The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

62 Dissociation of sensibility
expectations through some ungovernable
excess or loss’.
As is the case with all of the key terms
within Derrida’s vocabulary, it is impossible
to extricate the concept of dissemination
from the chain of signification in
which it is embedded. Thus we must
turn to his text of this title and, more
specifically, to his deconstruction of the
speech/writing opposition within Plato’s
Phaedrus. Concentrating on a family
scene – of good and bad fathers, legitimate
and illegitimate sons, good and bad
writing – Derrida employs the notion of
dissemination in order to demonstrate
how, for Plato, both semen (the Latin term
for seed) and sema (the Greek term for
sign) may either be planted productively
(within the realm of the father as logos) in
order to produce legitimate offspring
(speech) or may be scattered on the barren
ground outside his presence (writing).
As Derrida suggests:
Writing and speech have thus become
two different species, or values, of the
trace. One, writing, is a lost trace, a
nonviable seed, everything in sperm
that overflows wastefully, a force
wandering outside the domain of life,
incapable of engendering anything, of
picking itself up, of regenerating
itself. On the opposite side, living
speech makes it capital bear fruit and
does not divert its seminal potency
toward indulgence in pleasures
without paternity.
This opposition, however, is destabilized
by the disseminating play of writing from
which Plato’s argument cannot escape. We
can trace the effects of this dissemination
most obviously in the network of textual
referrals between the related concepts of
the pharmakon, the pharmakeus and the
pharmakos that Plato employs whenever
he is forced to confront writing and its
dangerous effects (see UNDECIDABILITY).
As Derrida reveals, the disseminating
proliferation of these terms within Plato’s
argument undermines the conceptual systems
on which it is based. Thus, the opposition
between speech and writing is
effectively disabled.
While the notion of dissemination
assumes a prominent place within any
deconstructive reading, its usefulness is
not limited to any one school or critic.
By reminding us that every text is characterized
by a play of signifiers that no
author or reader can control, the term
forces us to recognize that no text can ever
be reduced to its signified content. As a
result, dissemination calls into question
the traditional conception of the book as a
unified totality by acknowledging a proliferation
of meanings waiting to be discovered
– but not exhausted – by each new
reading. See also DECONSTRUCTION, LOGO-
CENTRISM, PRESENCE, UNDECIDABILITY.
See M. McQuillan (ed.), Deconstruction:
A Reader (2000) and N. Royle (ed.),
Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000).
JA
Dissociation of sensibility A term
coined by T. S. Eliot in ‘The metaphysical
poets’, originally an anonymous review in
TLS (1921) of Grierson’s anthology,
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the
Seventeenth Century. Its success dates
from its reprinting under Eliot’s name in
1924. The essay concludes: ‘The poets of
the seventeenth century...possessed a
mechanism of sensibility which could
devour any kind of experience. . . . [But
with Milton and Dryden] a dissociation
set in, from which we have never recovered...’.
This malady of English poetry
allegedly stemmed from a separation of
the ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ parts of the
poets’ consciousness, an inability to
accommodate intellection in the poetic