What "is" the differance?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Derrida's descriptions of khora and differance superficially appear to be like Wilber's description of consciousness per se in Integral Spirituality (Shambhala, 2007). For example Wilber says in Chapter 2:

"This happens to fit nicely with the Madhyamaka-Yogachara Buddhist view of consciousness as emptiness or openness. Consciousness is not anything itself, just the degree of openness or emptiness, the clearing in which the phenomena of the various lines appear (but consciousness is not itself a phenomena—it is the space in which phenomena arise)" (66).

Compare with this from Deconstruction in a Nutshell (Fordham UP, 1997):

“But something like khora is 'indeconstructible' not because she/it is a firm foundation, like a metaphysical ground or principle... Rather her indeconstructibility arises because she is...the space in which everything constructible and deconstructible is constituted, and hence...older, prior, preoriginary. Far from being a likeness to the God of the monotheisms...[it] is better compared to...the incomparable, unmetaphorizable, desert-like place without properties or genus....which is not be to confused with the Eternal, Originary Truth...of the intelligible paradigms above” (97-8).

I went into an exploration of Wilber's use of CPS on pages 4 and 5 of the IPN thread, how I think he uses the distinction metaphysically. So let's see how Derrida might be different. “Let us then, like the fool...ask 'what' differance 'is,' in a nutshell....[it] doesn't 'mean' anything at all” (99). After that quote Caputo launches into a discussion of linguistics, about how any word can only be defined in context with other words, and how that definition will change depending on the context of different words around it. In that sense meaning is all within relative context, and yet that differential between meanings, that space or interval in which meaning takes place, is itself not part of the context or meaning. Thus there is not one “essential” meaning of any word because it is contextualized within this play of differences, the play itself being a groundless ground in which meaning takes place.

This seems different than Wilber's metaphysical ground wherein all forms arise. The latter seems much more like Plato's archetypal realm of Ideal forms that step down into the sensible world and “in”form it. Granted Wilber doesn't see them as “pre-formed” but rather much more amorphous involutionary and morphogenetic “potentials.” Still, it seems this is part of the involutionary versus evolutionary dualistic scheme with one side being origin and absolute, with the other being result and relative. Derrida's differant khora is both outside and within that duality, not taking sides, as it were, but providing the stage upon which they play out their differences and similarities.

“He does not stake out the ground of a higher principle but concedes a certain an-arche at the bottom of our principles. Derrida is not denying that we have 'principles' or 'truth'.... He is just reinscribing our truth and principles in the an-arche of differance, attaching to them a co-efficient of 'contingency.' For the only 'necessity' he acknowledges is the necessity that precedes all oppositions...inscribing them in a vast and meaning-less receptacle called differance. This is why you cannot ask what differance 'is,' for its 'meaning' or 'truth'....[it] but points a mute, Buddhist finger at the moon” (102).

This differant khora is thus a way to keep meaning open so that it doesn't become fixed and rigidified. All possibilities reside therein so that different contexts as yet unseen will provide new meaning. It requires that we are ceaselessly pushing out boundaries and testing our limits, boldly going where no one—except perhaps Jean Luc and crew—have gone before.

Or maybe those Buddhists to whom Wilber refers? Balder and Bonnitta have made the case for a similar type of open, groundless ground that is in Dzogchen. Maybe so. And that perhaps Wilber, while using that Buddhism, still retains some metaphysics in his interpretation?

[kelamuni]

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[xibalba]

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[Edward theurj Berge]

One can read Derrida's essay "For love of Lacan" at this link.

[kelamuni]

nice exegesis, monsieur. i love it when you croak froggy to me. hahaha.

xibalba said:

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[xibalba]

Mes hommages, Monsieur

what about the "Otherness of the Other" ?

as a classical Heidegger-Lacan dandy would express.

hahahhah

kelamuni said:

nice exegesis, monsieur. i love it when you croak froggy to me. hahaha.

xibalba said:

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[xibalba]

Hi Kela

What is your opinion of the book of Bernard Faure "cutting across buddhist and western discourse".

I was rather disappointed. I found the whole rethoric to be sort of too elementary in its overall argumentation, and the choice of the representative figures not too "helpful". I was left with a sense of a lack of substantial depths.

kelamuni said:

nice exegesis, monsieur. i love it when you croak froggy to me. hahaha.

xibalba said:

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[xibalba]

oops
discourses with a s of course

 

xibalba said:

Hi Kela

What is your opinion of the book of Bernard Faure "cutting across buddhist and western discourse".

I was rather disappointed. I found the whole rethoric to be sort of too elementary in its overall argumentation, and the choice of the representative figures not too "helpful". I was left with a sense of a lack of substantial depths.

kelamuni said:

nice exegesis, monsieur. i love it when you croak froggy to me. hahaha.

xibalba said:

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I referenced this book, Shadow of Spirit, in another thread. Chapter 19 fits in this thread: "Woman and space according to Kristeva and Irigary" by Phillipa Berry. A few excerpts with perhaps comments later.

"One way in which Heidegger’s emphasis upon openness and the clearing has left its mark in the work of Kristeva and Irigaray is through their shared interest in a highly ambiguous spatial category which was used by Plato, but which also has evident affinities with the pre-Socratic thought that so fascinated Heidegger: the category of chora" (255).

"In deciding to focus upon this particular Platonic term, Kristeva was apparently rejecting a post-Platonic philosophical emphasis upon ideas in a fascination with the absence of form, or with that emptiness which precedes but is the necessary precondition of all forms of representation. This emphasis, while derived from Plato, has clear affinities with pre- Socratic thought: specifically, with the emphasis upon a primordial void or apeiron,found in the thought of Pythagoras and Anaximander" (256).

"She may have been thinking of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism in particular, for these systems place great emphasis upon the attainment of a paradoxical, non-dual model of knowledge which is also a knowledge of emptiness; this illumination coincides with the discovery of the illusory nature of the subject–object dichotomy. In this context, the void (sunyata) is identified with ‘absolute reality’ and held to contain all dualities and polarities; specifically, to unite the opposites of form and emptiness. It should be noted here that this fullness of the Buddhist void seemingly approximates more to a Derridean différance than to a Hegelian Aufhebung or sublation of difference" (258).

[kelamuni]

faure's book appears to have been written for the nonspecialist. when doing this kind of exegesis at that kind of level there is the risk that one can come off as sounding trite or even ridiculous. kinda dangerous. when writing at this level one should at least offer one's readers some new insights into the material. kinda patronizing otherwise. his approach may not translate well into this type of book.

xibalba said:

Hi Kela

What is your opinion of the book of Bernard Faure "cutting across buddhist and western discourse".

I was rather disappointed. I found the whole rethoric to be sort of too elementary in its overall argumentation, and the choice of the representative figures not too "helpful". I was left with a sense of a lack of substantial depths.

kelamuni said:

nice exegesis, monsieur. i love it when you croak froggy to me. hahaha.

xibalba said:

Sure, Sir, Lacan had a major influence on the works of Derrida and the semiotic philosopher Julia Kristeva. They used to attend his seminars at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" during the early 60ies. So little of his works is yet translated into English because his son-in-Law, the "nasty" Jacques-Alain Miller, is in charge of his legacy and this dude is keeping the "treasure" out of reach of the looker as the dragon of the tales. Ridiculous, mostly for business, money and prestige of course!

 

Well going back to Khora as the locus of "Otherness", it is the deep narcirssistic desire of jouissance of the analyst according to Lacan, the unconscious of course. It is like the place where a "semblance" of anarchic dissemination appears as discourse of the "Other" of the analyst . Thats´s complicated  lacanian aphoriristic talk. Remember there are three orders, real, imaginary and symbolic,  joined together as borromean knots. And in the semiotic deference of primary process as symbolized by the complex play of methonymic surjection in the discourse in the analysand´s speech, the semblance of elements belonging to so called secondary process assemblage of signifiers arises as symptom to Lacan and not as symbolic transferance awaiting the moment of interpretation by the analyst as it is too often naively told in ego-psychology circles. Gee I don´t know how to put that lacanian trash together in Angais. ahahhaha. But it is anarchism in the sense, as symptom, always radical to  constitutive  phallocentrism or logocentrism for Derrida.

 

Here is something I found, I am not especially impressed by its english formulation of lacanian "gibberish" but:

"Julia Kristeva deploys the term as part of her analysis of the difference between the semiotic and symbolic realms, in that Plato's concept of "khora" is said to anticipate the emancipatory employment of semiotic activity as a way of evading the allegedly phallocentric character of symbolic activity (signification through language), which, following Lacan, is regarded as an inherently limiting and oppressive form of praxis. More recently, Derrida uses "khôra" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. For Derrida, "khôra" defies attempts at naming or either/or logic which he attempts to "deconstruct".

Following Derrida, the american professor of humanities John Caputo describes khôra as: "neither present nor absent,active or passive, the good nor evil, living nor nonliving - but rather atheological and nonhuman - khôra is not even a receptacle. Khôra has no meaning or essence, no identity to fall back upon. She/it receives all without becoming anything, which is why she/it can become the subject of neither a philosopheme nor mytheme. In short, the khôra is tout autre [fully other]..."

Gee, fucking frogs!!!

And what about KW and his love of rigid frames?

His entire fulcrum theory is mainly derived from the synthetic work of Otto Kernberg, a blend of american ego-psychology trash of Hartmann (reactionary according to Lacan), kleinian object-relation theory and Kohut´s self-psychology?

so Lacan isnogood for him

ahaahahah

 

 

 

kelamuni said:

xibalba. if i take you right, you are saying that derrida is continuing the ideas of freud and lacan is the link. how does all of this relate to the idea of the khora, anarchism, and so on? is the khora the unconscious? i sometimes feel like i am missing something and that you understand that component i am missing.

[xibalba]

Ciao Kela

 

Yes, I am not so particularly pleased with Bernard Faure actually. I have read a couple of books of him. What do you think of these one  "unmasking Buddhism" (to me a better work) and "the rethoric of immediacy" on Chan Buddhism which I didn´t like so much. There is something with the metodology he used that is sort of "annoying" me even if he was inspired by  Bourdieu´s "origin and practice of the religious field".

 

I

[Edward theurj Berge]

In the referenced chapter above Berry notes that both Kristeva and Irigaray's concern is to explore the space between the secular and sacred--and the inner and outer, and all opposition, for that matter--a theme being explored in the Habermas thread. It is in these gaps that K and I find the feminine as empty space itself. And both do so from a reading of Heidegger's later notion of the Abgrund, the groundless ground of nothingness and openness within the clearing of Lichtung. H notes that Lichtung is an "open center" in the midst of opposition and from which that latter depend, but is itself not part of that categorization. (Also discussed in the Levin threads.) The center is aka alterity "in the midst" and considered sacred. And it is this meaning that K and I carry into their chora.

"Thus rather than simply representing the repressed opposite term either of idealist philosophy or of social reality, Kristeva argued that chora is always asymmetrically ‘other’ to what Lacan called the symbolic order – that is, to any philosophic, cultural or social construct" (256).

Within this feminine space resides an ecstasy which breaks all boundaries while bonding all manifestation in love. They emphasize its sacred, feminine embodiment which grounds the spatial (and the spiritual) in the temporal (and the earthly) flesh. Hence, that empty space between a woman's legs is indeed the portal in which we experience ecstasy and for a moment, at least, dissolve all boundaries in the throes of love. Holy, wholly, holey indeed.

[Edward theurj Berge]

In my comments to a fractal video Balder posted I showed some correlations between deconstructive and fractal iteration. I found an article by Katherine Hayles called “Chaos as orderly disorder” wherein she says:

“Derrida's deconstructive methodology is strikingly similar to the mathematical techniques
of chaos theory. Recall that Feigenbaum attributed the universal element in chaotic systems to
the fact that they were generated from iterative functions. He showed that for certain functions,
individual differences in the equations are overwhelmed as iteration proceeds, so that even though
the systems become chaotic, they do so in predictable or regulated ways. Derrida claims that his
iterative methodology is similarly regulated, in the sense that its production of undecidables is
not a capricious exercise but a rigorous exposition of the text's inherent indeterminacies.
For both Derrida and Feigenbaum, iterative methodology is closely tied in with the concept of
the fold. Feigenbaum showed that systems which make orderly transitions to chaos always have
folds in their iterative paths. Within the complex regions created by these folds, orbits wander
in unpredictable ways. Where does this unpredictability come from? Since the iterative formulae
and computer programs that enact them are perfectly deterministic, it could only come from the
initial conditions. Iteration produces chaos because it magnifies and brings into view these initial
uncertainties. Similarly, Derrida attributes textual indeterminacy to the inherent inability of
linguistic systems to create an origin. In Derrida, the fold marks the absence of an origin, just
as the inability to specify initial conditions with infinite accuracy marks the onset of chaos for
Feigenbaum. Thus nonlinear dynamics and deconstruction share not just a general attitude toward
chaos, but specific methodologies and assumptions.”

In noting the differences between the above iterations she says:

“Where deconstructionists see an apocalyptic break with logocentrism, scientists are likely to think of their work as a continuation of what went before. To a deconstructionist, to say someone is a recuperator is a damning comment; for most scientists recuperation is not an issue, because they see their work as enhancing rather than discrediting traditional scientific paradigms.”

If one reads the thread they will see this is not the case, particularly this post above.