apeiron

The present article defends he argument that there were tendencies in both mythological and pre-Socratic thought that paved the way for an explicit philosophy of disembodiment inherited by the Hellenistic mind, which flowered in the shapes of gendered ambivalence. By focusing on personification of boundlessness and the notion of apeiron, I discuss the genesis of the problem of disembodiment, and investigate its tendencies in mythical (pre-philosophical) thought and in single-element theories, abetted by arguments from feminist poststructuralist theories and from feminist philosophy, to pre- and post-Socratic/post-Platonic attitudes that spliced embodiment and femininity. The article aims to demonstrate that the problem of disembodiment is characterized by a pre-Platonic ambivalence concerning physis emanating in the relations between femininity, elementality, and death. I reveal that the problem of disembodiment is intimately tied to gendered ambivalence in both mythology (female mythic figures) and pre-Socratics (i.e., “elements” and “principles”) that transformed female boundlessness into male heroism. Hence, in the postmythological world the relation between women and death became problematic, which in turn led to a male anxiety over reproduction: an anxiety that was reliant on constellating women, death, boundlessness, and formlessness, and a process that eventually decries a lost preternatural male physis.