The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates
304
The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates
304Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786605320 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2018 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 698,717 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
'Pascal had his chasm ... / Alas! Everything is an abyss.' Baudelaire's famous words touch the bottomless depths of what a meaningless chaos would mean — or rather could not mean. However, more original than chaos, deeper than the chasm, and even more meaningless than the abyss, there lies the 'amorphous' or, even better, the 'the receptacle' and, as it were, the wet-nurse of all becoming: Khôra. It is 'an impenetrable and obscure state of being', Plato says in a precursory way in Timaeus, that 'demands careful elucidation' (49a). 'This is a difficult matter' (49a), the philosopher goes on to insist, such that only 'a god' acting as our 'savior' could 'take us safely ashore' by some 'unexpected and unsolicited exposition', and thereby 'lead us to a reasonable comprehension [of Khôra]' (48d). Moreover, this 'invisible and formless sort of being ... partakes of the intelligible in a baffling way' and 'resists the grasp of thought' (51a). We will speak of it therefore only by 'a sort of spurious reasoning' (52b), allowing ourselves to enter 'into the realm of a dream from which we cannot awaken' (52b). We shall see it as a kind of 'fleeting shadow', 'clinging to existence as best it may', on the verge of being 'nothing at all' (52c).
Such limits — or better, such a discourse on limits — have seldom been reached in the history of philosophy. These Platonic words could make us smile, either, at best, because it is a question of 'myth', or, at worst, because the philosopher would have opened the door to 'margins' which contemporary thought would later strive to adopt. However, the discourse on the 'limit' is to be articulated in an extreme manner, and at the extremities of thought, in that it has nothing to do with 'limitation'. Whereas the discourse on the limit reaches the threshold of a finitude without opposition (either finite or infinite), limitation receives its restriction, on the contrary, as the abstraction of a plenitude that it fails to fulfil (the limitation of the infinite by the finite). The determination of the modern human being as a 'figure of finitude', in Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze (who were close to Jacques Derrida in this regard) deals with the 'limit' rather than 'limitation', the 'immanent frame' rather than 'the terraced fountain'.
Thus, when considering the 'limit' and Derrida's desire to navigate the extremities of discourse — 'negative theology', of course, but also Khôra —, it is no surprise that we must engage in a dialogue, be it only a transitory one, with his mode of philosophizing. In effect, I will show that Khôra marks a 'great bifurcation' between two modes or pathways for philosophy in general: either the 'higher way' of negative theology (On the Name), or the 'lower way' sought by a non-reflexive philosophy (Khôra).
At this crossroads, much attention has been paid, and rightly so, to the former (On the Name), at least in France, but the latter (Khôra) has been quite neglected. Current discourse takes place as if this crucial dialogue on the excess of negation (negative theology, beginning with On the Name) has somewhat eclipsed the one about limitation (positive limit, beginning with Khôra). However, the famous and remarkable public discussion between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion at Villanova University on 27 September 1997 displayed even then the divergence between these two ways of thinking and thereby already opened us onto an alternative to the higher way of negative theology. 'Jacques seems to go towards Khôra and you seem to go towards revelation', notes Richard Kearney, turning towards Jean-Luc Marion, 'how do we know that we have been visited by a supereminent excess and not just simply invaded by khôra?' asks John Caputo to close the debate. Derrida's text ('How to Avoid Speaking: Denials'), to which the debate refers, nevertheless articulates the one and the other, negative theology and Khôra, or rather, opposes the one to the other, the hyperbole of the agaton to Khôra's parabola. Marion's 'In the Name, or How to Avoid Speaking of It' responds to it point by point, but by abandoning or almost abandoning Khôra altogether, pointing to a perplexity that I would be remiss not to share, if only in a preliminary way. At the end of 'Derrida and the Impossibility of the Gift', we read: 'Allow me to repeat [Derrida's] own words ("I am not convinced") to express my reluctance before the privilege he grants to khôra — and my persistence in recognizing the larger, because weaker, empire of givenness.'
6. THE EMERGENCE OF KHÔRA
Another Logic?
Why should we, along with Derrida, turn now towards Khôra? It is not motivated (far from it) out of any excessive deference to the philosopher, nor due to a particular taste for discourses playing at and with the limits of philosophy, nor for defying all logic. Many French philosophers, probably quite rightly, thought that in going thusly towards the margins of philosophy, Derrida was risking going beyond the limits of thought. Though wrongly in this regard, he was often and still is subject to a certain ostracism in France. Under the pretext of a so-called phenomenological orthodoxy, Derrida — the unclassifiable — has remained, for some time at least, non-classified. Referring to this '"logic other than the logic of the logos"', Khôra would not only be outside metaphysics but also outside philosophy itself. In thinking the unthinkable, one would therefore not think at all, and any dialogue on this particular point would close before opening in the first place. While a certain theological reading of Derrida prioritizes the apophatic over the 'choretic', or Dionysius' Mystical Theology over Plato's Timaeus, it is still the case that the Greek word khôra itself refers to something negative that Christian apophasis does not reach, but to which God himself, in his kenosis, could not remain indifferent. We must ask, then, how to speak of Khôra, or better, how not to speak of Khôra, since it appears to have been inevitable for Derrida, and likewise for negative theology itself; hence, the Christian cannot ignore Khôra.
Khôra is neither a place nor a god, neither a thing nor no-thing, neither an order nor a dis-order, neither a gift nor a withdrawal, as specified in the second commentary which Derrida devotes to it (Khôra, 1987). Instead, it is 'some-thing that is not a thing'; a '"there is" that gives nothing in giving the "there"' (without, however, being identified with the 'es gibt'); a word without any definite article that makes definite all articles (we say Khôra rather than 'the' Khôra); a simple mode of being that escapes all beings and nevertheless underpins the ground of being: 'There is Khôra but Khôra does not exist.' One could certainly object, once again, that such talk is mere wordplay. However, thanks precisely to Plato, the philosopher reaches in this limit a discursive mode of seeking the infra of discourse, a place of being weaving together all our modes of being, a descent downwards (Khôra) rather than a flight upwards (negative theology), a path like the Timaeus through the essential formlessness of the world and of the human rather than the Dionysian ascension of Moses to the divine (mystical theology). 'This silence, from the depths of which khôra seems to call her name', Derrida specifies in the 'Prière d'insérer' to Khôra, 'is perhaps no longer even a modality or a reserve of speech. No more than this bottomless depth promises the night of a day. On the subject of Khôra, there is neither negative theology nor any thought of the Good, the One, or of God beyond Being.'
On this Side of Meaning
Without directly adapting Derrida's path here, at least in terms of his flight to the 'margins' of philosophy, which remain to be found, we will nevertheless recognize in an exemplary way that Khôra contains something of the very limit which I am striving to reach both in the 'chaotic depths' of the unattainable, or almost unattainable, within phenomenology's framework of significance (as I explored in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb) and in the infra-linguistic, which the orientation towards pure expressivity would never be able to tap into (as I attend to in Crossing the Rubicon).
In order to make clear the urgency of this question, it serves us here to recall a parallel point in my previous work, Crossing the Rubicon:
Nevertheless another step forward must be taken. There is, or there was, the time of 'pure experience', and one might say, mute still, that, like Husserl tells us, 'must be brought to express its own meaning'. But now, it is time to let the dumb speak for himself in other ways than speech, or perhaps even in the unique mode of corporality. More accurately, the 'pre-reflexive' will perhaps no longer find its end or goal in the reflexive alone (including in the context of phenomenology) as if it were only preparing for it or establishing its foundation as in Husserl's phenomenology, any more than the unconscious will orient itself towards consciousness, as in Freud's psychoanalysis. An 'unconsciousness of the body' like Nietzsche, which is as dispersed as it is non-oriented, always remains impossible to synthesize from the diversity of our experiences. Recognizing this impossibility is a manner of abiding in and not fleeing from the chaos that shapes us.
We can therefore see, or at the very least feel, the necessity of the question. The 'descent into the abyss' or the 'entry into chaos' operative in the first part of The Wedding Feast of the Lamb was seeking a kind of 'desert' within us and within the world, or better, a kind of 'desert in the desert', that 'place' which Khôra both designates and inhabits. Khôra, according to the admission of the philosopher himself, is the earliest of the three essays that constitute a trilogy: Khôra, On the Name and Passions. Even if nothing authorizes us to label it as 'the original matrix or frame as one could be tempted to believe' (Prière d'insérer), it nevertheless founds the 'same thematic' on the possibility of discourse. The openness of the first text (Khôra) constitutes the unbounded field of the 'excess' of the second (On the Name), and the 'secret' of the third (Passions). The dialogue between the theme of excess in Marion in On the Name and Pierre Boutang's treatment of the secret in Passions relies on a resonance with the theme of chaos in Khôra, and herein lies its greatest originality: '[T]here is a biblical desert; there is an historical desert', Derrida explains in his discussion with Marion at Villanova, 'but what I call a "desert in the desert" is this place that resists historicisation. ... It resists ... not because it is obscure, but because it has nothing to do with the gift, with revelation or whatever it is which we are discussing here. This is what I point to when I refer to khôra.'
On the Path towards Khôra
It is essential, according to Derrida himself, that 'it remain possible for Khôra to be translated theologically and thereby to be re-appropriated by Jewish, Christian or Muslim discourse.' No theological re-appropriation, however, aimed either at the interrogation or even the transformation of the given tradition, could be put into operation without first reckoning with the great philosophical bifurcation which Khôra institutes here. From the two possible approaches in the desert (Khôra or negative theology) to the experience, or better, the ordeal of khôra (the limit at the limit) and to its possible theological re-interrogation (descent into khôra), the path is certainly long and strewn with obstacles. That is to say, one cannot strive to broach the frontiers of discourse without also reaching the limit of the 'things themselves'. Hence, there is and will always remain a gap between what could be said but will never be said owing to the excess of its phenomenality (the ineffable of the apophatic gesture); furthermore, what could be said will never be said since there is a definitive lack of words with which to say it (the muteness of chaotic corporeality). 'What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence', Wittgenstein famously quips in the Tractatus (section 7). However, the keeping silent that comes from a lack of intuition in Khôra is different than the silence arising from an excess of signification in On the Name, despite appearing quite the same. However, in being unable to speak of something because of the limits of the question itself, we nevertheless trace the contours of what lies in the subterranean depths of our humanity. Even still, it is certain that only God, in his kenosis, could ever truly reach Khôra and the ground of that which, in us, remains formless — if not to give it shape, at least to inhabit it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Loving Struggle"
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