Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Unravelling the Demonic Text 93ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it hasno power to protect or help itself. 51This lack of “protection” of the text is interpreted by Derrida to implya demand for ideological control. The King in Plato’s myth rejects writing,as the “father is always suspicious and watchful towards writing.” A writtentext leaves its author, and the “specificity of writing would thus be intimatelybound to the absence of the father.” 52 Writing is “orphan,” and therefore(working in the absence of its author who can not verify his proper intentions)always open for “ill-treatment” or misreadings.The fundamental irony of Plato’s text, of course, is that it is a writtentext, itself; Socrates never wrote anything, and it remained for his pupil,Plato, to record the living reality of his teacher’s dialogues into writing. Theparadox of a text written to denounce writing can be suspected to have itsinternal tensions, and Derrida exploits these possibilities in his deconstructivereading. As Phaedrus asks for “another sort of discourse,” that would bebetter and more effective than writing, Socrates says that he is thinking the“word which is written with intelligence in the mind [psuchêi: mind, soul] ofthe learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it shouldspeak, and before whom to be silent.” 53 The metaphor that Plato is using todescribe the “living and breathing word of him who knows” 54 is borrowedfrom the very thing this dialogue is trying to exclude from the truth. Thetruth is “written in the mind,” and elsewhere Plato had developed a theoryof truth and logic as inborn parts of our nature; in Meno, Socrates proveshow even an ignorant slave boy can solve geometrical problems because therules of logic are inherent in our thought. We only have to learn how to “unforget”these ideas (in anamnesis). 55 The Platonic project aims at recovery ofthe divine logic and ideas by studying our thinking in purely natural and internalmeans. In this view, “writing is essentially bad” because it is externalto memory. 56 It can not remember the truth, but is only a way of reminding(hupomnêsai) those who already have the deeper knowledge; “[n]ot remembering,by anamnesis, the eidos contemplated before the fall of the soul intothe body, but reminding himself, in a hypomnesic mode, of that of which healready has knowledge.” 57 Derrida argues, that this true knowledge is alreadya sort of writing (as the metaphor “written in the soul” betrays); as logos(word, reason) enters discourse, it is always already a sort of mimesis, repetitionand reproduction of the absent origin. Platonism, like all forms of reason,are in Derrida’s view inescapably involved in the aporia of language anddifferance: “Differance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at51 Phaedrus 275d-e.52Derrida 1972/1981, 77.53 Phaedrus 276a.54 Ibid.55Meno 81e-85d. (Cf. Phaedo 72e.)56 Derrida 1972/1981, 103.57Ibid., 135.