Khora

The concept of “return” is an apparent phantasm throughout Derrida’s work with each new notion introduced, returning to the question alluded from the start of “Faith and Knowledge”: what is it, to talk of a “return”?  Derrida asks, “when we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so confusedly today about “a return of the religious”, what do we thereby name?” . In this paper, I attempt to answer Derrida’s question by reversing it into “what we do not name” to discuss how is the “return” religious and what is religious in the “return”. Firstly then, the paper will focus on religious character of the “return” and then explore religious elements: how it comes to mean faith, promise and messianicity – a blind awaiting of a “to-come” that we do not name.

In this presentation I discuss how the Greek concept of chōra inspired two major philosophers of East and West in the early twentieth century: Nishida Kitarō in his development of the concept of place (basho) and Martin Heidegger in his thinking concerning “region” (Gegend).  Not only was Plato’s concept of chōra in the Timaeus an important source for both, we can also draw connections to the pre-Platonic everyday understanding of the term as well.  I argue that chōra in general entails concretion-cum-indetermination, a space that implaces human existence into its environment and clears room for the presencing-absencing of beings.

Keywords: Nishida, Heidegger, place, region, chōra

Paper presented at the annual SPEP conference of 2014 held in New Orleans, LA.

To say that interology is a way of life is to say that it is a practical philosophy, an ethics. This way of life is characterized by dialogue, communitas, life-enhancing relationality, productive tension, mode switching at opportune intervals, the primacy of leisure, frontiersmanship, liminality, readiness for rapture, playfulness, creativity, the sensation of freedom, and, if one is truly awakened, the capacity for unconditional bliss. The last phrase is a big claim reserved for buddhas, immortals, sages, yogis, and the like. In the final analysis, this understanding of interology is vitalistic in nature. It is preoccupied with autopoiesis, sees life itself as an artistic medium, and treats every instance of doing and non-doing as an opportunity for self-fashioning. Life starts to give off a different aura when one lives this way. Eventually, happiness becomes endogenous, and a species of inalienable spiritual triumphalism (not the vulgar stripe displayed by philistines, nor the type held in contempt by LU Xun 鲁迅) takes over, so much so that one becomes "unswayable by the eight winds," as the Zen expression has it. The Stoic-minded Kenneth Burke would use "heads I win, tails you lose" to characterize this attitude toward life. Spiritual self-sufficiency by no means implies isolationism, since one is always already thrown into relations. It is rather a matter of managing to get vital nourishment wherever one is thrown, and involves an intuitive, prudential praxis of selection and deselection, prehension and negative prehension, affectability and imperturbability, engagement and disengagement.

Considering the prominence of gold ground in Byzantine icons, this article puts into dialogue recent investigations on the phenomenology of icons with classical, late antique, and Byzantine conceptions of space and gold. Through its play with ambient light, gold operates in the same manner as the medium of sight, understood by Aristotle to be a diapha-nous substance that surrounds a visible object and, when activated by light, transmits colors from the object to the viewer. By considering the manner in which contemporaneous thinkers understood the materiality and composition of gold and air, this article argues that the icon's gold embodies the very air that surrounds the bodies of the figures represented , rather than being a mere symbol for an eternal heavenly realm. The aim here is to use this argument to consider how we can think of medium in an expanded field as not merely the physical substrate or materiality of an artwork, but rather as that imperceptible action of representation that mediates between the image as a mere potentiality of form in the artist's repertoire and the image as an actualized reality in a material.

This paper traces the seminal notion of khora from the Platonic Timaeus to Derrida's apophatic theology. John Caputo's and Richard Kearney's criticism of the latter are presented and discussed. The essay concludes with an "excursus" to the enigmatic frescos and mosaics of the Monastery of Chora.

The Bahktinian chronotope, Lacanian theory, and Kristeva’s chora, along with concepts from Derrida and others, combined with research into choreia, Dionysus, rituality, metatheater, performativity and, last not least, philological and literary close-reading, all aided in determining a specific Bacchic chronotope in archaic and classical choral song culture, a new structural interplay of time and space in Greek literature. It is deeply rooted in chorality and choric culture. Dionysus as the total Other, the unconscious, the god of the middle-ground, of mediation and transformation, serves, in a way, as the emblem of this chor(a)ic constellation. From chora emerges choros, his special medium of vitality in performativity. The Bacchic chronotope is permeable, hybrid, fluid and shifting. Moreover, his chora is a space of arrival in procession where the god transgresses boundaries in sudden epiphany.
After identifying briefly the major features of the Bacchic chronotope in the parodos of Bacchae the main focus of the paper is on the fifth stasimon of Antigone, an exemplary tragic song in this regard. This Bacchic chronotope is a whirl of concentric choruses extending even to the cosmic level. It is highly metatragic and a powerful mise en abyme, since it references back to the choral performance executed in honor of Dionysus and displayed in the orchestra of the Athenian theater of Dionysus.

In meiner Arbeit habe ich Interesse an die zweifache Wirkung des platonischen Logos: erstens an den konzentrierenden, immer in seine Basis zurückziehenden, zurückweisenden Aspekt, die ich Kapitulation nenne, zweitens die hinzufügende Betrachtungsweise, die das Ding immer als etwas anderes, als etwas neues, aber nie als vollendetes beschreiben kann (Rekapitulation).
Die zwei Darstellungsweisen erläutere ich anhand Plato’s Timäus, wo diese Bewegungen haben als Gegenstand die Konstitution (Begründung und ’Grundgesetz’) der Polis, die an ein streithaftes, unheiles Moment des Wahrheitsereignisses verknüpft ist.
Die Erzählung dieser Konstitution vollendet sich nich, weil die platonische Erörterung zwischen Vorbild und Abbild an einer dritten, schwer fassbaren Gattung gestößt wird: an die chora. Chora präsentiert sich nur durch Metaphern: die Analyse und Wirkung dieser Metaphern ist auch ein Teil meiner Masterarbeit.

Why is Derrida infatuated with Chora?
Of course, it is feminine and has elusive charm. Yet, is that enough to explain the long acquaintance of over 30 years and 25 texts, one of which is even specifically dedicated to her?
Chora is useful to Derrida: in the third Platonic genre he sees the perfect name for what is unnamable, the opportunity to enunciate what relentlessly resists every explanation.
Derrida’s willful conservation of Chora’s virginity bears its most effective fruits in the philosophical and theological reflection of the French philosopher: Chora’s absolute disjunction proclaims the impossibility of reducing Western thought to nothing more than the binomial mythos-logos, like a philosophical designation of this principle of indetermination, which marks the limits of knowledge incapable of completion; Chora’s inexplicability hence becomes the possibility of a philosophy of religion that is feasible precisely because a not empty silence required for all discourses about God (John Caputo expresses his thanks and rewrites a significant contemporary apophantic theology).
However, when the French philosopher and not a few of his followers try to introduce the resistant principle of Chora into other contexts, the outcome is less satisfactory. Derrida himself states his disappointment with respect to the architectural design of the Parc de la Villette, inspired by Chora and her unpurposive tension: what remains of stairways that lead nowhere and buildings that cannot be entered? Likewise, the results of political and social discussions conducted through Chora are apparently just as disappointing; no identity resists the sieve of the third genre: welcoming a foreigner becomes possible only if one radically renounces all determinism (and, thus, in the end, history itself), while what is feminine became a third genre before sexual distinction in order to avoid confrontation with the other, which is masculine: feminist thought is celebrating, but what?
Virginity becomes infertility: Derrida not only kills Heidegger, guilty of determinism against Chora, but also loses Plato who introduces the third genre, even at the cost of a bastard discourse, in order to explain the world and its complexity.
Chora is useful to Derrida, because it allows him to say that not everything is necessarily useful: the criticism is fascinating, but the thought (and the life?) gets muddled.

‘The quality of the discourse depends primarily upon the being of which it speaks’ (Derrida & Dutoit, 1995). Needless to mention that there is an inescapable symbiotic relation between discourse and conception- as they walk abreast. Therefore, the conception of something and its being ought to be entangled. If this is not the case, ambiguities arise and if the potentiality of these ambiguities is not meditated upon, and if it is considered in a caesarean-cum-tautological manner, only then chronic misconceptions arise. In this paper, therefore, so as to juxtapose the modern and the pre-modern conceptions of space and collective existence in a diachronous - as well as to some extent in a synchronous - manner, I am intent upon considering the case ontologically: primarily how the instillation of space, by acquiring something that is unacquirable (khôra1), into the modern intuition, ‘….which contained no affective surplus beyond a simple physical reference’ (Kaviraj, 2014) in the pre-modern zeitgeist, contorted the notion of space – by imposing shape on amorphous (khôra) and thus doing injustice in a tautological manner. Furthermore, I shall illumine which elements rendered this instillation possible; and thus I shall elucidate the role of numeric imagery along with other forms of imagery that intensified this instillation. In doing so, I might dissever and deconstruct the modern notion of space and collective existence and thus highlight the cardinal distinction between modern and pre-modern notions of space.

The chora is one of the most perplexing as well as neglected con- cepts in Whitehead's metaphysics. Explicitly drawing on Plato's Receptacle, Whitehead reinterprets the chora as the place, in between physics and metaphysics, where connections among actual entities happen. However, the relation between Whitehead's and Plato's choral remains widely unexplored. This article aims to correct this oversight By comparing the two philosophers, I intend to argue that, differences aside, the two philosophers adopted the chora to answer the common question as to how things can be identified in theflux of events. In this way, I hope not only to clarify the obscure role of the chora in Whitehead's metaphysics and its relation to Plato, but also to explore the complex process of identification.

This paper traces the seminal notion of khora from the Platonic Timaeus to Derrida's  apophatic theology. John Caputo's and Richard Kearney's criticism of the latter are presented and discussed. The essay concludes with an "excursus" to the enigmatic frescos and mosaics of the Monastery of Chora.

The concept of khôra, which was elaborated but quickly repressed by Plato in Timaeus, has caught the attention of a whole coterie of contemporary philosophers. It is often interpreted as "receptacle" or "uterus." Its presence in Deleuze's corpus is largely covert and easily overlooked. Foregrounding its significance in Deleuze's work allows us to get a firmer grasp of his vitalistic thought. Following the lineage of Plato-Leibniz-Whitehead, Deleuze takes khôra to be a screen, sieve, filter, or membrane that makes something issue from chaos, "even if this something differs only slightly." Khôra is the mother or locus of genesis, becoming, negentropy, and the event. Roughly speaking, the function of khôra is twofold: prehension and negative prehension, or simply selective prehension. Two statements made by Deleuze deserve our particular attention: first, "the brain is the mind itself"; second, "the brain is the screen." For our purposes, the second statement can be productively misinterpreted as, "the brain is the khôra." There is textual evidence in Deleuze's book, Negotiations, to support such an interpretation. After sorting out the rationale of Deleuzean vitalism through the lens of khôra, this article moves on to such notions as the intermind, composite khôra, and the global superbrain to probe into the human condition in the era of mental symbiosis between humanity and its artificially intelligent counterparts, and to negotiate the tension between control and becoming.

The paper will explicate the Sache or matter of the dialectic of the founder of Kyoto School philosophy, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), from the standpoint of his mature thought, especially from the 1930s and 40s.  Rather than providing a simple exposition of his thought I will engage in a creative reading of his concept of basho (place) in terms of chiasma and chōra, or a chiasmatic chōra.  I argue that Nishida’s appropriation of nineteenth century German, especially Hegelian, terminology was inadequate in expressing what he strove to say—for his concept of basho confounds traditional metaphysical discourse.  Because of its chiasmatic and chōratic nature, the Sache he strove to capture and express through the language of dialectical philosophy, perpetually slips away from any systemic bounds.  His “dialectic” (benshōhō) implies a chiasma or a criss-crossing of multiple factors on multi-dimensional levels that exceed in complexity simplistic binomial oppositions or the triadic formula of traditional dialectics.  The complexity is one of over-determination that threatens to undermine the very language of such a dialectic.  As the deep complexity of over-inter-determinations would deconstruct any notion of a substance, what Nishida offers—as opposed to an ousiology (or logic of substance)—is a chiasmology.  I thus argue that his so-called dialectic is really an unfolding of that chiasma.  And if chiasma expresses the over-determinate aspect of Nishida’s matter of thinking, chōra would express its under-determinate aspect.  Nishida himself based his concept of basho or “place” on Plato’s notion of the chōra from the Timaeus.  I take Nishida’s basho in its chōratic nature as what simultaneously unfolds and enfolds the chiasma.  But in the case of the chōra it is its under-determinate nature that refuses reduction to any of the terms of opposition.  In its self-withdrawal, it provides a clearing, a space, for the chiasmatic unraveling of the many.  Like the chiasma it undermines any claim to a first substance or the hegemony of a universal First.  For in its indeterminateness, it is “nothing” (mu).  The unfolding it enfolds is, as Nishida states, “a determination without determiner.”  In concrete terms, however, we might develop Nishida’s concept further by returning to the original pre-Platonic Greek meaning of chōra in the sense of “region” or “country,” to understand chōra or basho here as the very space of co-existence provided by this very earth.  As a chiasmatic chōra irreducible, in its over- and under-determinations, to being or non-being, Nishida’s basho qua mu proves to be the an-ontological origin of both on and meon (being and non-being).  Rejecting the culture-nature dichotomy this notion of our place of being as chiasma and chōra underscores our holistic symbiosis with the earth as the anontological (un)ground and clearing for our co-existence in a concrete milieau with one another and with nature.  It is this earth as our ultimate contextual wherein that provides a clearing for co-dwelling and mutual encounter with one’s other, that we must acknowledge today if we are to co-exist authentically and freely vis-à-vis our global neighbors and vis-à-vis the surrounding nature.
Diaphany, vol. 1, nr. 1

Çağdaş feminist edebiyat eleştirisinin önde gelen isimlerinden dilbilimci ve psikanalist Julia Kristeva, kendi özgün ve zengin yaklaşımını inşa ederken Platon’un mekânsal olana ilişkin kullandığı Chora kavramından fazlasıyla faydalanmıştır. Ortaya koyduğu bağlam esasta 1970’lere kadar giden ancak 1980 sonrası dönemde ivme kazanan Mekânsal Dönüş (Spatial Turn) sürecinin belki de en az dikkat çeken ancak en etkili ve belirgin örneklerinden biri olarak değerlendirilebilir.

Bu çalışmanın temel amacı Kristeva’nın hangi motivasyonla Chora kavramına yöneldiği, neden bu kavram ile analoji yaptığı ve kendi alanı ile coğrafya arasında kurduğu bu iletişimi -mekânsal dönüşün bir boyutu olarak- anlamlandırmaya çalışmaktır. Çalışma Kristeva’nın kendi eserleri ve konuya yönelik yazılmış ikincil metinlerle gerçekleştirilmektedir.

Kristeva temelde dilin gelişim aşamasında annelik ve babalık işlevleri üzerinde durmakta, Lacan’cı ve Freud’cu açıdan babalık ile özdeşleştirilen, öznenin dil edinimini kazandığı dönem olan simgesel dönemin tam olarak onların ifade ettiği ve genelde de kabul görüldüğü gibi gelişmediğini, maternal bağlamın ön planda olduğu ilksel sürecin, sonradan gelen yerleşik kurallara ve kurumlara tabiiyetin olduğu falosentrik simgesel dönemin altyapısını oluşturduğunu söylemektedir. Bahsettiği ilksel süreç Oedipus öncesi, ataerkil yasanın olmadığı göstergesel dönemdir ve özne/bebek bu dönemde annenin bedenini ritim, ses, tekrar gibi eylemlerle kendinde yeniden üretir. Burası ilk anlamların kurulduğu yerdir.

Buradaki vurucu nokta ise Kristeva’nın annelik işleviyle birleştirdiği göstergesel dönem ile Platon’un varlık (being) ve varoluş (becoming) arasındaki alanı anlatmak için kullandığı chora kavramı arasında kurduğu benzeşimdir. Platon’un Timaeus isimli geç dönem eserinde yer verdiği kavram, o günden bugüne mekân felsefesinin konusu olmuş ya anlaşılamayıp “konteynır” içeriğine indirgenmiş ya da muğlak bulunarak açıklamanın dışında bırakılmıştır. Bu anlamda kötü bir talihinin olduğunu söylemek yanlış olmaz. Diğer yandan ortada bir gerçek vardır ki, o da choranın Timaeus’ta bile açıklaması en zor kavramlardan biri oluşudur; çünkü tam olarak maddi değildir ama maddi referanslardan yoksun da değildir. Chora, bir “hazne” anlamı taşıyabileceği gibi bir çeşit ilke olarak da görülebilir. Ama şu kesindir ki niteliksiz ve şekilsizdir. Duyu organlarıyla algılanamayacak ancak gerçek dışı bir akıl yürütmeyle kavranabilecek bir yerdir. Aslında choranın varoluşa gelecek şeylere bir koşul ya da köprü işini gördüğünü söylemek de mümkündür. Bu anlamda chora, bir ihtimal olarak da görülebilir.

Kristeva işte choranın bu doğurgan (generated) niteliğine odaklanır. Kavramın geometrik uzamdan, anlamdan ve heceden önce oluşu, kendi ifadesiyle “dilin belleğine gitmek, dil pratiği içinde anneyle çocuk arasındaki ilişkiye değmek” için elverişli bir bağlam sunmaktadır. Babalık işlevine teşne olarak yorumlanan chora, annenin, doğurganlığın ve kaosun uzamı olarak aşağılanmış, “isimsiz ve yurtsuz” kılınmıştır. Diğer yandan choranın belki de Kartezyen logosla anlaşılması mümkün olmayan ya da yadsınan içeriği,  karmaşası (nonexpressive, undetermined totality) bir anlamda avantajı da olmaktadır: Katı, yerleşik, eril mantığın simgesel süreciyle başat ve hatta onu önceleyen göstergesel süreci ifade etmek için Kristeva, eski ve tanımlanamayan chorayı seçmektedir. Choranın besleyici, üretici ancak açıklama kaldırmayan ve bir anlamda da yok edici yapısı “orayı” hem bir yere hem de bir yok-yere dönüştürmektedir. Bu anlamda chora, sadece ideal olanı değil, saldırganlık ve iğrenmeyi (abjection) de içerir. Chora öznenin varolma imkânını bulduğu, üretildiği yer iken, aynı zamanda annenin bedenine olan bağlılığından ötürü, kendi varlığının yok edilme ihtimalinin olduğu yerdir.

Sonuç olarak çocuğun sosyal düzene girişinin ve dil ediminin gelişiminin yalnızca baba değil anne etkisiyle de olduğu, göstergesel dönemde gelişen anne bedeniyle bütünleşen şiirsel bir dilin burada etkili olduğu yönündeki izahatı, o zamana kadarki fallusçu, eril yaklaşımın anneliğe “oryantalist” yaklaşım olarak da ifade edilebilecek çerçevesini yerle bir ederken, başlıca desteğini maternal bulunup, tarihsel dikotomiler (zihin-beden, erkek-kadın, kültür-doğa) varlığında öteki ile buluşturulan çoklu ses ve anlamların heterotopik uğrağı, kitonyen choradan almaktadır.

Kristeva’s focus on the maternity is central to her theory of subjectivity, yet frequently misunderstood. While it provides us with a prototype of human passion, it appears to be paradoxical: only from the mother’s narcissistic desire comes selfless love for the child; the explosions of passion must be defused in order to allow for the explosions of plural representability. By analyzing and connecting Kristeva’s chapter on maternal passion (“The Passion According to Motherhood”) with her chapter on passionate timelessness (“The Sobbing Girl; or, On Hysterical Time”) I will elucidate both concepts to further describe the defusing of passion. I refer to Fanny Söderbäck’s “Motherhood According to Kristeva: On Time and Matter in Plato and Kristeva,” to supplement my exegesis and incorporate her description of chora as movement before linear time with the passion’s “movement” or transformation in the imaginary. Then, I will reinterpret the defusing of passion as resisting paradox because its movement is an oscillation between linear time and timelessness.

This article explores the more-than-human characterization of the Theotokos in the famous Akathistos Hymn. The Mother of God emerged as an intercessional figure in the Christian imagination during late antiquity, but the formative period of mariology is still partly uncharted territory to modern scholarship. Reflecting on its rich landscape imagery and chora language, the article argues that the Akathistos minimizes the human traits of the Theotokos, rendering her more as a spatial phenomenon. In the hymn, we may glimpse traces of Marian ideas less developed during subsequent periods, ideas which gesture toward what we may call a "dark mariology." The Logos incarnates into more than human flesh, and the womb has a close affinity with the landscape. The Akathistos evokes the vision of a wider nonhuman participation in the incarnation rooted in the natural landscape of the Theotokos.

KLASP (Klazomenai Survey Project) was initiated in 2006 for a systematic explora- tion of the khorai of Klazomenai, Teos and Lebedos. Field surveys so far have docu- mented settlement patterns diachronically for macro-archaeological periods from the Neolithic to the Byzantine era. Assessment of survey data demonstrates that the placement, re-use or abandonment of sanctuaries and shrines in their territories was closely linked with the newly introduced political system of the emerging polis. Poleis made use of topographical features, and rural sanctuaries and shrines for designating their territories. KLASP recorded natural spaces like caves and prom- ontories used as rural shrines, and built spaces used as sanctuaries on the Urla- Çeşme peninsula which comprised a large part of Northern Ionia. Related evidence is being assessed together with epigraphic evidence and written sources for identify- ing these cult places. Also, spatial organization of those cult places is discussed in order to explain their use for the organization of the khorai.

The historical archive of Architecture and Feminism displays two strikingly divergent interpretations of the feminine "space" that Plato designated under the name, amongst others, of chôra.

Elizabeth Grosz's 1994 paper "Women, Chora, Dwelling" judges chôra to be "a founding concept" of the "disembodied femininity" that, associated within our tradition with determinations of space as homogeneous and undifferentiated, has served as the ground for the production of our ever-increasingly inequitable and unsustainable, "man-made" world. Grosz concludes that chôra offers no resources for rethinking space, time, and dwelling, and specifically queries the value of Jacques Derrida's reconceptualization of chôra, space and spatiality.

Ann Bergren's "Architecture Gender Philosophy" (1992) equally contests Derrida's interpretation of chôra, maintaining—as does Grosz—that Derrida is complicitous with Plato's attributing a fundamental passivity to chôra.  Bergren distinguishes this "passified chôra" from what she aptly calls the "pre-architectural chôra": namely, the chôra as it exists primordially, in an ever-changing state of moving, differential multiplicity, before its subjection to the processes of geometrization, commensuration and domestication overseen by the Demiurge-Architect of Plato's Timeaus. For Bergren, however, chôra yield this "pre-cosmic", active and femininely-connoted chôra could, in its feminist implications, open up a radically new approach to architecture.

I would like to revisit these texts dealing with chôra, architecture, and "the feminine"—Bergren's and Grosz's, along with Plato's, Derrida's, Eisenman's and Irigaray's—in order to reexhume, or  refashion, a concept of space that might make room for another conceptual and social universe.

Any sort of colonial mentality strives to subjugate the “other” and dictate
its rule on it. In this respect, the logic of bipolarity, lying in the basis of the
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, is a point in question
that can be understood as domination of oneself upon the other. This presentation,
in which we will argue for the notion that “the colonial movement begins
primarily within the mentalities”, will focus on the importance and the
value that societies have to appreciate to the productivity and the creativity
via Plato’s concept of “khora” (territory/space). In the Timaeus Plato presents
a perspective that defies all bipolar structures including his previous theory
of ideas. A third kind (territory/space) added into the logic of dichotomies
displaces the structures which dictates its own rules (logos) upon the “other”
in a sense. Yet, the impossibility of reaching an absolute and definite verdict
about the objects appeared in the becoming world results from the uncertain
and unattainable nature of territory/space (khora in Plato) enclosing the becoming
as a whole. In other words, the contact between the binaries without
a third kind will inevitably lead to the logic of domination in which one dictates
its own law and will always get control of the other. In this presentation,
‘the unattainableness of territory’ will be ontologically emphasized and the
possibility of philosophical decolonization will be discussed via the concepts
of creativity, productivity and the awareness of the territory necessary for the
elimination of the colonization.
Keywords: decolonization, philosophical decolonization, territory, Plato, Timaeus, khora

Çağdaş feminist edebiyat eleştirisinin önde gelen isimlerinden dilbilimci ve psikanalist Julia Kristeva, kendi özgün yaklaşımını inşa ederken Platon’un mekânsala ilişkin kavramı choradan fazlasıyla faydalanmıştır. Ortaya koyduğu bağlam esasta 1970’lere kadar giden ve 1980 sonrası dönemde ivme kazanan Mekânsal Dönüş (Spatial Turn) sürecinin belki de en az dikkat çeken ancak en belirgin ve yaratıcı örneklerinden biri olarak değerlendirilebilir. Buradan hareketle çalışmanın temel amacı, Kristeva’nın hangi motivasyonla chora kavramına yöneldiği, neden bu kavram ile analoji yaptığı ve kendi alanı ile coğrafya arasında kurduğu bu iletişimi mekânsal dönüşün bir boyutu olarak anlamlandırmaya çalışmaktır. Bu kapsamda, öncelikle Platon’un mekânsal mecazı chora kavramı üzerinde durulmakta, ardından Kristeva’nın edebiyat eleştirisi ve psiko-analitik bağlama içkin çok yönlü düşünü mekân odağında irdelenmektedir. Çalışma mekânın nasıl dili/edebiyatı, psiko-analitik içerimi, feminist bağlamı düşünmenin bir tarzı olarak geliştiğine yönelik yapılan çıkarsama ile sonlanmakta olup, feminist eleştiri, edebiyat çalışmaları, psiko-analitik çerçeve ile ilişkilenmekle birlikte esasta yeni ve farklı bir coğrafi perspektifin nasıl üretilebileceğini sorgulamaktadır. Mekân kavramının imkânları, yapısal inşacı bir yaklaşım ve tarihsel-coğrafya perspektifiyle aranırken, Kristeva’nın kendi çalışmaları ve konuya yönelik yazılmış ikincil metinlere dayalı nitel-yorumlayıcı bir araştırma deseni benimsenmiştir. Sonuç olarak, Kristeva’nın anne bedeniyle bütünleşen şiirsel dilin çocuğun dil gelişiminde etkili olduğu yönündeki izahatının, o zamana kadarki fallusçu bakışın anneliğe “oryantalist” yaklaşım olarak da ifade edilebilecek çehresini yerle bir ettiği, başlıca desteğini ise mekânsal bir metafordan, maternal bulunup tarihsel dikotomiler varlığında öteki ile buluşturulan, örtüklenen çoklu ses ve anlamların heterotopik uğrağı, kitonyen choradan aldığı vargısına ulaşılmaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Kristeva, chora, mekânsal dönüş, annelik.

IN: Foran, Lisa and Rozemund Uljee (eds). Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (Springer 2016) pp.59-74.

The word ‘saying’ is used in English to translate both die Sage in the work of Martin Heidegger, and le dire in that of Emmanuel Levinas.    Here I sketch the manner in which these two ‘sayings’ converge and diverge around the place of language.  Broadly speaking I argue that in their treatment of this word Heidegger and Levinas remain within the tradition of metaphysics insofar as the term ‘saying’ names.  It names precisely a difference within the space of which the human subject dwells – either in the space of the ontological difference both named yet concealed in the essence of language (Saying) in Heidegger; or in the space of the ethical difference named in the primary signification of the responsibility of the one-for-the-Other (saying) in Levinas.  The naming of such a difference within which the human subject dwells means that it is a difference translatable.  The naming of such a difference establishes limits which circumscribe a space or place for the subject.  For Derrida, beyond such a difference between the one and the other, or between Being and being, is another difference: a difference that remains radically impossible.  It is approached through numerous terms such as différance, supplement, trace, and so on in Derrida’s work.  But this very multiplicity of terms itself reveals the radical impossibility of it being named as such.  Here, having outlined the accounts of Heidegger and Levinas, I conclude by approaching this radically untranslatable/unnameable/unsayable in Derrida through the word Khōra.

My paper will discuss the ontological implications of recent developments in Western philosophy of the notion of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere in terms of the social imaginary as noticeable in Paul Ricoeur, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Charles Taylor; the contributions two twentieth century Japanese philosophers, Miki Kiyoshi and Nakamura Yūjirō, can make in this regard; and a possible ontology of the imagination one might be able to draw from the above.  Miki shows a connection between the imagination and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō.  Nakamura in turn points to a connection between imagination and place via his development of the Aristotelian notion of common sense (koinē aisthēsis, sensus communis).  I then suggest that the linking of the imagination with the process of the forming of the formless as well as with place may allow us in turn to understand the imagination in the Greek ontological terms of the chōrismos of the chōra.

The concept of “return” is an apparent phantasm throughout Derrida’s work with each new notion introduced, returning to the question alluded from the start of “Faith and Knowledge”: what is it, to talk of a “return”? Derrida asks, “when we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so confusedly today about “a return of the religious”, what do we thereby name?” . In this paper, I attempt to answer Derrida’s question by reversing it into “what we do not name” to discuss how is the “return” religious and what is religious in the “return”. Firstly then, the paper will focus on religious character of the “return” and then explore religious elements: how it comes to mean faith, promise and messianicity – a blind awaiting of a “to-come” that we do not name.

Karagümrük ile eski dönemlerde adı Kynegion olan Balat arasındaki vadi, Bizans’ta manastırların yoğun olduğu bir bölgeydi. Vadinin en önemli manastırı, surlara en yakını olan Khora (bugünkü Kariye Müzesi) olmakla beraber, vadinin merkezini ise Petra Manastırı oluşturuyordu.

Konstantinopolis'teki siyasal çekişmeler nedeniyle 1283'te Khora Manastırı’na çekilen Maksimos Planudes’in burada kurduğu kütüphane, Bizans İmparatorluğu'nun en bilinir politik ve entelektüel figürlerinden şair Theodoros Metokhites tarafından zenginleştirilip yenilendi. Metokhites, kütüphane için “Tüm ölümlülerin kullanımına sunulmuştur’’ dediğinde yıl 1313 idi.

2 asır sonra ise Venedik’ten gelen bir matbaacı, Khora’ya komşu Petra Manastırı’nda Metokhites’in o ünlü hazinesini devralarak, Edirnekapı’ya yeni bir kültür mirası bırakmak üzere kolları sıvayacaktı.  Ermeni matbaacılığında kişisel girişimciliğin de temellerini atan Apkar Tıbir, aynı zamanda Karagümrük’te 16. yüzyılda oluşan Kefe Mahallesi’nin belleğini de oluşturan isimlerin başında yer alacaktı.

This article sets out to rehabilitate the medieval icon as a visual paradigm, seeing it not as a primitive attempt at painterly perspective and the verisimilitude it sought to achieve, but as a sophisticated symbolic system with an entirely different intention, one that will be shown to share the apophatic nature of certain mystical texts. The "inverse perspective" that typifies the icon creates the impression of a figure actively gazing out of the frame at the viewer, calling him or her to witness an intention that is not depicted on the panel but that haunts it from an invisible dimension beyond. Seeing this intention requires the witness to move by means of contemplation beyond the pigment and egg-yolk of the panel toward the archetype. It is this movement that differentiates the icon from an idol, which presents the visible as a full presence with no exit onto alterity. Finally, I hope to show that this distinction between icon and idol is still relevant today, the apophatic movement of the icon providing a valid alternative to our post-modern saturation of visibility.

My paper will discuss the ontological implications of recent developments in Western philosophy of the notion of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere in terms of the social imaginary as noticeable in Paul Ricoeur, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Charles Taylor; the contributions two twentieth century Japanese philosophers, Miki Kiyoshi and Nakamura Yūjirō, make in this regard; and a possible ontology of the imagination one might be able to draw from the above.  Miki shows a connection between the imagination and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō’s theory of place that Nishida had characterized in terms of a self-forming formlessness.  Nakamura—taking off from Miki’s attempts to concretize Nishida’s theory of place in terms of the creative imagination—in turn points back to that connection between imagination and place and explicates it via his development of the Aristotelian notion of common sense (koinē aisthēsis, sensus communis).  Such developments of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere and also in terms of “common sense” is reminiscent of the more recent Western developments of the notion of the notion of the social imaginary or social imagination as found in Ricoeur, Castoriadis, and Taylor, and in particular Castoriadis develops an ontology of the creativity involved in the imagination.  Recalling the fact that Nishida was inspired by the Greek notion of chōra in developing his theory of place, I then suggest that the linking of the imagination with the process of the forming of the formless as well as with place may allow us in turn to understand the imagination in the Greek ontological terms of chōrismos—etymologically related to chōra—as the difference that brings order to chaos by allotting beings, each to its own place.  Imagination as Ein-bildung might then be viewed as the ontological formation that, through differentiation, gives shape, form, to place.

Cette conversation entre Jacques DERRIDA et Richard KEARNEY, inédite en français, s'est tenue à New York le 16 octobre 2001. L'entretien, ici traduit par Thomas Clément MERCIER, est disponible en libre accès dans le premier numéro de la Revue ITER: http://lire-travailler-derrida.org/revue/terreur-et-religion-pour-une-politique-a-venir-dialogue-de-jacques-derrida-avec-richard-kearney/
Dans cet entretien, marqué bien entendu par les attentats dits "du 11 Septembre", l’immédiateté du contexte historique laisse peu à peu la place à une réflexion sur des questions plus larges ayant trait au rapport entre violence, politique et religion. Derrida y marque non seulement la nécessité de négocier, dans l’espace et le temps, entre des instances dont le statut relève des concepts classiques du politique, mais aussi de maintenir une référence à une autre politique et religion à venir. Il propose alors de repenser le politique et le religieux tout autrement, en référence à 'khôra', au-delà des concepts traditionnels de l’État et du droit international, au-delà de la citoyenneté et du cosmopolitisme.

Felsefi metinlerde dişilin izlerini süren Fransız feminist düşünür Luce Irigaray, unutulmuş ve bastı-rılmış öteki öğe olarak annenin, Batı medeniyetinin kurumsal olarak düzenle¬nen tüm pratiklerde bir ön koşul olduğunu iddia eder. Çalışmalarında Platon’a ve onun kavramlarına gönderme yapan Irigaray, sistemin dışına atılmış olan dişilin, eril ve söz merkezli Batı metafiziğin yapısı içerisinde başından beri mevcut olduğu gerçeğini ifşa etmeye çalışır. Bu makalede Irigaray’ın Platon’un Devlet diyaloğundaki mağara benzetmesi, Şölen’deki Diotima (kadın) figürü ve Timaios’taki “khora” kavramına ilişkin yaptığı analizler üzerinden, dişil ve felsefe arasındaki ilişki ile dişilin felsefe tarihindeki bastırılmış/unutulmuş içkin rolü ele alınacaktır.

Plato's Timaeus is a creation story that has baffled and intrigued numerous generations of philosophers. The central section, dubbed by John Sallis the ‘chorology’, deals with the triton genos, a third kind that comes somewhere in between the intelligible eidos and the sensible world. In Jacques Derrida's elaboration, this inbetweenness knits together Platonic metaphysics and also presents its most radical challenge. For this paper, the most interesting thing about the challenge presented by khōra to Platonic metaphysics is the way in which it makes metaphor a ‘bad’ concept in Derrida's terms, but also in the same moment this inscribes something that can only be articulated by the ‘failure’ of a form of catachretic or apophatic rhetoric as this intermediary keystone. Some recent commentators have argued that Derrida failed to fully work through how muthos and logos are related to rhetoric and logic in the Timaeus; this article shows through a careful reading of the ‘chorology’ that this criticism is problematic in the context of Derrida's wider corpus and then goes on to elucidate the challenges presented for the opposition between logic and rhetoric by the odd textual scene of the Timaeus. It argues that this analysis provides a basis to reinterrogate questions of rhetoric and epistemology, and reinvigorate textual and rhetorical analysis in the face of the challenges presented by speculative realism and the idealisation of mathematics.

The concept of a sacred place in spatial language is a phenomenon that transcends the possibilities of univocal phenomenological description. Every individual lives in his own perception of space and time based on at first instinctive and solipsistic encounter of space, to then fill it with different semiotic levels of it. This multilevel and intersystemic development of perception offers a discursive wealth where semiospheres coexist in vivid interactions. Sometimes they are like a palimpsest experience; others are a linguistic emptiness that generates new semiotic meanings. I would like to focus my speech on the concept of Khôra as an impersonal space of power where different forms of expressing what Rudolf Otto called the numen are configured. For this, I will use the concepts presented by Julian Kristeva, Jaques Derrida and Nader El-Bizri to express a bio-semiotic synthesis in the phenomenological experience of historical urban landscapes. Finally, I want to cross the sacred landscape through Alexei Lidov’s concept of “Hierotopy” to invigorate an experience, together with Khôra, where our perception of the landscape increases its meaning iconographically, semiotically and symbolically. Keywords: Khôra, numen, semiosphere, palimpsest, Genius Loci, hierotopy

In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place (basho) and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates—without necessarily completing—his oeuvre. What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendentimmanent- idea-genesis and by implication the Heaven-Earth-dichotomy. I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with. It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world. I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing from a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor, Jürgen Moltmann, and other philosophical and theological sources.