Critical Realist ontology and Bhaskar's dialectic

Critical realists (following Bhaskar)Footnote ⁹ argue that IR theorists have for the most part either followed a positivist approach in theorising or fallen into the trap of an epistemic fallacy by conflating ontology with epistemology in the sense that ‘only that which can be known can exist.’ Instead, critical realists argue that there is a reality ‘out there’, even if humanity did not know it. In Bhaskar's terms, we have ‘intransitive’ objects that are independent of, and transcend human knowledge of them.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, reality is made up of transitive and intransitive objects, with only the former contextually dependent on human knowledge. Critical realists seek to reinstate to intransitive objects – that is, ontological entities – their due role in IR theory. Yet this should not lead us to an ontological fallacy which fails to recognise ‘the constructional role of discursive elements in relation to ontology, (and thus the discursive relativity of social ontologies and ontological features)’, and which insists ‘on the search for ontological features independent of discursive knowledge.’Footnote ¹¹

Is it possible to avoid simultaneously both the epistemic and ontological fallacies? Yet, why do we feel obligated to avoid these fallacies in the first place? Perhaps, we can also ask: Is it possible to sustain both ‘fallacies’ and that instead of having an ‘either-or’ situation we might have a ‘both-and’ situation? Is it possible to fall neither in the ontological fallacy nor the epistemic fallacy and perhaps accept bits of both at the same time, that is, a situation of ‘neither-nor’ and ‘both-and’? This line of questioning is definitely not logical if one adheres to the logic of inquiry that rejects contradictions as unacceptable, as illogical.

The ‘logic’ behind rejecting something as being a ‘fallacy’ is at stake here. Perhaps what conventionally counts as fallacy is instead a source of deep insight that, if adequately rethought, might help us conceptualise better social theory as a discourse. This indeed is the task, or at least motivation, of this article. Instead of rejecting this or that ‘fallacy’, I argue, following Derrida, that we need to deconstruct the conventional either-or logic underpinning the notion of fallacy by showing how under a more generalised logic of ‘neither-nor’ and ‘both-and’ – a logic that combines both mutual exclusion and participation – we would not have to and cannot prioritise ontology over epistemology, or vice versa for that matter. We need a different logic, a logic that does not from the outset reject contradictions and where, more generally, aporias do have a role to play. In such a logic, contradictions, paradoxes, inconsistencies, and aporias could be thought of as constitutive of conceptuality, argumentation, and the discourse. Bhaskar's thinking on the possibility of naturalism in social theory, which has since 1993 radically changed, seems to provide a step in the right direction toward such a generalisation of the logic behind our thinking on ontology.

Rejecting what he termed as dogmatic ontological monovalence,Footnote ¹² that is, taking positive ontological entities as foundations, Bhaskar asserts that ‘negativity is constitutively essential to positivity … Non-being is a condition of possibility of being.’Footnote ¹³ Bhaskar argues that ‘non-being exists’ and that ‘non-being has ontological priority over being’.Footnote ¹⁴ Bhaskar hence considers real determinate absence, or, as he also terms it, absenting absence and negativity, as a foundational property of the ontological status of reality itself.Footnote ¹⁵ This makes reality one where ‘negativity is a condition of positive being.’Footnote ¹⁶

Although Dialectic Critical Realism is to some extent the state of the art in Bhaskar's approach, it has yet to find its way into the discourse of IR critical realists, give or take a very casual reference here and there.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet Bhaskar has intended to generalise and deepen his approach to social science – the 1979 possibility of naturalism – with his dialectical critical naturalism,Footnote ¹⁸ which makes negativity or the absenting absence as the ground for everything else. This raises a serious problem for critical realists who still advocate (positive) ontology. It indeed would mean that what comes first (that is, a positive ontology) is not really first after all. It is missing something, which, because it is missing, is not ontological, since we are talking about ontology as a first ground. Ontology in the 1993 sense of Bhaskar, as origin, is thus not originary enough for it needs something else – a non-being – to be as such. Non-being is constitutive of being and is its ground of ontological existence as such.

Yet Bhaskar is still falling prey to a serious problem – that of resorting to the thinking mode of negative theology (of sorts). While Dialectic Critical Realism is not a negative theology per se, it however shares some of the dangers and weaknesses that negative theology falls prey to. I next summarise the general contours of negative theology and then present Derrida's deconstruction of it.

The mode of negative theology and the logic of ‘without’

Negative theology is a mode of thinking and speaking – or, more appropriately, of how to avoid thinking and speaking – about God, without falling into the error of ‘naming something one actually brings into existence, something which has nothing to do with the Unnameable.’Footnote ¹⁹ Negative theology seeks to deny ‘every analogy between God and ordinary beings.’Footnote ²⁰ In doing so, it ends up always rejecting any linguistic or otherwise description of God as being inadequate such as opposing the naming of God, all in the name of God. The only path which is left as a way of speaking and thinking of God is negation. Critics charge that negative theology is nihilistic, empty speech, that it defeats the purpose of speech, and that ‘the pushing of negations to their hyperbolic limit, the compounding of the negations of negations ends up, in Hegelian style, at God or some kind of asymptote, as the guarantor of negativity leading to truth.’Footnote ²¹

Negative theology is one example of a general mode of thinking and speaking wherein we speak of what the thing cannot be or is not. The thing in itself is thus a pure transcendental, extra-linguistic, and cannot be appropriated through any discourse or language. The claims that this mode makes by negating them are everything that the thing in itself cannot be. This leads to major conceptual, logical, and linguistic difficulties since ‘every claim to the “things themselves” is a claim within and by means of the resources of certain semi-systems, linguistic and otherwise, situated within the framework of a complex set of contextual presuppositions which can never be saturated.’Footnote ²² Negative theology has as a result become ‘a reserve of language, almost inexhaustible in so few words.’Footnote ²³ The literature of negative theology thus ‘holds desire in suspense, and always saying too much or too little, each time it leaves you without ever going away from you.’Footnote ²⁴ Much of the controversy on/in negative theology revolves around the issue of whether by stating that God is a Being that is beyond beings negative theology ends up jeopardising the very ‘negativeness’ that it uses to define its own discourse. This is the issue that Derrida sought to address in his deconstruction of negative theology, and, more generally, the via negativae in any discourse.

Derrida's line of attack addresses the core question of ‘how to avoid speaking?’ Because speaking, writing, and thinking are all expressed in a language and because language always precedes us, this leads Derrida to conclude that ‘at the moment when the question “how to avoid speaking?” is raised and articulates itself in all its modalities – whether in rhetorical or logical forms of saying, or in the simple fact of speaking – it is already, so to speak, too late.’Footnote ²⁵ One has already spoken, if only to affirm that one is not speaking. Derrida makes it clear that ‘there cannot be an absolutely negative discourse: a logos necessarily speaks about something; it cannot avoid speaking of something; it is impossible for it to refer to nothing.’Footnote ²⁶

How can negative theology then pretend to be speaking of ‘not speaking of God and of the beyond of being’ even if it portrays these as unspeakable? Negative theology seeks to negate and instead ends up denegating its negative discourse, thereby affirming its discourse. When negative theology engages in a ‘sweet rage against language’, when it shows a ‘jealous anger of language within itself and against itself’, when it demonstrates a ‘passion that leaves the mark of a scar in that place where the impossible takes place’,Footnote ²⁷ this amounts to a ‘wounded, breached, auto-deconstructing’ discourse which is nothing but an affirmative end, an end that is affirmed and not negated.Footnote ²⁸ This makes negative theology fall prey to the logic of the double bind of negation/denegation. On the one hand, negating the name of God, and, on the other hand, simultaneously negating everything else except the name God. Not surprisingly, negative theology is thus a positive onto-theology – it refuses to positively attribute determinations to God but only as a way of affirming a super-essentiality of God.Footnote ²⁹ Negative theology seeks to negate without negating and to affirm without affirming. There are thus, says Derrida, two movements within the discourse of negative theology:

This logic of ‘without’ is what makes it possible for negative theology to always say ‘too much or too little’ and to leave ‘you without ever going away from you.’Footnote ³¹ The logic of ‘without’ is best represented in the simultaneously negative and affirmative meaning that the term without is given in the following statements on God by St. Augustine: ‘God is wise without wisdom’; God is ‘good without goodness’; God is ‘powerful without power.’ What is the effect of this logic of ‘without’ that seems to empty out the meaning of terms all the while affirming them, but yet without completely turning them into empty signifiers?

Derrida argues that the ‘without’ in St. Augustine's statements ‘does not merely dissociate the singular attribution from the essential generality: wisdom as being-wise in general, goodness as being-good in general, power as being-powerful in general.’Footnote ³² The strange logic of ‘without’ ‘does not only avoid the abstraction tied to every noun and to the being implied in every essential generality.’Footnote ³³ What also happens is that ‘in the same word and in the same syntax’, the ‘without’ acts so that ‘it transmutes into affirmation its purely phenomenal negativity.’ The logic of ‘without’ seeks to account for what ‘the principle of the good’ which not only is beyond being, but also simultaneously ‘transcends the good.’ We thus get a notion of God as ‘the good that transcends the good and the being that transcends being.’Footnote ³⁴

In the logic of ‘without’ there seems to be ‘a principle of demultiplication of voices and discourse, of disappropriation and reappropriation of utterances, with the most distant appearing closest, and vice versa.’Footnote ³⁵ The logic of ‘without’ has not only ‘the negative force of depriving or denying words of their old meanings but also the positive force of repeating or re-inscribing their old meanings in new ones.’Footnote ³⁶ Derrida explains that:

The logic of ‘without’ is characterised by three main features. First, although there is no repetition of meaning without change, it is also true that no change could completely eradicate the trace of previous meanings. There is always a process of simultaneous iteration and change. As put by Bradley, ‘every word or thing … is without itself, that is, in a process of play between its old body and an entirely new other.’Footnote ³⁸ Second, Derrida explains that the without ‘marks neither a privation, a lack nor an absence … it has the double and ambiguous meaning of what is above in a hierarchy, thus both beyond and more. God (is) beyond Being but as such is more (being) than Being: no more being and being more than Being: being more.’Footnote ³⁹ This is expressed in French as ‘plus d'être’. Third, the logic of ‘without’ is neither one of reversing a meaning to its opposite, nor one of double negation which takes us back to the original term. Nor is it one of Hegelian dialectic sublation that progresses towards a higher notion. The logic of ‘without’ is a sort of a tripartite negation of ‘without without without’, ‘step without step’, ‘not without not’, (‘pas sans pas’);Footnote ⁴⁰ it is ‘a negativity without negativity [sans sans sans]’;Footnote ⁴¹ it is a ‘conjunction-disjunction.’Footnote ⁴²

Negative theology tries to escape the logic of ‘without’, which always breaches and ruptures its discourse, by attempting to eject the ‘transcendental’ from the front door but only to bring it from the back door in a even more ‘purified’ or ‘essentialised’ version, in the form of a super-essentiality, thereby practicing a logic of contraband against its own discourse. Deconstruction seeks to save negative theology from seeking such a closure,Footnote ⁴³ that is, saving negative theology from the ultimate goal of negative theology. The solution consists in moving negative theology from the logic of contraband to a grammatology that would inscribe it and exceed it without return.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is what Derrida suggests through a reading of Plato's Timaeus from which he takes the notion of khôra (receptacle), but as expected, by displacing it into a sort of general khôra. Derrida's purpose in deconstructing negative theology is neither to negate it, nor to jettison it, nor is it to affirm it. The goal is to probe into the presuppositions and conditions of possibility and limitations of the discourse of negative theology.

Khôra qua receptacle

Plato's Timaeus presents khôra as neither being a form nor a sensible thing. Rather, it is the place wherein ‘the demiurgeFootnote ⁴⁵ impresses or cuts images of the intelligible paradigms, the place which was already there, which, while radically heterogeneous with the forms, seems to be as old as the forms.’Footnote ⁴⁶Khôra, termed as a place of a third kind, belongs ‘neither to becoming, nor to non-being (the khôra is never described as a void), nor to Being.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The khôra is quite unique in its singularity for it defies our common sense of thinking and speaking of ‘things’ in this world, as either ideal or material. Neither does ‘is’ apply to it, nor can it be used with khôra, nor does its logical opposite ‘is not’ apply to khôra either. ‘This nonbeing cannot but be declared, that is, be caught or conceived, via the anthropomorphic schemas of the verb to receive and the verb to give’, says Derrida.Footnote ⁴⁸Khôra is not ‘a support or a subject which would give place by receiving or by conceiving, or indeed by letting itself be conceived’, states Derrida.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nor is khôra a sort of super-sensible that can be referred to through a play of metaphors. The discourse of/about khôra is neither a metaphor nor does it deploy metaphors as logical or rhetorical tools. Khôra is a Greek word. Yet khôra, as used in Plato's Timaeus, does not have a meaning (at least not in the usual sense of the term meaning). Khôra is a receptacle, but one which is radically different from the usual sense of the term. Having no meaning in itself, no essence, and no identity, it nonetheless ‘receives all without becoming anything.’Footnote ⁵⁰

If khôra is a receptacle, does this make khôra a location, a place? Are we speaking of ‘a place of a place’? Derrida argues that ‘khôra is over there but more “here” than any “here”.’Footnote ⁵¹ In arguing so, Derrida is in fact displacing the meaning of ‘place’ as we are accustomed to using the word in a positive (or even negative) sense.Footnote ⁵² Derrida explains that this ‘place’ ‘is not that in which is found a subject or an object. It is found in us.’Footnote ⁵³ However, khôra ‘will always already be occupied, invested, even as a general place, and even when it is distinguished from everything that takes place in it.’Footnote ⁵⁴Khôra, not a place, ‘marks a place apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetric relation to all that which, “in herself”, beside or in addition to herself, seems to make a couple with her.’Footnote ⁵⁵ If khôra is always occupied, can we temporally ‘distinguish’ khôra from what occupies it? Derrida proposes that ‘in order to think khôra, it is necessary to go back to a beginning that is older than the beginning, namely, the birth of the cosmos, just as the origin of the Athenians must be recalled to them from beyond their own memory.’Footnote ⁵⁶ This implies that khôra is neither historical nor temporal. Although there is khôra, ‘nothing happens through it and nothing happens to it’ in time, in history, which makes it completely absent from historical change and not an agent of historical change; it is ahistorical and atemporal.Footnote ⁵⁷

Does the khôra have any determination at all? According to Plato ‘khôra is “amorphous”’ at the level of its ‘beingness’Footnote ⁵⁸ since the very ‘beingness’ of khôra is neither being nor non-being, let alone any other determination that the khôra might be thought to have. That the khôra ‘must remain without form and without proper determination’ is required for the khôra to be able ‘to receive all and allow itself to be marked or affected by what is inscribed in it.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, khôra does have what can be termed as pseudo-determinations. Khôra is selfless, escapes the realm of metaphors, and follows the logic of ‘without’.

First, a pseudo-determination of the khôra is that it ‘receives’ determinations without possessing or appropriating them. It gives place to determinations without turning them or experiencing them as its own properties, hence the name of receptacle.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, although the khôra receives as receptacle it does not become, nor could it be likened to, ‘its sensible imprints, which vanish from it without a trace’ in it.Footnote ⁶¹ The khôra is a working receptacle that receives without having a receiving self, a self as receptacle.

A second pseudo-determination of the khôra is that metaphors cannot be used to determine it, the reason being that it would mean attributing some borrowing from the ‘sensible’ or ‘intelligible’ forms. This would not work because these borrowings are themselves inscribed in the khôra, which is neither sensible nor intelligible. Derrida explains that the reason has to do with the fact that ‘the discourse on khôra is no longer a discourse on being, it is neither true nor probable and appears thus to be heterogeneous to myth.’Footnote ⁶² Derrida also explains that ‘if khôra is a receptacle, if it/she gives place to all the stories, ontologic or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what she receives and even of what she resembles but which in fact takes place in her, khôra herself, so to speak, does not become the object of any tale, whether true or fabled.’Footnote ⁶³

A third pseudo-determination of the khôra is that it cannot be spoken of within an Aristotelian logic of ‘either this or that’, ‘yes or no’. All attempts to describe it or understand it can only be done using the phrase ‘neither this … nor that’. ‘Khôra’, says Derrida, ‘seems to defy that “logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers” … that logic of “binarity, of the yes or no”.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The khôra follows a logic that might, for example, accept as a principle or axiom the invalidation of the principle of non-contradiction as well as the principle of contradiction. Derrida explains that ‘at times the khôra appears to be neither this nor that, at times both this and that, but this alternation between the logic of exclusion and that of participation’,Footnote ⁶⁵ this impossible situation from the perspective of an Aristotelian/Boolean logic looks as impossible ‘only from a provisional appearance and from the constraints of rhetoric.’ The logic of khôra is the logic of ‘without’.

Because khôra does not possess anything proper to it, in order to ‘work (in French: travail)’ as receptacle it has to borrow ‘tools’ – concepts, ideas, discourse, etc. – from whatever is being received in the khôra. The khôra is deployed as infrastructure in a discourse and ‘the discourse on khôra thus plays for philosophy a role analogous to the role which khôra “herself” plays for that which philosophy speaks of, namely, the cosmos’, in Plato's Timaeus.Footnote ⁶⁶ Hence, to be deployed, for example, in negative theology, the khôra would have to use ‘tools’ from negative theology itself. The khôra, which is a desert of sorts, becomes ‘the site where “negative theology” and its “analogates” happen.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Note that although the discourse on the khôra seems to be forming an inversion of the Platonist discourse on the Good as beyond Being and Christian Neoplatonist discourse of God as beyond Being, it is not strictly speaking an inversion. Although it seems that we have, on the one hand, in the Platonist and Christian Neoplatonist discourses, ‘a hyper-essential sur-reality for which words fail us, of which words fall short’ and, on the other hand, in the discourse on the khôra, ‘a hypo-essential sub-reality, an almost unreal, indeterminable indeterminacy which seems rather to fail words, to fall short of word or meaning’,Footnote ⁶⁸ this opposition is however misleading. The khôra is the ‘place’ that makes possible the discourse on the Good and God, on the hyper-essentiality and the hypo-essentiality, receiving all without making any as its own. Likewise, I argue, the khôra is the receptacle and the ‘place’ for Bhaskar's real negative and for the positive ontology of the critical realists.Footnote ⁶⁹

Khôra as the condition of possibility of the ontological

How are we to think that the khôra is the receptacle for Bhaskar's discourse on real negativity (or non-being as the foundation of being) and for the critical realists' discourse on the intransitives of positive ontology? First, the logic of ‘without’ blurs, on the one hand, the delineation between non-being and being, and, on the other hand, the delineation between intransitives and transitives. Bhaskar can speak of non-being only by using speech, which is a being. This means that we have a non-being without non-beingness since it is within a being (a speaking), a part of a being. Likewise, critical realists' intransitives are intransitives without intransitivity (at their core if we can term it in this way) since they can only be spoken of within transitive discourses.

Second, is it possible to generalise Bhaskar's discourse about non-being so as to displace the hierarchy that he creates between non-being and being? He states that ‘if there was a unique beginning to everything, it could only be from nothing by an act of radical autogenesis.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet he does not address the seeming contradiction between speaking of the possibility of a unique beginning to everything and speaking of an act of radical autogenesis. Is the latter part of ‘the everything’ that uniquely begins through autogenesis? Isn't he positing a beginning, or a condition, that ‘is’ before the unique beginning to everything? Or perhaps, more accurately, isn't he saying that the possibility of an act of autogenesis has to precede the possibility of a unique beginning to everything? For the possibility of an act of autogenesis to be possible before the possibility of everything, the possibility of such an act ‘emerges’ in a ‘place’, a ‘receptacle’ which does not ‘exist’, in a receptacle which ‘is’ without being a being. Isn't this precisely how khôra works in a discourse about beginning, just like in Timaeus's discourse on the evolution of the cosmos? Khôra is thus the condition of possibility that is presupposed in Bhaskar's discourse on real negativity (or non-being) as the condition of possibility of being.

Bhaskar further clarifies that ‘if there was an originating Absolute, nothing would be its schema or form, constituted at the moment of initiation by the spontaneous disposition to become something other than itself.’Footnote ⁷¹ The italicised ‘if’’ is probably meant to emphasise that Bhaskar is speaking of a potentiality not actually affirming that this is what happens. However, this reading cannot be accurate since real negativity will not be the unique beginning. Yet if we were to assume that Bhaskar thinks that this is a plausible scenario then he runs into trouble because in the very same statement he is speaking of ‘disposition to become’. Doesn't this imply that the Absolute is not absolutely the beginning? Where does the disposition come from, or perhaps, where is it located? One solution to this difficulty is again to resort to khôra. As noted by Derrida, khôra ‘marks a place apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetric relation to all that which, “in herself”, beside or in addition to herself, seems to make a couple with her.’Footnote ⁷² This means that within a discourse on real negativity, khôra would have been a receptacle wherein there is a dissymmetry between the real negativity and the discourse that speaks of it in terms of Absolute and disposition to become. The khôra works within such a discourse as the deployment of a discourse of originary performativity which speaks of a retroactively-positing of an autogenesis of the Absolute and its spontaneous disposition to become something. There is no Absolute or disposition to become qua discourse prior to or outside this double discourse about real negativity – an originary performative discourse which deploys a discourse of as-if the Absolute emerges through autogenesis. Therefore, khôra works through the event of ‘saying the non-being’. And ‘saying the non-being’ is all there ‘is’; all what there ‘is’ is a discourse of/on the non-being. The key feature of the event is discursively equipped with a khôral quality in the sense that the event occurs in a receptacle which does not possess any determinations of its own. The receptacle or khôra is the mode of ‘saying’ which is constitutive of the event of ‘saying real negativity’ and which does not exist apart from ‘saying real negativity’.Footnote ⁷³

In sum: I propose that we think of the ontological as neither positive nor negative but as one which is both at the same time without assuming a sublation that would generate a Hegelian unity of higher order. How? I propose to rethink the ontological in terms of its ontologicality, that is, the presuppositions that form the conditions of possibility of the discourse on the ontological. I suggest that these can be thought of in terms of khôra.

We should thus think of the ontologicality of ‘the ontological without ontologism’ within the logic of ‘without’, the logic of ‘neither-nor’ and ‘both-and’ – a logic that combines both mutual exclusion and participation. There is a sort of partial emptying and erasure of the property ‘ontology’ from the ‘ontological’, with the result that it is neither a real negativity in the 1993 sense of Bhaskar, nor a positive intransitive in the sense of the critical realists; rather, it is the condition of possibility to real negativity and positive intransitives.

Relevance to ‘concrete’ IR research and more

What is, some might argue, the relevance of this way of thinking for ‘concrete’ research in IR?Footnote ⁷⁴ This is an important issue. Yet I think that there is another question that needs to be addressed first. Indeed, raising the issue of ‘concrete’ research seems to be taking for granted the possibility of delineation between philosophical ontology and (scientific or) social ontology with the conventional (and Critical Realist) (CR) understanding that ‘a philosophical ontology’ is ‘an inquiry into which is logically prior to the development of any scientific or social ontology.’Footnote ⁷⁵ This view is in fact almost a ‘given’ in IR literature (and most of social theory). The argument then goes that instead of concentrating on pursuing ‘self-reflexively critical dead-end’ we must decide on a certain frame/framing; that is, we must enframe IR research (using CR or any other philosophical system/frame).

One purpose of this article is to suggest new ways of thinking how to go beyond this dualistic framing of theory. Thus, I support more or less Patomäki's insightful view that:Footnote ⁷⁶

Likewise, in an effort to go beyond dead ends that seemingly plague IR theory on this issue, Jackson provides an elaborated and thorough discussion of this issue in his 2010 book. Agreeing with how Patomäki and Wight approach the issue of delineation, Jackson explains that:Footnote ⁷⁸

Is the underlying philosophical ontology/social ontology demarcation sustainable when thought in terms of ontological qua khôra-logical? This is a question about the issue of ‘framing’, or more precisely, framing via philosophical ontology – wagers in Jackson's term – of the process of theorising. Critical Realism and Jackson's pragmatism/analyticism (or any other enframing) would want to settle down (even if only in principle or methodologically) the issue of what constitutes both the frame for concrete IR theory. Yet this way of thinking ignores the role of ‘enframing’ in the formulation of theories. I thus not only heed Patomäki's call that ‘recent developments in cosmology, physics and biology, including astrobiology, as well as theories of emergence and complexity, have made CR out-of-date in some important regards.’Footnote ⁸⁰ I also call for a rethinking of the relations of both ‘philosophy of ontology’ (à la CR, Jackson, or otherwise) and whatever insights we learn from contemporary sciences as a frame or parergon of the process of theorising social theory without ontologism. The delineation between philosophical ontology and social (scientific) ontology is, I argue, unsustainable due to the logic of parergonality, which can only be ignored through an act of violent silencing of one or the other side of the parergon/ergon. In this endeavour I draw insights from Derrida's statement on art when he writes that

And when he also states that

Before explicating my argument, let me briefly discuss Derrida's notion of parergon and the logic of parergonality. As put by Derrida, the parergon is

We can paraphrase this text and apply it to CR's or Jackson's enframing of IR almost verbatim, that is: the enframing is neither inside IR theory nor outside it, neither above nor below; the enframing disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work of IR theory. The enframing is not merely around IR work. That which the enframing puts in place does not stop disturbing the internal order of IR discourses. Derrida also explains that:

This can be translated onto IR as: CR (or any other approach) qua the parergon or enframing of IR inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper IR field. Yet the transcendent exteriority comes to play, and press against the limit of IR itself and intervenes in the inside only to the extent that the inside (IR theory) is lacking in something. Moreover, the frame, according to Derrida, has

Translated in terms of IR theory, we would say that CR (and other philosophical approaches) is a discourse which separates itself not only from the integral inside, that is, IR theory, but also from the outside of IR theory (all other fields of social theory, etc.) and from the whole field of historical, political inscription in IR and elsewhere. The paregonal frame thus does not obey the logic of ‘either this or that’ and does not respect any border delineations. As Derrida put it:

This means that in the case of IR theory, on the one hand, CR (and any other enframing) serves as a ‘ground’ for IR theory and as such merges in what constitutes the philosophical context of IR theory and then gradually into theories of knowledge. On the other hand, CR (and other enframings) merge into IR theory and are constitutively impossible to demarcate from IR theory when contrasted against the general background of knowledge beyond IR. As such, according to Derrida, ‘the parergon … disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.’Footnote ⁸⁷ This means that any enframing of IR theory disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, and melts away at the moment it is deployed. Yet the ergon or IR theory cannot be as such without an enframing (CR or anything else). What makes enframing and the enframed work essentially enmeshed and inseparable is what is lacking in both the parergon (enframing) and the ergon (IR work), or more precisely, as put by Derrida,

That is, what is lacking in both the enframing (of IR) and the work (IR) is the impossibility of arresting the play of différance in its contour, the supposed contour between the frame and the framed, a contour which never stops différantially disappearing and appearing into both the outside and the inside of IR work.Footnote ⁸⁹ As nicely put by Harvey,

I believe that this undecidability of the parergon/ergon distinction is what prompts Jackson to declare:

Wagers which are, as quoted up above, grounded on an ‘existential leap of faith’, nothing more and nothing less. This undecidable relation

The relation between the enframing (of IR theory) and the work (IR theory) is one of parergonality, which is not, as explained by Harvey,

Paraphrasing Harvey,Footnote ⁹⁴ the relation between IR work and its enframings is a double one. IR work is never fully complete, never fully finished, never fully independent, but rather entails an inner lack which calls forth the enframing to complete it. The work or IR theory is never without a frame. The relation between the enframing (of IR) and the work (IR theory), which is one of parergonality ‘is always of necessity double; appearing as externality, in fact internally connecting.’Footnote ⁹⁵

To conclude without seeking to impose closure on a necessarily open discourse on IR theory: thinking of the ontological qua khôra-logical is necessarily part and parcel of doing ‘concrete’ IR research since any enframing of IR is always already played out according to a logic of parergonality within a movement of différance between the inside (of IR work or ergon) and the outside (enframing or parergon); all within the ‘receptacle’ qua khôra. Not only does this imply that the customary practice of seeking a more ‘concrete’ IR theory/research is not possible, which is unsurprisingly seen in the continuous proliferation of new ways of approaching IR without any rest or respite. It also means that any cut or interruption is but a temporary one which is necessarily doomed to be replaced by more movement. We can interrupt and cut but this is only a deferral and a temporalisation toward more difference to come, which ineluctably remains haunted with traces of past theorisation and pushed forward through the promise for more.