Outside the Walls with Phaedrus

Abstract

In this chapter, Arnaud Mace analyses Derrida’s complex reading of Plato’s Phaedrus in detail. Derrida sought to locate the structure upon which the history of philosophy in his view rests, a structure he terms “phonocentrism” or “logocentrism,” in the very activity of reading texts passed on to us from ancient Greek thinkers. Nowhere is such a structure more thoroughly integrated than in Plato’s Phaedrus, and the only way to uncover it is to read the Phaedrus as a whole and write down the experience of reading it, as Derrida does in Plato’s Pharmacy. In this chapter, Arnaud Mace endeavors to read Derrida’s Pharmacy, uncovering three layers in its reading of the Phaedrus, which provides a successively deeper understanding of the structure of logocentrism. The first layer is concerned with finding the thread that unifies the whole dialogue in the opposition between writing and true knowledge expressed in live speech; the second finds that Plato deconstructed this first opposition by conceiving true knowledge through metaphors of writing and by building his ontology on a grammatical scheme; the third shows how Plato’s writing proves that a trial against writing is needed in order to discover the nature of the text as forever differentiating the many layers of its meaning and prompting the desire for it. Derrida’s Pharmacy, Mace argues, is nothing but a reading of the Phaedrus that lets the dialogue unfold the very structure of metaphysics that is enshrined in it.