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

significant or consistent hostility to writing. Once more, then, the failure of transcendental
arguments or empirical evidence for his 'history of metaphysics' drives Derrida to an exemplary
author for the postulation of all pervasive fear of writing in western conceptuality, and we should
not be surprised at his unwillingness to unveil the logographic or recapitulatory phases of the
Phaedrus. Given the insecurity of the history of logocentrism announced in Of Grammatology—a
history which constructed itself on the promise and collateral of the Phaedrus—we find a Platonic
logocentrism only definitively articulated in a Seventh Letter whose authenticity remains far from
secure. 84 We would also find a Platonism which also speaks in favour of writing, as in the Laws
when the text declares that writing 'will be a most valuable aid to intelligent legislation because
Regal prescriptions, once put into writing, remain always on record as though to challenge the
question of all time to come.' (Laws X, 891a)85 Reading quite casually, we would also encounter
a Platonism which—so far from dreaming of 'a memory with no sign' (109)—wants, and in all
equipoise, in all respite from contradictory play, to write mneme independently of hypomnesis, to
read writing as the truth of memory. In writing:
SOCRATES: It seems to me that at such times our soul is like a book.
PROTARCHUS: How so?
SOCRATES: It appears to me that the conjunction of memory with sensations, together with the
feelings consequent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our
souls. And when this experience writes what is true, the result is that true opinion and true
assertions spring up in us . . . (Philebus, 39a)
We would find, in short, a history of the repression of the written sign which does not commence
until Rousseau, a symptomatic history which, by committing itself to the 'all' of philosophy—'a
pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy' (my emphasis)—has a totalising relation to
the very tradition whose deepest presuppositions it claims to have revealed. 'Plato's Pharmacy'
gives us no options but those of assent or dissent in terms of this myth of rationalism's origin in
the privileging of speech. To this extent, we find ourselves at a considerable methodological
distance from the Derrida who (in the words of Derek Attridge) sees the text as 'radically situated
—written and read and re-read at particular times and places—and as possessing a singularity
(each time) which can never be reduced by criticism or theoretical contemplation.'86 Although
attentive to Plato's relation to the Sophistic discourses of his day, 'Plato's Pharmacy' situates the
Phaedrus in the rarefied, stratospheric context of a history of logocentrism. If reading involves a
play between the general and the singular, then the attempt to locate Plato's text at the opening
of a history of the repression of the written sign does not affirm the singularity of an act of writing
(Plato's Phaedrus) and an act of reading ('Plato's Pharmacy'): or, rather, the reading works itself
out in the contest between the singular force of a reading and the generalised structure which that
reading is forced to inhabit. The reading, qua reading, respects singularity in a finely calibrated
manner, but the grandiose expectation that it will identify the conceptual origin of the episteme
cannot withstand that distinctive idiom, that signature to which 'Plato's Pharmacy' is the most
arresting countersignature. For this reason, Derrida does indeed raise the Phaedrus to a level of
'interest and complexity unglimpsed by more orthodox commentators', 87 and this in spite of his
claims concerning the 'history of metaphysics'. Yet, this achievement can neither be the product
of the singularity of its reading alone: 'An absolute, absolutely pure singularity, if there were one,
would not even show up, or at least would not be available for reading. To become readable, it
has to be divided, to participate and belong.'88 This structure of participation and belonging is
overwrought in 'Plato's Pharmacy' and prompts us to look for another level of generality within
which the essay belongs. Is there, then, an alternative way of acknowledging the power, the
originality and claim upon generality of an essay which fails to establish the opposition between
speech and writing as a dominant, if repressed, theme of western philosophy?
In glancing comments, in his attention to the detail of the Platonic myth, Derrida hints at a third
term in his analysis. Along a relay of deferrals without conclusion, he promises to speak of '[t]he
kinship of writing and myth, both of them distinguished from logos and dialectics'. (75)89 One
might come closer to a pattern which dominates all of philosophy through seeing the good
discourse of logos—whether considered as philosophy or science—as seeking to found itself on
the systematic exclusion of muthos; just as Plato's ceuvre would indeed be the founding moment
of this exclusion, 'the most powerful effort to master it, to prevent anyone's ever hearing of it, to
conceal it by drawing the curtains over the dawning of the West'. (167) One could also argue,