Hugo, a character in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954) argues that because language does not allow us to present things as they really are, we can never describe anything accurately - he says that language is superfluous to the truth. Hugo does not believe in theory, but that every experience is 'unutterably particular' (p. 91). Likewise, in Khora (1995), Jacques Derrida shows how words are caught in networks of interpretation and we can never propose an exact meaning for a word. He writes how Plato's seemingly logical reasoning in the Timaeus might be internally troublesome and how the text has much more going on in it than the author may suppose. In the middle of the Timaeus, a chasm, abyss or empty space (khora) opens up. This is a space where the meaning of words unravel, unfold - a place where the ordering and regulation of thinking occurs. It is not clear what khora is, but it is something. Both authors write about how we are trapped under the net of language.This paper builds on ideas presented in my paper at last year's conference (Winter, 2007). It starts with my concern that school curriculum knowledge in geography has been trapped under the net of language and theory for too long. I draw on Derrida's thinking about khora as a space and a place (a receptacle, a container, a place of reverberation) to appropriate meaning afresh, to give way to the condition of possibility, of something other to come. I then turn to conceptualisations of space and place found in contemporary plans for school curriculum reform in the English National Curriculum for Geography before examining examples of lessons and pupils' work available on English government websites. Derridian deconstruction is not a methodology, method or instrument. If you read carefully enough, all texts self-deconstruct (Derrida, 1988). Meaning is caught up in networks of intepretation that go beyond the author and are never closed - they continually unravel. The French word differance describes how meaning is both differential and deferred. Derrida questions the metaphysical underwriting of knowledge. He calls this 'scientistic objectivism' (Derrida, 1974, p 61) that is naturalised through totalising definitions and definitive explanations. He argues for a greater responsibility towards the other by opening up more transgressive ways of knowing and by attending to other objects of knowledge that are currently constrained or tied up in a programmatic, prescribed and reproductive history. The focus will be on a deconstructive reading of examples of geography lessons taken from an English government website (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA)), to reveal the ways in which knowledge may be trapped in constraining networks of language and theory. Recommendations will be made for other ways of knowing Geography.Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press). Derrida, J. (1988) Letter to a Japanese Friend. Trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds.) Derrida and Différence (Evanston Ill, Northwestern University Press). Derrida, J. (1995) Khora in On the Name. Trans. Ian McLeod (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press). Murdoch, I. (1954) Under the Net. (London, Vintage Books). Winter, C. (2007) Knowledge and the Curriculum: Derrida, deconstruction and 'sustainable development' London Review of Education, Vol 5, No 1 [in press]. National or European journal