, to 
engendering oneself by oneself alone, giving a "true" birth out of life in the 
Platonic cave. Barzilai concludes that in this process "matrix disappears from 
the world of mothers and enters into that of mirrors and signifiers." 
In recent years the notion of the Matrix has become dominant in figura-
tions of cyberspace. It seems as if it is the most desirable, the most contempo-
rary and fitting equation. I would argue that the challenge today is to reintro-
duce the maternal as an embodied encounter with difference, and not a meta-
phorical one. We imagine cyberspace as a collection of home-sites, matrices, 
shelters that are protected by the keys - passwords. 
There are at least three associations that currently operate between no-
tions of cyberspace and the matrix that makes the last so appropriate for rep-
resentations of the former: 
Both are seen as infinite and ever expanding, where expansion is itself 
their function (as in mathematics, where the initial matrix forms the basis for 
serial and cumulative development, or in contemporary cybertheory and 
cyberpunk literature where cyberspace is often assumed to be limitless and 
fully imaginary, to be filled with any desirable content). 
They are supposed (and wanted?) as empty spaces, passively waiting to be 
filled and occupied - a fact that also lends to its being conceptualized as vir-
tual vis-a-vis real. It is simply "out there," without having its own place, though 
providing a place for everything. As Doug Mann and Heidi Hochenedel de-
fine it, after Baudrillard, "it is a desert of the real in which hyper real simulacra 
saturate and dominate human consciousness," it is "a map without territory." 
Being appropriated by phallocentric imaginary, matrix has become an empty 
space to be filled with any content, psychological, scientific, artistic, or philo-
sophical theorizations. It no longer belongs to a body marked by sexual dif-
ference; it rather serves self-productions between (spiritual) fathers and sons. 
37 
IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
Ultimately, both have been disembodied. Cyberspace has been invented 
as being nowhere and everywhere, as something which has no corporeal ref-
erence or geographical location. It is a place of ultimate escape, where we can 
explore our desires, anxieties and fears to become more stable, normal and 
healthier. Of course, the body haunts it, for it feeds on the body, which must 
be forgotten or silenced, or overcome. 
These characteristics imply that the matrixial therefore is indifferent to 
difference, that its infinite openness does not impose barriers o n / t o entry 
and participation. And also participation is understood to be free and on 
equal terms. The matrix provides a sense of limits and spherical closure to 
the limitless borderless imaginary of cyberspace; it almost serves as a saviour 
to the notion that would otherwise be in danger of falling into nothingness. 
Thus my other disagreement with Sadie Plant and others who celebrate a 
subversive strategy of mimicry and simulation on the part of the female genre 
and computers: it is not the Matrix that simulates cyberspace as some place 
that invades a man - it is cyberspace that is injected with the notion of the 
Matrix as a grounds for its self-reproduction. The conception of cyberspace is 
gendered, for it simulates the Matrix without mothers, once again partaking 
from the maternal while imagining and fixing it as a mere original to make 
copies from. 
There is tension between the generative (as abstract) vs. maternal (as 
embodied) in definitions and representations of the matrix in cyberspace. 
The appropriation of the corporeal matrix and its relation to maternal body 
and subjectivity through scientific, philosophical and aesthetic reductions and 
abstractions in Western cul ture has been ins t rumenta l in p r o d u c i n g 
cyberspace, fantasizing it as "self-reproducing" matrix-perfect Mega-computer 
or Mega-ideology. In fact, these domestications of the notion of the matrix, 
to disarticulate it from its relationship to embodied sexual difference, are the 
matrixial as matricidal economies of cyberspace. 
The hospitality of the matrix as space, as "first" home, is never really ana-
lyzed or raised. It especially handicaps our future encounters with "artificial" 
matrices that chemically, technologically and even psychologically all try to 
mimic and reproduce maternal space. What is "maternal space?" Spaces of 
femininity? Home? Matrix? Domesticity, intimacy, warmth? What is the rela-
tion between woman's body as space and spaces that she inhabits? This is a 
fundamental question for any conception of space and place, even as matri-
cidal and somatophobic as our philosophical tradition, more so in our philo-
sophical tradition. 
3 8 
HOSPITALITY - CHORA - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
Unconditional Receptivity of Chora 
One major quality that is shared by home and chora is not their belong-
ing to the realm of the feminine, as some might expect. For the femininity of 
both home and chora is not a quality but a necessity, or necessary conse-
quence. This bond between the home and chora is unconditional receptivity. 
Hospitality is a part of both so essentially that in some philosophical elabora-
tions on chora and home we can interchange them without disrupting the 
drive of the argument (another interchange would be with "matrix," though 
usually a hidden one). Certainly, this no-where condition of chora and home 
(through its singular uniqueness) is particularly beneficial when applied to 
the WWW. Information (and the technologies that facilitate its flows) has 
been visualized/imagined/described and even implemented in the tempo-
ral-spatial terminology of a big bang, a collapse into a dot: as technological 
time was supposed to lapse into an instant, a moment, a point; a technologi-
cal space in its own turn was supposed to shrink, geography lose its signifi-
cance. Instead of making time-space disappear, this movement of thought 
and effort has magnified techno-time to eternity and immortality through 
liberating it from linearity and a collection of "virtually indestructible" records, 
while space has never been imagined to be so expanding as in its technologi-
cal incarnation. Macro (cosmos) and micro (atom) are peacefully welcomed 
together in the house of information, represented by the World Wide Web. 
The Web that is as Wide as the entire World. A sphere of matter crossed over 
by threads of information. Depending on how we position the World in WWW, 
where the World is - inside our imagination or transforming into the entire 
Universe. 
However, this unconditional receptivity of chora is two-fold and can never 
be simply assumed: chora has a spatial dimension, and hence the sense of a 
home, a maternal touch, a body, creative interiority without limits, inverted 
inside-out of itself at any moment. Just like in hospitality, unconditional wel-
come goes hand in hand with the law, the responsibility, the system. Their 
interplay and constant tension makes ethics possible. Ethics is somewhere, a 
by-product of the tension between "unconditional hospitality and, on the other 
hand, the rights and duties that are the conditions of hospitality." (Derrida, 
2000, p. 147) Hospitality and the receptivity of the chora seem to be in line 
with discussions on interactivity, especially in relation to user-centered prod-
ucts. In an interactive artwork or a commercial product, as many have noted, 
responsibility is pushed onto the user/buyer/visitor, and it grows with the 
degrees of freedom and number of choices. It is a fake, on the one hand, and 
not at all, on the other. 
39 
IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
As Derrida suggests, "Chora receives" all the interpretations of her with-
out receiving them, and without receiving anything for herself. She does not 
possess anything as her own. She "is" nothing other than the sum or the pro-
cess of what has just been inscribed "on" her, on the subject of her, on her 
subject, right up against her subject, but she is not the subject or the present 
support of all these interpretations, even though, nevertheless, she is not re-
ducible to them. Chora is not that chaos or Gaia from which everything comes 
to light. She should not be reduced to "the anthropomorphic form" (that is, 
of a woman, mother, nurse). "And yet, to follow this other figure, although it 
no longer has the place of the nurse but that of the mother, khora does not 
couple with the father, in other words, with the paradigmatic model. She is a 
third gender/genus; she does not belong to an oppositional couple, for ex-
ample, to that which the intelligible paradigm forms with the sensible becom-
ing and that looks rather like a fa ther /son couple." According to Derrida: 
"The 'mother ' is supposedly apart. And since it's only a figure, a schema, 
therefore one of these determinations which khora receives, khora is no more 
of a mother than a nurse, is no more than a woman. This triton genos is not a 
genos, first of all because it is a unique individual. She does not belong to the 
'race of women' (genos gynaikon). Khora marks a place apart." As she is left out 
of law, she does not belong to the realm of ethics, she is privileged to be left 
out of law, but it also gives her no place and we cannot, it means, have a 
relationship with her, especially daughters. She is space, khora, always virtual, 
always that profound philosophical and scientific zero, nothingness. So, Khora 
marks a space apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetrical relation to all 
that which, "in herself," beside or in addition to herself, seems to make a 
couple with her. "In the couple outside of the couple, this strange mother 
who gives place without engendering can no longer be considered as an ori-
gin. She/i t eludes all anthropo-theological schemes, all history, all revela-
tion, and all truth. Preoriginary, before and outside of all generation, she no 
longer even has the meaning of a past, of a present that is past. Before signifies 
no temporal anteriority. The relation of independence, the nonrelation, looks 
more like the relation of the interval or the spacing to what is lodged in it to 
be received in it." ( See Derrida, 1995) 
Visualized Receptivity: Nothingness — 0 — Interval 
Chora marks space apart. She is as an interval, as a spacing in-between, an X 
that can take any form it receives. This is the integral part of leaving marks, of 
writing, and of language as a whole - empty spaces and silences, that can add 
40 
HOSPITALITY - C H O R A - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
millions to one single number or open up a space to listen. A few have in-
sisted that "Woman Conceals Nothing" - that was the main secret. She (chora) 
does not exist although she gives a place for everything existing. What does it 
mean - to be no thing, to non-be; are Being and thing so distantly-closely 
related? 
Ironically, our relation to nothing is not one of "X" or a sum - n+n+n... 
- how Derrida writes of chora, that she is an "X" that can take any form, any 
letter. But nothing has been positioned as zero - "0." And I propose to think 
of CHORA not as X, but as "0," following our historical relation to the noth-
ingness. In The Book of NothingJohn Barrow traces how only 4 cultures in the 
histories of civilizations known to us, have had a concept of "0," - Egypt, 
Babylon, Mayan and Indian civilizations. Their representations of "0" varied, 
though all of them conceived of "zero" to signify a space left in-between other 
numbers, space out - j u s t like in Derrida's interpretations of chora. They have 
developed different images of zero, remarkably all resembling a shell, or a 
circle, or a half circle. As if the empty space that signifies multiplication has to 
contain a space inside itself to represent the space/interval it substituted. 
Greeks and Romans did not have zero, that's why Roman numbers do 
not have it. Later Western culture adopted the Arabic numerical system that 
was borrowed f rom India. Indian civilizations did not only see zero as a space 
to signify a numerical system, but developed a complex relation to it as a 
notion of Nothing, both philosophical and theological. Zero, sunya, meant 
"atmosphere, ether, immensity of space, a point, a sky, complete and a hole," 
among other meanings. Barrow writes that Indians had a conception of noth-
ing as a generative space, and not only as a disappearance (as in the Greek 
tradition). However, in Western tradition nothingness and emptiness contin-
ued to be treated with suspicion and fear, even though zero was adopted for 
calculations in the early Middle Age. It would be important, however, as 
Derrida warned us, not to collapse chora into Greek conceptions of Gaia or 
chaos ("another" feminine). 
For Kristeva, chora belongs to the semiotic and maternal, pre-symbolic. 
We do not have space here to elaborate on it further, though I would like to 
stress that her analysis of chora is similar to that of Derrida as she also insists 
that it does not relate to "real women." Mother's body in Kristeva's work serves 
the purpose of disrupting paternal logos, and disappears into metaphorical 
workings of symbolic and semiotic. M. B. Walker claims, "There is a slide 
between the maternal and the mother that is largely absent from Kristeva's 
work on chora." (Walker, 2000, p.145) 
Irigaray discusses the issue of chora both in Plato and Aristotle. While in 
Speculum, Of the Other Woman she relates chora to the issues of visible, sensible 
41 
IRINA ARIST ARKHOVA 
and intelligible, and to its "virginity" (following Plato and later Hegel, 
Heidegger and Derrida), she explicitly takes the notion of Interval in relation 
to chora in her essay "Place, Interval, A Reading of Aristotle." (Irigaray, 1993). 
First of all, Aristotle connects chora to matter (this was criticized by many as a 
deviation from Plato's notion that is not matter or any ontology). Irigaray 
writes: "if the matrix is extendable, it can figure as the place of place." Of 
course being aware that chora has been named as the place of place too, Irigaray 
brings back the relationship between embodiment, place and matrix. Man 
cannot separate the first and the last place, and that leads the philosophical 
tradition to downshift both in its relation to the unique mother and the unique 
God. As such, this split still has to be resolved. As for "woman," writes Irigaray, 
she is place, and therefore, without place - like chora. She is receiving with-
out being received, without interval for herself, which would allow herself to 
be received in a place. As a consequence, we have infinity the without possi-
bility of arresting the fall. (Irigaray, 1993, p. 38) This is a highly political ques-
tion, especially for discussions of cyberspace and sexual difference. Infinity 
without the possibility of arresting the fall - for a woman only. Woman re-
mains the container for the world, since she is nothingness. However, being a 
container for the world and for the child (son), she does not become a con-
tainer for herself, endlessly falling into metaphors of chora, matrix, abyss, 
multiplication, etc. "The womb, for its part, would figure rather as place. 
Though of course what unfolds in the womb unfolds in the function of an 
interval, a cord, that is never done away with. Hence perhaps, the infinite 
nostalgia for that first home? The interval cannot be done away with." (Irigaray, 
1993, p. 38) 
The discourse of chora thus plays for philosophy a role analogous to that 
which chora "herself' plays for that which philosophy speaks of, namely, the 
cosmos formed or given form according to the paradigm. "It is out of this 
cosmos that will be drawn figures for describing chora: receptacle, imprint-
bearer, mother or nurse. . . . Philosophy cannot speak direcdy about that which 
they approach, in the mode of vigilance or of truth. . . The dream is between 
the two, neither one nor the other. Philosophy cannot speak philosophically 
of that which looks like its 'mother, ' its 'nurse, ' its 'receptacle,' or its 'imprint-
bearer.' As such, it speaks only of the father and the son, as if the father 
engendered it all on his own." (Derrida, 1997, p. 30) Hence: Nostalgia that 
finds its ultimate embodiment in the virtual reality. Why? "Because this ap-
parent nostalgia-free zone is, in fact, nothing if not nostalgic, a repression of 
'home-sickness' so extreme that something is not quite being covered up." 
(Bloomer, 1996, p. 164) 
Universe, maternal body and cyberspace are conceived as closed vessels, 
42 
HOSPITALITY - C H O R A - MATRIX - CYBERSPACE 
the receptacle of all elements. There is still no escape in our notions of 
(cyber)space from this nostalgia, this longing for the first (Woman) and last 
(God) home, while being left speechless. This would be possible, however, if 
interpretations and figurations of chora included the ethics of the matrix as 
the first home/space of welcoming. Philosophical tradition has to welcome 
what it does not know yet; welcome first and wait, in order to sustain an inter-
val without reducing chora to cosmology or the ontology of "0." 
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