On the Name

by Jacques Derrida, David Wood (Translator), Thomas Dutoit (Editor)

"The What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gies a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not have, as Plotinus said of the Good. What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?" Jacques Derrida thus poses a central problem in contemporary language, ethics, and politics, which he addresses in a liked series of the three essays. "An Oblique Offering" is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding―which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, raised inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organized around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius. The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word khora in Plato's Tmaeus . Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, khora opens and dislocates, displaces, all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. In addition to readers in philosophy and literature, Khora will be of special interest to those in the burgeoning field of "space studies"(architecture, urbanism, design).

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France

168 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three essays.

First one belabors the relations, contra Kant, of secret, debt, duty in the context of what Bakhtin might refer to as ‘answerability’; here, it’s ‘responsibility,’ and the problem of representation:

Think of the passion of Philoctetus, of Ulysses the oblique—and of the third (terstis), at once innocent witness (testis), actor-participant but also an actor to whom it is given to play a role, instrument and active delegate by representation, that is the problematic child, Neoptolemus. From this point of view responsibility would be problematic to the further extent that it could sometimes, perhaps even always, be what one takes, not for oneself, in own’s own name and before the other (the most classically metaphysical definition of responsibility) but what one must take for another, in his pace, in the name of the other or of oneself as other, before another other, and an other of the other, namely the very undeniable of ethics. (10-11)

So, we can rest assured that that’s cleared up now. (I do think there’s something to the network of relations here and the problem of representation (whether artistic, legal, legislative, whatever), but I don’t know quite what—hell, I don’t even just work here.

The second essay is a mess by even the abysmal standards to which D normally adheres. It’s generally a comment on a citation of Heidegger’s to a Leibniz letter that works over an obscure poet, Silesius, whose metaphors of deserts and whatnot tell us some about negative theology, or something.

Third essay is a close reading of Plato’s Timaeus, and it kicks ass. This is the type of writing for which anyone ever reads Derrida. It takes a marginal section of a marginal Platonist text in order to solicit the foundations of philosophical discourse in general. It’s badass. Am cribbing what follows from something that I posted elsewhere first--

Two precessions of the khora in this text prior to the essay actually on the khora:

In "Passions: An Oblique Offering": "And the secret will remain secret, mute, impassive as the khora, as Khora [sic] foreign to every history, as much in the sense of Geschichte or res gestae as of knowledge and of historical narrative (episteme, historia rerum gestarum), and outside all periodization, all epochalization" (27). so: mute and secret?

In "Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)": "or some khora (body without body, absent body but unique body and place [lieu] of everything, in the place of everything, interval, place [place], spacing. Would you also say of khora, as you were just doing in a murmur, 'save its name' [sauf son nom; safe, its name]?" (56). So: incorporeal?

Point of departure for the khora essay proper is an epigraph by mr. J-P Vernant, regarding how "the mythologist was left with drawing up in conclusion this statement of deficit, and to turn to the linguists, logicians, mathematicians, that they might supply him with the tool he lacked: the structural model of a logic which would not be that of binarity, of the yes and no, a logic other than the logic of the logos" (88). The relevant structuration is accordingly logos/mythos.

The khora fits in as what "goes beyond or falls short of the polarity of metaphorical sense versus proper sense that the thought of the khora exceeds the polarity, no doubt analogous, of the mythos and the logos. [...] the thought of the khora would trouble the very order of polarity, of polarity in general, whether dialectical or not." (92). To 'trouble' something in Derrida is classic 'solicitation,' the shaking of the foundations of a structuration. Here, D solicits the structure of binarism, polarity--which had been the basic assumption of deconstruction hitherto--that things were structured around binaries that might be conveniently solicited by surly deconstructionists. The khora apparently deconstructs deconstruction. That's brainmelty shit. (NB that there are hints elsewhere that deconstruction may not be self-reflexive.)

"Not having an essence, how could the khora be beyond its name? The khora is anachronistic; it 'is' the anachrony within being, or better: the anachrony of being. It anachronizes being" (94).

"Does the thought of khora, which obviously does not derive from the 'logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers,' belong to the space of mythic thought? is the 'bastard' logos which is regulated according to it still a mythos?" (100):

According to Hegel, philosophy becomes serious [...] only from the moment when it enters into the sure path of logic: that is, after having abandoned, or let us rather say sublated, its mythic form: after Plato, with Plato. Philosophical logic comes to its senses when the concept wakes up from its mythological slumber, Sleep and waking, for the vent, consist in a simple unveiling: the making explicit and taking cognizance of a philosopheme enveloped in its virtual potency. The mytheme will have been only a prephilosopheme offered an promised to a dialectical aufhebung. This teleological future anterior resembles the time of a narrative but it is a narrative of the going outside of narrative" (100-01).

This is fairly awesome, the teleological future anterior. What comes when determines what comes when, again? Do we need a prophet of the past to sort that out? (RSB nerds please take note!)

Overall point of the essay is remarkably plain (for a Derrida writing, at least):

Should one henceforth forbid oneself to speak of the philosophy of Plato, of the ontology of Plato, or even of Platonism? Not at all, and there would undoubtedly be no error of principle in so speaking, merely an inevitable abstraction. Platonism would mean, in these conditions, the thesis of the theme which one has extracted by artifice, misprision, and abstraction from the text, torn out of the written fiction of "Plato." Once this abstraction has been supercharged and deployed, it will be extended over the folds of the text, of its ruses, overdeterminations, and reserves, which the abstraction will come to cover up and dissimulate. (119-20)

That's kinda deconstruction in a nutshell. As a conclusion, it is warranted by the essay that precedes it; the khora is something that does not fit in with the standard interpretation of 'platonism' as the synthesis of the parmenidean aletheia and the heraclietean polemos. Instead, the khora is the triton genos that unravels this tidy reading. It is a marginal concept in a marginal portion of a marginal text of Plato; it is classic deconstruction to use this brief interlude as the point at which the entire narrative comes apart, the now standard 'oblique approach.' It is neither sensible nor intelligible; it is neither logos nor mythos. i.e.:

If the cosmo-ontologic encyclopedia of the Timaeus presents itself as 'probable myth,' a tale ordered by the hierarchized opposition of the sensible and the intelligible, of the image in the course of becoming and of eternal being, how can one inscribe therein or situate therein the discourse on khora? It is indeed inscribed there for a moment, but it also has a bearing on a place of inscription, of which it is clearly said that it exceeds or precedes, in an order that is, moreover, alogical and achronic, anachronistic too, the constitutive oppositions of mytho-logic as such, of mythic discourse and of discourse on myth. On the one hand, by resembling an oneiric and bastard reasoning, this discourse reminds us of a sort of myth within the myth, of an open abyss in the general myth. But on the other hand, in giving to be thought that which belongs neither to sensory being nor to intelligible being, neither to becoming nor to eternity, the discourse on khora is no longer a discourse on being, it is neither true nor probable and appears thus to be heterogeneous to myth, at least to mytho-logic, to this philosopho-mytheme which orders myth to its philosophical telos. (113)

The point has been to implode the Timaeus' notion of 'probable myth': "The demiurge formed the cosmos in the image of the eternal paradigm which he contemplates. The logos which relates to these images, to these iconic beings, must be of the same nature: merely probable." (112).

Recommended therefore for merely probable self-mutilators.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THREE ESSAYS BY THE FOUNDER OF “DECONSTRUCTION”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and writer, best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as “Deconstruction.”

The translator notes, “Jacques Derrida’s ‘On the Name’ comprises three essays, which, if taken together, would ‘form a sort of essay on the Name’… In 1993 the three essays simultaneously appeared in France as a ‘Collection’ of three separately bound but matching books published by Editions Galilée. ‘On the Name’…thus is not a translation of any French book title by Jacques Derrida; it is a name given to what is a hypothetical book in France.”

Derrida says in the first essay [‘Passions’], “Some souls believe themselves to have found in Deconstruction …---as if there were one, and only one---a modern form of immorality, of amorality, or of irresponsibility… while others, more serious, in less of a hurry, better disposed toward so-called Deconstruction, today claim the opposite; they discern encouraging signs and in increasing numbers … which would testify to a permanent, extreme, direct, or oblique, in any event, increasingly intense attention, to those things which one could identify under the fine names of ‘ethics,’ ‘morality,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘subject,’ etc.” (Pg. 15)

He continues, “For sure, in saying that (‘And let it not be said too precipitately…’ etc.), one gives ammunition to the officials of anti-deconstruction, but all in all isn’t that preferable to the constitution of a consensual euphoria or, worse, a community of complacent deconstructionists, reassured and reconciled with the world in ethical certainty, good conscience, satisfaction of service rendered, and the consciousness of duty accomplished (or, more heroically still, yet to be accomplished)?” (Pg. 17)

He notes, “I have often found myself insisting of the necessity of distinguishing between literature and belles-lettres or poetry. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom… No democracy without literature, no literature without democracy.” (Pg. 28)

He states, “There is only the edge in language… That is, reference. From the supposed fact that there is never anything but reference, an irreducible reference, one can JUST AS WELL concluded that the referent---everything save the name … is or is not indispensable. All history of negative theology, I bet, plays itself out in this brief and slight axiom.” (Pg. 60)

He concludes the second essay, “Isn’t negative theology… also the most economical formalization? The greatest power of the possible? A reserve of language, almost inexhaustible in so few words? This literature forever elliptical, taciturn, cryptic, obstinately withdrawing, however, from literature, inaccessible there even where it seems to go, the exasperation of a jealousy that passion carries beyond itself; this would seem to be a literature for the desert or for exile. It holds desire in suspense, and always saying too much or too little, each time it leaves you without ever going away from you.” (Pg. 85)

In the final essay, he says, “The violent reversion of which we have just spoken is always interested and interesting. It is naturally at work in this ensemble without limit which we call here ‘the text.’ In constructing itself, in being posed its dominant form at a given moment (here that of the Platonic thesis, philosophy, or ontology), the text is neutralized in it, numbed, self-destructed, or dissimulated: unequally, partially, provisionally.” (Pg. 120-121)

These essays will be of interest to those studying Derrida and the development of his thought.

[Rafael Borrego · Rating 3 out of 5]

🎙️ ¿Qué significa decir “Dios” cuando no sabemos lo que nombra?

Jacques Derrida, en Salvo el nombre, se enfrenta a este enigma.
Dice que el nombre “Dios” no designa una cosa, ni siquiera una divinidad definida. Más bien es el signo de un vacío: cada vez que lo pronunciamos, el lenguaje se hunde en un límite.
La tradición mística cristiana lo había intuido: la teología negativa dice que solo podemos hablar de Dios en negativo, diciendo lo que no es. Y, sin embargo, seguimos diciendo “Dios”.
Para Derrida, el nombre “Dios” no transmite un conocimiento, sino que abre una relación: aparece en la confesión, en la oración, en el testimonio. No nombra nada, pero crea comunidad, funda un vínculo, nos llama a responder.
“Salvar el nombre” significa conservar esa palabra como puerta hacia lo innombrable, no como certeza, sino como apertura.

🎙 ️ Salvo el nombre no es un libro fácil, pero es un viaje fascinante hacia el límite del lenguaje y del pensamiento.
Si quiere descubrir cómo el simple acto de nombrar a Dios puede transformar nuestra relación con el lenguaje, con los demás y con lo imposible, este libro merece su lectura.

[selin ho · Rating 3 out of 5]

one quotation that stuck with me: "The strange difficulty of this whole text lies indeed in the distinction between these two modalities: the true and the necessary. The bold stroke consists here in going back behind and below the origin, or also the birth, toward a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered, and which carries philosophy [...]"

[Mehdi Naqvi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oui, you've been mindfu....

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite Derrida, but to be honest I must say that the middle essay (Sauf le nom) went entirely over my head.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Khora essay is brilliant. My interest in Derrida is currently circulating around his notion of "spacing" (intriguingly close to the time-space of Heidegger's Beitraege) as well as the question of hospitality - pairing this interest with a close reading of the Timaeus is simply too tantalizing.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember the final essay being especially helpful for understanding Derrida's take on things.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yikes! But brilliant.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

second and last essay really hit much love

[Diana Chamma]

On the Name ed. By Thomas Dutoit. Stanford University press. California 1995

| Translating the Name? | by Thomas Dutoit

‘In English the word “surname” still means (and this has even become its primary meaning) the “family name” that follow one’s first, given, or baptismal name, i.e., that follows one’s “pre-name” or prenom as it is called in French. Unlike the English language, the French language, in its modern usage, has not retained this meaning of surnom. (Dutoit, x).’

‘It is necessary to keep “sur-name” instead of “nickname” as noun and verb for surnom and surnommer because in Derrida’s French text their function is too important not to be carried over into English, even though in English they bear a sense not admitted in modern French. (Dutoit, x)’

‘The surname is a repetition (and a forgetting) that conceals the sur-name, itself a repetition. (Dutoit, xi)’

‘tout sauf le nom then would be in English “totally safe the name,” which may be understood in the indicative as “the name is totally safe” or in the subjunctive as “that the name be totally safe.” “Except” for sauf is unfortunate because it loses the signified “safe.” There would seem to be an alternative: to somewhat literary “save” is synonymous with “except.” Thus, sauf le nom would be “save the name,” which could be understood exactly as “except the name.” The danger with “save,” however, is that it sounds like a verb in the imperative mood. In the French sauf le nom, there is no imperative whatsoever. (Dutoit, xiii)’


| Passions: “An Oblique Offering” by J.D. |

‘There is ritual everywhere. Without it, there would be no society, no institutions, no history. Anyone can specialize in the analysis of rituals; it is not therefore a specialty […] Through experience and more or less spontaneously, each one of us can to some degree play the part of an analyst or critic of rituals; no one refrains from it. (POO, 3)’

‘to play a role wherever it may be, one must at the same time be inscribed in the logic of ritual and, precisely so as to perform properly in it, to avoid mistakes and transgressions, one must to some extent be able to analyze it. One must understand its norms and interpret the rules of its functioning. (POO, 3)’

‘It would also be unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty. (POO, 8)’

‘It is insufficient to say that he “ought” [il faut] of friendship, like that of politeness, must not be on the order of duty. It must not even take the form of a rule, and certainly not of a ritual rule. As soon as it yields to the necessity of applying the generality of a prescription to a single case, the gesture of friendship or of politeness would itself be destroyed. It would be defeated, beaten, and broken by the ordered rigidity of rules, or, put a different way, of norms. (POO, 8)’

‘What is at issue is the concept of duty, and of knowing whether or up to what point one can rely on it, on what it structures in the order of culture, of morality, politics, of law, and even of economy (especially as to the relation between dept and duty). (POO, 9)’

‘ “To the further [supplementaire] extent,” we said, but we must go further: in the degree to which responsibility not only fails to weaken but on the contrary arises in a structure which is itself supplementary. It is always exercised in my name as the name of the other, and that in no way affects its singularity. This singularity is posited and must quake in the exemplary equivocality and insecurity of this “as.” (POO, 11)’

‘What returns to your name, to the secret of your name, is the ability to disappear in your name. And thus not return to itself (POO, 13).’

‘The oblique remains the choice of a strategy that is still crude, obliged to ward off what is most urgent, a geometric calculus for diverting as quickly as possible both the frontal approach and the straight line: presumed to be the shortest path from one point to another. (POO, 14)’

‘An invitation leaves one free, otherwise it becomes constraint. It should [devrait] never imply: you are obliged to come, you have to come, it is necessary. But the invitation must be pressing, not indifferent. It should never imply: you are free not to come and if you don’t come, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Without the pressure of some desire—which at once says “come” and leaves, nevertheless, the other his absolute freedom—the invitation immediately withdraws and becomes unwelcoming. (POO, 14)’

‘would it be moral and responsible to act morally because one has a sense of duty and responsibility? Clearly not; it would be too easy and, precisely, natural, programmed by nature: it is hardly moral to be moral (responsible, etc.) because one has the sense of the moral, of the highness of the law, etc.This is the well-known problem of “respect” (POO, 16).’

‘Clearly, it will always be possible to say, and it will be tru. That nonresponse is a response. One always has, one always must have, the right not to respond, and this liberty belongs to responsibility itself, that is, to the liberty that one believes must be associated with it. One must always be free not to respond to an appeal or to an invitation—and it is worth remembering this, reminding oneself of the essence of this liberty. (POO, 17)’

‘If I did respond I would put myself in the situation of someone who felt capable of responding: he has an answer for everything. He takes himself to be up to answering each of us, each question, each objection or criticism; he does not see that each of the texts gathered here has its force, its logic, its singular strategy, that it would be necessary to reread everything, to reconstitute the work and its trajectory, the themes and arguments of each, the discursive tradition and the many texts set to work, etc. (POO, 19)’

‘From these two arguments we can glimpse that a certain nonresponse can attest to this politeness (without rules) of which we spoke above, and finally to respect for others, that is to say, also to an exigency of responsibility. (POO, 19)’

‘a good education teaches children that the must not “answer back” […] when grown-ups speak to them, they must not reproach them or criticize them, and certainly not to ask them questions. (POO, 20).’

‘there is an art of the nonresponse, or of the deferred response, which is a rhetoric of war, a polemical ruse. Polite silence can become the most insolent weapon and the most deadly irony. (POO, 21)’

‘We testify […] to a secret without content, without a content seperable from its performative experience, from its performative tracing. (POO, 24).’

‘There is something secret. But it does not conceal itself. Heterogeneous to the hidden, to the obscure, to the nocturnal, to the invisible, to what can be dissimulated and indeed to what is nonmanifest in general, it cannot be unveiled. It remains inviolable even when thinks one has revealed it. Not that it hides itself forever in an indecipheral crypt or behind an absolute veil. It simply exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling, dissimulation/revelation, night/day, forgetting/anamnesis, earth/heaven, etc. It does not belong to the truth, neither to the truth as homoisis or adequation, not the truth as memory )Mnemosyne, aletheia), nor to the given truth, nor to the promised truth, nor to the inaccessible truth. (POO, 26)’

‘Certainly, one could speak this secret in other names, whether one finds them or gives them to it. Moreoever, this happens at every instant. It remains secret under all names and it is its irreducibility to the very name which makes it secret, even when one makes the truth in its name [fait la verite a son sujet] as Augustine put is originally. (POO, 26).’

‘It is no more in speech than foreign to speech. It does not answer to speech, it does not say, “I the secret,” it does not correspond, it does not answer: either for itself or to anyone else, before anyone or anything whatsoever. (POO, 27)’

‘In place of an absolute secret. There would b the passion. There is no passion without secret, this very secret, indeed no secret without this passion. In place of this secret: there where nevertheless everything is said and where what remains is nothing—but the remainder, not even of literature. (POO, 28).’

‘No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. (POO, 28)’

‘Solitude, the other name of the secret to which the simulacrum still beard witness, is neither of consciousness, nor of the subject, nor of Dasein […] It makes them possible, but what it makes possible does not put an end to the secret. The secret never allows itself to be captured or covered over by the relation to the other, by being-with or by any form of “social bond”. (POO, 30)’



| Sauf Le Nom (Post-Scriptum) by J.D |

‘the extreme and most consequent forms of declared atheism will have always testified to the most intense desire of God? (SLN, 36)’

‘the equivocity of the origin and of the end of such a desire: does it come from God in us, from God for us, from us for God? (SLN, 37)’

‘It remains the trace of a present moment of the confession that would have no sense without such a conversion, without this address to the brother readers: as of this act of confession and of conversion having already taken place between God and him, being as it were written (it is an act in the sense of archive or memory) (SLN, 40)’


‘To become Nothing is to become God
Nothing becomes what is before: if you do not become nothing,
Never will you be born of eternal light. (6:130) (SLN, 43)’

‘deconstruction has often been defined as the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible, of the most impossible, a condition that deconstruction shares with the gift, the “yes,” the “come,” decision, testimony, the secret, etc. And perhaps death. (SLN, 43)’

‘How does negative theology always run the risk of resembling an exercise of translation? (SLN, 47)’

‘what is called “negative theology,” in an idiom of Greco-Latin filiation, is a language, at least, that says, in one mode or another, what we have just specified about language, that is, about itself. How does one leap out of this circle. (SLN, 48)’

‘Negative theology means (to say) very little, almost nothing, perhaps something other than something. Whence its inexhaustible exhaustion … (SLN, 50)’

‘Apophatic statements represents what Husserl identifies as the moment of crisis (forgetting of the full and originary intuition, empty functioning of symbolic language, objectivism, etc.) (SLN, 50)’

‘the unknown God overflows the essence and the divinity, thwarting in this manner the oppositions of the negative and the positive, of being and nothingness, of thing and nothing—transcending all the theological attributes (SLN, 52)’

‘negative theology “consists,” through its claim to depart from all consistency, in a language that does not cease testing the very limits of language, and exemplarily those of propositional, theoretical, or constative language … (SLN, 54)’

‘negative theology would be not only a language and a testing of language, but above all the most thinking, the most exacting, the most intractable experience of the “essence” of language: a discourse on language, a “monologue” […] in which language and tongue speak for themselves (SLN, 54)’

‘ “God” “is” the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language. But the trace of this negative operation is inscribed in and on and as the event (what comes, what there is and which is always singular, what finds in this kénōsis the most decisive condition of its coming or its upsurging.) There is this event, which remains, even if this remnance is not more substantial, more essential than this God, more ontologically determinable than this name of God of whom it is said that he names nothing that is, neither this or that. (SLN, 56)’

‘It is necessary to attempt to think prayer, in truth to test it out (to pray it, if one can say that, and transitively) through this particular prayer, this singular prayer which or toward which prayer in general strains itself. For this particular prayer asks nothing, all the while asking more than everything. It asks God to give himself rather than gifts […] “If you don’t give yourself to me, then you have given nothing.” Which interprets again the divinity of God as gift or desire of giving. And prayer is this interpretation, the very body of this interpretation. (SLN, 56)’

‘But to lose the name is not to attack it, to destroy it or wound it. On the contrary, to lose the name is quite simply to respect it: as name. That is to say, to pronounce it, which comes down to traversing it toward the other, the other whom it names and who bears it. To pronounce it without pronouncing it. To forget it by calling it, by recalling it (to oneself), which comes down to calling or recalling the other (SLN, 58)’

‘But nothing is more illegible than a wound, as well. I suppose that in your eyes legibility and illegibility do not equal two in this place. According to you, it is this trace in any case that becomes legible, renders and renders itself legible: in and on language, that is, at the edge of language … (SLN, 60)’

‘Now the hyperbolic movements in the Platonic, Plotinian, or Neoplatonic style will not only precipitate beyond being or God insofar as he is (the supreme being), but beyond God even as name, as naming, named, or nameable, insofar as reference is made there to some thing. The name itself seems sometimes to be there no longer safe … The name itself seems sometimes to be no longer there, save [sauf, safe] (SLN, 65)’

‘I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology, and even among those texts that apparently do not have, want, or believe they have any relation with theology in general. Negative theology is everywhere, but it is never by itself. In that way it also belongs, without fulfilling, to the space of the philosophical or onto-theological promise that it seems to break [renier]: to record, as we said a moment ago, the referential transcendence of language: to say God such as he is, beyind his images, beyond this idol that being can still be, beyond what is said, seen, or known of him; to respond to the true name of God, to the name which God responds and corresponds beyond the name that we know him by or hear. (SLN, 69)’

‘But for a while now I have the impression that is the idea itself of an identity or a self-interiority of ever tradition (the one metaphysics, the one onto-theology, the one phenomenology, the one Christian revelation, the one history itself, the one history of being, the one epoch, the one tradition, self identity in general, the one, etc.) that finds itself contested as its root. (SLN, 71)’

‘Mount of Olives
Should the Lord’s agony redeem you from your sin,
Your heart must become first a Mount of Olives. (saint Paul, 2:18) (SLN, 72)’

‘If the proper of God is not to have properties (He is everything save what He has) (SLN, 73)’

‘It [abandonment] opens the play of God (of God and with God, of God with self and with creation): it opens a passion to the enjoyment of God:

How one can enjoy God
God is a Unique One; whoever wants to enjoy Him
Must, no less that He, be enclosed in Him. (I: 83)’ (SLN, 79)’

‘The difficulty of the “without” spreads into what is still called politics, morals, or law, which are just as threatened as promised by apophasis. Take the example of democracy, of the idea of democracy to come (neither the Idea in the Kantian sense, nor the current, limited, and determined concept of democracy, but democracy as the inheritance of a promise). Its path passes perhaps today in the world through (across) the aporias of negative theology (SLN, 83).’

‘One can have doubts about it from the moment when the name not only is nothing, in any case is not the “thing” that it names, not the “nameable” or the renowned, but also risks to bind, to enslave or to engage the other, to link the called to him/her to respond even before any decision or any deliberation, even before any freedom. An assigned passion, a prescribed alliance as much as a promise. And still, if the name never belongs originarily and rigorously to s/he who receives it, it also no longer belongs from the very first moment to s/he who receives it, it also no longer belongs from the very first moment to s/he who gives it. (SLN, 84)’



Khôra

‘One cannot even say of it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that. It is not enough to recall that Khôra names neither this nor that, or, that Khôra says this and that. (Khôra, 89)’

‘The oscillation of which we have just spoken is not an oscillation among others, an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two types of oscillation: the double exclusion (neither/ nor) and the participation (both this and that). (Khôra, 91)’

‘It is perhaps because its scope goes beyond or falls short the polarity of metaphorical sense versus proper sense that the thought of the Khôra exceeds the polarity, no doubt analogous, of the mythos and the logos. (Khôra, 92)’

‘They are led astray by retrospective projections, which can always be suspected of being anachronistic. (Khôra, 93)’

‘They always consist in giving form to it by determining it, it which, however, can “offer itself” or promise itself only by removing itself from any determination, from all the marks or impressions to which we say it is exposed: from everything which we would like to give to it without hoping to receive anything from it… (Khôra, 94)’

‘Khôra is not a subject. It is not the subject. Nor the support [subjectile]. The hermeneutic types cannot give form to Khôra except to the extent that, inaccessible, impassive, “amorphous,” and still a virgin, with a virginity that is radically rebellious against anthropomorphism, it seems to receive these types and give place to them. (Khôra, 95)’

‘You will already have noticed that we now say Khôra and not, as convention has always required, the Khôra, or again, as we might have done for the sake of caution, the word, the concept, the significance, or the value of “Khôra.” This is for several reasons, most of which are no doubt already obvious. The definite article presupposes the existence of a thing, the existent Khôra is that this name does not designate any of the known or recognized or, if you like, received types of existent, received by philosophical discourse, that is, by the ontological logos which lays down the law in the Timaeus: Khôra is neither sensible nor intelligible. There is Khôra; one can even ponder its physis and its dynamis, or at leasr ponder these in a preliminary way. But what there is, there, is not; and we will come bak later to what this there is can give us to think, this there is, which, by the way, gives nothing in giving place or in giving to think, whereby it will be risky to see in it the equivalent of an es gibt, of the es gibt which remains without a doubt implicated in every negative theology, unless it is the es gibt which always summons negative theology in its Christian history. (Khôra, 96)’

‘if we say Khôra and not the Khôra, we are still making a name out of it. A proper name, it is true, but a word, just like any common name, a word distinct from the thing or the concept. Besides, the proper name appears, as always, to be attributed to a person, in this case to a woman. Perhaps to a woman; indeed, to a woman. Doesn’t that aggravate the risks of anthropomorphism against which we wanted to protect ourselves? […] However, if Khôra indeed presents certain attributes of the word as proper name, isn’t that only via its apparent reference to some uniqueness […] ([…] and that is indeed how we understand it; there is only one, however divisible it be), the referent or this reference does not exist. (Khôra, 96-7)’