Always with irony. But what can be said of irony here?
—Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida's deconstruction of Western philosophy has exerted a wide influence in the anglophone humanities since the 1970s, including within strands of liberal, feminist, and radical political theory. The deconstruction of philosophical texts which would reveal their disavowed exceptions, exclusions, or supplements (“the Other of philosophy”)Footnote 1 is widely considered to embody, vindicate, or motivate a radically democratic political orientation, pointing to what Derrida calls a democracy “à venir” (to come).Footnote 2 This article reconsiders the “politics of deconstruction” in the light of a different understanding of what Stanley Rosen calls “hermeneutics as politics” from that which shapes Derrida's deconstructive writings.Footnote 3
Unlike leading criticisms of the political credentials of Derrida's work by figures such as Thomas McCarthy and Mark Lilla,Footnote 4 I focus here on Derrida's 1968 text “Plato's Pharmacy.”Footnote 5 The article critiques this Derridean essay through a perspective shaped by recent work on Plato by William H. F. Altman and Catherine Zuckert,Footnote 6 as well as criticisms of Derrida's deconstruction of Plato by Stanley Rosen, Seth Benardete, and Charles Griswold.Footnote 7 “Plato's Pharmacy” is paradigmatic within Derrida's corpus, despite the essay's characteristic claim that deconstruction undermines the logic of paradigms (71). Following Martin Heidegger, Derrida here attributes to Plato or “platonism” a founding role in shaping or “dominating” all of Western philosophy and culture, including political life and thought (149).Footnote 8 Plato's dialogues “set up the whole of Western metaphysics in its conceptuality” (82), the abiding object of Derrida's deconstructive labors.Footnote 9 Likewise, Derrida reads what he takes to be Plato's treatment of writing in the Phaedrus as a pharmakon (both cure and poison) as a definitive moment in shaping this “logocentric” legacy:Footnote 10 one that he suggests underwrites even the political divisions between conservative and radical, democratic and authoritarian political orientations.
Part 1 of this article hence reconstructs Derrida's key claims in “Plato's Pharmacy,” turning on the ambiguous signifier “pharmakon” and the treatment of writing in the Phaedrus. In part 2, I examine Derrida's three claims in “Plato's Pharmacy” concerning the political, putatively prodemocratic significance of his deconstruction of “platonism,” and deconstruction more widely. Part 3 contests these claims, and Derrida's reading of Plato, by critiquing Derrida's remarkable claims concerning the irony evidenced in the Platonic dialogues. In contrast to Rosen's, Benardete's, and Griswold's critiques of Derrida's Plato,Footnote 11 I attend primarily to the political dimension of Plato's dialogic writing, conceived as the artful attempt to present and inspire philosophical inquiry within the city, while avoiding the condemnation directed against Socrates by the men of Athens in 399 BCE. Far from being deeply “political,” I contend that Derrida's reading of Plato is singularly blind to this political dimension of Plato's writing in ways that lead him into telling interpretive errors and elisions.
The largest claim of this article hence triangulates existing critiques of Derrida's politics and of his reading of Plato. It is that Derrida's attempt to present his deconstruction of platonism in “Plato's Pharmacy” as meaningfully prodemocratic is deeply contestable.Footnote 12 I claim instead that “Plato's Pharmacy” shows very clearly how Derrida elides the differences (first) between political authority and “Western metaphysics,” despite the long history of the persecution of philosophers (one thinks for instance of Spinoza or Voltaire) by different Western states. It demonstrates (second) how Derrida artificially forces ironic philosophical writers like Plato into the preset mould of what he calls “platonism,” in order to motivate deconstruction's hermeneutic subversions and thus its putatively political “interventions.”Footnote 13 The smoking gun here, as it were, is that Derrida has no coherent account of the significance of Plato's choosing to write in dialogue form, using multiple spokespeople, including several mysterious “strangers,” to express what Derrida takes to be his “platonism.” In reading Plato or his Socrates as the father of “platonism,” I contend, Derrida not only profoundly misunderstands or denatures Plato's irony, a point Griswold noted some time ago.Footnote 14 As Altman's reading of Plato in particular allows us to see,Footnote 15 Derrida also misses completely the demotic dimensions to Socrates's injunction to philosophers to “go back down” into the city (Rep. 520c), having ascended through philosophical inquiry out of the cave of conventional doxa.
I close by contending that Derrida's elisions in “Plato's Pharmacy” (of Plato and his dialogic spokesmen, of the dialogues and “platonism,” and of platonism and closed political authority) reflect his own filial debts to Heidegger's thought. But while Heidegger's own deconstruction of Western metaphysics, looking back to the Presocratics, also laid claim to what Heidegger termed a “metapolitical” significance,Footnote 16 it was tied to a profoundly antiliberal and antidemocratic political orientation.Footnote 17 The politics of deconstruction is far more undecidable than its prodemocratic proponents claim, pushing us, if anywhere, towards forms of political decisionism.
1. Of Derrida's Pharmakon and the Egyptian Origins of “Platonism”
The dazzling brilliance of Derrida's deconstruction of Plato in “Plato's Pharmacy” has left many critics unsure how to respond. Some have moved to dismiss Derrida, Platonically, as a gifted sophist: an imitator of the real philosopher whose ends are questionable at best (Soph. 235a–b).Footnote 18 Certainly, any deconstructive reading must inhabit the texts that it then unravels, Derrida teaches. Just so, Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy” weaves its copious, written threads from the Phaedrus and the Statesman, but also the Republic, Philebus, Parmenides, Symposium, Charmides, Theaetetus, Laws, Protagoras, Lysias, the Hippias Minor, Sophist, Statesman, The Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo. But Derrida's polemos with Plato or with platonism—he does not consistently distinguish these things—focuses principally on the Phaedrus, to use a Greek term reflecting how Derrida locates his deconstructive intervention in this text in the “combat zone between philosophy and its other” (139).
In contrast to other readings of the text as an artful whole,Footnote 19 Derrida focuses on a sometimes overlooked part of the dialogue.Footnote 20 The Phaedrus ironically begins with Socrates declaring the need to “have done with” (khairein) all myths (73–74; Phdr. 229c–230a). Yet Socrates himself recounts a myth from Phaedrus 274b onwards, after the principal work of the dialogue seems to have been done. Derrida homes in on this “supplementary” myth (71). Socrates's myth is Egyptian, or at least we can say that it deploys Egyptian characters, since Socrates flags that some uncertainty surrounds it (Phdr. 274c).Footnote 21 In the muthos, the God Theuth, “father of written letters” (274e), presents writing to the king Thamus as a great gift or pharmakon to human beings. This gift will “improve their memories . . . [being] a recipe for both memory and wisdom” (80–81; Phdr. 274e). The king responds that this divine invention is indeed a pharmakon. But this time, the signifier “pharmakon” is used by the king to designate something verging into a charm or poison: “this invention will produce forgetfulness . . . with only a semblance of [wisdom], not with truth” (Phdr. 274e, 275b).
Derrida argues that this myth represents a “necessary supplement” to the text, wherein its deepest unwitting meaning is intimated or revealed. In a Platonic dialogue whose central lines (Phdr. 257c) concern the art of speechwriting (logographia),Footnote 22 Derrida argues that we cannot dismiss the myth as a reflection of any authorial failing (85–86; see Phdr. 264b–c).Footnote 23 Indeed, Derrida seems to agree with both the Straussian and Tübingen schools of twentieth-century Platonic interpretation that readers should always pay close attention to the literary setting of the dialogue: “the topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent” (74). Derrida thus points out that both subjects of the closing myth in the Phaedrus, those of writing and of the pharmakon, are present within the dialogue from its beginning, if only as “stitches” on the back of Plato's written canvas (75). It is the written speech Phaedrus hides beneath his cloak that has lured Socrates away from his usual haunts within the walls of Athens (75–76). Phaedrus, Socrates comments playfully, seems to have invented a drug (pharmakon) by promising Socrates speeches bound in books. He could be led by Phaedrus anywhere around Attica (Phdr. 230d–e).
As just indicated, Derrida also sees poetic significance in the setting of the interchange that takes place between Socrates and Phaedrus outside of Athens, on the banks of the river Illisus. This is the extramural place where a fountain is supposed to have been devoted to Pharmakia. As Socrates tells us in a first myth in the Phaedrus, it was this Pharmakia who facilitated the carrying off of the virginal Orithyia by the Boreal wind, just as Derrida suggests that the play of signifiers, différance or arché-écriture always eludes political or metaphysical closure (75).
It would be too much to suggest that this is all accidental, Derrida contends (75). “We are no longer at that point. The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile [naturellement plus féconde]” (72; Fr. 260). Indeed, one task of “Plato's Pharmacy” is to stress the “undecidability” of the metaphorical walls between philosophy and literary writing, as well as the necessary failure of “platonism's” attempts to corral written signifiers into the logocentric enclosure (139). The question is how to interpret this undecidability, and whether what we will see is Derrida's post-Heideggerian reading of it in terms of the weave of “arch-writing” does not lead him into telling elisions and unsustainable “ors,” like those he multiplies between Plato “or” Socrates “or” platonism.Footnote 24
Derrida's interpretation of the Phaedrus then is centrally concerned with the question of writing. And from the beginning, he stresses that writing is wittingly or unwittingly associated by Plato or by his Socrates with the pharmakon. This Greek signifier, as everyone knows after Derrida, can mean both poison and cure, also recipe, remedy, spell, and charm (77, 101–2).Footnote 25 The mythological cues of the Phaedrus also position the pharmakon as something which leads one astray, whether one is an Orithya or a Socrates, a Greek or an Egyptian: “one and the same suspicion envelops the book and the drug, writing and whatever works in an occult, ambiguous manner . . . governed by the laws of magic and not the laws of necessity” (78).
Derrida claims that the epochal significance of the Egyptian myth of Theuth and Thamos, as recorded in the Phaedrus, comes from its intention to systematically devalue writing beneath living speech. Speech in the platonic lineage is the medium of dialectics and of philosophic anamnēsis (recollection). It involves a logos which can answer for itself or with the sanction of its “father,” the speaking I, present to his own discourse (77; Phdr. 275e). Writing, by contrast, is a pharmakon or poison which dulls or hypnotizes living memory by externalizing, doubling, or copying it, just as the sophist imitates the philosopher (Soph. 235a–b). Written texts cannot answer for themselves except by repeating the same things, without sensitivity to who questions them, why, or how (Phdr. 275d–e). Written signifiers are after all just marks or tupoi which copy spoken language. Meanwhile, even spoken signifiers are the representations or copies of ideas in subjects’ living psyches. Writing is in this way comparable to the painting which Socrates excludes from the kallipolis in the Republic, a copy of a copy (Rep. 597a–d; Phdr. 275d–e; Tim. 19b). Yet writing's deceptive mimēsis of living speech is the more serious case. For its silence also “denatures” the medium of the voice which “it claims to imitate,” or so Derrida claims (137–38).Footnote 26
However, Derrida's central deconstructive contention is that this platonist devaluation of writing by Plato, Socrates, or Socrates's mythical Thamus cannot stand. For writing is also a pharmakon as a cure, medicine, and necessary support for philosophy which platonism and its founder(s) cannot do without. A good part of Derrida's essay is thus given over to showing how the “inside” of the pure, natural, spoken, living, philosophical, veridical, and distinctly patrilineal edifice of platonist logocentrism relies upon what it would expel to the “outside” to establish its authority. The “inside” of platonism is founded on systematically excluding the unclean (pharmakos), the written or grammatical, the artificial, the mythical, the mimetic, the magical, the literary or merely persuasive, at the same time as it cannot do without it (111).
Derrida hence shows how the philosophic discourses of Plato (or of Socrates or Timaeus or Diotima or the Eleatic or Athenian Strangers, or indeed the Egyptians his Socrates adduces) do not omit, but always turn upon, literary tropes, or on seemingly incidental examples and digressions. The putatively philosophical or dialectic arguments of the Phaedrus and the other dialogues thus play upon metaphors of paternity, inheritance, parricide, and filial relations (chaps. 2, 3, and 8), alongside those of phantasms, festivals, dissemblance, makeups, and paints (chap. 7), and of magic, charming, and intoxication (chap. 5). Then there are those irreducibly ambivalent words on “which Plato does not place much emphasis” (132), led by pharmakon itself. Derrida's own numerically central fourth and fifth chapters focus on the multiple, multiply ambiguous uses of the signifier “pharmakon” in the Platonic oeuvre (esp. 97–98), as well as its cognate pharmakeus (magician, sorcerer, or poisoner [119ff.]) and pharmakos (sacrifice, scapegoat), subjects to which we will return.Footnote 27
On the one hand, Derrida notes that there are many places in the Platonic oeuvre wherein writing, the bad pharmakon, is assigned positive valences, just as if it were a remedy as well as a poison. The very fact of Plato having written, and written works of “rigorous, sure, and subtle form” (67), Derrida seems to think too vulgar an observation to mention in this connection. Then there is in the Laws the advice of the “good judge” to try to “possess the writings of the legislator within his own soul” (124–25). We think also of the political value of regimes having written laws or law codes. This value rests exactly on their unchanging sameness, as Cleinias tells us, no matter when or by whom they are consulted (Laws 891a). But this is exactly what Socrates's Thamos in the Phaedrus had denounced (115–16). The Phaedrus itself ends by holding up writing as the highest form of play (156–58; Phdr. 276d). It is also praised by the eponymous Phaedrus as a hupomnēmata (memory aid) that the philosopher should collect, “at the service of dialectics and in order to leave a trace [ikhnos] for whoever might want to follow in his footsteps on the pathways to truth” (153).
If writing were solely a bad pharmakon, Derrida asks, why would Plato moreover use “scriptural” tropes (158) at several decisive points in the Republic, Theaetetus, Philebus, Sophist, and Statesman, as the means to clarify or illustrate key philosophical claims? Plato for instance seems to contradict himself by talking of ideas in the mind as a “writing” on the tablet of the soul (Phdr. 276a–b).Footnote 28 When he describes the workings of philosophic diairesis (roughly, division according to kind), the sumplokē (weaving) which constitutes the royal art of the statesman (163), and even the structure of the kosmos itself in theTimaeus (157–58), using figures and analogies from writing, this Other to philosophy's proper concerns, he again seems to be skirting inconsistency with his devaluation of writing as pharmakon.
On the other hand, if philosophy's “inside” were as secure from contamination as platonism supposedly desired, why are there so many places within the Platonic dialogues wherein dialectic, speech, and knowledge (epistēmē) are each described as just such pharmaka? Just as the sophists already described persuasive speech as a powerful pharmakon, so Meno and Alcibiades each attest to the almost magic force (pharmattein) Socrates's speeches exert upon them (128, 130–31). In the Charmides, Socrates presents himself as having the cure for Charmides's headache, in order to direct the beautiful youth towards philosophy and sōphrosunē (moderation), which he presents as pharmaka for the whole of his being (128; Chrm. 155d–156a). In the Phaedo, again, philosophy is presented as a pharmakon against the fear of death: what Derrida will call “the inverted pharmakon” of dialectics to trump all other pharmaka which play upon human beings’ fear of dying (126; see below).
With this effective Derridean collapsing of any lasting difference between Socrates and the sophists in place, we can now appreciate the radicality and charm of Derrida's claims concerning Plato or platonism. What, however, does Derrida say concerning the putative politics of this hermeneutic operation?
2. Derrida on the Putative Politics of “Plato's Pharmacy”
Derrida maintains that to deconstruct Plato or “platonism” is not simply to have returned to and uncovered the “major decision through which philosophy constitutes itself” (111), the decision in favor of logocentrism and its characteristic set of values. This apparently theoretical operation, he maintains, is also in itself putatively political.Footnote 29 “Over and above that which links the problem of writing to the problem of power, to the problem of democracy and democratization,” Derrida claims, “‘Plato's Pharmacy’ is through and through—and this is evident on each page and with each move—a political text, a text on Greek politics and institutions as well as on the political in general.”Footnote 30
Derrida echoes this claim in different places concerning his wider project of deconstruction. Responding to the scandal surrounding the disclosure of Paul de Man's anti-Semitic wartime writings, for example, Derrida went as far as to claim that deconstruction is principally motivated by the desire “to free oneself of totalitarianism as far as possible.”Footnote 31 “Deconstructive readings and writings,” Derrida affirmed elsewhere, “are . . . not simply analyses of discourse. . . . They are also effective or active . . . interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must also produce such utterances.”Footnote 32
Certainly Derrida's work has been invested with broadly left-liberal political hopes by many of his readers.Footnote 33 This is particularly the case after 1990, when Derrida's own texts began to concern more evidently political topics (justice, forgiveness, giving, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, etc.).Footnote 34 I do not wish to equate Derrida with his reception or legacy, as if someone might speak of “Derrida or deconstructionism” in the way Derrida speaks throughout “Plato's Pharmacy” as if Plato and platonism were synonyms, putting the latter term in inverted commas only once (101).Footnote 35 What I want to question is whether Derrida's way of linking the problem of writing to political life in “Plato's Pharmacy” leads him to the best way of understanding Plato's dialogues, or represents a significant misunderstanding of the relationship between politics and philosophy.
Three claims are presented within “Plato's Pharmacy” to justify Derrida's claim to the “de part en part” political character of his deconstruction of platonism. The first is that, as Derrida rightly identifies, “Plato's” critique of writing in the Phaedrus is related to his polemos with the sophists. The struggle, connected to the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy with the poets (Rep. 607b), concerned who could be the best educators of the young men of Athens and Greece. This pedagogical question was a decidedly political matter, as its central consideration in Plato's and Aristotle's most directly political texts reflects (108; cf. Rep. III–IV, VI–VII; Aristotle, Pol. VII–VIII).Footnote 36
The second reason Derrida reads his text as meaningfully “political” is his association of writing, disparaged by the Platonic Socrates, with the politeia of democracy, similarly reviled by the latter (Rep. 557c–558c, 561c–d). “One could compare the trial of writing [in the Phaedrus] with the trial of democracy outlined in the Republic,” Derrida asserts (144). The written signifier, Derrida suggests, is comparable to the ideal democratic citizen disparaged by Plato or by Socrates (Rep. 557a–561d). Neither has any proper place, paternity or patronym, and each is listlessly capable of simulating anything, even philosophy itself (144–45). On the strength of this analogy between underdetermined signifiers and democratic citizens, Derrida positions deconstruction as not simply political, but politically on the side of the democrats.
The third claim Derrida makes about the text's putative political significance concerns Derrida's association of writing as pharmakon with the cognate term pharmakos. As Benardete notes, Derrida brings this association to Plato.Footnote 37 For the term pharmakos is absent from the “ ‘platonic text’ ” itself, as Derrida here apostrophizes (129). Nevertheless, Derrida justifies his consideration of the pharmakos in “Plato's Pharmacy” by appealing to what he calls “the hidden forces of attraction linking a present word with an absent word in the text of Plato” (133).Footnote 38 And what are such “hidden forces” that would seemingly license the interpreter to attribute absent words and significations to Plato? In this connection, Derrida directly shows his post-Heideggerian hand:
If there were any sense in asking such a question, which we don't believe, it would be impossible to say to what extent he [Plato] manipulates it consciously or unconsciously, and at what point he is subject to constraints weighing upon his discourse from “language.” . . . It is in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions, between conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech and language, that these textual “operations” occur. (131–32; cf. 96, 168)Footnote 39
It is a matter here of what Derrida calls the arché-écriture Footnote 40 which he believes at once makes possible and impossible all discrete texts. The hidden forces of attraction here also characterize, in Derrida's thought, the same transcendental conditions that generate and undermine the oppositions that characterize all of the Western “metaphysics of presence” or logocentrism (168). And it is only by dissolving the Platonic texts into this transcendental condition of (im)possibility of textuality and philosophy that Derrida feels licensed to introduce the pharmakos into the dialogues, despite Plato's own failure to use it. Derrida is clear: “In a word, we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, complete with its inside and its outside” (133):Footnote 41 “Certain forces of association [des forces d'association] unite at diverse distances, with different strengths and according to disparate paths, the words ‘actually present’ in a discourse with all the other words in the lexical system, whether or not they appear as ‘words,’ that is, as relative verbal units in such discourse” (129–30).
Leaving the arch-writing aside for the moment, who or what then were the pharmakoi, and what might be the political relevance of their Derridean introduction into Plato (133)? “At Athens they led out two men to be purifications of the city: it was at the Thargelia: one was for the men and one was for the women” (Harpocration, cited by Derrida at 130; cf. 133). The pharmakos was a sacred victim. S/he was housed within the city to be ceremonially killed as a scapegoat to purify the polity. As Derrida comments, in the passage that answers most closely to his claim that “Plato's Pharmacy” is a text which directly intersects with concerns about Greek politics and institutions:
The ceremonial of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside. . . . The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected. Beneficial insofar as he cures—and for that, venerated and cared for—harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil—and for that, feared and treated with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. (134)
The pharmakos hence names an exclusion that is nevertheless internal to the concrete body politic. The sacrifice of the pharmakos was enacted in times of war or other perceived existential threat, as Derrida notes (133). Hence we can see why Derrida might want to bring the pharmakos into Plato, without needing to hypothesize concerning the putative efficacy of the arch-writing. At the level of putative theoretical texts, deconstruction aims to unconceal the usually devalued, excluded, or exceptional moments of founding “violence” in theoretical systems, or of Western metaphysics, the system to embrace all systems. These founding violences Derrida tellingly already calls “decisions” in “Plato's Pharmacy,” a redolent term which he will develop in the later works on more directly political subjects (132).Footnote 42 But the pharmakos represents just such an excluded Other, drawn directly from the political realm, vindicating Derrida's claims about the political significance of deconstruction.
Derrida takes the preceding three claims to license his claims that the deconstruction of Plato just is political, if it is not yet “justice” itself, as Derrida will later tendentiously claim.Footnote 43 Derrida's essay weaves together into one invisible thread Plato's pharmakon, the intimate Other of philosophy-as-logocentrism, and the pharmakoi of closed, political communities. At this point, the deconstruction which would show the dependence of logocentric metaphysics on its pharmaka and pharmakoi emerges as directly, completely political, without need for anyone to go down into the cave, the city, or the agora.
3. Irony, Dialogue, Socrates, and Derrida
My own proposed pharmakon, in the sense of remedy or medicine, against Derrida's claims about the politics of his deconstruction of Plato is based on a challenging of what I will call Derrida's vertiginous collapse of the difference between philosophy and politics. It is the parameters and consequences of this vertiginous collapse that I bring out now. Derrida is right to observe that Plato criticizes sophistry, rhetoric, and logographia for corrupting the best young men in Athens such as Phaedrus, the enthusiast of Lysias. But then we should also never forget that it was for corrupting the youth of Athens that Socrates himself was condemned by the city. That is, just as Socrates “tries” writing and sophistry and democracy before the court of his logoi in the Platonic dialogues, so was Socrates himself tried by the city of Athens before a political court, which also condemned him. Socratic philosophy, far from being on the side of the fathers of Athens, we see, was considered to be a political threat that turns sons against their fathers (Ap. 17a). As Socrates recalls in the Apology (18a–d, 19c), this parricidal charge was comically made in Aristophanes's Clouds before it became the legal charge of Anytus and Meletus, Socrates's “younger accusers” (Ap. 19a–d).
It is absolutely pivotal that Derrida's reading of Plato just does not register these directly political conditions shaping Plato's philosophical writings (see 152). Derrida does recognize that Plato's writing represents a response to the execution of Socrates (156). But Derrida reads this execution as giving empirico-mythical form to a putatively deeper, ontological necessity: that the father, Socrates, must die, if the son, writing and hence Plato, is to become possible “from out of Socrates’ death” (156).Footnote 44 For this quasi-ontological reading of Plato's response to Socrates's death to pass muster, moreover, Derrida finds himself committed to the profoundly tendentious supposition that Socrates was a figure of paternal authority in Western philosophy's primal “family scene.” “The time has come to recall that Socrates in the dialogues plays the role of father, represents the father,” he announces (146).Footnote 45 Significantly, Derrida can cite only one Platonic passage, from the Apology, to support this claim—and this with an interesting slip, saying that the statement comes “from his prison cell,” which would mean the Crito or Phaedo, not the Apology (146). The passage from the Apology is that wherein Socrates argues, in the law court, that he has only sought to take care of the Athenians’ souls “like a father or an elder brother” (hōsper patera ē adelphon presbuteron) (Ap. 31b). But an elder brother is not a father figure, and to be on trial for corrupting the youth is not a charge we would usually associate with a paternal authority.Footnote 46
To Derrida's credit, he does qualify his ambiguous concession that Socrates only “represents” (146) the father in the dialogues. “Socrates is not really the father, either; only the surrogate father,” he writes. “Socrates is the supplementary relation between the father and the son” (152). But this last claim, by making of the individual Socrates a transindividual “relation,” is itself opaque. Derrida also notes that Socrates is famously described in other settings within the Platonic dialogues not as a father, but as a midwife, and “for the essential, Socrates shares the fate of the midwife: sterility” (153).Footnote 47 Sterility contradicting paternity, this insight by itself should again have called Socrates's paternal bona fides into doubt. Socrates's self-presentation as a gadfly intent on stinging the somnolent horse of the Athenian citizenry also underlies his atopia, and again undermines Derrida's positioning him as in any way a father figure (Ap. 30e–31a).
“Plato's Pharmacy” even goes so far on this subject as to register how Socrates, this father “who is not really the father,” becomes after his condemnation a pharmakos for the city of Athens. This is perhaps the most interesting point in Socrates's confuting of Derrida's attempts to situate him as a law-giving father. Diogenes Laertius tells us that Socrates was born on the sixth day of the Thargelia, “the day when the Athenians purify the city” (at 135). His death was clearly intended by Meletus et al. as a purification of the city of Athens, staggering after the loss of the Peloponnesian War.
Finally, Derrida recognizes despite himself the pointed resemblance Plato sets up in the Symposium between Socrates and the daimon Eros, another decidedly nonpaternal figure (119; Symp. 198c).Footnote 48 Eros, Plato tells us, spends all of his life philosophizing (philosophon dia pantos tou biou). But he is also a fearsome sorcerer (deinos arēs), magician (pharmakeus), and sophist (sophistēs) (Symp. 203c–e).Footnote 49 “And in that way,” Derrida asks, “isn't [Socrates] the spitting image of a sophist [ne ressemble-t-il pas à s'y méprendre à un sophist]? A pharmakeus? A magician? A sorcerer? Even a poisoner?” (119; Fr. 69). Yes, but the question is, In what sense can such a pharmakeus and poisoner be situated as the normative pater of something so presumptively normative as Western metaphysics?Footnote 50 Something decisive is missing here.
Derrida responds to this implied question in a way which comes close to making undecidability work like a charm. “The threads of these complicities are almost impossible to disentangle,” he shrugs (119). And so they are, almost. Derrida acknowledges that the subject of Socratic irony is at play in the doublings and complicities surrounding pharmakon as poison and cure, writing and speech, paternity and sophistry which are also his own deconstructive concern (72, 120). But then it is deeply contentious whether the terms and suppositions of Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy” equip us to adequately grasp the subject of Socratic irony.
Derrida's conception of this irony reflects his post-Heideggerian postulations cited earlier from the most directly political chapter of “Plato's Pharmacy,” on the pharmakos. Given the transcendental role Derrida assigns to the generative arch-writing or “arche-truth” (166; see 70, 125–26, 131–32, 166–68)Footnote 51, any questions of authorial and therefore political agency, in Plato or any other writer, become finally nugatory (131–32). Indeed, Derrida wonders:
If one got to thinking that something like the pharmakon—or writing—far from being governed by these oppositions, opens up their very possibility without letting itself be comprehended by them; if one got to thinking that it can only be out of something like writing—or the pharmakon—that the strange difference between inside and outside can spring; if, consequently, one got to thinking that writing as a pharmakon cannot simply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot be subsumed under concepts whose concepts it draws . . . , one would then have to bend [plier] into strange contortions what could no longer simply be called a logic of discourse. (106)
Derrida's conditional anaphora “if one got to thinking” gracefully softens what is the central doctrinal claim underlying his position. Derrida believes on these post-Heideggerian grounds that no author can control their text and stabilize meaning, even an author as adept as Plato. Accordingly, as Griswold notes, to the extent that irony presupposes authorial control of both stated and unstated meanings, Derrida's position in fact undermines the possibility of any distinction between irony and (dis)honest mistakes.Footnote 52 More widely, Socrates's, Plato's, or the platonic devaluation of writing, rhetoric, and sophistry, as part of the intentional meaning of the Platonic texts, can only be false or inauthentic. In Derrida's telling phrase at the end of chapter 4 of “Plato's Pharmacy,” philosophical comprehension involves a groundless “decision,” “an act of both domination and decision” (118). The pursuit of philosophical dialectic, more widely, can only for Derrida be one more such decision in the endless game of arché-écriture with no more intrinsic legitimacy than what it opposed. Indeed, such a polemos of force and counterforce, pharmaka against pharmaka, would be at once the meaning of what we, following Carl Schmitt, might call “the political”Footnote 53 in Derrida, and the principle of its seamless decisionist extension from the intramundane, deliberative, and institutional world of politics to the theoretical, textual world of philosophy or deconstruction.Footnote 54 In such a Derridean world, what remains to be said of Socratic or Platonic irony certainly denudes it of anything like its traditional meanings:
Irony does not consist in the dissolution of a sophistic charm or in the dissolution of an occult substance or power through analysis and questioning. It does not consist in undoing the charlatanesque confidence of a pharmakeus from the vantage point of some obstinate instance of transparent reason or innocent logos. Socratic irony precipitates out one pharmakon by bringing it in contact with another pharmakon. Or rather, it reverses the pharmakon's powers and turns its surface over. (121)
It can indeed be questioned, with Griswold, whether what Derrida describes here can any longer be called “irony”.Footnote 55 But one thing is clear. Derrida wholly forecloses any possibility that Socrates and then Plato might have consciously deployed irony, double meanings, myths, and the other rhetorical devices we read in the dialogues in their considered attempts to disarm hostile critics and favorably present philosophical inquiry, and as a means to stimulate interlocutors and readers to philosophize for themselves. He likewise forecloses any possibility that “analysis and questioning” might lead the philosopher to ascend out of conventional opinions towards a larger truth, per the famous Platonic cave eikōn (Rep. 515c–516d; see 82–83). The distance between the philosopher's ways of thinking and speaking and those of ordinary men and women is clear in those passages from Symposium in which Alcibiades famously describes Socrates's atopia, strangeness or out-of-placedness (Symp. 215a, 221d). Such atopia with respect to Attic norms meant that Socrates scarcely needed to physically absent himself from the city's walls, as in the Phaedrus, to become a pharmakos. But then, in what is politically decisive, we are told in the Republic that the philosopher whose theoretical pursuits have allowed him to ascend out of the cave of ordinary doxa should be compelled to return to the polis (Rep. 519c–520d, 540a–b).Footnote 56 The philosopher must be prudent at this moment, as Plato's Socrates advises, prophetically (Rep. 516e–517a). For if he is not, his atopia will see him end up before the courts of the city, unable to defend himself and his philosophical way of life, and subject to exile or death (Rep. 517d–e; cf. Tht. 173d–177a).
In the cave eikōn of Republic VII, that is, Plato explicitly thematizes a difference between the bios politikos and bios theōrētikos. This ancient opposition, central to a great deal of Western thought, is completely invisible in Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy,” and its vision of competing pharmaka with no outside or transcendence. The opposition distinguishes between the convention-, institution-, and law-based life of citizens within the polis and the skeptical, analytical, reflective, and erotic pursuits of the theoretical life. Philosophy, as philosophy, must exercise the right to call into question the prevailing doxa and nomoi of the city and its fathers. Derrida himself exemplifies this, even as deconstruction emerged in a modern polity, France, wherein by the mid-twentieth century philosophy had become almost uniquely integrated into democratic public culture. By contrast, Plato's Athens was not nearly so culturally liberal as Derrida's France or the United States of America, in which deconstruction has been so academically popular.Footnote 57 In a word, Plato could not so openly challenge the nomoi and doxa of his day as Derrida does, without risking exile or worse.
It is Stanley Rosen who commented that, if Plato had been interested in founding a systematic logocentric “metaphysics,” “he would have written not dialogues but metaphysical treatises.”Footnote 58 Contra Derrida, to read Plato's writings consistently as dialogues, in the light of what we might call the politico-philosophic difference, involves reading them as the political presentations of Platonic philosophy to the polis. It is to remain sensitive above all to how the philosopher, far from being a paternal figure, stands under political suspicion of corrupting the youth and turning them against their fathers’ ways. Political prudence hence dictates that the philosopher moderate his speech, responsive to the different preoccupations, abilities, and desires of different audiences, as well as the changing occasions and purposes of his different logoi.Footnote 59 A way of reading the dialogues that is sensitive to their political determination is hence not surprised about the ways that Plato makes an ironic art of committing almost every sin he charges the poets with in the Republic (Rep. 361d–398b, 595a–607d). Principal among these is writing only through other characters, excepting the thirteen letters (Rep. 392d–394c), as William Altman and Catherine Zuckert in particular have recently examined.Footnote 60 As “Plato's Pharmacy” astutely notes, Plato's antiplatonist sins also include frequent self-conscious recourse to myths, comedy, elevated rhetoric, metaphorical conceits, and seeming sophistries. The result is that, as Socrates complains of the tragedians in Republic III, but as Plato writes in his own name in the Second Letter: “there is not and will not be any written work of Plato's own. What are now called his are the work of a Socrates made young and beautiful” (314c; Rep. 394b–395e).Footnote 61
So let me put things more Platonically and poetically. We may well agree with Derrida that writing is excluded by Plato because “it does not come from around here,” as Derrida colloquially puts it (107). But then we should also not miss that Derrida finds himself in the embarrassing position of arguing against Socrates's or Plato's or platonism's devaluation of this foreign invention by citing as platonism's representatives the characters Timaeus from Locri, the Athenian stranger in Plato's Laws (which is set in Crete), the Eleatic stranger in the Statesman and Sophist, and not least, the Egyptian king Thamus in the Phaedrus.Footnote 62 There is no need to postulate deconstructively concerning the “structural laws” or “forces of attraction” governing the arch-writing to explain this Derridean irony.
Concluding Remarks, on the Politics of Deconstruction
For all of his hermeneutic virtuosity, Derrida fails to understand the political dimension underlying Plato's dialogic writing. He is blind to the political reasons shaping Socratic irony, as well as Plato's choice to write poetic, dramatic, sometimes enigmatic and aporetic dialogues. The atopic philosopher who, following Socrates, goes back down into the city has reason to speak and write both with care and, if he is able, with playful artistry. Such a philosopher, contra Derrida, is not a law-giving father. He is the object of paternal suspicion, when he is not a pharmakos like the condemned Socrates.
Derrida's claims that his reading of Plato and deconstruction per se are political, antiauthoritarian interventions also need to be read with the greatest critical caution. In order to motivate these claims, Derrida has not only to tendentiously identify Plato's dialogues with platonism and, as such, “the whole of Western metaphysics in its conceptuality” (82). He also asks us to effectively identify Western metaphysics with political authority per se, presumptively since both (truly) involve more or less systematic, linguistically mediated structures exercising forms of normativity, control, and exclusion, and since any political authority must have recourse to metaphysically inflected categories to frame and justify its exactions. Only with these elisions in place can Derrida claim that his deconstructive demonstration that platonism depends on the pharmaka of writing, rhetoric, magic, and sophistry it devalues represent a political action in solidarity with the excluded or subaltern.
But these elisions are each contestable. The relationship between philosophy and political authority in the Western tradition has remained fraught, even in the period of what Derrida calls logocentrism. Socrates is not philosophy's only martyr or exile in this epoch of “Western metaphysics.” So, the implicit deconstructive identification of political authority with logocentrism, metaphysics, or platonism is unsupportable. At the same time, this means that deconstruction itself is in no way a necessarily politically antiauthoritarian pursuit, however genteel its proponents’ own intentions may be. As Miriam Leonard has noted, there is also the paradox that “whenever Derrida seems to court democracy, it is his anti-democratic friends [Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schmitt] who take centre stage.”Footnote 63 By the time we read in “Plato's Pharmacy” that Socratic dialectic can only be one pharmakon in combat with other pharmaka, a rationally ungroundable decision opposed to other such decisions, we see that this patrilineal paradox has deep bases in Derrida's foundational works.
So, it is with Derrida's own philosophical paternity, as against that of Plato, that I want to close. As I have indicated, it seems to be Derrida's own debts to his philosophical father, Heidegger, that makes the French deconstructionist so constitutively blind to the “politico-philosophical difference” which shaped Plato's art of writing.Footnote 64 To echo Derrida, this is a debt which effectively means that it is as if Heidegger were behind Derrida unnamed, dictating to him as he wrote “Plato's Pharmacy.”Footnote 65 Looked at through a lens shaped by Plato's dialogues, Heidegger's attempt to reread Western philosophy as the unfolding of a series of systematic answers to the one ontological question (the Seinsfrage) represents a deeply “pre-Socratic” conception of philosophy. To say this is not only to remark Heidegger's own preoccupation with Parmenides, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, including at the very period of his political engagement, starting from The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides in 1932.Footnote 66 It is to note that the Presocratics were also the phusikoi, whose inquiries into the apolitical things in the heavens and beneath the earth Socrates's “second sailing” (deuteron ploun) turned him away from, when he became Socrates as we know him through the Platonic texts (Phd. 99b; see 87).
Heidegger's own profoundly antiliberal politics, as Hannah Arendt might have seen,Footnote 67 is a politics predicated on a philosophical denigration of the messy pluralistic complexity of political life in democratic polities. (Heidegger's view of democracy is thus ironically far closer to Plato's Socrates's depiction of democracy in the Republic than to Derrida's democratic gestures.)Footnote 68 The philosopher who feels no need to go back down from outside of the cave and his inquiries concerning Being cannot communicate with his contemporaries on anything like an equal footing. He will be inclined to scorn their reliance on doxa or “idle chatter,” leaving his recondite writings on temple porches as dedications to the few with ears to hear, or to the gods. We should not be surprised if such a Presocratic philosopher shows himself drawn to top-down modes of political power which treat governing as making, a process which requires closed hierarchies of command and may demand violence, as well as an onerous duty beneath the proper dignity of philosophy. To read Heidegger after Plato, especially in his most politically active period, is to hear echoes of the enigmatic Athenian Stranger of the Laws, and of the Eleatic Stranger who endorses absolute rule in the Statesman (291c–295b) whose geographical cognomen itself suggests his kinship with the Presocratics.
By contrast with Heidegger and the Presocratic phusikoi, though, Socrates “went back down” into the city. He even sat in his prison cell as a pharmakos, arguing to his friends against the justice of evading a questionable sentence passed by the democracy of Athens.Footnote 69 Plato also, unlike many later middle Platonists and Neoplatonists (to evoke another distinction Derrida's moniker “platonism” renders invisible),Footnote 70 remained a political philosopher, concerned to present philosophy favorably to nonphilosophers in the polis and to entice others to turn their souls around, without turning their backs on the civic virtues, led by justice. For these reasons, we can do no better than finally quoting that Roman philosopher and orator-politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who famously observed in his Tusculan Disputations (5.4) that “Socrates was the first who brought down philosophy from the heavens, placed it in cities, introduced it into families, and obliged it to examine into life and morals, and good and evil.”
Socrates's philosophical vocation of bringing philosophy into the polis, not the arch-writing discovered or posited by deconstruction, explain why Socrates became for the Athenians a pharmakos. It also explains why Plato's dialogues in which Socrates is made young and beautiful remain an inscrutable pharmakon, no less for Jacques Derrida than for the men of Athens.
