Derrida and Beyond: Living Feminism Affirmatively

That which goes beyond the oppositions "sensible" versus "intelligible" (K 89), "material" versus "formal" (K 99), "mythos" versus "logos" (K 92), the "metaphorical" versus the "proper," the "visible" versus "invisible," "form" versus the "formless," "icon" versus "paradigm" (K 91), that which is neither "meaning" nor "essence" (K 102), neither "object" nor "form" (K 102), neither "body" nor "soul" (K 103), neither "active" nor "passive" (K 92). That which "gives place" (K 99) to such oppositions but is not itself determined by them, that which is "[b]eyond categories, and above all beyond categorial oppositions" (K 90).

I refer to khôra, that which troubles polarity, that which is unnameable, untranslatable, uninterpretable, yet bearer of every interpretation. That which cannot be said to properly exist as determinate, since as Derrida puts it, "There is khôra but the khôra does not exist" (K 97). Khôra is "excess" but as an excess that is nothing—"nothing that may be" and nothing that "may be said ontologically" (K 99). Strictly speaking indeterminable. Lacking in properties that would function like "those of a determinate existent" (K 97), khôra is "[a] morphous" (K 95), enigmatic.

Even the way I began is not strictly speaking accurate; indeed, it is full of inaccuracy, misleading, aberrant. Errant. For it is not quite that khôra can be neither sensible nor intelligible, material nor formal, and so on, but rather that, "at times the khôra appears to be neither this nor that, at times both this and that" (K 89). The only way one can begin to speak of khôra is in errancy, in full errant flow. Having already misspoken then is merely to have committed an unavoidable fault, for one is always and inevitably too late to capture that which is khôra, which resists naming and determination but that enables, facilitates, holds in place all that is to follow, all that is to become and to be, all the oppositions Derrida names in an effort to specify how khôra is beyond them and yet precedes them all. It gives meaning to them all, it contains them, maintains them in their being and becoming, even in their mutual contradiction.

"To have nothing that is one's own"—isn't this, asks Derrida, "the condition of khôra?" (K 105). A place, or rather a non-place, of giving. We are within the strange, impossible, nonexistent economy of the gift, since the true gift lacks any economy of exchange, recognition, calculation, or symbolic payment (see WB 198). The gift must not be reciprocated or acknowledged in any way, since to do so would be to draw it back into the realm of economics. To recognize, even to thank with gratitude would be to fail to allow the gift to stand as gift. It would be to draw the excess of the gift back into the circuit of meaning from which it extracted itself in being a gift. So with khôra, to name is always to misname, to engage in catachresis. Khôra is a gift that gives nothing, but "gives itself " (Derrida 1987, 175). With khôra we are perhaps, says Derrida, in a place "where the law of the proper no longer has any meaning" (K 105). A place of "impropriety" (K 97). A "neutral space" (K 109), a place of a "third genus . . . a place without place, a place where everything is marked but which would be 'in itself ' unmarked" (K 109). A place of "effacement" (K 116; see also K 92 and 110). A place of "welcome" (K 111), marked only by the "gift of hospitality" (K 111), a place of "chaos, chasm, khôra" (K 112), a place of "enigma" (K 113), a place of the "receptacle" (K 117), a place occupied by a "strange mother," one who "gives place without engendering," one who is "Preoriginary, before and outside of all generation" (K 124), one who is "older than the beginning" (K 126). Khôra requires our discontent with the orthodoxies of binary oppositions that continue to orchestrate thinking.

Derrida says, "Philosophy cannot speak philosophically of...