Khôra or 'The Great Bifurcation': Discussion with Derrida

There are two ways: the higher way (mystical theology, apophatism [Denys]), and the lower (Timaeus, Khôra [Plato]). Drawing from the debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida at Villanova in 1997, this essay demonstrates the dilemma that constitutes contemporary phenomenology today, at least in France. Far from repeating one way or the other, or demanding that we must choose, a new possibility is opened up here, in which the 'descent into Khôra' defines another figure of God by means of the lower way rather than the higher. It is a 'God made low', close to that of St. Bonaventure or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from whom nothing escapes − including our passions and our drives − that the Motherhood and the Perichoresis of Khôra will come to transform, or at least inhabit.