painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them
something, they preserve a quite solemn silence.
Similarly with written words: you might think that
they spoke as if they had some thought in their
heads, but if you ever ask them about any of the
things they say out of a desire to learn, they point to
just one thing, the same each time. And when once
it is written, every composition is trundled about
[kulindeitai] everywhere in the same way, in the
presence both of those who know about the subject
and those who have nothing at all to do with it, and
it does not know how to address those it should ad-
dress and not those it should not. When it is ill-
treated and unjustly abused, it always needs its fa-
ther [that is, its author] to help it; for it is incapable
of defending or helping itself. ( 275 d–e)Derrida exaggerates the hapless, homeless character of writ-
ing, pushing Plato’s account of it much further than Plato him-
self does. Writing “rolls this way and that,” Derrida proclaims,
“like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a
bad seed, a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum.... Wandering in
the streets, he doesn’t even know who he is, what his identity—
if he has one—might be, what his father’s name is” (Dissemi-
nation 143 ).
This is picturesque but inaccurate. Writing, as Socrates
indicates, depends on its father in times of need: that is, an au-
thor must answer for what he has made, his text. Derrida’s
image of writing as amnesiac and homeless invents a stark
contrast, one that enables him to portray Plato—quite implau-
sibly—as an enemy of all written expression. Writing under-
mines what Derrida sees as Plato’s basic interest in crystal-
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 151