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5 KHORA OR GOD? RICHARD KEARNEY In an essay entitled “Dark Hearts: Heidegger, Richardson and Evil,” Jack Caputo has this to say about his debt to the great American Heideggerian, Bill Richardson: “If, as Heidegger says, thinking is thanking, then one can offer a work of thought as a bit of gratitude. Derrida, on the other hand, repeats the warning of the circle of the gift according to which, in all gift-giving , something is always returned to the giver. The giver always gets a pay back, a return on the investment, if only (or especially) in the most oblique, the most indirect form, of gratitude. Therefore, the purest gift-gifting demands ingratitude, which does not pay the giver back and therefore pay off and nullify his generosity. Since I am in the highest degree the beneficiary of William Richardson’s work and friendship, and more grateful than I am permitted to say, I have undertaken to protect his generosity with a certain ingratitude, precisely understood, with an utterly ungrateful bit of disagreement , not only with him, but also with Heidegger, to whom I have accumulated a life-long debt. So I offer what follows in the spirit of the deepest and most loyal ingratitude, cognizant always of the unworthiness of my ungift, which comes in response to what in a simpler world I would call the richness of the contribution that William Richardson has made to philosophy in America.”1 Replace the names Richardson for Caputo—and Derrida for Heidegger —in the above citation, and you will have a reasonable idea of my own “loyal ingratitude” to Jack Caputo here today. Or as Nietzsche put it, in more graphic terms, the best way to thank a mentor is to be a thorn in his flesh. So here goes. I want to concentrate here on Jack Caputo’s intriguing analysis of the notion of Khora in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion.2 Though this analysis is deeply indebted to Derrida , and especially his essay of the same name,3 there is, I submit, something uniquely suggestive and provocative about Caputo’s reading. The first mention of khora in Prayers and Tears occurs in the second page. It arises in the context of Caputo’s discussion of Derrida’s distinction 107 between the Differance of deconstruction and the “God” of negative theology . This is how Caputo unpacks the distinction: “However highly it is esteemed, differance is not God. Negative theology is always on the track of a ‘hyperessentiality,’ of something hyper-present, hyper-real or sur-real, so really real that we are never satisfied simply to say that is is merely real. Differance , on the other hand, is less than real, not quite real, never gets as far as being or entity or presence, which is why it is emblematized by insubstantial quasi-beings like ashes and ghosts which flutter between existence and nonexistence, or with humble khora, say, rather than with the prestigious Platonic sun” (PT, p. 2). Caputo concludes with this typically teasing inversion: Derrida’s differance, he suggests, “is but a quasi-transcendental anteriority, not a supereminent, transcendent ulteriority” (PT, p. 3). So far, so good. Later in this opening chapter, entitled “God is not Differance,” Caputo adds another telling inflection to the point at issue. If God is higher than being, differance is lower than it. If God, like Plato’s agathon, has gone beyond us, differance is more like Plato’s khora in that it hasn’t yet reached us. It is beneath us, before us, behind us: anterior rather than ulterior. This is how Caputo, paraphrasing Derrida, puts it: “God does not merely exist; differance does not quite exist. God is ineffable the way Plato’s agathon is ineffable, beyond being, whereas differance is like the atheological ineffability of Plato’s khora, beneath being (Khora 30/ON, 96)” (PT, p. 10). In other words, unlike the God of theology , Khora is radically anonymous, amorphous, aleatory and errant—or as Derrida would say, “destinerrant” (PT, p. 11). In a subsequent section of the book entitled “Three Ways to Avoid Speaking,” Caputo revisits Derrida’s landmark intervention in the negative theology debate “How not to Speak: Denials” (Psy., 563).4 The apophatic tradition of negative speaking—extending from the Greeks to Eckhart and Heidegger—begins with Plato. But Plato was complex in that he pointed to two different “topics of negativity” (Psy., 563). On the one hand, the famous Good beyond...

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