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

Platonic intention which appeals to the disputed Seventh Letter as a definitively Platonic
moment.56 Having seemingly suspended the distinction between voluntary and involuntary
signification, 'Plato's Pharmacy' follows Of Grammatology in utilising the ambiguities of 'dream'
(rêve) as it combines desire with unconsciousness, volition with the involuntary, purposiveness
with inadvertency. Derrida also uses the impersonal case to this end: when he wants us to think
of what Plato demands, what Plato wants-to-say, his essay tells us that the Phaedrus demands,
that philosophy wants-to-say. The model of deliberate organisation is required, but it cannot be
affirmed as the intention of an author called Plato: 'The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure and subtle
form is naturally more fertile', Derrida declares at the outset. (67) On the next page, he will inform
us: 'At the precisely calculated center of the dialogue—the reader can count the lines—the
question of logography is raised.' (68) Clearly there is no calculation without a calculator:
something or, more likely, someone, for example, calculatedly placed the issue of logography at
the precise midpoint of the Phaedrus.
The question of intention raises itself tellingly in Derrida's lengthy attention to the myth through
which the trial of writing is instituted. 'Our intention here has only been', he says—in a statement
which also affirms a Platonic intention—'to sow the idea that the spontaneity, freedom and
fantasy attributed to Plato in his legend of Theuth were actually supervised and limited by
rigorous necessities.' (85) One might expect Derrida's interests to settle here on the coexistence
of muthos and logos in Plato's discourse, but the essay does not tend that way. Instead, Derrida
uses the myth to lock the Phaedrus into a by now familiar network of oppositions:
Plato had to make his tale conform to structural laws. The most general of these, those that
govern and articulate the oppositions speech/writing, life/death, father/son. master/servant,
first/second, legitimate son/orphan-bastard, soul/body, inside/outside, good/ evil,
seriousness/play, day/night, sun/moon, etc., also govern, and according to the same
configurations, Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian mythology. (85)
Perhaps Derrida might even indeed have chanced that Plato also intended his tale to conform to
those laws: this will indeed be the unstated assumption on which the reading of the myth of
Theuth proceeds. Derrida notes, with some patience, the many faces worn by the god—his
associations with the moon, with recognition and learning, his later appearance in the Cycle of
Osiris as the god charged to weigh the hearts of the deceased at their judgements—but it is the
association of Theuth with death which is taken as axial to the Phaedrus's determination of
writing. 57 Having already introduced the equation of speech with life in the form of a Platonic
logos-zoon (also established via the Sophist58), the figure of Theuth then provides the
countervailing figure of 'writing-death'. Nothing of course forbids the association: Plato may have
expected his audience to foreground Theuth's connection with death. He may also have
anticipated that the whole range of mythic reverberations would sound from the name of the god;
then again, he might have been drawn by an unconscious logic to that which in 'Theuth' is
moribund. But the claim that 'structural laws' are betrayed in this 'choice' strains credibility. Any
appeal to what Derrida himself characterises as '[t]he discordant tangle of mythological accounts
in which [Theuth] is caught' (86) will be too haphazard to fall under the rule of law: nor will there
be any guarantees for proceeding to the claim that 'it goes without saying that the god of writing
must also be the god of death'. (91) Quite mundanely, dramatic exigencies would have guided
Plato in his displacing of the Greek benefactor by the Egyptian god: Prometheus being the
inventor of writing in Greek mythology, it is unlikely that any audience envisioned by Plato would
credit King Thamus as an adversary of the great Titan. 59 In thematic terms, the question of
whether Plato intended the amalgam 'Theuth-writing-death' is impossible to answer: the more
fruitful inquiry would centre on why Derrida should wish mortification to claim centre stage in the
Phaedrus's discussion of writing.
In seeking to connect the reading of Plato's Phaedrus to that of Rousseau, 'Plato's Pharmacy'
faces a number of difficulties. Where Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages argues the
'proper' primacy of speech and presence, the Phaedrus is not concerned with issues of origin—
considered de jure or de facto: placing writing's origins in Theuth's hands doubtless respects a
tradition whereby divine intervention is used to explain civilisation's beginnings, but it will also
ensure that the hierarchical equations of speech with nature and writing with culture do not
complicate this debate.60 This is not to say that the Phaedrus does not borrow its imagery and
oppositions from the natural order. The section on speech/writing is indeed studded with such