Of course language by the very fact it is language can only say. It also has to have something to say. The question is what can it say or can it say anything any sort of objective truth about the world. It it only because it does have a trace that it can do anything. The problem is the trace cannot be recovered and is under erasure so again we cannot even uncover the trace and never an origin. What I think is significant of the Khora is the idea that there is something that the trace is written on but that doesn't have an identity.

I've read it.

It's a light, sprawling history of the American "postmodernist" academic movement (with a few pointers to its cultural and political aspects), and of the concurrent burial of its source-thinkers in France. Quite entertaining, although nothing in there is news. Philosophically, it's skin-deep; there is almost no exposure of the "postmodern" philosophers' theories, since that's not the point of the book.

I hope that it will be translated into English so that young Theory-loving Americans will no more suppose me to be "sooo lucky because I am able to study philosophy in the country of Postmodernism." Cusset's point is sadly clear: pomo is an American movement, and anything that might look like it in France has been banned by our own brand of conservatives. No Derrida and Deleuze for me at the Sorbonne; dropping their names in a dissertation is the ticket for a straight "E".

I think there is a disconnect. Derrida is trying to show how poetry, philosophy, science anything textual is suspect. Why is it that one text is able to tell us true things about the world and other texts don't. If language is metaphorical and therefore under erasure then all texts are under erasure and not able to stand as more true or representitive. The idea that language is able to represent some reality is niave. Foucault has done a lot of work on showing the idea of representantion is flawed. Since the origin is itself always receeding and is another form of interpretation. We run into Wittgenstein idea of reification. It seems anyone who truely believes in some actual word that is representative of the real is talking metaphysics. I look at george lakoff and his work on metaphores we live by and how we embody the world and even his great work falls to displacement. Let not get to the place we talk of "kicking stones pragmatism" Wittgenstein did a good job of showing that is a niave. Barnaby have you read Blanchot infinte conversations? You may definitely see him as a poet but much like Nietzsche is a poet there is real philosophy in poetry. No doubt Dylan Thomas is a great poet but he is trying to do a different kind of poetry.

1) Every thing that exists has a place.
2) If place exists, then it must have a place.
3) But place can't have a place, therefore it doesn't exist.

Number 2 is perhaps a bit of a problem Wittgenstein would say was a langauge problem. Taking a particular and abstracting a general. But the particular is already stating a general from the start. I don't speak in a vaccum it is the trace of the past that determines the present. So any particular is already imbued with a shared abstraction or it cannot be communicated to myslef or others. But from an understanding of the organisms and Autopoiesis all systems organize their world unconsciously. We have no way of knowing what is underneath it is filtered from the beginning. Maybe it is a bit of Russel's Paradox we are caught in here. But it is metaphysics all the way down.

You bring up very good objections. To answer them: Yes, compassion does have a place - in my hearrt. :)


We are talking place in general. Yes, place in general doesn't have a place any more than any universal must have a specific physical instantiation.

But, what is the experience behind such very good objections which you put forward?

Well first, I would suggest to read John Sallis' Of Chorology on the Timaeus (after, of course, reading Derrida's essay and the Timaeus itself), which would help to link D's discussion to the historical place and problem of its genesis. Second, I would ask myself why Derrida chooses this word at this intersection in the history of philosophy: obviously it is a retrieval of the Platonic myth of origin which allows for both an engagement with the origin of difference and identity and a simultaneous exposure of the weird "site" (neither fully mythological nor theoretical) of the origin. To think the Khora today, here, now . . . What does that mean? What does the unthought within Plato still hold in reserve for us? How are we to (re)-understand the very idea of origin, for instance the anthro-biological origin of language or the cosmological origin of the universe? What if all origins are chorological, what if all of them, in their naming, displace and unsettle and deform the effort to determine them happening in the wake of their "original" blossomings? To think with Derrida, one cannot merely use tropes of non-determination, but rather one must always think in a present which is always under deconstruction. Think, for instance, of the confusions which physicists such as Hawking get into when they wax theological and start talking about "knowing the mind of God." How is the lost khora both granting the possibility of determination and yet confusing all attempts to recover it as origin? How is the history of Plato's determination of origin both functioning and lost in the genesis of such confusions? To make ANY sense of Derrida, his words must be performatively situated in a culture marked by an essential forgetting of abyssal difference as "origin" and an obsessive need to cover over this forgetting with positive programs of ontotheological decision. Philosophy does not take place in a bottle.