clear, absolute perfection. Derrida remarks that, for Plato,
“The immortality and perfection of a living being would
consist of it having no relation at all with any outside. That is
the case with God” ( 101 ). And the philosopher, devoted to a
pure, imageless knowledge, would be a kind of God. Yet this
Greek sage, though called the divine Plato by centuries of read-
ers, neither wants godhead nor believes that he can attain it.
He knows we are impure, by nature. Derrida’s picture of Plato
is far from the much more complex real thing.
Penelope Deutscher, a loyal Derridean, accurately sum-
marizes Derrida’s derogatory version of Plato when she writes
that “Plato’s debasement of writing implies his idealization of
a thoroughly spontaneous, immediate, undeterred, therefore
non-‘inscribed’ knowledge, or thought. Derrida exposes this
ideal as an impossible phantasy.”^2 Deutscher’s, and Derrida’s,
description is valid only for Platonism, and a rather simple-
minded Platonism at that, not for Plato himself. As I will
argue, and as the best readers of the Phaedrus,Charles Gris-
wold and Giovanni Ferrari, also point out, Plato does not de-
base writing in his dialogue.^3 Instead, he protests the mis-
use of writing, specifically by sophists and allied rhetoricians.
He does so in order to define what philosophy can offer,
how it distinguishes itself from the crowd-pleasing speech-
maker’s art.
Derrida claims that for Plato books are “foreign to living
knowledge” ( 73 ). Plato tries to dominate writing and subor-
dinate it to speech, by “inserting [writing’s] definition into
simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and out-
side, true and false, essence and appearance.” Finally, Derrida
gives this paraphrase of Plato’s point: “In truth, writing is es-
sentially bad” ( 103 ). The pharmakon leads readers astray ( 70 –
71 ). And Plato, writes Derrida, desperately wants to get back on
152 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud