Bi-medial Plato, Derrida’s pharmakon. By Francesco Tampoia PhilPapers 2015

Abstract

Who is Jacques Derrida for us, today? Is it possible by now, with

critical detachment, to be in touch with him again, to start from

the beginning of his philosophizing in company with Plato, and

from this vantage point to re-read Dissemination? What really stands

between Plato and Derrida? In the first page of Pharmacia Derrida

writes: “We will take off here from the Phaedrus ... Only a blind

or grossly insensitive reading, could indeed spread the rumour

that Plato was simply condemning the writer’s activity”.1 Hence the

question: Is the nexus writing/pharmakon, as Derrida says,

profitable for thinking of something essentially ambivalent and

irreducible, present and absent, something bearer of indefinitely

deferred presence in the play of infinite real or imaginary

substitutions?

Keeping in mind that, for Derrida, the history of metaphysics is

the history of the thinking of Being as presence, the main

enterprise of this essay orbits about the specifically problematic

of writing, understood as τέχνη but also as a key locus both for

Plato and for Derrida. In contrast with Heidegger radical critique

of technology and his traditional opposition between techne and

logos, technology here - and thinking of its function and value-

regards the technical and the non-technical, the practical and the

theoretical, and reveals it always as a “parasitical

contamination”.

Through textual analysis and new perspectives, in what follows I

will focus on some interesting unrolling, connected/disconnected

threads. By discussing the readings of different scholars and

philosophers such as the disputed classicist E. A. Havelock, the

historians of ancient philosophy G. Reale and C. H. Kahn, first, I

explore the nexus speech/writing, some ambiguities within Platonic

corpus, and argue that historically Plato was a bi-medial

philosopher and writer, an aspect taken for granted, but not

sufficiently attended by scholarship.

In the second part -apparently independent of the first- I hold

that the Derridean reading of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ discovers a

special deconstruction at work within Plato’s dialogues. In the

light of the manifold τέχνη, and of the hybrid Khôra, at the end the

apparent ambiguity in Plato’s stance and Derrida’s φάρμακον invites

us to identify Plato as the Father of deconstruction, like J.

Derrida implicitly suggests, and Derrida as his son.

Key words: Speech/Writing, Bimedial Plato, Plato and techniques, the

“Plato’s pharmakeia” by J. Derrida, Plato’s Khôra, the Earmarks’ by

Michael Naas.

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Stranger: We shall find it necessary in self-defence toput to the question thatpronouncement of father Parmenides (Ton tou patros Parmenidoulogon), and establish by main force that what is not (mēon), in some respect has a being, and conversely thatwhat is (on), in a way is not. Theaetetus: It is plain thatthe course of the argument requires us to maintain thatat all costs (Phainetai to toiouton diamakheteon en toislogois). Sophist 241d. “As my colleagues know, each time I study Plato, I find, I try to find someheterogeneity in his own corpus, and to see how, for instance, the Timaeus -within the Timaeus the theme of the chora is incompatible with his so-called'system'. So to be true to Plato, and that is a sign of love, of respect, I have toanalyze the functioning, this functioning of his work, and I would say thesame for the whole of Greek philosophy.” J. Derrida   1) Bi-medial Plato (The historic, linguistic, sociological and philosophicalcontext).What does writing mean for Plato historically? Incomparison to the classical monographs and fundamentalstudies on Plato, conducted between the 19th and thefirst half of the 20th centuries, the studies of the lastdecades, inspired amongst others by E. A. Havelock withhis Preface to Plato, have managed to focus on the historical,literary, and cultural context in which the greatAthenian lived. Re-readings, widening of horizons, newand original perspectives supported by more critical andrefined research-tools, have opened up newinterpretations on the cultural turning point of the lastyears of the 5th century and the first years of the4th century B. C. in Athens and in Greece. The old and newproblems of exegesis, the debate on the developmental

approach, i.e. the evolutive hypothesis about Platonicthought, the unwritten doctrines, the privileging of thewriter over the philosopher, and the relationship betweenspeech and writing within the thought of the greatAthenian, have all been thoroughly discussed.In the first part of this essay, which refers to somewritings of scholars and philosophers forward the hugePlatonic literature, my ambition is not to deliver anexhaustive account of the vexata quaestio speech/writing.Moving from the historical, literary, and philosophicaloutline of Fifth century Greece, my project is toemphasize that Plato, philosopher and writer, must beregarded as a bi-medial intellectual, lover and appraiserof the two means of spoken and written communication. Writing, ambiguous instrument, innovative technology ofword, ennobled by its requirement of mimesis, appeared inGreece after the first half of the 6th century in publicdocuments and papers, used by professional men- for themost part non-Athenians, physicians, rhetoricians,historians, and by dramatists for their sketches. But,during the sophistic era, when dialectic was carried intothe agora, writing became a problem. It caused abreakthrough in speech, a difference, a semantic, logicaland epistemological shift. How did this change happen?How did the Greeks accomplish it in such a short period?According to Havelock, the answer lies in a fundamentalnovelty: “If the educational system transmitting theHellenic mores had indeed relied on perpetual stimulationof the young in a kind of hypnotic trance, to use Plato’language, how did the Greeks ever wake up?The fundamental answer must lie in the changingtechnology of communication. Refreshment of memorythrough written signs enabled a reader to dispense withmost of that emotional identification by which alone theacoustic record was sure of recall. ‘’This could releasepsychic forces, for a review and rearrangement of whathad now been written down, and of what could be seen as

an object and now just heard and felt. You could as itwere take a second look at it.”2 Plato is well consciousof such epochal shift from oral to written communication.His choice is removed from the stance that byrestructuring thought, writing overcomes difficulties oforal communication, and establishes a more cognitiveactivity. In sum, writing is not only an instrument, notonly graphè. By means of the written word, preserving andre-producing the communication in this new way, visionadded up to hearing. In the Foreword to his book Preface toPlato, forestalling the red thread of his thesis, Havelockwrites: “Between Homer and Plato, the method of storagebegan to alter, as the information became alphabetized,and correspondingly the eye supplanted the ear as thechief organ employed for this purpose… Plato, living inthe midst of this revolution, announced it and became itsprophet”.3 Later on, pointing out and articulating thecultural and anthropological aspects of his research,Havelock adds, “Direct evidence for mental phenomena canlie only in linguistic usage. If such a revolution, asoutlined, did take place in Greece, it should be attestedby changes in the vocabulary and syntax of written Greek”(Ibid). Havelock reasserts his position through numerousreferences to influential documents on Greekcivilization, all of which allows him to say: “it remainstrue that the crux of the matter lies in the transitionfrom the oral to the written and from the concrete to theabstract, and here the phenomena to be studied areprecise, and are generated by changes in the technologyof prescribed communication which are also precise”.4 Itis a given that for the Greeks the poets were entitled toproduce the corpus of knowledge in order to cover acultural encyclopaedic space. It is a given that thepoets had the social task of offering an educational andinstructional system on which the social and politicalmachine could rely for its good functioning. It is agiven that education was preserved and transferred

through an oral vehicle- a real load-bearing means ofknowledge- ... until writing established itself. ForPlato poetry cannot be the instrument for the culturaland human education of the young, it revealed a worn-outand obsolete means. Plato “admits”, nonetheless, theimportance of either building or “fictioning” in theprocess of education. Plato craves the stability foundedon the “theoretical view” of the Ideas, Plato “knows”that “alētheia and mimēsis are interconnected, that poetryand mimesis belong together and with philosophy to ahierarchical ontological and epistemological system.Then, the famous Plato’s judgment, delivered in the tenthbook of the Republic, with the explicit reference to theold quarrel between philosophy and poetry, means probablythe interruption of the sovereignty of myth, is part of astrategy for real attack on tradition, as we clearlyunderstand deconstructing the Republic as a whole, takingthe dialogue in all its complexity: ”Once the Republic isviewed as an attack on the existing educational apparatusof Greece, the logic of its total organization becomesclear“.5 Reducing the employment of mnemonic functions,writing at first sight appears a sort of spokenrecording; speech, on the contrary, is re-constructed ina different way by descriptive syntax and conceptualdefining of semantics. Once the use of topics forspeaking became accepted custom, the search forpredicates increased; predicates gave a continued actionto sentence and transformed it into a continuedcondition; static facts began to replace diachronic factsand the philosophical language of being (as a form ofsyntax) began to replace that of becoming. Inreconstructing this significant stage of Greek languageand thinking, with detailed and precise linguisticreferences, Havelock returns to the topic (see the firstpage of Program of Investigation in The Muse Learns to Write.Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present) claimingthat the replacement of an atemporal present, or

its transformation into a logical present, instead of animmediate present, or past, or future, became a concernfor pre-Platonic philosophers, above all for Parmenides.His lively and fascinating verses show plainly thedynamic of association between speech and writing. In hispoem the present tense of verb to be assumes a logical,epistemological, and ontological value unimaginable withoral language. At last, considering the pronoun’sfunction, in Preface to Plato Havelock proposes othergrammatical suggestions: “The Greek pronouns, bothpersonal and reflexive, also began to find themselves innew syntactical contexts, used for example as objects ofverbs of cognition, or placed in antithesis to the ‘body’or ‘corpse’ in which the ‘ego’ was thought of asresiding”.6 And further on, recalling the aim of hisstudy, i.e. the description, on the one hand thespeech/writing transition and on the other the crisis ofGreek culture in the 5th century B.C., he closes byarguing: “Our present business is to connect thisdiscovery with that crisis in Greek culture which saw thereplacement of an orally memorized tradition by a quitedifferent system of instruction and education, and whichtherefore saw the Homeric state of mind give way toPlatonic. For this connection, the essentialdocumentation lies once more in Plato himself and mostspecifically in his Republic” (ibid.). Plato agrees tothe change and stands on the side of novelty, against thetradition. He knows, let me stress, that it implies anact of abstraction and engendering, a turning point thatcan no longer be delayed. He knows that humancommunication, spreading with writing, involves language,thought, culture and living. For a study in depth, let mesuggest the reference, as Havelock does, to W. J. Ong. Inthe Parmenides, where Plato says that the philosopher isthe man who looks for seizing things in se, he speaksof mathema as the intelligible sphere of what perenniallyis. In the Republic, in the famous passage of the divided

line, the mathema is situated at the side of dianoia, andthis marks an irremediable discontinuity with theimmediacy of doxa, “Plato constructs his Parable of theLine to identify this total area as the noetos topos- thearea of the intelligible, or as the noeton genos, the genusof the intelligible. . . He dramatizes this antithesis asone between the visible and intelligible worlds . . . Themind must be taught to enter a new syntactical condition,that of the mathematical equation, in preference to thesyntax of the story”.7 Perhaps it is possible to lose theLine, however it remains a divided line, and it standsfor a breaking. The mathematicians (the geometers)proceed according to the intelligible, and the body ofthe symbols they use, the written language they use, isthe more perspicuous vehicle for logical relations.Socrates was the thinker who realized what was occurring,the thinker who emphasized the problem of abstractionwith his method, always looking for ways to draw away thecontext in which the objects are perceived. But he didnot succeed in making this novelty his own totally, andso he became a paradoxical figure, “Just as Parmenides,for example, remained a minstrel attached to the oraltradition, yet defiantly struggling to achieve a set ofnon-poetic syntactical relations and an un-poeticizedvocabulary, so Socrates remains firmly embedded in oralmethodology, never committing himself to a techniquewhich, even if he did not know it, could only achieveitself completely in the written word and had indeed beenbrought to the edge of possibility by the existence ofthe written word”.8

 Plato and techniques Is Plato writing a τέχνη? What is the inner relationbetween writing and philosophy? A close reading of theearly (Gorgias) and the late dialogues ( the Sophist andthePhilebus) leads to discover the frequent use of the

term τέχνη and the remarkable conceptual weight oftechnique in the variety of contexts, semanticarticulations, controversial analyses and epistemicdefinitions. Techne, indeed, is the special knowledge andability directed to producing and constructing, a sort ofintermediate competency between mere experience, empeiria,and theoretical knowledge, episteme. While the mereexperience rests upon what is retained and associated inmemory, and regards only particular instances and theirconception, τέχνη proceeds from many cases to universalconcepts. While experience knows only the “that,”theτέχνηknows also the “why,” the reasons of the things,and in this respect approaches theoretical knowledge. InPlatonic dialogues great interest in technique followsthe initial rejection. Was not his master, Socrates, theson of a sculptor and a midwife? Had he not trusted incraftsmen and technicians, observing and admiring theirabilities, using irony and malice, willing, at the sametime, to think through techniques, employing curiosityand critical spirit? Hence the query, if technique isdifferent from philosophy, can technicians think? Andreverse, can philosophers be technicians? Such adichotomy is evident in the Republic, and Plato mentions itin numerous passages. The aporia tinged in this dualism isresolved by means of the παιδεία, a sort of technique thataims at understanding the diversity and ambiguity, thesense of proportion, the knowledge of variety, eitherquantitative or qualitative. In the Gorgias, Gorgiasmaintains that rhetoric is superior to all arts, evenmedicine. Socrates replies by affirming that rhetoricoperates at level of belief, while what makes an art ortechnique well founded is the objective level, the levelof knowing its inner logic, the possibility of bringingforth a mental project proportionally and perfectly toeffect. Mathematics, medicine and other arts arescientific because they can be controlled, proved andfalsified, and depend upon the art of measurement related

to due measure (to metrion). Rhetoric, on the contrary,gives temporary and emotional results, looks only forpersuasion, and does not submit to critical judgments.Its very name is not art, but rather εμπειρία, “knack”,neither able to explain the cause of everything, nor tounderstand the nature of things. For the technicians -notfor nothing are called contributors and dependents ofdivine Demiurge- it is fine to pursue the materiality andmechanics of their work, provided they realize an ideal,inspired to a divine source almost parallel with the moredifficult care of soul. To Callicles who, praising themerits of rhetoric, despises techniques, Socrates replieswith the defense of pilot, of strategist, of engineer,"This is why it is not the custom for the pilot to givehimself grand airs, though he does save our lives; norfor the engineer either, my admirable friend, whosometimes has the power of saving lives in no less degreethan a general-to say nothing of a pilot-or anyone else:for at times he saves whole cities. Can you regard him ascomparable with the lawyer? And yet, if he chose to speakas you people do, Callicles, magnifying his business, hewould bury you in a heap of words, pleading and urgingthe duty of becoming engineers, as the only thing; for hewould find reasons in plenty. But you none the lessdespise him and his special art, and you would call him“engineer” in a taunting sense” (Gorg. 512bc). That, inreference to the disparaged value people gave, still givetoday to whatever is a machine, a machination, craftinessagainst nature, and overturning it makes of rhetorica machination of sort. In the Philebus, giving in to theutopian temptations of the Republic, to differentdichotomies and dualisms, Plato, through Socrates,ironically will touch on the philosopher who lacks thetechnical knowledge, thus: “Now will this man havesufficient knowledge, if he is master of the theory ofthe divine circle and sphere, but is ignorant of ourhuman sphere and human circles, even when he uses these

and other kinds of rules or patterns in buildinghouses?”(Phil. 62ab). Not knowing how all human sciencesand techniques are made, this man will be unable to findthe street of the house where he lives! Plato’s man needsknowledge of partial truths, a mixture of all knowledge,pure and impure experiences, complementary portions ofthe larger unity of a more complex system. On the way,Plato refers to a systematic classification of sciences,a network of terms, relations, and oppositions (music,metric science, vulgar philosophy, dialectic) in whichtechniques have an important part, that is clearlydifferent from the one in the Republic, but not inconflict with it. At the end of the Philebus, Socratesreplies to Protarchus, “Shall I, then, like a doorkeeperwho is pushed and hustled by a mob, give up, open thedoor, and let all the kinds of knowledge stream in, theimpure mingling with the pure?”- Prot. “I do not know,Socrates, what harm it can do a man to take in all theother kinds of knowledge if he has the first”- Soc.“Shall I, then let them all flow into what Homer verypoetically calls the mingling of the vales?”- Prot.“Certainly” (Phil. 62cd). The victory of mixed life hashad the important effect of reorienting Protarchus’sperspective to what constitutes a proper human life. Itappears evident to both Socrates and Protarchus that itis impossible to exclude, from the whole of knowledge,the technical abilities, necessary for daily living, orto exclude all sciences, arts and trainings that areintegral parts of Rationality and of Good. The Socraticdialectic must, then, become a search for a standard thatis common to both philosopher and non-philosopher. WhileSocrates accommodates himself to Protarchus’s view, atthe same time he trains Protarchus in the life of mindand moves him toward philosophy.

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What is the essential, the inner relation between writing(literature) and philosophy?To respond this question I will refer to two differentscholars, historians of ancient philosophy: G. Reale andC. H. Kahn. After some references to W. Jaeger and H.Gomperz, and after taking a stand on numerous passagesfrom dialogues, in part agreeing with Havelock, theItalian scholar G. Reale, in his book “Platone. Alla ricercadella sapienza segreta”, writes that Republic, judged as adialogue about the state, is indeed a pedagogical andrevolutionary book, the manifesto of a new, philosophicalπαιδεία supported by the new vehicle of writing. But, evenif in accordance with Havelock on some points, Reale addsthat true, deep thinking, cannot be conditioned bytechnology. He claims that the most suitable vehicle ofphilosophy is dialectic orality, and just for this Platouttered the “unwritten doctrines”. In a significantpassage Reale writes, “Plato, a great writer, was notonly aware he was the most prolific writer of his epoch,of which he gave proof by deed. In crossing from oneculture to another, he discovered that the new means ofcommunication namely writing, besides having advantagesalso had disadvantages, and introduced some elementswhich could render communication ineffectual and moreharmful”.9 According to Reale there are two Platos, Platothe great writer of dialogues, and the esoteric Plato ofdialectic orality, of the unwritten doctrines. Thewritten text, Reale adds, produces a relation ofdifference, distance and alienation between him whowrites and him who reads. It cannot effectivelyaccomplish the task of teaching, which consists in goinginto the corners and depths of the soul. But, here is notin question that speech is good, writing is bad, here israised the problem of the proper and improper modes ofwriting, the problem that each art has its good and badpoints. In contrast to Reale and his privileging ofspeech, I prefer to follow the more credible third pivot

point: Plato blames oral tradition, but also deplores badwritings. Both means cannot be taken at face value, theyare valuable provided that they are compared to a pre-existing model of beauty and truth, and are inspired bydivine madness, by god Eros, appointed to give wings tosome, not to others. More, by the reading ofthe Symposium- a sort of manifesto of the poet-philosopher in which φιλόσοφος is defined lover oflogos, daemon inspired by Eros- we can grasp the value ofthe eroticism of research, the eroticism of writingthrough the splendid image of wings, feathers (πτερόν), ofsymbolic value, over and over again evoked in mythology,in culture, and in Greek technology (Daedalus’wings,Icarus’flight). “First, he is ever poor, and far fromtender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather he ishard and parched, shoeless and homeless; always on thebare ground, with no bedding, taking his rest ondoorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to hismother’s nature, he never dwells with want. But, he takesafter his father in scheming for all that is beautifuland good; for he is brave, impetuous and high-strung, afamous hunter, always weaving some stratagem; desirousand competent of wisdom, throughout life he pursues thetruth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, and artfulspeech. By birth neither immortal nor mortal” (Sym. 203).With different approach, in the Preface of Plato and theSocratic Dialogue, C. H. Kahn reminds us that Plato was “thefirst author to offer a systematic definition of thegoals and methods of philosophy” and that Plato is “theonly major philosopher who is also a supreme literaryartist”. Kahn focuses his critical study particularly onthe Gorgias, on account of, in his view this dialogue isthe key to understand the Platonic work “It is importantto bear in mind that the publication of the Gorgias musthave catapulted Plato from the ranks of the minorSocratics to his permanent position among the suprememasters of Greek letters”10. According to Kahn, Plato’s

contemporaries clearly perceived that by writingthe Gorgias and the Protagoras, he had produced literarymasterpieces. In the Gorgias, Socrates is near to angerwhen Callicles seems to ascribe to rhetoric an ambiguous,even if fascinating technique, the primacy due tophilosophy. In Callicles’ view philosophy makes one feelill at ease, makes one blush, throws one into crisis byits frequent contradictions, and makes one feelconstantly in between knowing and not knowing. Maybe itis suitable for the young. An unsure adult, in betweenknowing and not knowing, is not a true man. He is notfully developed because he has no courage, and is ill anddecrepit. Here, the reader is confronted with aparadoxical scene and finds difficult to understand whichof the two, Callicles or Socrates, the wise man is. Themimetic peculiarity of Platonic dialogues gets the upperhand by the continuous alternationbetween akribeia and mimesis. To the joke of the Thracianservant provoked by Thales falling into the well, we mustnow add the irony of Callicles who dictates, with hisbarbs, another definition of philosophy. Later, Kahnretakes his thesis “the man who in my view was only anoccasional author before the composition of the Gorgiasin his late thirties, became from then on something likea full-time writer”.11 The literary form of the Platonicdialogues is the finished product of a careful, ironic,subtle writer who uses the dialogical form to involve thereader. Plato, as successor to Socrates and Euripides,tries to compete with Thucydides, takes position againsttradition, and claims that the Greek world of Sophocles,Homer, and Hesiod is false. In the final part of his bookKahn concludes that Plato opted for the most efficientand suitable medium for the type of interlocutor at hand,“if this view is correct, the author and his conceptionof writing remain essentially the same for the Socraticand for the later dialogues: it is only the targetaudience that changes. However, Plato’s conception of writing is

scarcely separable from his conception of philosophy (my italics). Soour conclusion has interesting implications forthe apparent development or revision of the theory ofForms in the later dialogues and the relation of all thisto the “unwritten doctrines”.12 Writing as techno-logy,means of post-Parmenidean thought, spoken metaphoricallywithgrammatike, and vehicle of logos, enters thus intodialectic play of mixture. Plato puts the speech/writingdichotomy in a more ample and mixed picture, the pictureof sciences and techniques, of dialectic and ethics,a kind of interdisciplinary and inter-technique complex,a different aggregate which unravels and takes intoaccount the multiplicity, a generative multiplicity, adissemination which in turn flows into multiplication ofunities. The eroticism of Platonic inquiry presupposesthe aporia of good and evil, of human and divine, of pureand impure and gives rise to a super-speech, arche-writing, in order to go behind and beyond, a techniquethat exceeds either category of presence or of absence, aspecial tension in order to go into and onto the mixture.To conclude, provisionally at least, we have an ambiguousPlato, a two-faced Plato, a bi-medial Plato in betweenspeech/writing, a bi-medial intellectual interested andsensitive towards the philosophical problematic ofwriting. Enlarging the concept of writing, we discoveranother meaning of this bi-mediality, and approach themanifold meaning of pharmakon. 2)Derrida’s pharmakon (From the exegetic, historical, philosophicalcommentaries on Plato to the Derridean reading of Plato'sPharmacy). On 2 October 1994 Jacques Derrida participated at theround table in the Philosophy department of VillanovaUniversity. He said that his work was based on the

classics of Greek philosophy, “. . . the way that I tryto read Plato, Aristotle and others is not a wayof,  let's say, commenting or repeating or conservingthis heritage. It is an analysis which tries to find outhow their thinking works or doesn't work, [an analysis]of the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneitywithin their own corpus, as well as the law of this self-deconstruction. Deconstruction is not a method or a toolthat you apply from the outside to something;deconstruction is something which happens, which happensinside. There is a deconstruction at work within Plato'swork, for instance. As my colleagues know, each time I studyPlato, I find, I try to find some heterogeneity in his own corpus (myitalics), and to see how, for instance, the Timaeus -within the Timaeus the theme of the chora is incompatiblewith his so-called 'system'... I love reading Greek. Itis difficult, this thing, a very difficult task, and whenI read Plato I enjoy it, and I feel, if anything, it'sdifficult; I think it's an infinite task. The project isnot behind me; Plato is in front of me.” 13 It deals witha precious fragment of intellectual autobiography bywhich we understand some aspects of his way of doingdeconstruction. Well, but is really Plato the first tooverturn Platonism, or at least to point out thedirection for the reversal of Platonism, as GillesDeleuze said? The aim of Derrida is to force the textssaying something different from what they had alwaysseemed to say (double reading): the first reading thatfollows the tendencies of the dominant reading- situatingthe text within the metaphysical tradition of the West-the second(s), not an arbitrary step, the one that takesrigor, knowledge of the history and the context ofphilosophical and philological means. In Derrida’s view,deconstructive analytical persistence and acuity remain apromise of work that mostly is still caught between thepoles of faithful exegesis and impatient criticism, as he

showed exemplarily by his strategic misreadinginDissemination.‘Let us begin again’ Derrida writes at the openingof Plato’s Pharmacy “. . . the dissimulation of the woventexture can in any case take centuries to undo its web.The example we shall propose of this will not, seeingthat we are dealing with Plato, be the Statesman, whichwill have come to mind first, no doubt because of theparadigm of the weaver, and especially because of theparadigm of the paradigm, the example of the example-writing-which immediately precedes it. We will come backto that only after a long detour. We will take off herefrom the Phaedrus”.14 In the first part of Dissemination,Derrida discusses the complex network of terms, relationsand significations associated with theword φάρμακον adopted in and surrounding Plato’s texts.The word pharmakon in Greek has multiple andcontradictory meanings including drug, healing remedy ormedicine, enchanted potion or philter, charm or spell,poison, and so on. This word, which serves Plato in someof his most striking passages, reveals an operative forcethat sustains his discourse within the closure ofmetaphysical oppositions and hierarchical valuations. Atthe same time, it differs from the systematic structuresit produces. In holding that a superficial reading of thePlatonic corpus has spread the conviction that Platocondemned the art of writing, Derrida calls attention tothe Phaedrus, which he defines as a decisive dialogue forthe whole issue, and the very turning point of theactivity of the philosopher-writer Plato. For Derrida,the Platonic condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus isnot univocal. On the one hand, Plato maintainsthat gramme taking the place of the living voice or ofthe presence of phone falsifies the philosophicaldiscourse, cannot defend itself, and cannot reply. On theother, he underlines the duplicity and ambivalence ofwriting. As Derrida explains, pharmakon can mean remedy

and poison, good and evil, cure and its exact opposite;can mean either inside or outside, speech or writing. Inthis way writing reveals another writing, masked by itsderived or common meaning (archewriting). It is not matterof simply inverting the received order of priorities sothat writing will somehow take precedence over speech andits various associated values. With the ambiguity ofPlatonic attitude towards gramme, the question is whetherto consider pharmakon as the image of the entire historyof metaphysics, the image of differance of Being and entity.Derrida creatively presents his interpretation ofthe Phaedrus, and emphasizes the critical significance ofPlato’s use of the word pharmakon, as that which producesa complex, self-contradicting and ambiguous account ofthe metaphysical opposition of speech and writing.Derrida retrieves, too, a profoundly important Platonicinsight when he shows the way in which the textual momentbrings us towards nothing less than the very passage tophilosophy. Textually he writes, “Socrates compares thewritten texts Phaedrus has brought to a drug (pharmakon).This pharmakon, this ‘medicine’, this philter, which actsboth as remedy and poison, already introduces itself intothe body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. Thischarm, this spellbinding virtue, this power offascination, can be-alternately or simultaneously-beneficent and maleficent”.15 The myth of the birth ofwriting, referred to at the end of the dialogue, is thusrendered: “I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt,was one of ancient gods of that country, the one whosesacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the godhimself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers andarithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts anddice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the kingof all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who livedin the upper region, which the Greeks call the EgyptianThebes, and they call the god himself Ammon” (Phaid.274cd). Theuth, by offering the King the alphabet,

maintains that this science will give Egyptians morewisdom and will enhance their memory (this discovery is amedicine for wisdom and memory). But, the King is by nomeans persuaded and replies: “Most ingenious Theuth, oneman has the ability to beget arts, but the ability tojudge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their usersbelongs to another; and now you, who are the father ofletters, have been led by your affection to ascribe tothem a power the opposite of that which they reallypossess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness inthe minds of those who learn to use it, because they willnot practice their memory. Their trust in writing,produced by external characters, which are not part ofthemselves, will discourage the use of their own memorywithin them”. (Phaid. 274-275). No doubt, the problemwith writing is that it substitutes mere inscriptions forthe authentic living presence of spoken language. It alsoprovides a pseudo-memory in that it is the substitutionof mnemonic devices for genuine, living wisdom, orgenuine memory as anamnesis (un-forgetting). The best onecan hope for is that this new invention will not be takenseriously, but treated as a mere pastime! As in numerousPlatonic dialogues, here is evident a kind of corroding,ironic, critical, deconstructive antelitteram or self-deconstructivePlatonic attitude. Or, if we prefer, a very personalhermeneutics apt to divide, to decompose, and to burstbefore looking for the whole. In this dialogue thereader, familiar with Plato, clearly perceives- asnowhere else- the sensation of being face to face with adouble Plato, one that is playing hide and seek, now inthe role of King Thamus, now of demigod Teuth. Somescholars have defined this dialogue as the dialogue ofseduction, and certainly Plato understands, in themeantime he is writing, that he is despising writing, andthus contradicting himself. Plato understands he hasfallen thus into a performative contradiction.16 Or, toput it differently, can he (Plato) do so because he is in

a scene? “The imprints (tupoi) of writing don’t inscribe,is Theaetetus’ hypothesis, imprinted in the wax of thesoul, replying so to the spontaneous, autochthonousmovements of psychic life. Knowing that he can commit orleave his thought to the outside, to the record, tophysical traces, spatial and superficial, spread on aplane table, the man who has the technique of writing,will rely to it.”17 This man knows that, in his absence,writing will give him vitality via his words, even if heis dead. But he also knows that such a technique willexercise memory even less, and he will become forgetfulin the long run. The sophists, too, exercised memory,“But, we have seen, it was in order to enable themselvesto speak without knowing, to recite without judgment,without regard for truth, in order to give signs. Orrather in order to sell them. Through this economy ofsigns, the sophists are indisputably men of writing atthe moment they are protesting they are not. But isn’tPlato, too, through a symmetrical effect of reversal? Notonly because he is actually a writer…and cannot,whether de facto or de jure, explain what dialectics iswithout recourse to writing; not only because he judgesthat the repetition of the same is necessary inanamnesis; but also because he judges it indispensable asan inscription in the type.”18 The outward appearance ofthe alphabet, which Thamus refers to, consists in themobility of signs that can be incised on stone, on sand,on other materials. Being written, the alphabet implies atechnical jump, the invention of a system of manageableelements, silently speaking, and, at the same time, cureand technique, device, appearance of logos, deceptiveprosthesis, and deferred form of language. Platounderstands that the graphic representation, exact andfaithful of human sounds, by “digital letters”-which canbe manipulated and combined, in an endless variety- candetermine a turning point. He understands, too, that aslight shift, change or exchange of writing could modify

the meaning of words. On his part, Derrida, while on amore plain reading is not so much concerned about anyconflict between speaking and writing, aboutthe proper and improper use of both spoken and writtenlanguage, at the same time he manages to corrupt theplain sense of the Phaedrus into a diatribe againstwriting. Through multiple plays on word pharmakon , hethrows himself towards a kind of collapsing into a seriesof binaries: Theuth and his father, and by implication,writing and speech, Plato's story and Egyptian father,Plato's story and Egyptian myth, philosophy andmythology. In distinguishing himself from his opposite,Theuth also imitates Thamus and becomes his sign andrepresentative, obeys and conforms to him, finallyreplaces him. He is thus the father's other, and standsfor subversive movement of replacement. The god ofwriting is at once his father, his son, and himself. Hecannot assign a fixed spot in the play of differences.Perhaps, is Theuth- Derrida thinking of himself? Sly,slippery, and masked, an intriguer, like Hermes, he isneither king nor jack, rather a sort of joker, a floatingsignifier, one who puts play into play. Later on, Derridacomes close to calling parricide the option for writing,asserting that writing is not only technique, it is alsothe condition of Platonic dialectic, the repetition oflogos, and epochal destiny that involves man anduniverse. Writing is the possibility of speaking/nonspeaking, to go forward unhiddeness from hiddeness, to pointout the former differance of the whole, the former structureof Being. Differance is not a concept truer than presence;rather the relatively indeterminate space opened up byprocess of differentiation in the condition of theproduction of meaning. Differance investigates thesubversion of every kingdom. It is the medium in whichopposites are opposed, the movement and the play thatlinks them among themselves, reverses them and makes oneside cross over into the other: soul/body, good/evil,

inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing. InDerrida’s view, it would seem that Plato needs what heapparently condemns, that Plato is persuaded to resort towriting “because he cannot in fact explain whatdialectics is, without appealing to writing”.Leaving aside the principal thread of reasoning, andtaking hint from the Derridean reference tothe Timaeus and the Khora in exergue, it seems difficult todetermine the chronological relation between the Philebusand the Timaeus. Although the concept of apeiron (indefiniteor indeterminate) of the metaphysical scheme inthe Philebus clearly has affinities to the receptacle, itdoes not appear by name in any other later dialogues.Apparently the receptacle is intended to serve both asthe matter from which particulars are constituted and asthe spatial field or medium in which they subsist. Allowme to elaborate this in more details. There is ongoingdisagreement about the nature of the entities which aresaid to enter into and disappear from the receptacle.They are not forms. Some scholars have suggested thatthey are character types (or character tokens) derivedfrom the forms, and that these types (or tokens) areproperly the form copies (mimemata) that have a prominentplace in the argument for the receptacle (49c7–50a4).Whatever the merits of this reading, the things thereceptacle is said to “receive” are “all the bodies(somata)” (50b6). Bodies are three-dimensional entities,and this makes it likely that it is the emergence anddisappearance of the variously characterized observableparticulars as such, and not their properties (types ortokens), that are mentioned in these passages (49e7–8,50c4–5, 52a4–6). Timaeus does not use any descriptiveword that can suitably be translated as “matter” or“material”. He does, however, use the word "receptacle",the chora. And, its function of providing a “seat” (hedra,52b1) reinforces the conception that its role is toprovide a spatial location for the things that enter and

disappear from it (49e7–8, 50c4–5, and 52a4–6). Moreinterestingly, by means of Khora- which was firstpublished in 1987 in a volume dedicated to Jean-PierreVernant, and then appeared as a stand alone essaymonograph in 1993 along withPassions  and Sauf le Nom- Derridatakes up a reemerging thread he wanted to amplify in LaPharmacie de Platon, but hadn’t got around develop. It is asif the notion of Khora burst into the Derridean text totake the place of the pharmakon, to continue the play ofthe pharmakon. In Greek, Khora means ‘place’ in verydifferent senses: place in general, receptacle,residence, habitation, place where we live, and a pre-phenomenal, without gender, non-site where inscriptionsare set or erased. Khora is something Plato cannotimmediately assimilate into his own thought. It is theradical antecedent, something that cannot be represented,except negatively. Neither the mother, nor the nurse whonurtures infants, it is a kind of hybrid being, notexactly the void, and it is not temporal; it is spacingwhich is the condition for everything to take place, foreverything to be inscribed. In the Timaeus Plato isexplaining the birth of the cosmos, and Khora is the pre-organization that has to do with the continued tensionbetween the sensible, the contingent and theintelligible. Khora is the place of a third kind beneathor before Heideggerian Being. As H. Rapaport 19points out,what Derrida apprehends is thatboth pharmakon and chora are neither substances nornonsubstances (music and language are analogous), thatthey are disseminative (they proliferate different forms,types, patterns), and that they are neither present norabsent. They are anterior to metaphysical law ofcontradiction and break with the logic of ontology, wellestablished already in Aristotle. Retaking from 29 Theencounter with the Eleatic Stranger in Plato’s Sophist,aforementioned in exergue, means that there still persist‘traces of an alterity that refuses to be totally

mastered’ in thought, and marks the destruction of theParmenidean One. By means of pharmakon, image ofdifference, image of the ontological difference, and bymeans of the insistence of a paternal and parricidalvocabulary, Derrida induces us to reflect both on thespectral relations between paternity and language and onthe ambiguities entailed by the fact that Plato, a sonfigure, is writing, with the death of Socrates’condemnation of writing as parricide. At the end, wepenetrate into another level of Platonic reserve, into afamily scene, whereas “the heritage is the heritage of amodel, not simply a model, but a model which self-deconstructs, deconstructs itself so as to uproot, tobecome independent of its own ground, so to speak, sothat today philosophy is Greek and is not Greek”.30 It isplatonic and non platonic. Endnotes *For Plato’s dialogues I quote from Loeb ClassicalLibrary, Plato, Translated by W. R.M. Lamb Symposium; translated by H. N. Fowler Philebus,Phaedrus; R. G. Bury Seven Letter,London William Heinemann LTD-Cambridge MassachusettsHarvard University Press1966.1) Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Translated, with anIntroduction and AdditionalNotes, by Barbara Johnson, Continuum London-New York1981, p. 72. Original title : La dissemination, La pharmacie dePlaton, Ed. Du Seuil Paris 1972.2) E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, Basil Blackwell Oxford1963, p. 208.3) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. V4) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. IX5) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. 13.6) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. 198

7) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. 228-98) E. A. Havelock, ib. p. 292. The book by E.A.Havelock ,The Muse Learns to Write. Reflections on Orality and Literacyfrom Antiquity to the Present is edited by Yale University Press,New Haven and London 1986. See also M. Vegetti,Nell'ombra di Theuth. Dinamiche della scrittura inPlatone, in Sapere e scrittura in Grecia, a cura di M.Detienne, Roma-Bari 1997; Les savoir de l’ecriture en Grece ancienne,edited by M. Detienne.9) Giovanni Reale, Platone-Alla ricerca della sapienza segreta,Rizzoli Milano 1998 p. 25(my translation.) See also G. Reale, Toward a NewInterpretation of Plato, translated from the tenth edition andedited by John R. Catan and Richard Davies. Washington,D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp.xxviii, 459. ISBN 0-8132-0847-5 (hardcover), 0- 8132-0854-8 (paper); from Italian edition: Giovanni Reale “Peruna nuova interpretazione di Platone”, Vita e Pensiero,Milano 1987.10- C. H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic dialogue, CambridgeUniversity Press 1996, Preface.11) C. H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic dialogue, CambridgeUniversity Press 1996 p. 5312) C. H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic dialogue, CambridgeUniversity Press 1996 p. 382-383.13) J. Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, A conversationwith Jacques Derrida, Edited and with a Commentary byJohn D. Caputo, Fordham, 1997, 9-10.14) Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Translated, with anIntroduction and Additional Notes, by Barbara Johnson,Continuum London-New York 1981, p. 71. Originaltitle : La dissemination, La pharmacie de Platon, Ed. Du SeuilParis 1972.15) Jacques Derrida, ibid. p. 7516) Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, JacquesDerrida. Circumfession : Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases”, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 41 and s. f.

17) Jacques Derrida, ibid. p. 107.18) Jacques Derrida, ibid. p. 115. In OffGrammatology Derrida argues that writing should not besubordinated to speech, and this presumed subordinationis nothing more than an historical prejudice. Further, heargues that to define a graphic sign is to define anysign. Every sign is a signifier whose signified isanother signifier. That to say, meaning is alwaysdeferred.19) H. Rapaport, Deregionalizing Ontology: Derrida’sKhôra, in Derrida Today 2008, p. 103.20) Michael Naas, Earmark-Derrida’s Reinvention of PhilosophicalWriting in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy in Derrida and Antiquity, Edited byMiriam Leonard, Oxford University Press New York 2010),p.46.21) Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, cit. p. 15822) Michael Naas, Earmark p. 5323) Michael Naas, Earmark p. 6124) Michael Naas, Earmark p.61-225) Michael Naas, Earmark p.6426) Michael Naas, Earmark p.6527) Michael Naas, Earmark p.6628) Michael Naas, Earmark p.6729) Derrida- Dissemination, Outwork, prefacing, p. XXV)30) Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. XXV