199
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 1 | 2019 | 199–218
* University of Bergamo
Anna Montebugnoli*
“Something remains to be said”: On the 
Metonymic Ontology of the Platonic Chora
1. Introduction
The history of the chora – the third kind of reality (triton genos) introduced by 
Plato in the middle of the Timaeus – and of its
1
 interpretations
2
 is that of a con-
stant fluctuation and undecidability between its different meanings, in particu-
lar between that of matter and space, substance and place – one or the other, 
or both one and the other.
3
 It is, that is to say, the history of the attempts to 
translate it (without, as far as possible, leaving anything out), of the efforts to 
turn the mythical discourse on the triton genos, along with its metaphors and 
figures – nurse (tithene), shapeless (amorphon) receptacle (hypodoché), moth-
er (meter), space (chora), place (hedra), bearer of imprints (ekmageion) –, into 
a logical sequence, following at least in part the familiar Platonic principle of 
ensuring a consistent nexus between the discursive, epistemological, and on-
1
 In the literature, the name chora is sometimes treated as a feminine noun and sometime in 
the neuter. Here I will treat it as the latter in order to stress its thirdness (triton genos).
2
 The debate on the nature of the third kind of reality introduced by the Timaeus begins with 
Aristotle and the Ancient Academy, continues throughout mid- and Neoplatonism, and up 
to modern and contemporary scholars. On the history of this debate, see in particular Luc 
Brisson, Le Même et l’ Autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon. Un commen-
taire systématique du Timée de Platon, Academia Verlag, Sankt Augustin 1998, pp. 221–253.
3
 For an interpretation of the third kind of reality as space, see Keimpe Algra, Concepts of 
Space in Greek Thought, E.J. Brill, Leiden 1995, pp. 72–120; Jean-François Pradeau, “Être 
quelque part, occuper une place. Τόπος et χώρα dans le Timée de Platon”, Les Études phi-
losophiques, 3/1995, pp. 375–399. For an interpretation of the third kind as matter, see in 
particular Carlo Diano, “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Gior-
nale critico della filosofia italiana, 49 (1979), pp. 321–335; Mary Louise Gill, “Matter and 
Flux in Plato’s Timaeus”, Phronesis 32 (1987), pp. 34–53. For an interpretation of the third 
kind as an intermediate nature between space and matter, see Luc Brisson, Le Même et 
l’Autre, pp. 208–221; Barbara Botter, “Il ricettacolo di materia e spazio in Timeo 48e–53b”, 
in: C. Natali, S. Maso (eds.), Plato Physicus, cosmologia e antropologia nel Timeo, Hakkert, 
Amsterdam 2003, pp. 165–187; Francesco Fronterotta, “Introduzione” in: Platone, Timeo, 
Rizzoli, Milano 2003, pp. 51–70; Dana R. Miller, The Third Kind in Plato’s Timaues, Vande-
rhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003.

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tological planes. This principle clearly states that “true opinion” can never be 
separated from the logos and while things without the logos “are unknowable,” 
things with the logos “are knowable.”
4
 I am not concerned here with examining 
how diverse readings of the Timaeus arrange the order of these terms, some-
times giving priority to the philological concerns, then to the logical issues, and 
sometimes to the ontological inquiry into the kinds of being. Whether the focus 
is placed on the text and its philological coherence or on the diachronic conse-
quentiality of Plato’s thought, it is the same criterion (although less cogent) as 
unveiling the structural similarity between an object, its knowledge, and the 
surrounding discourse that guides most attempts at unravelling the “myth” of 
the chora – or, rather, its “myth within the myth,”
5
 i.e. the “probable myth” of 
the third kind of reality, within the cosmological mythos of the Timaeus. 
Such a mythos is much harder to decipher in so far as it is carried out under the 
sign of a “bastard reasoning” (logismós nothos),
6
 the only kind of reasoning ap-
propriate to such a “difficult and obscure kind of thing”
7
 (chalepón kai amydrón 
eidos), which “the argument seems to demand”
8
 (eisanankazein) as a result of the 
“wandering cause”
9
 (planomene aitia) – i.e. the “necessity”
10
 that, together and 
against the “intellect” (nous), accounts for the universe and its movements –,  
and which can be known only in a “dreamlike”
11
 fashion (oneiropolein). The 
rigorous and well-ordered series episteme-being-logos that organises ancient 
philosophy in general (and that of Plato in particular),
12
 as well as its “weak” 
version doxa-sensible-mythos, is replaced within the discourse on the chora by 
the “irregular” and aporetic one triton genos-dream-bastard reasoning. Leaving 
aside the problems concerning each of these terms, it is worth noting that all the 
issues raised by the chora – the difficulty of comprehending it, the question of 
its role in the Platonic theory of ideas, even the possibility of its rigorous philo-
sophical translation – relate to the gap between these two series. Therefore, the 
4
 Theaet. 201d1-3, translated by John Mcdowell, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, p. 94. 
5
 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1995, p. 113.
6
 Tim. 52 b2, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, p. 45.
7
 Tim. 49 a3, p. 40.
8
 Ibid.
9
 Tim. 48 a7, p. 39.
10
 Tim. 48 a4, p. 39.
11
 Tim. 52 b3, p. 45.
12
 See in particular Crat. 439 b-440 c; Resp. VII 533 e-534 a; Phaedr. 247 c-e. 

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“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
third kind of reality ends up being at the same time the negative correlative of 
the eidetic principle, the weakest point (on account of its passive indifference) 
of the ontological order, and the most reluctant to allow for any identification, 
in so far as it constantly and inevitably “slips” on the sequence of transpositions 
ordered by the logos series. 
In fact, this resistance to the logos is what made the chora the central figure of 
the constellation of the “theories of difference” that have sought and are still 
seeking to rethink Western philosophy and culture by questioning its tradi-
tion. Among those, especially Derrida’s analysis of Western logocentrism and 
Continental feminist thought (particularly Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s philoso-
phy)
13
 have drawn attention to this Platonic concept, marking it as the sign of 
the difference, of the alterity and criticism of the ontological, logical, and sym-
bolic order of the logos.
Therefore, instead of undertaking a definitory challenge that would risk running 
around in circles – with the terms bouncing between different series of concepts 
(space, void, bodies, elements) and systems (philosophy, physics, mathematics, 
geometry) –, this article aims at investigating the features of the triton genos 
within the framework of the philosophies of difference, not only by analysing 
its capacity to deconstruct the logocentric model, but also (and foremost) by fo-
cusing on its ability to construct, i.e. outline, a different way of organising the 
linguistic and ontological order of reality. Such an investigation, however, must 
go back to the letter of the Platonic text. In fact, my thesis is that Timaeus’s ex-
position of the third kind already contains the clues to an understanding of the 
chora as a function, reorganising ontology, language, and experience, which is 
able to resonate with the themes of contemporary philosophy. 
This return to the Platonic text should be understood in two ways. (1) It is the re-
sult of a twin aspiration, both genealogical and “anachronistic,” that has guid-
ed the various theories of difference; an aspiration rooted in the desire of both 
drawing another “lineage” of the history of philosophy, and, at the same time, 
breaching its traditional chronological (and logical) order. Such a revolutionary 
13
 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia University Press, New York 1984, 
in particular pp. 25–30; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell University 
Press, Ithaca 1985, in particular pp. 243–343.

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drive tests itself first and foremost in the philological and philosophical decon-
struction of the texts of the tradition. This double aspiration thus leads to a re-
thinking not just of the history of philosophical concepts, but also, before that, 
of its words and language; i.e., it leads to the identification of the traces of other 
ways of speaking and talking that make it possible to say what is left unsaid by 
the logos, therefore questioning both the absoluteness of its order and the image 
it draws of what exceeds it. In this context, the reading of the Timaeus repre-
sents (2) an attempt at finding one of the many possible genealogical threads of 
such linguistic and theoretical otherness.
Within this general hermeneutic framework, the article aims, more specifically, 
at (i) recognising in the triton genos the figure of a different way of naming things 
and their mutual relations, a way that can already be labelled a metonymic one –  
with specific reference to the theoretical meaning given to the term by the femi-
nist thought of difference
14
 –, as opposed to the metaphorical one of the classic 
logos. However, according to the aforementioned principle of ancient philoso-
phy’s entangled nexus between language and being, this metonymic mode of 
signifying and naming necessarily follows directly from the way in which the 
argument of the chora redefines the classic scheme of Platonic ontology. Based 
on this, the article will (ii) try to bring to light the eccentric form of connection 
between ontology and language set up by the triton genos, and the central role 
of this reconfiguration of Platonic theory for the contemporary philosophy of 
difference. This implies, however, a rethinking of the classic series epistemolo-
gy-language-ontology seen above. Such a rethinking proceeds from the recogni-
tion of the onto-metonymic order of the chora, the renunciation of the “logical” 
translation of the figures that describe its characters and functions, and finally 
the acceptance of both the impossibility of a “science” of the triton genos and 
the possibility of a different way of knowing and perceiving.
15
 The third aim of 
the article is therefore (iii) to track down the terms of another series, different 
from that of epistemology-language-ontology, which is able to give an account 
14
 See in particular Luisa Muraro, “To Knit or to Crochet. A Political-Linguistic Tale on the 
Enmity between Metaphor and Metonymy”, in: C. Cesarino, A. Righi (eds.), Another Mo-
her: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism, University of Minnesota Press, 
Minneapolis-London 2018, pp. 67–119.
15
 On the knowledge of the chora, see in particular Luc Brisson, Le Même et l’Autre, pp. 
197–208.

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“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
of the nexus between the onto-linguistics of the chora and its peculiar kind of 
knowledge and perception. 
In this context, I shall start this line of reasoning with a quotation from Luce 
Irigaray’s Speculum and, in particular, from the chapter entitled La mystérique, 
in which she writes about the difficulties of thinking and speaking in a different 
language from that of the logos: 
Words begin to fail her. She senses something remains to be said that resists all 
speech, that can at best be stammered out. All the words are weak, worn out, un-
fit to translate anything sensibly. For it is no longer a matter of longing for some 
determinable attribute, some mode of essence, some face of presence. What is 
expected is neither a this nor a that, not a here anymore than a there. No being, 
no places are designated. So the best plan is to abstain from all discourse, to keep 
quiet, or else utter only a sound so inarticulate that it barely forms a song.
16
“Neither a this nor a that,” highlighted by italics, echoes the Timaeus’s syntag-
ma tode kai touto, which is central to the understanding of the triton genos, in so 
far as it raises one of its main hermeneutic issues: that of what kind of linguistic 
“substance” the third kind confers on the sensible. 
2. Metonymic ontology
2.1 Introducing the third kind 
As is well known, the Timaeus is the only Platonic dialogue about nature (perì 
physeos), a mythical treatise
17
 about the origin and the organisation of the uni-
verse. Within this “physical” context, and with particular reference to the “wan-
dering cause,” the “necessity” opposed to the order of “reason,”
18
 Timaeus intro-
duces a new kind of reality, a “third” after that of ideas and phenomena, “difficult 
16
 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 193.
17
 On the mythical discourse of the Timaeus, see in particular Leonardo Taran, “The Creation 
Myth in Plato’s Timaeus” in: J. P . Anton, G. Kustas (eds.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philoso-
phy, Sate University of New York Press, Albany 1971, pp. 372–407; Luc Brisson, Platon, 
les mots e les mythes, Maspéro, Paris 1982; Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Plato’s Natural Phi-
losophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, pp. 
48–68.
18
 Tim. 48 a4-c 1, p. 39.

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and obscure,” the nature of which is, first of all, to be “the receptacle (or nurse, if 
you like) of generation” (pases einai geneseos hypodochén autén hoion tithenen).
19
The triton genos is immediately linked to the theme of generation, one of the 
main problems of Platonic philosophy, in so far as the need to preserve at any 
cost the separateness of the ontological planes makes it impossible to give an 
account of the participation of the phenomena in the ideas (and vice versa), 
and, consequently, of the existence of something as a sensible world, subject 
to becoming. This is, in fact, the aporia of the Parmenides: what kind of nex-
us can exist between objects so ontologically heterogeneous that any relation 
between them is impossible? The Timaeus (which follows the composition of 
the Parmenides) seems to be an attempt to find an answer to this puzzle by in-
troducing, in the general scheme of Platonic ontology, two new figures: the de-
miurge, which shapes the universe according to the eidetic paradigm, and the 
chora.
20
 The latter, in so far as it is described as the nurse and the receptacle of 
generation, seems able to give an account of the generative processes that rule 
the phenomenal world – i.e. the world of becoming – and, therefore, to solve, at 
least in part, the problem of the participation of phainomena and ideas (eide).
However, the nourishing and “receptive” role of the chora (which has so many 
consequences for the Platonic ontological model) is not explored here, immedi-
ately giving way to the linguistic “awkwardness” that becomes apparent as soon 
as Timaeus’s argument focuses on the elements of the sensible. Such linguis-
tic difficulty depends on the impossibility of defining them with precision, an 
impossibility that depends in turn on their ontological inconstancy. Therefore, 
after introducing the third kind of reality and connecting it to the theme of gen-
eration, Timaeus adds:
This [i.e. the fact that the third kind is the receptacle and the nurse of generation] 
is a true statement, but it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about it. That 
degree of clarity is difficult, however, and not least because achieving it neces-
sarily requires the raising of a prior problem about fire and its companions. The 
point is that it’s hard to say, with any degree of reliability and stability, that any 
of them is such that it should really be called ‘water’ rather than ‘fire’, or that any 
19
 49 a6, p. 40 (translation slightly modified).
20
 On the relation between the Parmenides and the Timaeus see Francesco Fronterotta, “In-
troduzione” in: Platone, Timeo, pp. 30–51 and Luc Brisson, “Comment rendre compte de 
la participation du sensible à l’intelligible chez Platon?”, in: J.-F. Pradeau (ed.), Platon: les 
forms intelligibles, P .U.F., Paris 2001, pp. 55–85.

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“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
of them is such that it should be called by any particular name rather than by all 
four names, one after another.
21
Thus, the comprehension of the third kind of reality seems to depend directly 
on an understanding of the linguistic issue connected to the phenomenal world. 
Moreover, it was the need to define the uncertain nature of the elements that 
led to the reconfiguration of ontological dualism: “What we have to do is see 
what fire, water, air, and earth were like in themselves before the creation of the 
universe, and what happened to them then. No one before has ever explained 
how they were created,”
22
 says Timaeus immediately before referring to the third 
kind of reality, the introduction of which is therefore enclosed between two ref-
erences to the linguistic-definitory problem of the nature of the sensible. The 
images describing the chora are therefore deeply linked to the linguistic and 
ontological problem of becoming, for which the doctrine of the ideas was able 
to only partially account. 
2.2. Organising the argument: the onto-linguistic circle
Experience, says Timaeus, shows how the elements tend to transform into 
each other in an inexorable circle of modifications and mutual production.
23
 
Therefore, “since it seems, then, as though none of them ever retains its identity, 
how could one insist without qualms and without making a fool of oneself that 
any of them is ‘this’ rather than something else?”
24
 In order to solve the prob-
lem of the impossibility of any deictic designation of the phenomena connected 
to the ontological inconsistency of their elements, Timaeus proposes the well-
known pronominal distinction between the permanent entities of being and the 
unstable ones of becoming:
By far the safest course is to treat them and speak about them as follows. Whenever 
we see something — fire, for instance — that is constantly changing, we should 
not label it ‘this’ fire, but ‘something of this sort’. Likewise, we should never say 
‘this’ water, but ‘something of this sort’, and the same goes for everything else 
that we indicate by means of expressions such as ‘that’ and ‘this’, under the im-
pression that we’re designating some particular thing and that these things have 
21
 Tim. 49 a7-b5, pp. 40–41.
22
 Tim. 48 b3-6, p. 39.
23
 Tim. 49 c6, p. 41.
24
 Tim. 49 d1-3, p. 41.

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the slightest stability. The point is that they run away rather than face expressions 
such as ‘that’ and ‘this’ and ‘just so’, and every form of speech that makes them 
out to be stable entities. We had better not speak of any of them like that. Instead, 
it would be safest to say ‘something of this sort’, an expression which can be used 
to describe each and every one of them, and is similarly applicable at every stage 
of the cyclical process. So, for example, we should refer to fire as ‘something that 
is regularly of this sort’ and so on for everything that is subject to creation.
25
This is an extremely problematic passage of the text, starting with the fact that, 
depending on how we translate the Greek text, the philosophical meaning 
changes radically.
26
 However, what is important to emphasise here are two is-
sues: 1. the close connection (as already seen above) linking Plato’s theory of 
language and his ontology, according to which different levels of being imply a 
different linguistic “bond”; 2. the peculiar way in which this connection – which 
in other Platonic dialogues is developed within the eidetic doctrine – is here 
entangled in a strange conceptual knot, which makes it impossible to isolate 
the sequence of images that describe the chora from the problem of what kind 
of language can name the elements of the sensible. These two considerations 
stress how the structure of the argument highlights both the triton genos’s link 
with the ontological and linguistic issues of Platonic philosophy, and its radical 
difference from the way in which these are dealt with in the doctrine of ideas.
In fact, the importance of the linguistic role of the third kind,
27
 along with its 
generative nature, is brought to light by the way in which the text specifies that 
“the only safe referent of the expressions ‘this’ and ‘that’ is that within which 
each created thing comes into existence and puts in an appearance, and from 
which it subsequently passes away, but anything that is of such-and-such a 
quality – warm or white or any of the opposites, or any combination of oppo-
sites – should never have that terminology used of them.”
28
 The chora is entitled 
25
 Tim. 49 d5-e7, pp. 41–42.
26
 On this, see Luc Brisson, Le Même et l’ Autre, pp. 180–197 and Francesco Fronterotta, note 
No. 193 to the Greek text of Platone, Timeo, Rizzoli, Milano 2003, pp. 261–263.
27
 On this, see Jacques Derrida, On the Name, p. 64: “The latter [i.e. the chora] figures the 
place of inscription of all that is marked on the world. Likewise, the being-logical of logic, 
its essential logos whether it be true, probable, or mythic, forms the explicit theme of the 
Timaeus.”
28
 Tim. 49 e7-50 a4, p. 42.

207
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
to the same deictic determination that elsewhere Plato ascribes to ideas.
29
 This 
attribution is all the more extraordinary if we consider the dizzying sequence of 
heterogeneous images through which the triton genos is described, which seems 
to contradict the acknowledgment of its stability. Indeed, to clarify the sense of 
its deictic determination, Timaeus immediately compares the third kind to the 
gold used by artisans to shape different figures, restating the difference between 
the latter, which are “something of this sort,” since they are all modifiable, 
and the former, which is always the same throughout the productive process.
30
 
Moreover, he compares it to “the stuff from which everything is moulded — to be 
modified and altered by the things that enter it, with the result that it appears 
different at different times.”
31
 Such an appearance, however, does not change 
the “essence” of the “receptacle of all material bodies” (dechomeme somata 
physis)
32
, the main feature of which is to “only ever ac[t] as the receptacle for 
everything,” and to “never com[e] to resemble in any way whatsoever any of the 
things that enter it.”
33
 The argument moves forward by accumulating different 
images of the third kind: it resembles a mother, next to the ideas-father and the 
sensible-son; it is shapeless (amorphon), since it must receive the schemata of 
the eide, and lacks any kind of attribute, just like the odourless substances that 
are used for the production of perfumes, or like “the soft materials” or the “base 
staff” made “as uniform and smooth as possible” by artisans in order to create 
different figures.
34
 
We shall return to the series of comparisons used by Timaeus to describe “the 
mother and receptacle of every created thing, of all that is visible or otherwise 
perceptible,”
35
 as well as to the problem of the way in which it “somehow” re-
ceives the ideas. For now, it is important to note how this sequence of images de-
scribing the triton genos is enclosed between two segments of the text concerning 
the problems of denomination and the nature of the elements – both segments 
relating to the stoicheia’s onto-linguistic alterity as compared to the chora, and to 
the nexus that links them to it. The argument thus proceeds as follows:
29
 See Tim. 52 b5-d1, p. 45.
30
 Tim. 50 b1-5, p. 41.
31
 Tim. 50 c2-4, p. 42.
32
 Tim. 50 b6, p. 42.
33
 Tim. 50 b8-c2, p. 42.
34
 Tim. 50 c7-51 a1, p. 43.
35
 Tim. 51 a4-5, p. 43.

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In so far as we can use what we’ve been saying to arrive at a conception of its 
nature with some degree of accuracy, the best we can do is say that fire is the 
impression we receive when some part of it has been ignited, and water is the 
impression we receive when some part has been moistened, and earth and air are 
the impressions we receive in so far as it is the receptacle for copies (mimemata) 
of earth and air.
36
 
Leaving again aside the issue of the mimemata (i.e. the elements) and the follow-
ing excursus on the connection between the phenomena and the ideas within 
the narrative context on the triton genos (to be discussed below), we find – along 
the line that connects the descriptive series of the chora and the definitory issue 
of the elements – another sequence of images of the third kind designating, this 
time, its spatial nature. In fact, while summing up for the third time the kinds of 
reality, Timaeus uses the term chora to describe the triton genos:
Then, third, there is space (chora), which exists for ever and is indestructible, 
and which acts as the arena for everything that is subject to creation. It is grasped 
by a kind of bastard reasoning, without the support of sensation, and is hardly 
credible. In fact, when we take space into consideration we come to suffer from 
dreamlike illusions, and to claim that every existing thing must surely exist in 
some particular place and must occupy some space.
37
After another brief interlude about the connection between dreams, figures of 
the chora, and eide,
38
 the argument continues with yet another general onto-
logical summary restating the link between the triton genos and the elements 
entering and leaving it:
As if it were not enough that the nurse of creation presents a complex appearance 
(as a result of being moistened and heated, of assuming the characters of earth 
and air, and of acquiring all the qualities that follow from all this), it is also thor-
oughly imbalanced (as a result of being filled with dissimilar and imbalanced 
powers), and not only is it shaken by the things it contains, so that it lurches hap-
hazardly all over the place, but its motion in turn further shakes them. This stir-
36
 Tim. 51 b2-6, p. 43.
37
 Tim. 52 a8-b5, p. 45.
38
 Tim. 52 b5-d1, p. 45.

209
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
ring causes them to be constantly moving in different directions and to become 
separated. It’s like when things are shaken and sifted by sieves or other devices 
for cleaning grain: the heavy, dense material goes one way, while the light, flimsy 
material goes and settles elsewhere. Likewise, when these four were shaken at 
that time by the receptacle (which was itself in motion, like an implement for 
shaking stuff), the least similar among them ended up the furthest apart, and 
those that were most similar were pushed the closest together.
39
If we combine all these paragraphs, what emerges is something like a spiral 
path – with a series of interruptions as regards the link between the three kinds, 
which constitute another thematic sequence, which we will see below – where 
the ontological-definitory problem of the elements entails the introduction of 
the third kind, and where the series of figures outlining its characters – (1) re-
ceptacle-nurse, (2) mother-shapeless-moulded staff, (3) space-place – is always 
followed by a new exposition of the linguistic and ontological problem of the 
sensible, or, more precisely, of its stoicheia, defined as (1) “something of this 
sort,” (2) a part (meros) of the third kind, and as (3) the series of movements of 
aggregation and disintegration that happen inside the chora. Therefore, each 
one of these descriptions deals with the onto-linguistic dimension of the sen-
sible from a new perspective, linked more or less directly to the sequence of 
images of the triton genos that precedes it. 
At this point, the identification of this scheme allows for three theoretical moves: 
highlighting the onto-linguistic function of the chora; underlining its character 
of function instead of seeking its correct conceptual translation – matter and/or 
space and/or mother etc.; and, finally, recognising the peculiar features of this 
function, emphasising its discontinuity and its radical heterogeneity to the nex-
us of similarity that the doctrine of ideas institutes between language and being. 
2.3 Metonymy and metaphor
In fact, this analysis of the text sketches out an image of the triton genos as a 
criterion ordering the problematic definition of the elements (“as though none 
of them ever retains its identity, how could one insist without qualms and with-
out making a fool of oneself that any of them is ‘this’ rather than something 
39
 Tim. 52 d4-53 a7, p. 46.

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anna montebugnoli
else?”
40
) and giving partial reliability to the substantial instability (“looks as 
though there’s a cyclical process whereby they generate one another”
41
) of the 
sensible. At the same time, the triton genos is in turn defined by the ontological 
and linguistic relation it establishes with the things it comes into contact with. 
Indeed, the chora makes it possible to name the elements on the basis of the 
way in which its peculiar ontological consistency allows for and organises their 
coexistence: its spatial (chora, edra, hypodoché), material (ekmageion, chrysos), 
and generative (meter, tithene) nature arranges the elements according to a nex-
us of conjunction, proximity, and combination, which determines – in agree-
ment with, once more, the general rule of connection between language and 
being – a linguistic organisation consistent with the peculiar ontological form. 
Such an onto-linguistic relation between the chora and the elements is based 
on a principle that can be defined as a metonymic one. In fact, through a series 
of operations entailing the “concatenation,” “combination,” “contiguity,” and 
“alignment”
42
 of the elements, the triton genos signifies the same as that which 
in linguistics describes the metonymic signification. Such operations are both 
the effect and the denomination of the variety of its way of being. Thus, 1. fire 
is nothing other than the burning part (meros) of the chora, which is in turn 
made visible and nameable as such just as long as the relations of contiguity 
and proximity do not transform it into water (i.e. the liquid part of the chora), 
air (i.e. the aerial part of the chora), or earth (i.e. the earthy part of the chora); 2. 
the expression “something of this sort” can now be understood as an indication 
of the metonymic modality of language, which signifies on the basis of a nexus 
of spatial and material contiguity and proximity, and which is always modifia-
ble according to the combinatory possibilities deriving from the peculiar way 
in which the elements are brought together in the chora; 3. between the move-
ments of the aggregation and disaggregation of the elements and those of the 
chora there is a mutual implication, in so far as it is the same onto-metonymic 
principle that guides the processes of the composition and disruption of the for-
mer and organises the partial and transitory figures of the latter. 
40
 Tim. 49 c7-d4, p. 41.
41
 Tim. 49 c6-7, p. 41.
42
 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”, in: 
Roman Jakobson, Moris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin-New 
York 2002, pp. 73–75.

211
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
Thus, in this brief exposition of the third kind in the Timaeus we get a glimpse 
of an alternative to the classic order of being and logos, which works, on the 
contrary, according to the metaphorical criterion of similarity – i.e. phenomena 
as imitations of ideas – and substitutability – i.e. phenomena in place of ide-
as. The difference in the metonymic signification and ontology manifests itself 
here “negatively” as a lack of those definitory criteria that rule the eidetic nexus 
between ontology and language and, “positively,” as the multiplication of the 
figures that describe its equivocity. In fact, it is worth noting that this difference 
does not present itself as a pure otherness or as a simple denial of the metaphor-
ical order of the logos, i.e. as an antagonism that expresses itself as absence of 
form (amorphon) and qualification – which instead characterise the world of the 
eidetic order. The chora’s “positive” onto-linguistic – i.e. metonymic – ability 
to signify and organise the sensible acts as a counterpart to such a privative di-
mension (which does exist, as the sequence of the third kind’s attributes prove).
Therefore, the triton genos and its signification find themselves close to, or, rath-
er, in the middle of the metaphorical operations of the eide, the description of 
which interrupts, as mentioned above, that of the third kind and its connection 
with the elements, sketching out a different thematic sequence, i.e. that of the 
metaphorical semantic operation. The outcome is a complex and almost inextri-
cable “twine of threads” – both metaphorical and metonymic – that weave the 
ontological and “linguistic fabric of reality.” However, it is far from a homoge-
neous fabric: the chora is an irregular figure, in which the elements constantly 
aggregate and disaggregate as a result of the connections of similarity as well as 
of spatial, “material, and causal”
43
 proximity, in which the “likenesses of real 
existences” are “modelled after their patterns in a wonderful and inexplicable 
manner”
44
 and which, in an equally “mysterious way, partakes of the intelli-
gible.”
45
 Those two ontological and linguistic axes stand together, in the same 
fashion in which metaphorical and metonymic signification are bonded: that is, 
as stated by Muraro, “in a relation that is not one of pacific complementarity but 
one of competitive rivalry.”
46
 The difficulty understanding and naming the cho-
ra, its connection with the ideas and the sensible, its thirdness, the multiplicity 
43
 Luisa Muraro, “To Knit or to Crochet”, p. 54.
44
 Tim. 50 c4-5, p. 42.
45
 Tim. 51 a4-b2, p. 43.
46
 Luisa Muraro, “To Knit or to Crochet”, p. 69.

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anna montebugnoli
of its figures, all the stumbling, the hesitations, and the involuted forms of its 
exposition depend, therefore, on the conflictual coexistence of these two differ-
ent kinds of signification and ontological organisation. Indeed, one reshapes 
experience “as an ideal representation,” by “defining things” and “duplicating 
the world in a representation”;
47
 while the other “articulates experience into its 
parts”
48
 and signifies things through “what accompanies them, in natural se-
quences or human usage.”
49
 With regard to the latter, i.e. natural sequences or 
human usage, it is not by chance that the descriptive series of the triton genos 
are equally distributed between generative images, on the one hand, and tech-
no-poietic ones, on the other. We need now examine these images in order to 
better understand the problem of the perception and knowledge of the chora.
3. Three kinds of aesthetics
As seen above, the series of spatial, generative, and poietic figures of the third 
kind depends on its metonymic ontology, the mechanism of which such figures 
describe:
50
 space and place, mother and nurse, the receptacle of generation, and 
at the same time the material-surface of inscription and the production of the 
figures of the phenomenal world destined to be endlessly modified on the basis 
of the combinatory and “syntactic” character of the chora. This in turn owes its 
onto-linguistic feature to the sequence of images outlining its work of reconfigur-
ing the sensible and its peculiar “exchange” therewith. Thus, between the meto-
nymic language through which the chora makes it possible to name the elements 
(and through which these in turn make the chora visible) and its different figures, 
there is a reciprocal relation, in so far as the former cannot be understood with-
out the latter and vice versa. The connection that we have analysed between the 
exposition of the elements’ denomination mechanisms, on the one hand, and 
the descriptive series of the chora, on the other, not only recognises the onto-met-
onymic function of the third kind, but also explains the untranslatability of its 
figures into rigorous philosophical terms. In the ontologically and linguistically 
suspended space of the description of the triton genos, the criteria of transla-
tion and conceptual adaptation that can usually be applied to the mythical word 
47
 Ibid., p. 71.
48
 Ibid.
49
 Ibid.
50
 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 2010, 
p. 64.

213
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
(mythos) – and particularly to the Platonic eikotoi mythoi – do not apply, this 
despite the fact that “the cosmo-ontologic encyclopedia of the Timaeus presents 
itself as a ‘probable myth’, a tale ordered by the hierarchized opposition of the 
sensible and the intelligible, of the image in the course of becoming and of eter-
nal being,”
51
 which would seem to frame the argument of the triton genos as a 
“myth within the myth […], an open abyss in the general myth.”
52
 
The particular onto-linguistic nature of the chora determines the heterogeneity 
of its exposition as compared to both the “true logos” and the probable mythos,
53
 
therefore advising against any purpose of translating it into logical terms as well 
as of converting its mythological form. In fact, “the thought of the chora exceeds 
the polarity […] of the mythos and the logos.”
54
 Thus, its thirdness represents 
an alternative to the “scala naturae” of classic metaphysics and to its polari-
sations – logos-mythos, truth-probability, sensible-intelligible, doxa-episteme, 
etc. However, such an alternative is not just a pure otherness, or a simple eccen-
tricity compared to the order of being. The discourse on the third kind does not 
simply suggest the existence of something behind the series of being and its log-
os. It actually reveals the “secret” of its inner mechanism, that of a metonymic 
ontology that is usually subordinate to the metaphorical one and that here, on 
the basis of its generative, linguistic, and poietic ability, lays out an organisation 
of the sensible that is parallel and opposite to that of the metaphorical ontology.
The generative, spatial, material, and techno-poietic images of the chora there-
fore do not represent a series of attributes of a single theoretical object (whether 
it be space, matter, or a hybrid of the two), or different manifestations of a myth-
ological character (some sort of mother-uterus receiving both the semen of the 
ideas and the poietic order of the demiurge), or a link between the mythical and 
logical words. That is, they are neither “fundamental elements, ‘translations’ 
that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality,”
55
 nor “abso-
lute metaphors,”
56
 nor Ur-metaphors of the metaphysical and physical order; 
and, finally, they cannot be understood literally, as their material heaviness 
51
 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, p. 113.
52
 Ibid.
53
 Ibid.
54
 Ibid, p. 92.
55
 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, p. 4. 
56
 Ibid.

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anna montebugnoli
and spatial hindrance would describe an external existence to the absolute and 
unique order of metaphorical ontology.
57
Rather, these are figures of metonymy. They represent “pieces” of its peculiar 
linguistic ontology, aspects of the sensible world that is organised by it, and 
technical modalities of this organisation and of its modification. The maternal 
gestation and generation (meter and tithene), the modelling procedures of the 
“soft materials” and the rules of their figurative composition (gold, ekmage-
ion), the cycles of physical transformation (the shift from fire to air, to water, 
to earth, and back), and spatial modification (the gathering and division of the 
elements): all of these figures name portions of the phenomenal world, variable 
ways of being, according to criteria of spatial, material, causal, and temporal 
proximity. The metonymic functioning of the chora is indeed further clarified as 
a mechanism for the combination and recombination of parts of the sensible; 
an operation conflicting with that of the eidetic metaphorical ontology which, 
in so far as it establishes standards of recognition and similarity, as well as of 
appointing identities and defined characters, allows the fixing of the order of the 
phenomenal world by marking the positions within it.
58
 
In this sense, the processes of the decomposition and reconfiguration of the 
parts of the chora acquire an aesthetic dimension. Contrary to the organisation 
of the sensible by means of determinations and crystallisation, the third kind 
describes the procedures through which the sensible is rearticulated, as well 
as the “corresponding forms of visibility”
59
 of this rearticulation. In this regard, 
the metonymic function of the chora takes the form of what Rancière calls an 
“aesthetic ac[t],”
60
 i.e. an act that opens “new possibilities” and new “modes 
of transformation”
61
 of the sensible world. Such an aesthetic dimension of the 
chora thus assumes three different deeply intertwined forms:
57
 See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, in: Id., Mar-
gins of Philosophy, The Harvester Press, Brighton 1982, pp. 207–271.
58
 On this, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 
Continuum, London-New York 2004, pp. 9–19.
59
 Ibid., p. 10.
60
 Ibid., p. 9.
61
 Ibid., p. 10.

215
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
1. The first form can be labelled as mimetic-generative aesthetics, which is par-
ticularly evident in the connection between the triton genos and the eide. In fact, 
the nature of chora, says Timaeus, “is to act as the stuff from which everything is 
moulded – to be modified and altered by the things that enter it, with the result 
that it appears different at different times. And whatever enters it and leaves it 
is a copy of something that exists for ever, a copy formed in an indescribably 
wonderful fashion.”
62
 Such a wonder, linked as it is to the problem of the par-
ticipation of the ideas in the chora, can be explained in light of the unusual 
manner in which metonymic and metaphorical ontology are brought together 
in this passage of the Timaeus that describes how both of them – each in its 
own way – constitute the sensible. The copies (mimemata), which in the context 
of the doctrine of ideas are the result of a complex series of equivalences and 
analogies between the paradigms and their imitations, become here the “inter-
mediate” form consequent to a double generative process – on the one hand, 
the figure of the mother and the receptacle “nourishing” and giving an account 
of the becoming, and on the other, the figures of the father and the paradigms 
that, in so far as they leave (even though feeble and temporary) traces of their 
existence, make it possible to (re)shape the forms and the images of the phe-
nomena. The mimemata are therefore the result of the coming together of these 
two processes of production-generation, the effect of a combinatory mimesis of 
ideas-paradigms-father and receptacle-nurse-mother,
63
 each one carrying out 
its autonomous way of “modelling” the sensible. 
2. A second form of aesthetics, which can be referred to as a poietic-mimetic one, 
is sketched out by the series of “handcrafted” images that describe the third kind, 
as in the case of gold that can be moulded into “all the shapes there are” while 
remaining always the same,
64
 or as in the case of “liquids which are to receive the 
scents” that are made odourless by artisans, or, again, as materials that, in order 
to be able to receive all kind of impressions, must be smoothed over by crafts-
men.
65
 Therefore, the third kind’s lack of form, on which all these figures insist, 
must not be understood as a condition of existence, or as a substantial property 
of the triton genos. On the contrary, it is described as the result of the poietic pro-
62
 Tim. 50 c2-6, p. 42.
63
 Tim. 49 a6-50 d3-4, pp. 40–42.
64
 Tim. 50 a5-b5, p. 42.
65
 Tim. 50 e8-51 a1, p. 43.

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anna montebugnoli
cesses and techniques of the “anesthetisation” of the materials, i.e. as the result 
of a series of procedures that make it possible to remove all forms, along with 
all primary and secondary qualities, in order to ascribe new ones. Thus, these 
figures of the chora do not describe the negative nature of a passive substance or 
matter, but rather the poietic-aesthetic process, which consists of the constant 
manipulation of the forms of the sensible, the outcomes of which do not depend 
on the classic rules of mimesis – i.e. the imitative canon, based on the nexus of 
similarity linking the copy to the model – but instead on the handcrafted work of 
the modification of sensible objects, one whose repeatability and transformative 
power determines the (transitory) arrangements of the sensible.
3. A third configuration of the aesthetics of the chora relates to its peculiar form 
of knowledge, similar to the eccentric gnoseology of the dream. In fact, when we 
“take […] into consideration” the third kind of reality, which can be “grasped by 
a kind of bastard reasoning, without the support of sensation,” and “is hardly 
credible,”
we come to suffer from dreamlike illusions, and to claim that every existing thing 
must surely exist in some particular place and must occupy some space, and that 
nothing exists except what exists on earth or in the heavens. This dreaming keeps 
us asleep and makes it impossible for us to determine the truth about these and 
other related matters; we find it impossible to speak the truth even about the 
realm of true being, where illusion plays no part. And the truth is this: since even 
the conditions of an image’s occurrence lie outside the image itself — since it is 
an ever-moving apparition of something else — it has to occur in something other 
than itself (and so somehow or other to cling on to existence), or else it would be 
nothing at all.
66
The third kind is both what makes it possible for the images to exist, in so far 
as it offers them a space for their manifestation, and what confers on them their 
transitory and mutable characteristics, i.e. what makes them phantasmata, re-
sidual images lingering in the visual memory. What it does is to transform such 
images into dreams (along with the “mnestic” materials of the eidetic world) 
and phantoms, “erratic” figures wandering through different ontological and 
temporal planes of being, moving between the fixed and eternal existence of 
66
 Tim. 52 a8-c5, p. 45.

217
“something remains to be said”: on the metonymic ontology of the platonic chora
ideas and the unstable and temporary plane of experience. In so doing, these 
images “measure” the ontological, aesthetic, gnoseological, and chronological 
distance that separates the time of dreams from that of wakefulness. In fact, in 
so far as they are traces and sensible memories of the eidetic paradigm, they 
make visible the gap between being and becoming, i.e. between ideas and mi-
memata; a gap that is, first and foremost, a temporal one, marked as it is by 
their phantasmatic existence, which makes them anachronistic signs of the on-
tological articulation of being, or, rather, signs of its anachronism. The chora is, 
indeed, “anachronistic; it ‘is’ the anachrony within being, or better: the anach-
rony of being. It anachronises being,”
67
 in so far as it receives, produces, and 
records the traces of the ideas, of the passage of their phantasmatic images, of 
the constant movements of the poietic-mimetic processes of the combination 
and recombination of the sensible. To this anachronistic ontology there corre-
sponds a likewise anachronistic aesthetics, the representations of which are 
always “out of time,” offset, misaligned from the ideal model; an anachronic 
and phantasmatic aesthetics, which outlines an epistemological and perceptual 
framework closer to that of dreams than to that of truth (or even opinion). 
Therefore, the metonymic ontology of the third kind allows for a composite aes-
thetics that illustrates at the same time the process of the modification of the 
sensible, its possible taxonomies (linguistic, poietic, mimetic ones), the anach-
ronism of its representations and the oneiric mechanism of its “bastard” knowl-
edge. Thus, in the brief exposition of the triton genos, the series ontology-log-
os-epistemology is replaced by that of chorology
68
-taxis
69
-aesthetics. Or, rather, 
both series are brought together – next to and in opposition to each other – to 
describe the weaving process of the fabric of the sensible. 
4. Conclusion
Everything said so far applies only to the few pages that the Timaeus devotes 
to discussion of the third kind of reality, which ends, not by accident, with the 
return of the demiurge: 
67
 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, p. 94.
68
 On the ontological meaning of this term, see John Sallis, Chorology: On the Beginning in 
Plato’s Timaeus, Indiana University Press, Bloomington-Indianapolis 1999. 
69
 The term refers here to all different kinds of operations of linguistic conjunction (hypo-
taxis, parataxis, syntaxis).

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anna montebugnoli
This explains, of course, how they [i.e. the elements] came to occupy different lo-
cations even before they had become the constituents of the orderly universe that 
came into existence. Not only were they disproportionate and erratic, however, 
before that event, but even when the organization of the universe was first taken 
in hand, fire, water, earth, and air, despite displaying certain hints of their true 
natures, were still wholly in the kind of state you’d expect anything to be with 
no god present. Finding them in that condition, then, the first thing the god did, 
when he came to organize the universe, was use shapes and numbers to assign 
them definite forms.
70
The demiurge fixes and inscribes the eidetic order – which until then had exist-
ed “somehow” next to that of the chora – through the shaping of the universe, 
starting (again) from the elements. Such a work of shaping is conducted accord-
ing to the rules of the logos, i.e. by “measuring” the sensible on the ideal mod-
el and, in so doing, immobilising it through proportions and arranging it into 
numeric-geometric figures that arrest the metonymic transitions of the chora.
71
 
The introduction of the god-artisan, the second father after the ideas, makes it 
possible to affirm and enforce the priority of the ontological order of the logos 
through the submission of metonymy and its ontology to the logical and onto-
logical signification of metaphor. In so doing, it establishes what Muraro calls 
the “hypermetaphoricity regime,”
72
 in which the oppositional balance between 
metonymy and metaphor is broken in favour of the latter. Here, in this passage 
of the Timeus, the dominion of the logos that will rule most of the history of met-
aphysics – thus becoming the main polemical target of the philosophies of dif-
ference – is instituted. The Platonic argument of the third kind therefore repre-
sents, by virtue of its heteronomy, equivocity, and anachrony, the always availa-
ble possibility of another genealogical beginning and the point of “catastrophe” 
of the (historical, logical, and epistemological) traditional order. That is, it rep-
resents the possibility of a metonymic reconfiguration of the sensible – and thus 
of a different language – that is able to give ontological, linguistic, and aesthetic 
form to what remains to be said.
70
 Tim. 53 a4, p. 46. 
71
 Here I am referring to Lacan’s well-known theory of language, metonymy, and the signify-
ing chain. Luisa Muraro deals with the Lacanian interpretation of Jakobson’s linguistic 
theory in “To Knit or to Crochet” (see in particular pp. 82–89).
72
 Ibid., p. 112.