Plato's Pharmacy

TLDR: Derrida's deconstruction of the Platonic maxims can be traced back to the origins of these deconstructions as discussed by the authors, and it is possible to trace the successful moments of deconstruction back to their origins so as to leave bare the devices on which they are based.

Abstract: ALTHOUGH A GREAT VARIETY OF TOPICS are discussed in Derrida's philosophical writings, a central theme recurs in many of them: the relationship between speech and writing. Derrida consistently uses the same methods to deal with this topic, and my reading aims to expose the regulation of these methods. This essay tries to point out the blurring moments of the strategy which lead to one of Derrida's most outrageous outcomes, which is that writing precedes speech. This notion, however, is only the starting point; its consequences are the impossibility of communication and the collapse of the Platonic maxims. Such successful moments of deconstruction are traced back to their origins so as to leave bare the devices on which they are based. It will then be possible to discern a specific recurring stage during which occurs an illegitimate movement according to the Derridan rules of the game. Derrida's discussion of the Phaedrus begins at the "geographical" center of the dialogue (275c) with the deprecation of the profession of logography. The logographer, who writes orations for trials in which he himself does not appear, represents, for Derrida, the intersection of two crucial phenomena: the presence of the absence (the writer of the speech is present only by means of his own cited words, while being physically absent from the trial), and the gap between writing and truth. The logographer, he says, in the strict sense, composes speeches for use by litigants; speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence. In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and would never think in truth, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of non-presence and non-truth. (76; 68)(1) At this point Derrida follows Plato, who temporarily abandons the topic of writing (274b), and also leaves the problem of absence and truth for a different subject, the kidnapping of Orithyia in the middle of a game with Pharmacia (229b). Pharmacia is a link (une maille) between the kidnapping, which ends in rape and death, and the reappearance of writing in a later stage of the dialogue. Here, the connection between Pharmacia and the Greek word [unkeyable] is important: Pharmacia is also a common noun signifying the administration of the [unkeyable], the drug: the medicine and/or poison. . . . A little farther on, Socrates compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought with him to a drug [[unkeyable]]. This [unkeyable], this "medicine," this philter, both remedy and poison at the same time [a la fois], already introduces itself, with all its ambivalence, into the body of the discourse. (78; 70) For Derrida, the [unkeyable] is only an element in the chain of significantions (108; 95), whose interplay constitutes the textual phenomenon. It is impossible, however, to try to analyze each of the elements in isolation. This kind of interpretation, according to Derrida, would damage the subtle texture of the literary object in a most vulgar way. Sharp distinctions, he claims, are unacceptable in dealing with language: It is always possible to think that if Plato did not realize [n 'a pas pratique'] certain options [passages] and even actively barred them from being realized [les a meme interrompus], it is because he perceived them but left them in the domain of the potential [dans l'impraticable]. Such a formulation is possible if one avoids all reference to the difference between conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, a most vulgar means [instrument fort grossier] when one comes to deal with language. (109; 96) The borders, however, between the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary, are stressed here, only to be blurred later on. It is not that the limits are important in and of themselves; their only significance stems from being targets for deconstructive assaults. …