A book has to come to an end. There is a need for a conclusion. The thought that I pursue resists such endings. Therefore reflections that I have done cannot have closures. They remain open. They live in their readings. In this sense, they are parasitical. They cannot come to end. Their endings/ ends continue in the readers. They are open endings. They cannot be closed because meaning comes only in the reading. The reader disseminates their meanings but they too remain open without reaching the final closure. They are marked by what Derrida calls deference which reminds us of difference and delay in the arrival of meaning. But the readings that one does are not a throw of dice. They are not arbitrary. They have an incessant flow of their own. Such readings are made possible by the Khora. They do not end on one side the two poles of either/ or logic. They do not believe in the logic of Aristotle. They transgress his logic as well as its dialectical closures. They also transgress his dictum that says that virtue stands in the middle. They are excessive. There is always a surplus meaning that is always left as Paul Ricoeur would tell us. This surplus meaning resists any closure.
This is why they cannot be domesticated. They are not master narratives nor the narratives of the masters. They embrace every reader without any discrimination. They are democratic that is why they are open to the readings to come. They are also waiting for the readers to come. They are not infantile texts that infantilize/ silence the readers by imposing a singularized monarchic reading. They remain as Derrida would say undecidable. Thus, they always stay on the threshold never really going all way down to closure. They are always on the way never fully reaching their destinations. They remain in their coming. They do not have the safety and security of a home. They are not coming home in the Heideggerian sense. They keep moving in different directions and ride with different readers.
The texts that I am talking about give up the dialectical impulse and embrace dialogical pulsations. It is this closure of dialecticism and opening of the dialogical that keeps them open and welcoming. They do not oppose or place binaries that privilege one leg of a polarity. That is one-legged thinking. We have been thinking about one leg for a long time. It is now time to think on both legs. The dialogical approach stands on both the legs while the dialectical although in Hegel cancels and keeps polarities at a new level of sublation and appears to stand on both legs is finally abandoning both legs and is standing on its head as Karl Marx would tell us. The texts in our way of thinking are affirmative. They do not oppose or negate. To oppose would be to endorse the power of closure of the dialectical logic.
They place everything side by side. They are not linear and vertical although they follow grammar and principles of legibility. They follow a logic that is horizontal and rhizomatic and shun aside the vertical and tap root thinking/ one-legged thinking. This is why they are not bothered with the prefix and postfix. They have no fix at all. They open and keep opening a world to their readers. The dialogue and therefore bring about the fusion of horizons taught to us by H. G Gadamer. But this fusion of horizons is not the final one. There are many more to come as other readers populate the texts. They are always haunted by their closures and in a way carry their closures with them but remain in a chaosmic condition/ uneasy condition as they welcome and embrace their readers. This is why the texts embody a kind of irreducibility that resists all reductive endings.
There is a kind of open reading that I encourage the readers to embrace. Readers, as well as writers, remain haunted by Aristotle. We like his hylomorphism and either/ or logic. The writer attempts to imprison his ideas in the singular forms of the phonetic-idiographic writings while the reader tries to set the singularized ideas free from their alphabetic cages/ prisons. In doing this, Aristotle would say that we are faithful to his principle of matter and form. Besides, we think through either/ or the structure of his logic. Either/ or thinking promotes a monologue. It is monarchical and privileges one side over the other side. We have to give up the spectres of Aristotle that are haunting us.
As Christians, we have to follow the logic of Christ. The logic of Christ is not monologic. It is dialogic and better still polylogic. It is not opposing the divine and human in Jesus and admitting only one side. Such admissions on one side have been greeted as heresies of Docetism that privilege his divinity. We also cannot privilege only the humanity of Jesus and render him only as one of our human heroes. We do have traces of Docetism in our theologies. Docetism haunts our theologies at many levels. We cannot oppose Athens and Jerusalem as Tertullian did. We need to embrace Athens and Jerusalem and come to Chalcedon that embraced the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why we have to embrace the hermeneutics of hyphenation. This hermeneutics is dialogical and keeps everything into its embrace.
It is in this spirit of the hermeneutics of hyphenation that the texts are written. They are using what may be called the logic of Khora. This logic does not close on one pole of a polarity. It leaves all poles in a denegated condition. It is an affirmative logic that says yes. By juxtaposing all polarities side by side it opens us to new readings that resist closures. It takes us to what Derrida calls the impossible that we cannot see coming. It may disconcert us as well as comfort us. However, we have never let off the hook. They may deconstruct us and open us to new horizons. We are not chasing a closed horizon that we can anticipate. Such a closed horizon closes on us and our thought and vision are constricted. We enter the impossible, the zone of the divine. It will bring us to things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard. It will enable us to live by faith and not by sight.