194 Derrida 1963–1983
quasi-philological reading of the Phaedrus. Derrida had, as we have
said, learned Ancient Greek only belatedly, but he now seemed to
move in it quite easily. While using a standard French translation,
the one by Léon Robin published by Budé, he constantly went back
to the original text and retranslated passages, especially each time
the word pharmakon occurred. This term, whose traces Derrida
followed closely in his reading of Plato, had in fact been translated
sometimes as ‘remedy’, sometimes as ‘recipe’, ‘poison’, ‘drug’, or
‘philtre’. Since these variations seemed to him quite pernicious, he
endeavoured to bring out the extent to which ‘the malleable unity
of this concept, or rather its rules and the strange logic that links
it with its signifi er, has been dispersed, masked, obliterated, and
rendered almost unreadable not only by the imprudence or empiri-
cism of the translators, but fi rst and foremost by the redoubtable,
irreducible diffi culty of translation’.^21 The question was all the
more far- reaching in that this concrete term, now a ‘philosopheme’,
seemed in his view to play as central a role in Plato’s work as did
‘supplement’ in Rousseau. Hemlock itself, the potion that Socrates
was sentenced to drink, ‘is never called anything but a pharmakon’.^22
The question of the inscription of the philosophical text in its lan-
guage, and thus the matter of translation, would become constant
preoccupations of Derrida – especially because the foreign versions
of his own texts would keep forcing him to confront them.
At the end of an evening spent together, Philippe Sollers gave
Derrida the manuscripts of his two new books, Logics and Numbers.
Derrida already knew most of the essays gathered in Logics, but
he was deeply impressed by Numbers. He was soon immersed in
‘this arithmetical and theatrical machine’, ‘this implacable numera-
tion and these seeds innumerable in number’.^23 He very quickly
expressed the desire to write something, while being fully aware of
the resistance of this strange fi ction, imbued with refl exivity:
I dream of a genius idea – but I have no genius – or a way of
writing that would allow me to ‘get stuck in’, so that within the
dimensions of an article I could both write a text, master your
machine and yet present it as something to be read enrolled
around its consumed self. I’ve never taken on such a diffi cult
task, one both necessary and risky. And if I fi nish it, it will all
have been said, by you fi rst and foremost, in Numbers already
and in that remarkable, in every respect, interview in La
Quinzaine.^24While his friendship with Sollers again seemed unclouded, rela-
tions with Jean-Pierre Faye had become very prickly. Faye was fi ve
years older than Derrida, a writer but also an agrégé de philosophie: