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

Unravelling the Demonic Text 95both important for a reading of the demonic – the irresolvable conflict andthe pursuit of an integrative interpretation. The demonic in Phaedrus notonly amounts to attempts to denounce the aporias and differance of writing.Already in the first part of the dialogue Socrates refers to his “spirit andsign” (daimonion) that reproves him for his initial mistake: he did not payproper respect to the subject of their discourse – love, Eros – as he focusedonly on the rhetoric. “I was distressed lest I be buying honor among men bysinning against the gods.” 66 Furthermore, the discussion addresses the fantasticcreatures of myths, the Centaurs, the Chimaera, Gorgons and Pegas,and multitudes of beings with “strange, inconceivable, portentous natures.” 67Socrates seems to renounce such myths, but actually his view is more complicatedand worth quoting here:But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: Iam not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so itseems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevantthings. And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customarybelief about them, as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things,but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and morefurious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divineand quiet lot is given by nature. 68Socrates thus associates the question of self, and knowledge of self, toimaginary beings, and also metaphorically models the self he might findthrough his investigation to “Typhon,” or some less frightening creature ofmyths. The philosophical pursuit of Socrates is thus primarily directed towardsa proper understanding of one’s self, and the proper comprehensionof love (a daimonic force, according to Plato) is essential to this project.Socrates states that love is a kind of madness, but that there are two kinds ofmadness, “one arising from human diseases, and the other from a divine releasefrom the customary habits.” 69 Further, he makes “four divisions of thedivine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspiredby Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysus, the poetic by the Muses,and the madness of love, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros, we said was thebest.” 70 The main problem with the speech written by Lycias and Socrates’response in the beginning of the dialogue was not that the other was writtenand the other “purely oral,” but that they did not proceed in a philosophicalmanner. Those speeches approached the insanity of love from two differentstarting points, and consequently recovered two different conceptions of it,sis different from Derrida’s. Such choices are ultimately derived from different perceptionsabout the task of the reader. Socrates can be interpreted as addressing exactly thesequestions of differing interpretations in Plato’s dialogue.66 Phaedrus 242d.67 Ibid., 229d-e.68Ibid., 229e-230a.69 Ibid., 265a.70Ibid.