I found a curious connection whilst researching in a paper entitled Khora: The Hermeneutics of Hyphenation by John Manoussakis. I don’t understand it all and I don’t know that I agree with it all, but towards the end I did find some parts that are interesting.
Outside the city of Istanbul there is an ancient monastery that is known to all the sources under this odd name: the Monastery of Chora (an alternative transliteration for "khora").1 Its unusual eponymy is explained by its even more extraodinary frescos and mosaics that dated back to the fourteenth century. It’s iconographic program includes depictions of both Virgin Mary and Christ that bear the same inscription alike: The Khora
In the first of the two plates we can see a mosaic of the Virgin the inscription reads' {The Khora of the uncontainable).
In the second plate, Christ is depicted with an inscription that and reads as follows: ' (He Khora ton Zonton = the khora of the Living)
In the paper he goes on to explain:
During the Incarnation, Platonic khora, serves as the intermediate, the triton genos (man and the divine; she [Mary] is the point of contact between the the two poles of all dualisms (Greek or Jewish); she is the overlapping place of the two circles, their meeting place and of course, the hymen that hyphenates them. Like the receptive character of khora, Mary receives the entire deity within her body without appropriating it into herself. Thus, she becomes a paradox, an antinomy, the chore of the akhoron, a topos that sustains what is a-topos and u-topos: the receptacle of the un-receivable, the container of the uncontainable.
In the second plate, Christ is depicted with an inscription that runs in both sides and reads as follows: ' (He Khora ton Zonton = the chore of the Living). Christ is par excellence the khora that receives both humility creation in their entirety, but with no confusion, in His incarnate person. The Incarnate Christ bears the same characteristics that ruled over His hyphenated birth: neither exclusively God nor quite Human, but both God and Human; neither just the Word nor only Flesh, but the Word who became Flesh; neither high in the heavens nor down on the earth, but the channel through which the heavens emptied onto the earth and the earth ascended in the heavens.
I don’t fully understand this but then there are elements that I am very interested in, The Khora and emptying out in relation to Christ and Mary as intermediate - between man and divine. The liminal?
In his paper Manoussakis sources Derrida and John Caputo’s work on Derrida, a key source to my research. I like it when connections present themselves to me, its encouraging.
