Reading Jacques Derrida’s “Khôra” #1

On one of the most famous and discussed contributions of the French philosopher

Returning to Greek concepts has been something of a stylistic exercise for continental philosophers, at least since Heidegger. In many cases, however, this exercise is not simply a stylistic choice but has specific philosophical purposes.

In this post I would like to begin a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Khôra (1993). I will not go deeply into the etymology and meaning of this word in Greek, especially in Plato’s philosophy, willing to leave that task for another time.

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The Book Khôra and the Text “Khôra”

The book called Khôra consists of three texts, and the first, also called “Khôra,” was the oldest of the three. In the book’s preface, Derrida explains:

Khôra, the oldest of the three attempts [i.e. of the three texts of this book], is not, however, its original “matrix” or “mold,” as one might be tempted to think. It only illustrates an exemplary aporia of the Platonic text. The Timaeus calls khôra (locality, place, spacing, positioning) this “thing” which is nothing of what it nevertheless seems to “give rise to” — without ever giving anything, however: neither the ideal paradigms of things nor the copies that an insistent demiurge, with an idée fixe before his eyes, inscribes in it. (my translation)

The concept of khôra is often considered to be a part of Plato’s Timaeus that does not fit with the general views expounded by Plato himself. Sometimes considered untranslatable the first meaning of the Greek khôra was “place” / “region” / “area” or even “country” (there is a tendency in continental philosophy to assume the untranslatability of some expressions). In Plato’s Timaeus, however, it refers to a kind of cosmological space that Plato himself had difficulty to explain. Derrida writes:

Neither sensible nor intelligible, neither metaphor nor literal designation, neither this nor that, and this and that, participating and not participating in the two terms of a couple, khôra, also called “matrix” or “nursemaid,” nevertheless resembles a singular proper name, a first name, earlier, at once maternal and virginal (that is why we say here khôra and not, as always, the khôra) whereas, in an experience that we must think about, it silently calls the nickname given to it and remains beyond any maternal, feminine or theological figure. (my translation)

Such an explanation may seem absurd and the very concept of khôra aporetic. Yet, for the Greeks, the word was not cosmological. It referred to a concrete place with concrete boundaries. The concreteness of this little word will, for Derrida at the end of the preface to the book entitled Khôra, be related to a political dimension. He notes:

When it comes to khôra, there is neither negative theology nor thought of the Good, the One or God beyond Being. This incredible and improbable experience is also, among other dimensions, political. It announces a way of thinking, rather than promising it, a testing of the political. (my translation)

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The Epigraph

In an epigraph, Derrida cites words from Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, a book first published in French in 1974. On page 250 of this study, Vernant wrote:

The myth therefore puts into play a form of logic that can be called, in contrast to the philosophers’ logic of non-contradiction, a logic of ambiguity, equivocation, polarity. How can we formulate, or even formalize, these tipping operations that turn a term into its opposite while keeping them at a distance from other points of view? It was up to the mythologist to draw up, in conclusion, this observation of deficiency by turning to linguists, logicians, mathematicians so that they provide him with the tool he lacks: the structural model of a logic that would not be that of binarity, of yes or no, a logic other than the logic of logos. (Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne, 1974, p. 250, my translation)

1974 is a troubling date. In that year, the Japanese philosopher Yamauchi Tokuryū (you can find my French study on his philosophy here) devoted a whole original work to emphasizing that the “logic of the logos” (rogosu no ronri ロゴスの論理) is inoperative to grasp some objects of knowledge.

Vernant made a similar observation, suggesting that myth cannot be grasped by such logic. Something else is needed. This seemingly ungraspable mythical dimension is what interests Derrida in his text entitled Khôra.

The Introduction

The introduction of his text “Khôra” begins with something relatively prosaic, but which says a lot about how many French philosophers see language:

Khôra comes to us, like the name. And when a name comes, it immediately says more than the name, the other of the name and the other in short, whose irruption it precisely announces. (p. 15, my translation)

When a name is used, the name always says more than the name itself. It points to something that the speaker does not possess. Something that is more than a name and even more than that “something.”

Similarly, that which is indicated by the Greek word khôra is more than the name used to call it, more than that “something.” It happens and opens something that goes beyond. But beyond what and toward what?

However, to point out that an object of knowledge can be both what it is and more than what it is (i.e. beyond) seems contradictory, at least if the point is to grasp in one movement that thing as it is AND as it is beyond as it is. This is why Derrida writes:

We know that what Plato refers to as khôra seems to challenge, in the Timaeus, this “philosophers’ logic of non-contradiction” of which Vernant speaks, this logic “binarity, of yes or no.” It would therefore perhaps fall under this “logic other than the logic of logos.” Khôra is neither “perceptible” nor “intelligible”; it belongs to a “third kind” (tritongenos, 48e, 52a). (pp. 15–16, my translation)

So what Derrida is trying to describe, following a phenomenological path, cannot be perceived and is not intelligible. The good questions here are: Is there anything that is neither perceptible nor intelligible and yet can be described? And if so, how do we go about it?

In such an attempt, he continues?

One cannot even say of it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that. It is not enough to point out that it names neither this nor that or that it says both this and that. The embarrassment declared by Timaeus manifests itself in a different way: sometimes khôra appears to be neither this nor that, sometimes both this and that. But this alternative between the logic of exclusion and that of participation, we will come back to at length, perhaps has to do with a temporary appearance and the constraints of rhetoric, or even some inability to name. (p. 16, my translation)

Thus, biaffirmation and binegation may be a means to an impossible end: to name the un-nameable, to designate what cannot really be designated. At least Derrida sees it in the way Timaeus in Plato’s dialogue approaches what he means by khôra.

The French philosopher remarks that Timaeus’s embarrassment to speak of the unknowable pushes him to a minimum, stuck in the impossibility of telling the truth about khôra, of not saying falsehood, of not being inaccurate.

It is a strange situation when the philosopher is forced by his own questioning not to make affirmative statements and is merely forced to the modesty of trying not to be wrong.

It is, paradoxically, the supreme reserve, the supreme obligation of the one who tries to approach a limit object, that is, an object that stands where there is no science, nothing certain, nothing self-evident, only the certainty of the importance of the question.

Let us recall this once again, as a preliminary approach: the discourse on khôra, as it presents itself, does not proceed from the natural or legitimate logos, but rather from a hybrid, bastard (logismô nothô) or even corrupt reasoning. It announces itself “as in a dream” (52b), which can deprive it of lucidity as well as confer on it a power of divination. (p. 17, my translation)

This is based on such reflections that Derrida asks precisely:

But is such a discourse a myth? Will we access the thought of khôra by still relying on the logos/mythos alternative? What if this thought also called for a third kind of discourse? And what if, perhaps as in the case of khôra, this call for the third kind was only a detour to point the way to a kind beyond kind? Beyond categories, especially categorical oppositions, which first allow us to approach or express it? (p. 17, my translation)

Derrida places this philosophical inquiry as a tribute to Jean-Pierre Vernant. Is there a way to approach such an object beyond or below the opposition of myth and logos? “Is there something to think about, as we were saying so quickly, and to think according to necessity?” (p. 18, my translation).

Derrida’s italics are important here. His point is to think about khôra, and not just to offer some ungrounded reflection on it, to think according to its “necessity.” What does khôra impose on us in terms of thinking about khôra itself?

The Beginning of the Part 1

To start the first part of this text, Derrida asks:

The oscillation we have just mentioned is not just any oscillation, an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two kinds of oscillation: double exclusion (neither/nor) and participation (both … and, this and that). But do we have the right to transport the logic, paralogic or metalogic of this over-oscillation from one set to another? (p. 19, my translation)

He notes that such “oscillation” usually concerns kinds of beings, but that the questioning of khôra pushes toward something else: an oscillation between kinds of discourses (mythos or logos) or between what is and what is not.

It is a logic which is already not logical, it is paralogical. It is an alternative to ordinary logic, and is even metalogical since it grounds logic itself. This questioning of khôra leads the philosopher where no one has gone before (I am sure that you appreciate this serious joke!), to a philosophical place that is not just a place, but — perhaps — the foundation of and for thinking.

Timaeus presents khôra as, among other denominations, “mother” and “nurse.” Noting that commentators treat Plato’s descriptions as metaphorical names, images, comparisons, Derrida rejects what he considers to be more or less a strategy for getting rid of difficulties.

For him, Plato does not use such words for pedagogical, illustrative, or instrumental purposes (p. 21). It is not that khôra is literally meant by such expressions, but that it is beyond (au-delà) or below (en deçà) such an opposition between what is metaphorical and what is not. It exceeds the polarity between myth and logos.

Such would at least be the question that we would like to put here to the test of a reading. The envisaged consequence would be as follows: with these two polarities, the thought of the khôra would unsettle the very order of polarity, of polarity in general, whether or not it is dialectical. Giving rise to oppositions, it would not itself submit to any reversal. And this, another consequence, not because it would be unalterably itself beyond its name, but because by going beyond the polarity of meaning (metaphorical or proper), it would no longer belong to the horizon of meaning, nor of meaning as meaning of being. (pp. 22–23, my translation)

What then would the concept of khôra refer to that would say nothing about the “meaning of being” since it refers to a spatial something that is not being; that is, if I may use the expression, beyond or below the opposition of being and not-being.

To be continued…