THE HIGH AND THE LOW: One of the sections in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (see below) concerns Plato’s Timaeus, and its description of the khora. The khora is… well, it’s there, and that’s about all it is. “Khora is the immense and indeterminate spatial receptacle (dekhomenon, hypodokhe) in which the sensible likenesses of the eternal paradigms are ‘engendered,’ in which they are ‘inscribed’ by the Demiurge, thereby providing a ‘home’ for all things.” And later: “For the khora is an ‘abyss,’ a void of empty space; it is also an infinite play of reflections in which the paradigms produce their images, simply ‘reflecting’ sensible things like a mirror that is not altered by the images it reflects.” Later still: “It might appear at times that khora looks a little like the unknown God, the deus absonditus, the mysterious origin beyond origin, about whom we cannot say a thing. …[Derrida’s essay] ‘How Not to Speak’ explores the analogy and, more importantly, the disanalogy of khora with the God of negative theology.

“…In this essay Derrida draws our attention to the tension between what he calls two ‘tropics of negativity,’ that is, two opposing ways in which philosophical thought finds itself up against its limits, against something that resists being said, two things equally unsayable but for quite opposite reasons. The first is the most familiar and prestigious text in all of Plato’s work–the one that makes all the standard anthologies used in ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ courses–the famous and sublime passage from the Republic, 509Bff. in which Plato describes the idea of the Good as ‘beyond being’ (epekeina tes ousias). Here the movement (the ‘tropic’) of negativity, of not-saying or unsayability, is upward, hyperbolic, ‘obeying a logic of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyper-essentialisms’ of Christian Neoplatonism. For the tradition of negative theology, stretching from pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckhart, turned on a view of the Christian God that had been basically cast in the terms of Plato’s theory of the Good beyond Being. In this first movement, thinking has run up against an excess of transcendence, a being of such supereminent sur-reality that, while giving birth to being, movement, and knowledge, it is itself beyond them all. Still, as the offspring of its father and cause, the sensible world is ‘like’ the Good, and, so, the excess of the Good is situated within an ‘analogical community’ in virtue of which the sensible world is said to be ‘like’ the intelligible world. Hence, the Good can be sensibly compared to the ‘sun’ of the sensible world; for, like the sun, the Good is neither seeing nor visible, neither knowing nor intelligible, but a third thing, viz., their light, cause, and medium.

“But the khora constitutes another way to be otherwise than Being, another kind of third thing, one moving in a fully opposite direction and submitting to different tropes. Rather than ‘hyperexistence’ or supereminent being, khora seems to drop below being, barely to be at all, to be if at all next to nothing.

“…The discourse on khora thus forms an almost perfect inversion of the discourse on the Good. …On the one hand, hyperbole and the excess of being, essence, and meaning; on the other, defection, less than meaning, essence, and being.”

OK. I do not pretend to understand all that very well; when people waver off into words like “essence” and “being” without giving me some sense of what the heck we’re talking about, I get lost. I am also generally uninspired by, and not well versed in, negative theology; so again I am at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting this stuff about khora vs. God.

Nonetheless, I think there are some interesting things to think about here. The suggestion seems to be that the same experiences, graspings, sense of something beyond reason or ordinary experience that has inspired so much religious thought, could just as easily be a signal of something “below” reality as something “above” it. And I don’t really know what to do with that suggestion, except to say that I would need to know a lot more about what an apprehension of something “below” reality looked like before I could comment.

It’s obviously useful to be chastened, to be reminded that once we spiral off into ineffable-experience-land, we may be confusing the divine with mere chaos. But I don’t really have any reference points for an experience of chaos. The experiences of God’s presence that I’ve had have been experiences of an intense, almost animal aliveness; a sense that the things in this world are arrows toward something greater (like the Jewish theological idea that objects in the world are words spoken by God); a deeply positive sense of a “greater than,” not a less-than. Maybe this is just because my culture had prepared me more for the “greater-than” experience. Who can say? All I can say is what the experience actually resembled to me. It is difficult to talk about, but it can be alluded to, as when Harold Bloom (I think?) writes that Hamlet “dies upward.” There is a discernable difference in a play in which someone dies “upward” as vs. a play in which someone dies “downward.” So asking, “Is your ‘ineffable experience’ really an experience of God, or of khora or chaos?” seems to me a bit like asking, “Why do we ally the sublime with the beautiful, instead of the ugly?” After all, the sublime is painful; it is often not-beautiful; why do we give it the exalted term “sublime” rather than the degraded term “ugly”? The only real answer to that question is to describe a sublime experience. Or, more accurately, the only real answer to that question is to have a sublime experience.