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On Politics, Irony, and Plato's Socrates as Derrida's Pharmakon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2021

Matthew Sharpe
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Abstract

This paper challenges the reading of Derridean deconstruction as a necessarily antiauthoritarian version of “hermeneutics as politics.” It does so by critically rereading Derrida's 1968 essay “Plato's Pharmacy.” Part 1 reconstructs Derrida's key claims in “Plato's Pharmacy,” turning on the ambiguous signifier “pharmakon” and the treatment of writing in the Phaedrus. Part 2 examines Derrida's three claims in “Plato's Pharmacy” concerning the political, putatively antiauthoritarian significance of his deconstruction of “platonism.” Part 3 contests these claims, arguing that Derrida cannot comprehend Socratic irony since he is blind to the political shaping of Plato's dialogic writing, 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. Finally, I argue that Derrida's indebtedness to Heidegger underlies these shortcomings in his reading of Plato.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , Spring 2021 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame.

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References

1 See McQuillan, Martin, The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (London: Pluto, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar; Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 2010). For texts which support Derrida's claims about the prodemocratic significance of deconstruction, see Thomson, Alex, Deconstruction and Democracy (London: Continuum, 2005), esp. 9–54Google Scholar; Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. 46–97Google Scholar; Lüdemann, Susanne, The Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), esp. 82–110Google Scholar.

3 Rosen, Stanley, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

4 McCarthy, Thomas, “The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida's Deconstructionism,” Philosophical Forum 21, nos. 1–2 (1989): 146–68Google Scholar; Mark Lilla, “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998. See also Zuckert, Catherine, “The Politics of Derridean Deconstruction,” Polity 23, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 335–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, “Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism,” in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 161–84Google Scholar.

5 Derrida, Jacques, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Johnson, B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Parenthetical page references in the text should be understood to be to this work unless otherwise indicated. Where Johnson's translation involves any arguably contentious renderings into English of important terms or phrases, cross-referencing to the pagination of the original (Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de platon,” Tel Quel, nos. 32–33 [1968]: 256–403) will be indicated by (Fr. [page number]), and the French provided. Standardized references to classical works will be given parenthetically in the text.

6 Zuckert, Catherine, Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Altman, William H. F., The Guardians of Action: Plato the Teacher and the Post-“Republic” Dialogues from “Timaeus” to “Theaetetus” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016)Google Scholar and The Guardians on Trial: The Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues from “Euthyphro” to “Phaedo” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).

7 Stanley Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” in Hermeneutics as Politics; Benardete, Seth, “Derrida and Plato,” in Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings of Ancient Poetry and Philosophy (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's, 2012)Google Scholar; Griswold, Charles Jr., “Epilogue: In Defense of Dialogue,” in Self-Knowledge in Plato's “Phaedrus” (State Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 230–42Google Scholar.

8 See Heidegger, Martin, “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, William (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johannes Fritsche, “With Plato into the Kairos before the Kehre: On Heidegger's Different Interpretations of Plato,” in Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, ed. Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 140–77.

9 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 57, 64; Benardete, “Derrida and Plato,” 354.

10 See Wortham, Simon Morgan, “Logocentrism,” in The Derrida Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010), 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction”; Benardete, “Derrida and Plato”; Griswold, “Epilogue”; and Zuckert, Catherine, “Derrida's Deconstruction of Plato,” in Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 206–30Google Scholar.

12 Cf. Zuckert, “Politics of Derridean Deconstruction,” 354–55.

13 See Jacques Derrida, “Critical Response,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 13 (Aug. 1986): 16.

14 Griswold, “Epilogue,” 235.

15 See Altman, William H. F., Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the “Republic” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013)Google Scholar.

16 I use the technical term “metapolitical” in this paper, first since Heidegger uses it in the Black Notebooks to describe what he calls his “metaphysics of dasein” (see Heidegger, Martin, Ponderings, II–VI, trans. Rojcewicz, Richard [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016], 85–86 with 91Google Scholar), but second and more importantly, insofar as in both his and Derrida's thought the term reflects a collapsing of the differences between philosophical and political concerns which we will track in parts 2 and 3. As a result, as we will see in “Plato's Pharmacy,” “deconstructing” a text is presented by Derrida as itself “political.”

17 Cf. Zuckert, “Politics of Derridean Deconstruction,” 352–54; on Heidegger's politics, the fullest documentation is found in Faye, Emmanuel, Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Smith, Michael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

18 See Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 50–51, 56, 61, 65–66, 73; Mortensen, Christopher, “Plato's Pharmacy and Derrida's Drugstore,” Language & Communication 20, no. 4 (2000): 329–46, esp. 338–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maljaic, Eric, “Derrida's Pharmacy: A Note on Derrida and Phaedrus,” The Explicator 68, no. 2 (2010): 136–39Google Scholar; Rinella, Michael A., “Revisiting the Pharmacy: Plato, Derrida, and the Morality of Political Deceit,” Polis 24, no. 1 (2007): 134–53Google Scholar; Rinon, Yoav, “The Rhetoric of Jacques Derrida I: Plato's Pharmacy,” Review of Metaphysics 46, no. 2 (1992): 369–86Google Scholar.

19 See Griswold, “Epilogue,” 235.

20 Rinon, “Rhetoric of Jacques Derrida I,” 369.

21 See Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 56–57 on the strangeness that Derrida sees in the founding operation of Western metaphysics having been delivered through the mouth of an Egyptian monarch and reported second- or third-hand by Plato's Socrates. See also part 3 below.

22 You can count the lines to verify this quantitative centrality, Derrida notes (73).

23 See Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 216–17.

24 See Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 67–68.

25 See Rinella, “Revisiting the Pharmacy”; Kakoliris, Gerasimos, “The ‘Undecidable’ Pharmakon: Derrida's Reading of Plato's Phaedrus,” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 13, ed. Hopkins, Burt and Drummond, John (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; Griswold, “Epilogue,” 234.

26 There is a long-standing argument that ancient philosophical writing was written to be read aloud. See Hadot, Pierre, “The Oral Teaching of Plato,” in Selected Essays, trans. Sharpe, Matthew and Testa, Federica (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 81–90Google Scholar.

27 Derrida reads or effectively writes this term into the Platonic texts (69), despite his avowed failure to find it in the dialogues directly, except via what Derrida calls “the hidden forces of attraction linking a present word with an absent word in the text of Plato” (133). We return to the pharmakos below, and this remarkable appeal to hidden forces of attraction operating despite authorial intention and the very letters of a text. See Benardete, “Derrida and Plato,” 355–56.

28 Cf. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 223.

29 See Ville, Jacques de, “Derrida, Semiotics, and Justice,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue internationale de sémiotique juridique 23, no. 3 (2010): 239–42Google Scholar.

30 Quoted in Leonard, Miriam, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988): 648.

32 Derrida, “Critical Response,” 16.

33 See note 1 above.

34 See, for example, Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political; Guerlac, Suzanne and Cheah, Pheng, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

35 “It could no doubt be shown, and I will try to do so when the time comes, that this blockage between the passage among opposing values is already an effect of ‘Platonism’” (at 101). The context is discussing the opposing significations condensed in the single signifier “pharmakon.”

36 Derrida's conscious aim is not to side with the sophists: “this reading of Plato is at no time spurred on by some slogan or password of a ‘back-to-the-sophists’ nature,” but deconstruction alerts us to the inability of authors to fully master the logics of their own texts (111). Cf. Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 50–51, 56; Mortensen, “Plato's Pharmacy,” 336.

37 Benardete, “Derrida and Plato,” 355–56.

38 Cf. Rinon, “Rhetoric of Jacques Derrida,” 372–73. To be fair, Derrida hesitates before the evidence concerning how much of the literary material he finds woven into the Platonic dialogues can plausibly be held to be involuntary. He does not reconsider his basic commitments in this light (e.g., 78).

39 Rinon, “Rhetoric of Jacques Derrida,” 370–71.

40 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) on the notion of arch-writing, the ultratranscendental condition of possibility and impossibility of stable sense.

41 See Zuckert, “Politics of Derridean Deconstruction,” 353–54.

42 See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Bases of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992), 4, 7, 10, 14–15, with Lilla, “Politics of Jacques Derrida.”

43 See references in preceding note.

44 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 84.

45 See, for a contrasting Derridean interpretation of the “structural laws” of paternity that would ex hypothesi govern the demotion of writing against speech in philosophy and myth, Meljac, “Derrida's Pharmacy.” The arguments I make against Derrida on this point also apply to Meljac's intervention.

46 This is another “or” that Derrida does not stop at. We note several other literary indications that philosophy is a challenge to paternal authority, as Plato understands it. For the philosophical discussion of justice to proceed in the Republic, the father, Cephalus (whose very name means “head”), leaves (Rep. 331d); just as the long peripatetic journey of the Laws ends before the group ever arrives at the cave of Zeus, father of the gods (Laws 968e–969d).

47 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 60, 82–83.

48 Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Chase, M. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 147–78Google Scholar; Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 220.

49 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 220.

50 Cf. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 225.

51 See, on arch-writing, Derrida, Of Grammatology, 6–94; Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 72; Mortensen, “Plato's Pharmacy,” 338.

52 Griswold, “Epilogue,” 235.

53 See Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Derrida on Schmitt, see Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005), 112–37Google Scholar; cf. Löwith, Karl, “The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Wolin, Richard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

54 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 67–68.

55 Griswold, “Epilogue,” 235.

56 See Altman, Plato the Teacher.

57 See Holub, Robert C., Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

58 Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 73, with 58–60; see Griswold, “Epilogue,” 235.

59 Cf. Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 72–73, 84.

60 See Zuckert, Plato's Philosophers; Altman, Plato the Teacher and Guardians on Trial.

61 See Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 217, 224–25, 227–28.

62 See here also William H. F. Altman, “Why Derrida Is Right about Timaeus and Wrong about Plato,” Academia, online at https://www.academia.edu/5221814/Why_Derrida_is_Right_about_Timaeus_and_Wrong_about_Plato. In his defense, Derrida momentarily confronts this problem when he reflects on the striking fact that it is Egyptian characters in Socrates's myth who explain the provenance of writing, and its logocentric devaluation as a bad pharmakon. However, at this moment, we see how the postulate of arch-writing, like Derrida's notion of undecidability (as above), can work every bit like a post facto charm. “We are . . . bracketing off the problem of factual genealogy and of the empirical, effective communication among cultures and mythologies,” Derrida writes, as if these were incidental things in explaining the origins of writing. For what is at stake are “structural laws” which would allegedly “govern and articulate the oppositions of speech/writing, life/death, father/son.” These structural laws, far beneath anyone's intentionality and operating across the differences between entire cultures, “also govern, and according to the same configurations, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian mythology,” as well as, via Plato's Phaedrus, platonism and the entire history of Western logocentrism (85). Again, see the texts by Altman and Zuckert listed in note 6 on the need to register the difference between Plato and his characters.

63 Leonard, Athens in Paris, 210; cf. McCarthy, “Politics of the Ineffable,” 146–68.

64 Cf. Rosen, “Platonic Reconstruction,” 68.

65 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Postcards, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9–10, 16, 25, 35, 59; cf. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 227–28.

66 Heidegger returned to Parmenides during the fateful winter of 1942–43, then lectured on Heraclitus (B 16) in summer 1943; he wrote on B 50 in 1944, before turning to Anaximander in the immediate postwar (1946). See Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1985), and Glenn W. Most, “Heidegger's Greeks,” Arion 10 (2002): 83–89. Heidegger's conception of the history of Being looking back to Plato and the Presocratics dates from the same period.

67 Cf. Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 108–13Google Scholar; “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 73–103.

68 Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, J. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), secs. 26–27, 34–38Google Scholar; cf. Chapoutot, Johann, Le nazisme et l'antiquité (Paris: Broché, 2012), 284–300Google Scholar.

69 See Altman, Guardians on Trial, 207–28, with Plato the Teacher, where this “going back down,” from the dialogue's first words, is read as the key to Plato's larger conception of justice, at least for the philosopher.

70 See Dillon, John, The Middle Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. The proliferation of competing Platonisms after Plato's death is itself powerful testimony, if not to Derridean dissemination, then to the deliberate or ironic underdetermination of Plato's dialogues.