This article was downloaded by: [Lancaster University Library]On: 05 November 2014, At: 07:27Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The ExplicatorPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Derrida's Pharmacy: A Note onDerrida and PHAEDRUSEric Meljac aa Indiana University of PennsylvaniaPublished online: 08 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Eric Meljac (2010) Derrida's Pharmacy: A Note on Derrida andPHAEDRUS, The Explicator, 68:2, 136-139, DOI: 10.1080/00144941003723923

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144941003723923

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,

sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lan

cast

er U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

07:

27 0

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 2, 136–139, 2010Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X onlineDOI: 10.1080/00144941003723923

ERIC MELJAC

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Derrida’s Pharmacy: A Note on Derridaand PHAEDRUS

Keywords: Jacques Derrida, Phaedrus, Plato

In the film Derrida, Amy Ziering Kofman asks Jacques Derrida to namethe philosopher who would most likely be his mother. After a pause, Derridacomments that this question is a good question. Biting his nail, he thinks longand hard. After a moment, Derrida says, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, thatthe answer to the question is an impossible one, for the history of philosophyis a history of men, not of women, such that there is no philosopher who couldrightly be called his mother. Instead, Derrida suggests, he rests at a peculiar pointin philosophic history when his “philosopher mother” would necessarily have tobe his own daughter or his daughter’s daughter, for the philosophical revolution(so to speak) that he initiated by way of deconstructing the structural formula ofphilosophy enabled the feminine to enter the philosophic paradigms where beforethey were almost entirely absent.

This cinematic excerpt acts as a perfect segue into the realm of gender as itpertains to Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Phaedrus. Derrida’s somewhat meanderingdiscussion of fathers and sons in “Plato’s Pharmacy” may be difficult to follow,yet directing one’s reading of Derrida to that of the mytho-historical in this regardhelps illuminate some of what Derrida aims to address. Namely, Derrida links thehistory of the discussion and act of writing to the paternal, finding that the ancientGreek pater, with its multitude of referents (at once meaning “the father who isalso chief, capital, and good(s)” [81]), spawns as its son ekgonos, whom Derridaargues “signifies production and the product, birth and the child, etc. This wordfunctions with this meaning in the domains of agriculture, of kinship relations, and

136

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lan

cast

er U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

07:

27 0

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Derrida’s Pharmacy: A Note on Derrida and PHAEDRUS 137

of fiduciary operations. None of these domains . . . lies outside the investmentand possibility of a logos” (81–82).

Simply arriving at this point is a labor. Derrida’s text depends on a variety ofprior knowledges. One must, for example, know Plato’s Republic and Phaedrus.One must also know ancient Greek; the histories of myth, origin, and writing; andthe tradition in which logos takes a form other than writing. From whence canone come to know all of these things in an effort to find Derrida’s meaning, ifmeaning is what one finds when reading “Plato’s Pharmacy”? Such knowledge,in Derrida’s terms, comes from a tradition of paternity, such that the knowledgein the form of the logos comes from a father, inherited by his son(s). Finding thesource, if a source can be found, requires a reading by and through the paternalline almost exclusively, because the paternal line, at least in terms of Phaedrus, ifnot all of Western philosophy, is the line that can be traced back to a beginning.

Perhaps the best way to begin is to jump ahead and address Derrida’s dis-cussion of mythology as it pertains to logos and Phaedrus. Derrida mentions theEgyptian mythology of logos by way of the sun-god Ra. Derrida writes,

Thoth is an engendered god. He often calls himself the son of thegod-king, the son-god, Ammon-Ra: “I am Thoth, the eldest son ofRa.” Ra (the sun) is god the creator, and he engenders through themediation of the word. His other name, the one by which he is in factdesignated in the Phaedrus, is Ammon. The accepted sense of thisproper name: the hidden. Once again we encounter here a hidden sun,the father of all things, letting himself be represented by speech. (87)

Derrida’s purpose in introducing Thoth, son of Ra, is to establish the mythol-ogy that informs early Western philosophic writings such as Phaedrus. Themythologies established, not only by the Egyptians but by the Greek as well,place the authority of writing, the mediation of the word, in the hands of the sonof the god-king. The word, the logos, has its origin in the god-king, who is alwaysa masculine figure. Thus, the vested mythological interests in the word as wordalways rested in the paternal. Thoth, Derrida reminds his readers, mediates theword for Ra in the Egyptian mythologies. As Derrida puts it,

This type of subordination thus puts Thoth in Ra’s place as the moontakes the place of the sun. The god of writing thus supplies the placeof Ra, supplementing him and supplanting him in his absence andessential disappearance. Such is the origin of the moon as a supplementto the sun, of night light as supplement to daylight. And writing as thesupplement of speech. (89)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lan

cast

er U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

07:

27 0

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

138 The Explicator

Writing, then, at least as Derrida sees it, is vested in the paternal, for the wordbegins with the masculine god, and it is represented in his absence by his son, thegod of writing.

The mythological confirmation of this belief even finds its way into Christianmythology, although Derrida does not mention it. Consider the first verses of theGospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and theWord was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things cameinto being through him, and without him not one thing came intobeing. (The Holy Bible, 1.1–3)

The manifestation of Jesus Christ, the son of the Hebrew god, was the mani-festation of the word of god, the origin of the text of god. One cannot mistake thepaternity of the word in this respect. In fact, the rise of Christianity in the first fewcenturies after its inception only served to strengthen the ancient Greek and evenEgyptian ties between logos and masculinity. But that discussion is best saved foranother essay.

Derrida links the mythological source, or egg, to the history of philosophyand writing by way of the Phaedrus dialogue in which Socrates, in recitation ofmyth, adopts the character, or characteristics, of the paternal myth. As Derridaputs it,

Plato has not simply borrowed, nor borrowed a simple element: theidentity of a character, Thoth, the god of writing. One cannot, in fact,speak—and we don’t really know what the word could mean hereanyway—of a borrowing, that is, of an addition contingent and externalto the text. Plato had to make his tale conform to structural laws.. . . In concerning ourselves with the fact that Plato has not merelyborrowed a simple element, we are thus bracketing off the problemof factual genealogy and of the empirical, effective communicationamong cultures and mythologies. (85)

What Derrida means here is that the structural laws within which Plato mustwork, according to his point in time, his contexts, and his limits, are structural lawsthat come from the myths that more immediately inform his world (which are,perhaps, a bit alien to the world we inhabit today). To clarify, the borrowing Derridaqualifies (“and we don’t really know what the word could mean here anyway”)is not a borrowing by way of using in an effort to illustrate, but a borrowing byway of necessity; it is a necessary borrowing based entirely on immediacy. The

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lan

cast

er U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

07:

27 0

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Derrida’s Pharmacy: A Note on Derrida and PHAEDRUS 139

textual world—the world of logos—in which Plato operates is a world informedand shaped by such myths. If the myths of Thoth, and by extension the myths ofthe Greek gods, obey the same structural laws by which Plato constructs Phaedrus,as well as The Republic and his other works, Plato cannot be said to be workingoutside the system of paternity, in which the god of writing is engendered as the sonof the god-king. The structural laws to which Plato is obligated, Derrida argues,“govern and articulate the oppositions of speech/writing, life/death, father/son,”and “also govern, and according to the same configurations, Egyptian, Babylonian,and Assyrian mythology” (85).

Here one comes to the point Derrida makes elsewhere, the idea that there is noway to exist outside text. Despite Plato’s desire (and by extension Socrates’s desire)to escape the mythology, especially perhaps the myths of the poets who bastardizethe truth, by employing the dialectic, he is unable—because of his context, his pointin history, the logos that informs the dialectic he himself employs—to escape. Hisemployment of the myths in the text are the most obvious evidence of the failure toescape, but beyond the superficial evidence exists, as Derrida reminds his readers,the very structural laws that govern the authoring of Phaedrus. The tradition ofdialogue, the tradition of the father instructing the son (if one accepts Socrates asthe father of the dialectic instruction and Phaedrus as the son), the very fact thatmen are discussing philosophy under a tree—all point to a structural frameworkformed and informed by the paternal. The issue at hand, then, is that these samestructural laws, by way of the Western tradition of looking back to Plato as the eggof philosophy, re-emerge in the logos of the present. The play, however, the spacesin between the points in the structure, hold promise for the inclusion of the other,others who (silently) informed the same texts—the mothers, perhaps, or, to useDerrida’s idea, the daughters, who bring forth the paternal figures who dominatethe logos. For it is the philosophic revolution that Derrida furthers (rather thansimply fathers) by way of his deconstructive return to the mythic and female eggthat opens up more spaces for the feminine. In this way, Derrida’s “dissemination”becomes only part of a conception, creatively joining with a secretive egg, there toengender a place for the feminine. Thus, deconstruction reconstructs the structurallaws under which Plato works and opens a space for Derrida’s daughter or hisdaughter’s daughter to exist in an otherwise paternal text.

Works Cited

Derrida. Dirs. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Perf. Jacques Derrida. Zeitgeist, 2002. Film.Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Print.The Holy Bible: The New Standard Revised Version with Apocrypha. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989.

Print.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lan

cast

er U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

07:

27 0

5 N

ovem

ber

2014