- Speaking of the difficulty of translation, I thought this essay could've been translated in a much clearer manner. Also, a lot of it was lost in keeping the Greek - such as the play with the word eidos. I think a small glossary would be appropriate here.
- "Let us freeze the scene and the characters." This could only be done with writing, not with speech. To writing's advantage, it allows for a closer look and more time to analyze.
- "The father is always suspicious and watchful toward writing." This is evidenced in patriarchal institutions like the government and the church who have historically been involved with censorship and banning books.
- "He has no need to write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices." Damn, I want to be a king.
- It is curious to me that Derrida never mentions the reader in his essay. I'll throw out some of my educated guesses in the presentation tomorrow.
- "If it were purely external, writing would leave the intimacy or integrity of the psychic memory untouched." I agree with Derrida on the preposterousness of Plato's cut and dry oppositions. And while I recognize the harmful effects on truth/memory that Plato attributes to writing, I don't see anywhere where Plato says these effects cause permanent damage. It merely causes it to be put to sleep, forgotten which I don't believe implies destruction. Consistent reproduction and repetition can cause the original message to be denatured (the Telephone game is a perfect example), but this doesn't change the original meaning in any way.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Plato's Pharmacy
Since I'm presenting on this text tomorrow, I'll spare you all the repetition of what I'm going to speak about and I'll just talk about some points that I found to be interesting.
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"This is evidenced in patriarchal institutions like the government and the church who have historically been involved with censorship and banning books."
ReplyDeleteIndeed, though (and this is in part Derrida's point) both government and the church would be inconceivable without books and writing. Hence they cannot simply ban all books and all writing, much as they might perhaps want to.
" "Let us freeze the scene and the characters." This could only be done with writing, not with speech. To writing's advantage, it allows for a closer look and more time to analyze."
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps Socrates (not Plato?) would say that is the problem: in a dialogue, we can more easily turn the appropriate face of a word to our interlocutor, and hide faces that confuse our ("our": an important word?) meaning. In writing, the reader is free to run behind the scene and see things there that lead off in the wrong direction.
It makes me think of that insect, the water boatman: it skims across the surface of water, taking advantage of the surface tension. Perhaps Socrates is saying that dialogue has a surface tension that writing doesn't and so we can effectively navigate it in a certain way that we can't with writing.
And more generally, as Jon remarks, perhaps Socrates refuses precisely those institutions, such as the church, which will be built out of writing. Both writing and money arrive at the same time: both are pharmakons.