Volume 16

Messianicity Without Messianism Through Nishida’s Logic of Basho

30 July 202422 December 2024By Rodrigo De los Santos

Rodrigo E. De los Santos
Texas A&M University

Volume 16, 2024

Derrida’s reading of Khōra

The Timaeus is Plato’s attempt to present a cosmology rooted in causation, being, and becoming. In this dialogue, the universe, the world, and the body are conceived as three levels sharing a similar structure graspable through reason. The earth, the center of the universe which is itself alive, is a place or receptacle for the body-order of the human, which in turn is the seat of logos. The relationship between universe, world, and human, kosmos, polis, and anthropos, is one of imitation. If the cosmos is good and ordered, World and humans are like the universe, and correspondingly alike as copies or simulacra of the divine order. Indeed, in the Timaeus, the form of likeness, homoios, is the central protagonist, representing the principle that makes logos and mythos possible.

Let us recall that the craftsman, the ordering god-like figure of the Timaeus, made the universe in likeness following the eikon or eternal model by connecting two domains in tension: Being and Becoming. The Timaeus’s demiurge, however, is itself ungraspable. Here we face an impossible experience, the alogon, the pythagorean crisis of the irrational, that which is beyond speech or ratio, but must be for both speech and story to take place. Timaeus’s placement of the unspeakable as the prime mover of the creation story is purposeful. The efficient cause is like a craftsman, but neither man nor god. The divine craftsman is better seen, not as a mimetic subject, but as a place where speech finds the space for imitation. As likeness entails difference, the demiurge masterfully actualizes mimetic poiesis utilizing motions that sway between stability and instability. Thus, the craftsman-like demiurge is a placeholder for the genesis of mimetic activity, but different from a technical subject: its role is placing likeness through harmonizing being and becoming in difference, being himself a contradictory topological figure that Timaeus invokes to give voice to our incapacity of granting any determination to the eventfulness of an event. Thus, the demiurge becomes a mimetic force or space within the Timaeus, a pure motional agency that acts like a subject but it is different from man and god, nurture and nature. It is the actualization of spacing that interweaves the primordial, ungraspable protoelements that Timaeus employs as the initial impetus of the motions of production and reproduction of a speech that is itself “a bastard copy” of the Real. Therefore, the text of the Timaeus simulates an account of genesis through repetition. As the genesis of all unfolds in three musical stories—the story of intellect, the story of necessity, and the story of man—we are told by Socrates that these likely stories (ton eikota mython) are neither arguments nor myths, but nomos, laws and songs (29D). The original state of things is chaos, unmusical, and out of tune (30A). The demiurge mixes the forms of Same, Other, and Being with force, mathematically attuning them to the correct order of the model. As Kalkavage suggests, Timaeus reverses the traditional perspectives of time and space. In the dialogue, time is associated with stability, the imitation of eternity by making motion regular, while place is the figure of instability and process (120). That is to say, placing is an irrational element that must take place to place the order of logos. This primordial place is inhabited by non-elemental originary stuff that are ungraspable by the intellect but constitutive of it.

In the second story we are told that before everything, there are “irrational” protoelements that exist by chance, and the task of the demiurge is the ordering of all in their right place. At the climax of the dialogue, we find the enigmatic figure of khōra (52B). Usually translated as space or place, khōra is introduced as a non-empty receptacle filled with powers that is in perpetual motion. Timaeus speaks of it as a third kind that, in addition to likeness and the model, is a receptacle and nurse for becoming and a medium of things happening (52D). Khōra intrudes into the logic of being and becoming and resists the principle of likeness. Khōra is a word that places place, the region in which the demiurge, a figure of place himself, kneads together Being, Same, and Other, creating a hybrid between the intelligible and the material. As such, Khōra is a place of radical difference where likeness sways back and forth to give contour to reality, a locus of tension and conflict of the fleeting eventness of events. Ultimately, khōra seems to be a field in which difference retains its constitutive unspeakability. For the living, khōra is an unhomely, uncanny place that places all places.

Jacques Derrida is interested in khōra because it represents a space of radical ambiguity and indeterminacy, allowing him to explore the themes of textuality, interpretation, the impossible, and ultimately the limitations of logos and mythos in philosophical discourse. For Derrida, khōra challenges the philosophical discourse by putting a question mark on the possibility of categories, disrupting conventional oppositions such as being and becoming, the sensible and the intelligible. Indeed, khōra is a word that opens the path for letting the taking place of the unfolding of events as they are.

When I refer to khōra, I refer to some event, the possibility of taking place, which is not historical, to something non-historical that resists historicity […] There is a biblical desert, there is an historical desert. But what I call “the desert in the desert” is this place which resists historization, which is, I will not say “before,” because that is chronological, but which remains irreducible to historicization, humanization, and anthropo-theologization of revelation. (Derrida and Marion  76).

As a place of absolute heterogeneity, khōra is a place of resistance. According to Derrida, it is “the condition of possibility which makes history possible by resisting it” and “a place of non-gift which makes the gift possible by resisting it” (Derrida and Marion 76). Khōra is the place of resistance that, by resisting place, places the taking place of events, and for this reason, Derrida argues that khōra is the absolutely universal place, irreducible to any single place (76). A groundless ground, and the grounding of all. Khōra resists naming, and this is why Derrida leaves the word untranslated, choosing to retain the original term to preserve its intricacies that would be lost in translation. In the Timaeus, the khōra is alien to the model and the principle of likeness, and yet it participates in and with them in the act of creation through the craftsman.

Derrida highlights the discourse of khōra in the middle of the Timaeus to raise the possibility of a third type or genre of discourse beyond logos and mythos, an infragenre. I take the discourse of khōra as that which places all determinations, but it is itself undetermined. Khōra never lets itself be reached and escapes any interpretation. It is beyond hermeneutics since it cannot give form to it. The discourse of khōra is thus inaccessible, and yet receives and gives place to words such as “inaccessible,” “impassive,” or “amorphous” (Derrida, “Khōra” 95). As a giver of place, Derrida tells us, khōra receives and gives place to all the determinations of language, but it does not possess any of them as its own: 

She ‘is’ nothing other than the sum or the process of what has just been inscribed ‘on’ her, on the subject of her, on her subject, right up against her subject, but she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations, even though, nevertheless, she is not irreducible to them. Simply this excess is nothing, nothing that may be and be said ontologically (“Khōra” 99).

This suggests that khōra is a figure that encapsulates all interpretations that in turn refuses any interpretation. While in the Timaeus khōra is the place of the placing activity of the demiurge, on a textual level Derrida seems to associate khōra with the placing of writing. Here, khōra symbolizes the endless interpretive possibilities that texts offer. It embodies the idea that meaning is not fixed but open to multiple readings. The discourse on khōra is merely the ungraspable placing of logos and mythos, the very place of deconstruction. Derrida emphasizes that khōra gives place to all stories but refuses to become an object of any tale (“Khōra” 117). Thus, to think of khōra is to engage in aporetic thinking, a thinking of the impossible. In other words, the discourse of khōra announces the textuality of the text, the possibility or site of arche-writing, the tracing of the trace, and ultimately, the space in which deconstruction “inhabits,” for lack of a better verb. But what else can we say about this space beyond the possibility of both the possible and the impossible? What, if any, possibilities of new paths of thinking does the discourse on khōra open up, especially if we are interested in thematizing the current anthropocenic predicament of the ungraspable future to come and the generalized impasse of contemporary nihilism?

2. The aporetic Field of Emptiness

In Aporias, Derrida recalls that deconstruction is defined as an aporetic experience of the impossible (27). In this sense, the discourse on khōra, that is, the discourse of the place of deconstruction, can be seen as the aporetic experience par excellence. The aporia, the “not knowing where to go” is a matter of a nonpassage (Derrida, Aporias 12). As paralyzing and uncanny as it might be, the experience of the nonpassage is necessary to come to terms with the Otherness of the other, the otherness of a text, for example, and the radical indeterminacy of the future to come. A text is a finite infinitude where the reader is powerless to its radical alterity. The text happens in a khoratic region materialized in a piece of paper or a computer screen. And yet, khōra is neither the paper nor the screen, but the placing of the event of the text. When I face a text, I comprehend myself as finite. The text becomes a canvas poorly painted by my own finitude emerging from the antinomial khoratic realm of différance. If the experience of confronting a text is aporetic, I, the reader, transverse the nonpassage of it through the act of reading, a region with indeterminate, ungraspable limits. The event of the text “arrives” in difference and likeness, akin to the arrival of the discourse of khōra in the middle of the Timaeus. Khōra locates the arrivant, that which arrives, making textuality thinkable. Therefore, khōra, the nonpassage that leads to an aporetic experience of the impossible, is the fundamental structure of différance. In other words, Being manifests itself through difference and deferral in the place of deconstruction that evades determinations, but must be there to make sense of presence and absence, Self and Other, being and becoming, the political and the apolitical. Khōra is neither a place nor a thinking of overcoming, but originary coming-to-terms-with, an infraspace.

Recognizing the aporetic nature of deconstruction calls for a new relation with uncertainty beyond the political when expecting the what-is-to-come of the future. The idea behind the discourse of khōra underscores the evolving nature of meaning. Future events are not static but unfold through a process of difference and deferral, where interpretations can shift, collapse, and re-emerge over time. The future to come, however, needs to be accounted for. That is, the infinite finitude of the future entails a type of limit for the intellect to grasp it. For humans, the ultimate horizon of the coming-to-terms-with is the expectation of death, which is the same as the aporetic experience of life. Derrida explains:

What is the place of this unique aporia in such an ‘expecting death’ as ‘expecting’ the only possibility of the impossible? Is the place of this nonpassage impossibility itself or the possibility of impossibility? Or is it that the impossible be possible? Is the aporia the impossible itself? […] Here dying would be the aporia, ‘existing’ one’s death, as well as the impossibility of existing once one is dead (Aporias, 73)

The utmost possibility of the human being is existing one’s death, the ultimate “to-come” as such. Derrida calls death “the name of a secret,” that “signs the irreplaceable singularity” and makes itself awaited in naming the proper name without a name (Aporias 74). Thus, death is alogon. Derrida invokes the figure of the Marrano to refer to “that which lives without a name (Aporias 77). Derrida’s marrano is a figure of incalculability that places existence as aporetic. The Marrano has an intimate dwelling in khōra, in the perpetual placing of impossible places. She is forced to be open to a future-to-come, and thus, embraces the possibility of the unforeseeable.

The exploration of the Derridean khoratic register can be further developed under Kitaro Nishida’s interrogation of Western metaphysics through the concept of Basho or place. Nishida’s contribution to philosophy lies in his attempt to criticize all forms of dualisms characteristic of Western metaphysics, in particular its obsession with subjectivism or the primacy of the grammatical subject. This culminates in a formal articulation of Zen Buddhism through Western philosophical language that opens the path to a thinking of place without a place, a field where life and death are seen as one and the same: life-death. Nishida’s notion of pure experience, that is, originary experience without mediation where “one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness,” necessitates a space before the subject-object distinction where “knowing and its object are completely unified” (An Inquiry into the Good 3-4). Indeed, Nishida believes that this opposition that is later introduced through reflection has nothing to do with the original experience of Being. In fact, this separation reifies mind and world, reducing them to calculable objects. Thus, what in Western metaphysics is known as mind and world, for Nishida seems to be an arbitrary articulation of an aporetic experience via language, when in reality the original “direct experience,” cannot be exhausted in language. As Fujita Masakatsu indicates, the subject-object opposition of everyday life oscillates between the inner and the outer, the private and the public: “our manner of seeing things takes our ‘private’ perceptions and repositions them in ‘public space’” (391-92). In other words, the articulation of the aporetic gesture of direct experience becomes totalized in spacetime through politics. However, “the undivided knowledge-emotion-volition of the facts of our direct experience themselves can neither be measured nor spoken in such public manners” (Masakatsu 394). Consequently, the aporetic nature of direct experience, to use Derridean parlance, must be perpetually deferred through coming to terms with a difference that resists identity, unity, and division. A fluidity that is always to come, and yet it is always already there as “Nothing.”

Nishida’s logic of Basho can be used to conceive textuality and contextuality indistinguishable from each other. As John Maraldo indicates, Nishida’s concept of absolute nothingness, the ultimate place within which the Real takes place, can be grasped as the site, or better, the nonsite, which terminates the infinite regress of context-scheming (417). That is, a context of a different order that precisely allows the distinction between text and its contexts. The Field of Absolute Nothingness or Emptiness, as Nishitani will further elaborate, is the ultimate horizon that gives shape to the discourse of Being (life) and Nonbeing (death) (Religion and Nothingness). This field is a double negation that affirms. While the thinking of being results in consciousness, the thinking of death opens the abyss of the nihil. Nishitani believes that the Field of Emptiness disrupts the radical negation of the nihil, creating an opening beyond both Western and Eastern nihilism that has put us at an impasse. In other words, the field of Emptiness is a matter of letting things be in their full unpredictable indeterminacy.

Derrida’s notion of the messianic is related to an openness to this unpredictability, “the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice” (Specters of Marx 33). For him, a democratic promise must keep an undetermined messianic hope, an eschatological relation to the event-to-come that cannot be anticipated, but that one must live-toward, acknowledging that one cannot recognize it in advance; one should leave a place to receive the unknown arrivant, the foreigner, the event that one cannot anticipate and which cannot be asked to give anything in return, “hospitality without reserve” (Specters of Marx 81-82). Why? Because the arrivant brings a promise of another thinking, not an ontotheological program, but an affirmative emancipatory thinking. This is the messianic without messianism (Specters of Marx 94). As a general structure of experience, Derrida names the messianic “a desert in the desert” which is the necessary condition for the possibility of faith, promise, future, expectancy without expectation of death, and a relation to the singularity of the other (“Faith and Knowledge” 56-57). Derrida thus associates the messianic with khōra.

Khōra and the Field of Emptiness are abstractions to represent abstractions, conditions for the possibility of an opening to an-other thinking, a marrano thinking. According to Leung, Derrida’s formulation of the “X without the X” that we find in khōra and his concept of messianism runs parallel to the Kantian forms of intuition: khōra is cast in spatial terms, while the messianic is described in temporal terms (Leung 40). However, in Derrida’s articulation, space and time lose all determination and concreteness, and remain placeholders for speech and thought. Accordingly, Derrida’s “religion without religion” can be seen as an attempt to abstract theological and metaphysical transcendence to affirm a mode of being in which life is not grounded on ontotheological structures or desires of immortality, but rather, on an affirmation of lifedeath, an infraexistence of a third kind. If this reading is correct, marranismo, at least Derrida’s version, is looking for an end without an end (another end) that prepares the coming of the arrivant’s secret. This is possible due to the impossible nonpassage that places the eventfulness of any event: the absolute emptiness of khōra.

The promise of instituted religions of “the good” sustains a life mediated by the constitutive powers of the polis, in an absolute totalization of the political. This precarious condition is regulated by and structured in metaphysical violence. Here, of course, I am making a reference to Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, that contradictory, undetermined figure that lives under a double exclusion: the human law —it cannot be a victim of homicide— and the divine law of the polis —it cannot be sacrificed (Homo sacer 80). The life of homo sacer is reduced to bare life, a mere biological fact, and suffers a type of violence that reveals a hidden sphere of human action, the sovereign sphere. In this hegemonic sphere, the person is captured in a state of exception in which rights can be suspended by the sovereign at any moment in the name of the greater good. The fundamental premise of Agamben’s project is that the state of exception is the norm in the modern state (State of Exception 86-88). In the modern polis, violence is the instrument par excellence of communitarian power, and an innate characteristic of the inquisitorial logic of identity.For the marrano, this otherwise hidden form of life is as clear as water. The task we face in the marrano register is a deconstruction of a field of life/death. A displacement beyond mythos and logos that will enable the grasping of that clearing in withdrawal that comes to oneself. A thinking after the end of metaphysics, an end without an end toward the event that is neither predictable nor calculable, but that it is already there. Neither a program nor a paradigm. Beyond reform and revolution. A retrieval in coming-to-terms-with of a forgotten primary, direct experience. This requires a new understanding of the sacred and the impersonal. As Moreiras has indicated, Marranismo is a placeholder for a thinking of the site of posthegemonic freedom that emerges from the irreducible experience of a “non-administrative relationship to death” (“Two Reasons for Marranismo”). This is the only possibility for an attunement to the ways things are. Marrano thinking is a radical refusal for the sake of radical freedom, a refusal to seek shelter into registers that protect against one’s own finitude and our aporetic direct experience of existence: a refusal of metaphysical sacrifice that instead welcomes the journey that transverses the field of consciousness and the field of nihility, using Nishitani’s version of Basho. A marrano “apocalypse” is then an encounter with the unspoken that lies on the horizon. It goes toward the unimaginable through the unspoken in total fluidity. This position is the thinking of the Real, real thinking that awaits in absolute openness for what is to come and the inarticulable promise of the secret: the coming-to-terms-with lifedeath.

Works Cited

  • Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • —. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell, The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  • Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Marion. “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney.” God, the Gift, and Posmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 54-78.
  • Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. Translated by Samuel Weber, Routledge, 2010, pp. 42-101.
  • —. Aporias. Translated by Thomad Dutoit. Stanford University Press, 1993.
  • —. “Khôra.” On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit. Translated by Ian McLeod, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 89-127.
  • —. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 2006.
  • Leung, King-Ho. “The Religion (without Religion) of the Living (without Life): Re-reading Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’.” Eidos vol. 5, no. 3, 2011, pp. 35-49.
  • Maraldo, John. “Nishida Kitaro’s Philosophy: Self, World, and the Nothingness Underlying Distinctions.” The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, edited by Bret W. Davis, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 417-30.
  • Masakatsu, Fujita. “The Development of Nishida Kitaro’s Philosophy: Pure Experience, Place, Action-Intuition.” The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, edited by Bret W. Davis, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 389-415.
  • Moreiras, Alberto. “Two Reasons for Marranismo.” Infrapolitical Deconstruction (And Other Issues Related and Unrelated.), 6 Dec. 2015, https://infrapolitica.com/2015/12/06/two-reasons-for-marranismo-by-alberto-moreiras/
  • Nishida, Kitaro. An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives, Yale University Press, 1990.
  • Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan van Bragt, University of California Press, 1983.
  • Plato, and Peter Kalkavage. Timaeus. 2nd ed., Focus, 2016.