fail. Writing has to win, Derrida argues. The dialogues are
books, after all; we are reading them. The truth, Plato an-
nounces, is “written in the soul.” The philosopher finds it nec-
essary to use the image of writing, rather than speech, for the
highest thing he can evoke: truth.
ThePhaedrusconstitutes a “trial of writing,” Derrida
claims (Dissemination 67 ). As far as Plato is concerned, writing
loses against speech, the living word that Socrates, who never
wrote anything down, remains loyal to. But in Derrida’s book,
writing is the necessary victor. Only after writing appears
can we understand the difference between it and speech, and
know the way these two opponents are entwined with, or par-
asitic on, each other ( 101 ). In his way of living and talking,
Socrates embodied virtue (arete). But his example lives only
because Plato wrote so much about him.
Let us take a closer look at Derrida’s complex argument
in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Derrida tells us he will pick out for us
the “hidden thread” of Plato’s dialogue ( 65 ). This thread leads
to a more far-reaching conclusion than Derrida’s preliminary
idea (that Plato, because he writes, must make speech yield to
writing). For Derrida, the Phaedrus’s covert message, which
Plato himself remains unconscious of, is that speech also actu-
allyiswriting: that all our expression is an ambiguous creature
divided against itself. The voice, with Plato’s aid, proclaims its
own superiority over the written word, but this boast cannot
be sustained. What if these two seemingly opposed entities,
speech and writing, are in fact the same thing? In that case,
Derrida argues, Plato’s effort to distinguish writing from
speaking must fail.
Socrates tells the story this way, close to the end of the
Phaedrus.He has heard about an Egyptian god named Theuth,
“the first to discover number and calculation, and geometry
and astronomy, and also games of draughts and dice; and, to
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 149