“Plato’s Pharmacy” is an extended essay, over a hundred
pages long, first published in Tel Quelin 1968 and reprinted in
Derrida’s book Dissemination( 1972 ). In “Plato’s Pharmacy”
Derrida devotes not a single sentence to the myth of the char-
ioteer, probably Plato’s best-known fable about what human
beings are like. Instead, he dwells on the subject of speech and
writing in Plato’s dialogue, epitomized in the obscure myth of
Theuth near the end of the Phaedrus.As he so often does, Der-
rida here takes a small, overlooked section of a text and argues
that it is all-important. Derrida does not touch the crucial cen-
ter of Plato’s dialogue, only its fringes.
Along with the Symposium,thePhaedrusmay be Plato’s
most sparkling, fascinating dialogue. There are two drives
within us, says Socrates: two sources of self, two ruling prin-
ciples. One of them is an inborn desire for pleasures; the other
is worthy opinion informed by knowledge (epiktetos doxa).
Good judgment guides us; desire drags us down. For Plato, this
remains the most fundamental fact about us, as souls: we are
split in two. But the split is far from simple. Socrates’ defini-
tions seem to struggle against each other. Socrates defines eros
as “the irrational [aneu logou] appetite that has gained power
over the judgment [doxa] urging one toward the right thing.”
This appetite is “forcefully driven by the desires akin to it in
its pursuit of the body’s beauty, winning in the contest, and
taking its name from its force—it’s called eros.”^1 (Socrates
here puns on eromenos,“beloved,” and erromenos,“forcefully”
or “violently” [ 238 b–c].) Eros wins out against judgment or
doxa, against the accepted opinion that shows us the right
thing to do.
In order to understand love in its madness, Socrates re-
marks, you have to know what the soul is like. The soul re-
sembles a charioteer with a pair of winged horses, one of them
144 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud