Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

he calls onto-theology.' Jacques Derrida, Positions, op. cit., pp. 9–10. Doubtless we should read
Derrida as Derrida read Heidegger, for the 'signs of a belonging to metaphysics'. No activity, at
base, could be more faithful.
44. I adapt this formulation from the text: 'What does Rousseau say without saying, see without
seeing?' Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, op. cit., p. 215.
45. On the dual meaning of pharmakon as both poison and remedy, see Jacques Derrida, 'Plato's
Pharmacy', op. cit.
46. To reverse the priority of speech over writing is simply to reconfirm their opposition and to
remain 'irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics'. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, op. cit.,
p. 314.
47. J. Hillis Miller, 'Deconstructing the Deconstructers', Diacritics, vol. 5, no. 2 (1975), pp. 24–31:
p. 31. Derrida, too, raises the possibility of a text that everywhere exceeds and incorpo
rates any interpretation that might be made of it, but he does so in the context of his polemic with
Lacan: 'what happens in the psychoanalytic deciphering of a text when the latter, the deciphered
itself, already explicates itself? When it says more about itself than the deciphering (a debt
acknowledged by Freud more than once)? And especially when the deciphered text inscribes in
itself additionally the scene of the deciphering?' Jacques Derrida, 'Le facteur de la vérité', The
Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411–96: p. 414.
48. Which again reflects the convergence—noted in the previous chapter—of transcendentally
auteurist and transcendentally anti-auteurist theories in a similarly idealised notion of the text.
49. As Paul de Man does in an otherwise superb essay, 'The Rhetoric of Blindness' in Blindness
and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, revised and
enlarged, ed. Wlad Godzich (London: Methuen, 1983) pp. 102–41. Intention does not appear by
name in the essay, but that is plainly its subject. De Man claims: 'Rousseau's text has no blindspots
. . . There is no need to construct Rousseau; the established tradition of Rousseau
interpretation, however, stands in dire need of deconstruction . . . instead of having Rousseau
deconstruct his critics, we have Derrida constructing a pseudo-Rousseau by means of insights
that could have been gained from the 'real' Rousseau'. (141–2) We do not need to be constrained
by the terms of de Man's argument here. Nothing obliges us to decide between the absolute
deconstruction of Rousseauian intention and its absolute recuperation; a thoroughgoing
comparison of the Essay and the Grammatology would doubtless reveal a pattern of partial
deconstruction and partial appropriation. In a sense, we are again presented with the same
absolute divide on intention that we sketched at the opening of this section. One which is further
confirmed when we consider that a few years later de Man ventured an interpretation of
Rousseau—written very much under the influence of Derrida—which took up a rigidly antiintentionalist
standpoint. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), especially pp. 278–301.
De Man's changing positions on intention and the author will be discussed in the conclusion.
50. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed.
Sarah Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 136.
51. References will be made parenthetically in the text to Jacques Derrida, 'Plato's Pharmacy' in
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (London: Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 61–
171. An early version was published as 'La Pharmacie de Platon' in Tel Quel, nos. 32 and 33
(1968); the later French version is collected in Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1972), pp. 71–197.
52. All references to Plato will be made to Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the
Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1961). Page numbers and letters given parenthetically within the text refer to
Stephanus's Renaissance edition. The translation of the Phaedrus in the Princeton edition is by
R. Hackforth and may also be consulted in R. Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus, translated with an
introduction and commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). For an alternative
to Hackforth's translation as well as suggestive commentary, the reader would do well to consult
C.J. Rowe, Plato: Phaedrus, with Translation and Commentary (Warminster: Aris and Phillips,
1986). For those who wish to read in French, 'La Phannacie de Platon' should be read alongside
Léon Robin, Platon, Oeuvres Complêtes IV. 3: Phèdre, 2nd Edition (Paris, 1950).