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

275e) However, the mythic discourse prescribes the contrary:
the king answered and said, 'O man full of arts (technikotate), to one it is given to create the
things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that
shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is
your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. (274e–275a)
Writing as techne is separated from the father; creator and creation, inventor and invention, are
sundered because the filial bond precludes objective evaluation. According to Derrida, speech is
praised for maintaining the unity of philosophical speaker and statement in the present; written
words are condemned for their parricidal usurpation of the father-author. 64 While Theuth is not
separated from a written discourse but from the medium of writing he has invented, the sanctity of
the paternal relation is here desecrated by King Thamus. The art of writing would be defended
with all too much parental solicitude by the father of writing (pater on grammaton). It is universally
the case, Thamus declares, that the father will never judge impartially; of all people, therefore, the
father is the only one to be debarred by right from the court of judgement. The regal defender of
speech here introduces the very breach—the separation of son from father, of creation from
creator—for which writing is later to be condemned: any discourse 'when it is ill-treated and
unfairly abused . . . always needs its parent (pater) to come to its help.' (Phaedrus, 275e) So
stark is the contradiction between mythical account and ensuing dialectical exchange that were
we to look for a Platonic 'mouthpiece' in this overdetermined scene, there would be no more and
no less justification for reversing the Derridean identification to see the dialectical position as
represented by the god of writing.65
In any case, it can never be the purpose of the ensuing dialogue to echo or simply elaborate King
Thamus's judgement: the regal rejection is amply ironised by the fact that writing had not been
refused to the human world in which the Phaedrus was written. Indeed, from this position, the
reader who reads Plato alongside Derrida might begin to wonder if the Phaedrus wishes to set
itself against writing in anything like the regal or Derridean manner. There is Platonic scholarship
which sees the Phaedrus as a defence of Plato's own practice of philosophical writing, one in
which the Socrates who speaks is continually ironised and undercut by the Plato who writes. 66
We need not go this far, though, to challenge Derrida's conviction that this dialogue bears first
witness to 'the exclusion and the devaluation of writing'. (158)
One of the peculiarities of 'Plato's Pharmacy' is that its argument travels some 110 pages to
arrive where the Phaedrus's reflections on writing begin. The admirable movement whereby
writing is reappropriated is the movement by which the text of Derrida glides under that of
Plato.67 Derrida is of course aware of this: he will be conscious that his text has not been read
when commentators take 'Plato's Pharmacy' to undo an opposition which the Phaedrus sets up in
classical terms. The by-now standard proposition that 'Plato shows a metaphysical preference for
speech over writing' is not adequate to the work of the Phaedrus. One might risk, at most, the
banal suggestion that 'Plato shows an ethical preference for speech insofar as the medium of
speech is the medium par excellence of dialogue' but even such a qualified distinction is not
drawn by the Phaedrus with determining force. Nothing, indeed, is of a piece here, and the
relationship between speech and writing will be one of distribution and overlap rather than of
antinomy. Plato discriminates between good and bad speech in such fashion that the latter finds
itself in the place of a repudiated writing. Enigmatic on first inspection, this textual economy
becomes entirely coherent if the reader registers how the Phaedrus is governed by the opposition
between monologic and dialogic discourse.68 Socrates' first objection to writing alights on its
unresponsive and monologic nature:
The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they
maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as
though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to
be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever. (Phaedrus, 275d)
It is not absence of life that carries over from painting to writing so much as the inability to hear or
reward questioning. All discourse which offers itself to debate, to question-and-answer, is
approved in Plato's text in the same movement by which all unresponsive, univocal
communications are condemned. These latter discourses will include both writing and nondialogic
speech. It is not speech (as a logos present to the individual) but dialogic speech that
Plato upholds in opposition to both writing and unresponsive speech. (Phaedrus, 277d—e) 69