Chora from Greek, word for a vessel, container. A term borrowed by Julia Kristeva from Plato‘s Timaeus, meaning “an essentially mobile and extremely conditional expression constructed by movements and their ephemeral states” (1974 [1984], 25).
Chora “precedes evidence, likeness, space and time. Our discourse, all discourses, move together and against the Chora, in the sense that they both depend on it and deny it” (26).
What Kristeva is trying to cover with this expression is, in principle, incomprehensible: it is about the inexpressible spaces of discourse. This experience roughly corresponds to what Charles S. Peirce calls primacy, an immediacy that “precedes all synthesis and all differences, it has no wholeness or parts. It cannot be an articulated thought. Confirm it, and it will now she has lost her characteristic innocence … stop thinking about her, and she will be gone“(CP 1.357).
