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

figures, many of which Derrida himself has taught us to read there. Images of gardens, of suitable
soil, of boundary, defence, enclosure, and cultivation do their work alongside the procedures of
rational enquiry: all of which express healthy constraint, controlled growth, supervised
development, in an economy of domestication which also defends (boetheia) and nurtures that
which is being tamed. On the other side, Derrida's figure of dissemination serves eloquently to
mark writing insofar as it drifts, it rolls, (kulindeitai: 275e) exceeds domestication, breaks out of
the closed and controlled spaces the dialogic forum, the ideal speech situation. However, what
the text does not provide is a system of imagery configured on the axis of life/ death. Indeed, the
figures of rolling, drifting, of disseminating express just as much animation—albeit in a wild,
untrammelled and profligate sense of living, of being animate, of moving. Whilst the comparison
of writing to painting (Phaedrus, 275d) registers the fixed nature of written logoi,61 it is quickly
succeeded—in the same speech—by the image of drifting. (Phaedrus, 275e) Far from being
cadaverous or petrified, this wandering free-floating energy places itself on the disreputable side
of a distinction between two modes of vitality: one controlled, enclosed and cultivated; the other,
aleatory, wanton and wandering.
Derrida, though, is determined to discover the life/death opposition in these four Platonic pages,
and it is no coincidence that he begins to talk of writing substituting 'the breathless sign for the
living voice' (92) only when Theuth has been boxed into the corner of death:
As a living thing, logos issues from a father. There is thus for Plato no such thing as a written
thing. There is only a logos more or less
alive, more or less distant from itself. Writing is not an independent order of signification; it is
weakened speech, something not completely dead: a living-dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred
life, a semblance of breath. (143)
Presumably this claim does not wish to be taken in any historical sense in seeking to exploit the
idea of writing as eidolon, as Hadean shade of the living word, but the metaphoric insistence
could be read as an attempt to have the Phaedrus say what a Rousseau would have it say as
much as what a Socrates or Plato did say. Certainly, the missions of the Phaedrus are no more
romantic than they are in quest of a noble primitivism embodied in speech: Plato's text does not
export the network 'speech/writing, life/ death' into western conceptuality so much as Derrida's
mythological excursus imports a Rousseauian sense of writing into a dialogue which is concerned
with the ethical and epistemological status of discursive media. Indeed, the Phaedrus condemns
the spoken in the same terms as the written. (Phaedrus, 277e) 62 Altogether banally, we shall
find that statements are evaluated through the validity of their logoi rather than their lexis, for their
proximity to 'justice and honour and goodness'. (Phaedrus, 278a)
A second area of difficulty in Derrida's treatment of the myth of writing centres on his identification
of the Platonic view with the pronouncement of King Thamus. Talking of the play of signification
set in motion by the pharmakon, Derrida asserts: 'It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through
the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clearcut
oppositions'. (103: my emphasis) The significance of this statement to the essay's construal of
authorial intention need hardly be underlined. The 'voice' of a mythic character is given by Derrida
as an authorial 'voice': Thamus becomes the place from which the Platonic wisdom speaks. In
tracing the intricate chain of the pharmakon, Derrida neglects to consider the vertiginous play of
signatures in this scene: in a dialogue written by Plato, King Thamus 'speaks' the judgement on
writing within a myth which is 'spoken' by Socrates. Narrative, mimetic and technical
considerations militate against declaring that it is Socrates or Plato who speaks in the King's
words; and all this before one even begins to ask how mythic logoi accommodate to dialectical
logoi in a tale whose authorship is immediately challenged by Phaedrus. (Phaedrus, 275b) Even
were the judgement of Thamus shown to be in consort with the Socratic viewpoint—a task which
is rendered counterintuitive when weighed against that recapitulatory statement at 278b—d
(which we shall consider in due course)—Derrida would still be called upon to balance the
delicate scales of the Socratic problem.63 Moreover, the first axiom of judgement established by
Thamus is in clear contradiction with what Derrida justly takes to be a central argument of the
Phaedrus. The strongest objection Plato makes to writing specifies its separation of a discourse
from the subject who produced it, a separation which orphans a piece of writing, leaves it helpless
before incompetent, malign and abusive readers: 'the composition . . . drifts all over the place . .
. it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong. (Phaedrus,