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

Derrida obscures the problematic of writing in Plato altogether more than the dialectician who is
accused here of 'drawing the curtains over the dawning of the West'. (167) The pharmaceutical
reading deconstructs the opposition between speech and writing on the basis of a sundering
which never takes place. There is a narrative strategy in certain philosophical works whereby a
postulate is hidden from the demonstration so as to make its presentation the more conclusive in
closing; somewhat similarly, 'Plato's Pharmacy' only shows how the speech/writing opposition is
insupportable within the Phaedrus by insisting on a classic form of the opposition which Plato's
text does not propagate. The claim that '[t]he dividing line now runs less between presence and
the trace than between the dialectical trace and the nondialectical trace' (155) amounts to little
more than saying that for Plato there is good and bad discourse independently of the media
through which they are articulated. The Derridean performance thus depends on the suppression
of those moments when philosophy (wisely) refuses to inaugurate any epoch of logocentrism.
These tensions are abundantly evident when Derrida chooses to remind us of the epochal
significance of both the Phaedrus and the reading of it which 'Plato's Pharmacy' has produced:
According to a pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy, good writing (natural, living,
knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant,
external, mute artifice for the senses). And the good one can be designated only through the
metaphor of the bad one. Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of
logic. Bad writing is for good a model of linguistic designation and a simulacrum of essence. And
if the network of opposing predicates that link one type of writing to the other contains in its
meshes all the conceptual oppositions of 'Platonism'—here considered the dominant structure of
the history of metaphysics—then it can be said that philosophy is played out in the play between
two types of writing. Whereas all it wanted to do was to distinguish between writing and speech.
(149: my emphases)
All the conceptual oppositions of Platonism are contained in the play between two types of
writing; Platonism dominates the history of metaphysics; therefore the Phaedrus establishes the
contradictory pattern which both stabilises and destabilises the history of philosophy. What might
it mean for an opposition of this kind to dominate all of philosophy? For philosophy to be played
out in the play between two types of writing? For all the themes of the west to be reducible to a
good writing which masquerades as spoken presence and a bad writing which obscenely writes
itself? On an empirical level, and one clearly not intended by Derrida, we could summon Aristotle,
who, though dependent on thought as logos, castigates the idea of an ideal speech situation in
the scene of dialectical instruction; the very same who sees speech as unscientific, ill-befitting the
proper practice of philosophy. 80 A scholasticism could also be invoked in which the paradoxical
structure of devaluation and dependence is found not in relation to writing but in the attempts of
Ockham, Abelard and others to escape speech as the model for the determination of meaning.81
Numerous other pathways could be followed—including those leading to and from a Baconian
rationalism which explicitly defines itself in terms of the ethos and episteme of writing—all of
which would reveal that the problems encountered by Demida's phantasmatic history derive from
his desire to graft the technological onto the metaphysical in such a way that the media of speech
and writing are deconstructed long before their adequacy to the categories of presence and
absence has been assessed. As media, speech and writing are largely exiguous to a tradition
which concerns itself with a ratio and not an oratio: the mimetic subordination of writing to speech
occurs only in an exteriority or 'realm of expression' which is not an object of primary concern to
the metaphysician. That this ratio is sometimes portrayed as a 'writing in the soul' does not imply
any contradiction with the mimetic subordination of writing to speech: if anything, it shows how far
tradition is from identifying speech with logos. Indeed, as Martin Elsky suggests, 'for many
Scholastic logicians, speech and thought are at odds': 'The act of speech is a moment of struggle
between the mental articulation of a thought and its expression in the sounds of conventionbound
speech'.82 What Derrida uncovers as an arche-writing is already for the metaphysician a
language of purely mental concepts which exists prior to its phonetic or graphic expression: if this
language is best described as an interiorised writing prior to its inscription as marks-on-the-page,
it is because speech and writing are not set in opposition by the quest to describe what Ockham
called 'mental words' which 'reside in the intellect alone and are incapable of being uttered
aloud'.83 That the metaphor of a 'writing in the soul' served best to capture this mental language
reveals a tradition which, so far from being in contradiction with itself, has never demonstrated a