Abstract
In this essay, one of Derrida’s early texts, Plato’s pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida’s other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud’s texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida’s analysis of writing in Plato’s pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s texts and Freud’s study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida’s contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato’s texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this ‘early’ text of Derrida and his ‘later’, seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato’s pharmacy, with its investigation via ‘writing’ of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality.
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Notes
This aspect can for reasons of space not be explored in the present essay in detail. This has been done elsewhere.
See also Derrida [5, pp. 111–112]. Gasché [22, pp. 95–105] points out that in Plato, weaving (symploke) plays an important dialectical role, whereas in Derrida, especially in Plato’s pharmacy, weaving is generalized so as to show the relation of dialectics to an alterity which is its condition of possibility as well as impossibility. The other of dialectics, that which was understood to be negativity, is shown to no longer be its other, to no longer belong to it, to not even be a negative. The other in Derrida’s thinking ‘is irretrievably plural and cannot be assimilated, digested, represented, or thought as such, and hence put to work by the system of metaphysics’ (at p. 103). The pharmakon is one of the names for this otherness. The reading of Plato’s pharmacy presented in the present essay ties in closely with that of Gasché, although here the other will be explored in closer relation to a certain thinking of Freud; see also Kamuf [26] where the same theme of weaving is at stake in an analysis of Plato’s pharmacy.
See in general, Freud [21, vol. IV, pp. 305–309; vol. V, pp. 514–515; vol. XV, pp. 170–183; vol. XIX, pp. 12–13].
See inter alia Freud [21] vol. VI (The psychopathology of everyday life); vol. VIII (Jokes and their relation to the unconscious); vol. IX, pp. 1–95 (Jensen’s Gradiva); vol. XI, pp. 57–137 (Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood); vol. XIII (Totem and taboo); vol. XXI, pp. 1–56 (The future of an illusion); vol. XXIII, pp. 1–137 (Moses and monotheism).
See also Freud [21, vol. IV, p. 111 n 1].
This is explored by Derrida [14, pp. 1–38], where he points to the weaving metaphors employed in the passage quoted above and brings this ‘resistance’ to analysis in relation to Freud’s elaboration of the repetition compulsion and death drive, inter alia in Beyond the pleasure principle [21, vol. XVIII, pp. 1–64]. Plato’s pharmacy and the figure of the pharmakon are incidentally also referred to here (at pp. 30–31).
In devising this neologism, Derrida was presumably not unaware of Freud’s remark in The interpretation of dreams [21, vol. V, pp. 356–357] that ‘[i]n the case of unintelligible neologisms…it is worth considering whether they may not be put together from components with a sexual meaning’. The analysis which follows seems to confirm thus postulation.
Page number references in Plato’s texts will be to the page numbers indicated in the margins of these texts.
The Phaedrus has incidentally been criticised in similar terms for many centuries. It has, specifically because of the inclusion of the Egyptian myth on the invention of writing which we will discuss below, been regarded as either the work of a young, immature Plato or an old Plato, close to senility [18, pp. 71–72].
In relation to the pharmakon, it is worth mentioning Freud’s ‘The antithetical meaning of primal words (Urworte) [21, vol. XI, pp. 155–161; vol. XV, pp. 179–180] as well as his expression of agreement in The interpretation of dreams with Hans Sperber that ‘all primal words referred to sexual things but afterwards lost their sexual meaning through being applied to other things and activities which were compared with the sexual ones’ [21, vol. V, p. 352]; see further Freud [21, vol. XV, p. 167]. One of Derrida’s texts which come very close to, but nonetheless goes beyond this Freudian analysis is ‘A number of yes’ where he analyses the boundless ‘yes’ at the ‘pre-origin’ of language, through a reading of Michel de Certeau [20, pp. 231–240]. The latter text ties in with the analysis in par 8 below.
See also Meyer [32, pp. 503–504], Brogan [2, pp. 8–13], Naas [34, pp. 44, 49], and Hobson [23, pp. 64–65]. The early commentaries on Plato’s pharmacy, by Norris [35, pp. 28–45], Culler [4, pp. 142–144] and Johnson [24] which were relied on by legal scholars, may have contributed to the many misunderstandings surrounding this text. Although these latter commentaries show a great deal of insight in relation to Derrida’s texts, they can and have been read to suggest that what is at stake in the pharmakon is simply a double meaning, that is, remedy and poison.
See further par 5 below.
Socrates in the Phaedrus incidentally defines love as ‘a kind of madness’; Plato [36, p. 265a].
See also Plato’s Cratylus at pp. 400d and 419e–420b. Derrida [18, p. 75] refers in this context to the ‘diaphanous purity’ (in the sense of a texture so fine to permit seeing through) of the waters, which must have welcomed and drawn Orithyia and Pharmaceia like a spell, where Socrates and Phaedrus are reclining. It is furthermore interesting to note at this point that Lévi-Strauss [30, pp. 378–405] detects a close relation in myth between weaving and pubic hair.
The word Pharmacia (Pharmakeia), Derrida [18, p. 75] notes, is also a common noun used to refer to the administration of the pharmakon, or drug: poison and/or medicine, hinting that it was through poisoning (or perhaps the pleasurable or blind use of a drug that she lost her life (at 78)). See also Derrida [11, pp. 236–237, 240–241] for a reflection on the reasons for society’s condemnation of the drug addict.
In what has up until now been the most detailed discussion of Plato’s Pharmacy in the legal context, Brosnan [3, pp. 365–376] contends (at 366) that Derrida’s remark that ‘[t]hrough her games, Pharmacia has dragged down to death a virginal purity and an unpenetrated interior’ [18, p. 75] is ‘somewhat illogical’ (the words italicized by me is the only part of the sentence quoted by Brosnan), in view of the Phaedrus suggesting instead that Boreas was the one responsible. Brosnan’s assessment is another indication (together with his view that Derrida’s word-play and reversals of oppositions are simply techniques, or ‘an intensely skeptical method’ (at 371), and his implication that Derrida seeks to convince us of some kind of truth in a way similar to a work of modernist art (at 370–371)) of the carelessness with which he reads Plato’s pharmacy. According to Brosnan (at 366), Derrida’s ‘ultimate conclusion’, which ‘is not clearly stated in so many words’ is that the privilege of speech in the speech/writing opposition ‘is wrong’. Both speech and writing, he contends, instead share the trait of being distanced from immediate truth or presence. The perplexity of the author faced with this text appears further from the rhetorical questions posed at the end of his analysis of Derrida’s essay (at 372): ‘Where do you go with an insight or claim that two things conventionally viewed as opposites are “in a sense,” the same thing? That is what is most conspicuously absent from Derrida’s account of the Phaedrus, a sense of just what is at stake if you choose to accept this view. What does it matter if, as Derrida claims, the entire history of Western philosophy can be re-explained as a meta-conflict of speech versus writing? We are left to guess what, if anything, would be different’ (footnote omitted). It is remarkable that this acknowledged lack of comprehension does not reduce the author to silence, but (revealingly) rather seems to incite him into making the accusations against Derrida referred to above. In this regard the remarks of Freud [21, vol. XI, p. 39] in relation to resistance to psychoanalysis appear apposite.
In other accounts Boreas is furthermore said to have raped her and she, having become an immortal goddess, to have borne him a number of children.
The invocation and dismissal of the myth in relation to Pharmaceia, with the latter’s allusion to the pharmakon ties in with Plato’s analogous treatment of writing. Myth and writing share the same fate in Plato’s texts insofar as both are in opposition to logos. They are furthermore both orphans: whereas logos has a father, writing has been abandoned by his father and the father of myth is almost impossible to find; Derrida [18, pp. 145, 183 n. 69]. Their invocation and dismissal is, as should slowly become clear, what provides the condition of possibility for the dialogue.
Writing on the other hand is not a being (on). At the same time it is not simply a non-being either (meon). The danger of writing lies exactly in this ability to slip out of the simple opposition or alternative between presence and absence [18, p. 111].
There is clearly a similarity between the familial scene depicted here and Freud’s Oedipus complex as well as its ideal resolution; see further par 6 below.
Freud [21, vol. V, p. 355; vol. XV, p. 158] points out that wood in general and tables specifically stand for women in dreams, whereas a bed alludes to sexual intercourse: ‘Tables, tables laid out for a meal, and boards also stand for women—no doubt by antithesis, since the contours of their bodies are eliminated in the symbols…. Since “bed and board” constitute marriage, the latter often takes the place of the former in dreams and the sexual complex of ideas is, so far as may be, transposed onto the eating complex.’ See also Derrida [8, pp. 315–317] on the symbolic meaning of the bed in Ernst’s fort/da game; and further Derrida [18, pp. 205, 210, 231, 233]. Freud’s insight that matter (Latin: material from mater (mother)) or wood/board/plank represents women in dreams, furthermore tells us something of the limit/border (brothel/French: bordel; German Bordell) in Derrida’s thinking and specifically in this context, the limit between inside and outside; see further Derrida [9, pp. 54–55].
See also Derrida [18, p. 78].
See also the discussion of Staikou elsewhere in this Issue on the metaphysical desire for the intact kernel (which does not exist) that lies behind this inside/outside logic.
This can be explained with reference to the Freudian death drive which will be referred to again below. In Archive fever [12, p. 11] Derrida comments in this respect that ‘the death drive is also…an aggression and destruction (Destruktion) drive’ which inter alia ‘incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnēsis’. It is because of death as interior to life (which forgetfulness, here not limiting itself to repression (at 19), points to), that signs are needed as an aid to memory; see also Derrida [18, pp. 108 and 113].
The mechanism of displacement in dreams, which was referred to in par 2 above is clearly of relevance here.
See in general, Bremmer [1].
Socrates was born on the sixth day of the month Thargelion, the day the city is purified [18, p. 135]. Socrates furthermore died from drinking hemlock (pharmakon—at 129) after having been sentenced to death for offending the gods and misleading the youth, and as we will see in par 7 below, he is sometimes referred to in Plato’s dialogues as a pharmakeus (magician).
This also explains Derrida’s remark that the discourse he engages in here is not strictly speaking a psychoanalytical one [18, p. 179 n. 56].
Plato incidentally does not stop with the condemnation of writing (and painting), but as Derrida [18] points out, proceeds to condemn through reliance on the same structure pederasty and prostitution which involves a wasteful scattering of sperm (at 151–152), the planting of seeds that do not bear proper fruit (at 150), democracy which is at the disposal of everyone (at 144–145), the festival which subverts the order of the city (at 142), as well as the outlaw, the pervert, and the vagrant (at 144). Writing is therefore tied to immorality, to a perverted politics, to pleasures without paternity (at 151). This natural tendency, of for example sperm to disseminate, must according to Plato be tied down, submitted to the law of the logos. This can happen only when the father remains present; otherwise ‘nature’ takes its course.
Derrida, in pointing to other versions of the myth, follows the example of Lévi-Strauss [29, pp. 216–217] who convincingly advocates an approach which does not seek for the most authentic or earliest version of a myth, but takes account of all versions of a myth in reading it; see also Derrida [7, pp. 286–287].
Plato in the Republic [36, p. 508c] refers to the sun in the visible realm as an analogy to the Good in the intelligible realm. The sun, itself an offspring of the Good, in other words ‘stands in the visible world in the same relation to vision and visible things as that which the good itself bears in the intelligible world to intelligence and to intelligible objects’ [18, p. 87].
Freud in Totem and taboo [21, vol. XIII, pp. 41–51] discusses the appearance of this feature in archaic communities where the chief is regarded as being taboo in the sense that he cannot be approached and viewed directly, but only through intermediaries. This is because of the mysterious and dangerous magical power that is believed to emanate from him and corresponds with the belief of a boy in the excessive powers of his father. There is nonetheless ambivalence in this relation because of a simultaneous distrust of the father, and which finds expression in the practice that the chief must be guarded, but also guarded against. Freud is of the view that remnants of this belief still persist in modern societies (at 43). See furthermore Freud [21, vol. XII, p. 54] on the sun as ‘nothing but another sublimated symbol for the father’. Derrida [18, p. 88] seems to allude here to these texts of Freud.
As clearly appears from these passages, the question of the origin of reason has been a topic of discussion since the dawn of philosophy. One should therefore be careful not to assume too quickly that Derrida’s enquiry into reason’s origin (which is to be clearly distinguished from an opposition to reason) amounts to a ‘performative inconsistency’ as contended for example by Solum [38, p. 484].
Socrates was as we saw, similarly seduced out of the city, but by ‘writing’.
As should already be clear, the question ‘what is?’ is strictly speaking inappropriate in relation to the pharmakon as it has no identity.
The ‘writing’ that is invoked is as we will see in par 8 below not to be equated with writing in the usual sense and is closely associated with death.
See further Derrida [7, p 227] where he reads this as a reference to the ‘psychical trace’; see further below.
Plato incidentally invokes dreams in the same context to further explain this idea [18, p. 159]; see also at 168.
Derrida [7, pp. 219–220] points out in this regard that Freud came to realise to an increasing extent that the process of dream-work can be better expressed by writing with its relations to space, time and difference, than through speech, and through hieroglyphic writing perhaps best of all.
In this text, Derrida [7, pp. 196–231] incidentally makes reference a number of times to the Phaedrus (at 221–222, 227).
The term ‘psychic’ must be qualified as the ‘writing’ which is at stake here actually precedes the distinction between the physical and the psychic.
See also Derrida [6, p. 312].
Referring here again to the mechanism at stake in dreams, we can say that fiction in the form of myth as a rule lends itself better to the ‘representability’ of the unknown, of death. Derrida’s reading of writers such as Maurice Blanchot is of relevance here. See furthermore Lévi-Strauss [31, pp. 45, 54] on the novel as the successor of myth in the Western world.
See above.
See similarly Derrida [7, pp. 196–197] on Of grammatology [6]. One of the very few secondary texts which show an appreciation of this, as well as of the importance of Freud’s thinking in the development of the ‘notion’ of general writing is Spivak’s Preface to Of grammatology [39, pp. xxxviii–xlvi].
See further Derrida [6, pp. 159–161].
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Acknowledgments
The present essay took shape via a discussion on Derrida and his relation to law with Cees Maris and Frans Jacobs, to whom gratitude is expressed. The author would furthermore like to acknowledge the generous funding provided for the research by the South African National Research Foundation.