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

well? And what should dream or writing be if, as we know now, one may dream while writing?
And if the scene of dream is always a scene of writing? At the bottom of a page of Emile . . .
Rousseau adds a note: ' . . . the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will
say I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams,
and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which might prove useful to
those who are awake'. (315–16)
Has deconstruction forced a breach in the metaphysics of presence, and thus awoken from
Rousseauism? Or merely pursued the dream of an origin of languages a little more consciously,
in the manner of reverie? So much Derridean work issues in this uncertain hour, balanced
between revision and rupture, when the voices of critic and author vie and coalesce in such a way
that we are never sure who is speaking, or if the reader has ever emerged from the text he was
reading. The Myth Of Writing
it seems to me that 'the history of metaphysics' was a bad name. Derrida never really finished, or
even undertook, that much-promised deconstruction. He hasn't been Son of Heidegger in that
respect.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 50
The father of metaphysics himself dreams throughout 'Plato's Pharmacy'. He dreams all of
philosophy as an idealised speech; he dreams of a memory with no sign. Here Derrida engages
with the inaugural text of that enigmatic history which Speech and Phenomena and Writing and
Difference and Of Grammatology have attempted to surprise.51 He will also seek to repay the
substantial line of credit these texts have drawn on Plato's Phaedrus52 in their appeals to an
'epoch of logocentrism', to a history of the devaluation of writing: 'what seems to inaugurate itself
in Western literature with Plato will not fail to re-edit itself at least in Rousseau, and then in
Saussure.' (158) Referring to these cases as 'three ''eras'' of the repetition of Platonism', and to
his path of reading as 'a new thread to follow and other knots to recognise in the history of
philosophia or the episteme' (158), Derrida affirms that 'the "linguistics" elaborated by Plato,
Rousseau and Saussure must both put writing out of the question and yet nevertheless borrow
from it, for fundamental reasons, all its demonstrative and theoretical resources'. (158–9) Derrida
identifies protocols familiar from the earlier readings: 'the texture of the text, reading and writing,
mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity'. (65) Supplementary play in Rousseau
discovers a Platonic equivalent in the pharmakon, a similarly exorbitant figure which derives from
and yet defies authorial intention. Replaying the 'Question of Method' outlined by Of
Grammatology, Derrida declares:
The word pharmakon is caught in a chain of significations. The play of that chain seems
systematic. But the system here is not, simply, that of the intentions of an author who goes by the
name of Plato. The system is not primarily that of what someone meant-to-say [un vouloir-dire].
Finely regulated communications are established, through the play of language, among diverse
functions of the word and, within it, among diverse strata or regions of culture. These
communications or corridors of meaning can sometimes be declared or clarified by Plato when he
plays upon them 'voluntarily', a word we put in quotation marks because what it designates, to
content ourselves with remaining within the closure of these
oppositions, is only a mode of 'submission' to the necessities of a given 'language'. None of these
concepts can translate the relation we are aiming at here. Plato can not see the links, can leave
them in the shadow or break them up. And yet these links go on working of themselves. In spite
of him? thanks to him? in his text? outside his text? but then where? between his text and the
language? for what reader? at what moment? To answer such questions in principle and in
general will seem impossible; and that will give us the suspicion that there is some malformation
in the question itself, in each of its concepts, in each of the oppositions it thus accredits. (95–6)
54
The peculiar significations that collect around the word 'pharmakon' emerge as a general principle
of reading, one which authorises the reader to bypass (non-pharmaceutical) moments of
altogether less ambiguity. What seems 'voluntary' will not translate into what is intended; the
involuntary, on the other hand, will not rule out the possibility of desire on Plato's part.
Furthermore, the notion of volition is maintained whilst also being identified as '"submission" to
the necessities of a given "language"'—as though such submission disallows voluntarism within
the play of those necessities.55 Derrida will indeed play off his own reading against a model of