JACQUES DERRIDA

For those with minimal background either in deconstruction or Derrida, DISSEMINATION as ably translated by Barbara Johnson is not the place to start. In her Translator's Introduction, Johnson tries mightily to provide the tyro with some way to make sense of the forthcoming tsunami that will surely twist the reader into a linguistic pretzel. Johnson places DISSEMINATION into the context of the book's being a critique of Western Metaphysics and though she skims over such critical terms as "trace," "supplement," and "difference," it would clearly help if the reader had at least mastered their meanings. Her analysis of Derrida's deconstruction of Rousseau is correct as she notes that "Rousseau's life does not become a text through his writing: it always already was one." I would caution any reader, however, to be immediately suspicious of any claim of Derrida's that includes the phrase "always already" as even the presenting of one case to the contrary quite effectively negates that claim in its entirety. This review is not the forum for a list of such a claim that invalidates deconstruction. For those who do not wish to take my word for it, see AGAINST DECONSTRUCTION by John Ellis for a very lengthy list.Fully half of DISSEMINATION is Derrida'a critique of Plato's Phaedrus. The remainder of DISSEMINATION is a wandering and very loose series of critiques of Mallarme that defy both comprehension and summation. The best that I can do in a very few words is to suggest that Derrida's meandering prose style that involves puns, weird printing patterns, and non-English characters is a repackaging of his theory of deconstruction into physical form. Since his long and complex essay "Plato's Pharmacy" is seminal, I shall spend the remainder of this review on it. In "Plato's Pharmacy," Jacques Derrida tries mightily to connect his own theories on twentieth century deconstruction to a close reading of Plato's Phaedrus. In this dialogue, Plato sets out what he thinks is so painfully obvious--that speech is "privileged" or favored over writing. Derrida responds by pointing out what he sees as many underlying discrepancies, contradictions, and uncertainties that lie underneath Plato's literal words but which, in his opinion, subvert them so that the reverse meaning appears. "Plato's Pharmacy" is no easy read. Part of the problem is that Derrida assumes that the reader is intimately familiar with Plato's Republic as well as his other assorted dialogues. Derrida further uses Greek words and phrases with depressing frequency. Finally, his prose style is bafflingly complex and nuanced, thus reflecting the tenets that underlie his multi-faceted theory of deconstruction. To comprehend Derrida's analysis of Phaedrus, one must have a working understanding of deconstruction. So here it is. In an earlier essay, "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourses of Human Science," Derrida lists several key components of deconstruction. (1) Western thought has wrongly assumed that there exists a "center" to all discourse that is fixed and eternal: God, man, honor, love, truth, etc. This belief is no more than a shared illusion that masks the "true" fragmentary nature of the universe. (2) Using Saussure's system of signs of paired binaries, Derrida "de-centers" this non-existent center, thereby obliterating the formerly comforting notion of a universal acceptance of meaning. (3) These signs now can be seen to point only to other signs, thus never actually pointing to a fixed center that he calls a "transcendental signified." (4) As a consequence of this never-ending pointing of sign to sign, the trail of signs like the bread crumb trail of Hansel and Gretel can only defer and postpone the search for meaning, thus requiring one to accept the shattering notion that there is no "there" there, no Eternal Truth in the universe. And finally (5) as one uses Derrida's list of technical terms like "trace," "supplement," and "differance" what becomes apparent is that the stated meaning of a text or of its author can always be found to really express the opposite of that stated meaning. One should note that the ideas constituting Derrida's basic thesis that no true meaning exists anywhere are not accepted by all critical theorists. See for example, John Ellis in his AGAINST DECONSTRUCTION who persuasively refutes nearly all of Derrida's claims. Derrida begins his long essay to prove that Plato had things backwards when the latter claimed that speech has privilege and priority over writing. Derrida does not come out and bluntly assert that Plato is wrong. In fact, "Plato's Pharmacy" is marked by a series of convoluted and highly allusive twists of logic that Derrida obviously believes proves his own thesis that writing is privileged over speaking. Even when Derrida seems to agree with Plato over some key points, the careful reader will note that Derrida's use of a historical/logical/linguistic context will undermine and subvert Plato's surface intention. In fact, Derrida is cleverly using his own deconstructive technique as a scalpel to dissect Plato's claims about the privileging of speech over writing. Most of this essay uses various combinations of the Greek word pharmakos, which translates into English as "scapegoat" or "sorcerer." The problem is that Plato never uses this word in Phaedrus; what Plato does use is variations of it: pharmakeia and pharmakeus, all of which relate either to speaking or writing. It is precisely here that Derrida begins to weave his deconstructive thread that the absence of one word (like pharmakos) will act as a "trace" that will nudge the reader into associating it with another and similar word (like pharmakon which translates either as "sorcerer" or "wizard"). The word "trace" is a key concept in Derridean thought as it suggests (Derrida hates to define anything since the act of definition tends to support the reality of a transcendental signified so he uses linguistic subterfuge by "suggesting" or "implying" that a wispy ephemeral non-substantive non-object like a "trace" may perform its subliminal magic) that a word that is not really "there" may be "there" anyway. It is Plato's non-use of pharmakos (scapegoat) that Derrida uses to emphasize via its trace lineage that Athenians would choose one unfortunate individual to suffer for the collective sins of the populace. (See Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" for a dramatization of the theme) Plato refers often to Socrates using one of pharmakos's derivatives (pharmakon). Thus, Socrates is explicitly linked to sorcerer even as he is implicitly linked as scapegoat. Using this same sort of linkage, Derrida is able (for those who accept this logic) to similarly link and thus subvert a wide range of binaries that Plato assumes all point toward a transcendental signified: speech/writing, memory/forgetfulness, living/dead, original/copy, mythos/logos, inside/outside, bounded/unbounded, etc. When Derrida notes that speech is no more than a variation of writing, he asserts that Plato--in his insistence on a sharp demarcation between them that cannot withstand the sort of deconstructive reversal of binaries--has unwittingly subverted his own thesis concerning the privileging of speech over writing. Finally, Derrida points out the irony that Plato uses writing to attack writing. "Plato's Pharmacy" emerges then as an extended exercise in allusion, metaphor, logic-chopping, and deconstructive sleight-of-hand to illustrate that any text may be made to stand on its head if one is sufficiently clever to do so.

The cover of the book was not the same as the one pictured on the site.

Very pleased with the condition of the book. I don’t expect to understand the contents inside, I just ordered it so it will look nice on my bookshelf.

Of his own admission (p.341), "It is a Tower of Babel in which multiple languages and forms of writing bump into each other or mingle with each other, constantly being transformed and engendered through their most unreconcilable otherness to each other, an otherness which is strongly affirmed, too, for plurality here is bottomless and is not lived as negativity, with any nostalgia for lost unity." To read a text without knowing where it comes from or where it is going is Derrida's hopeless gift to philosophy and literature. If it weren't for professors of literature, he would have been buried deep in the trash heap of philosophy. As for the merits of translator Barbara Johnson, unreconcilable is not a word, even if Derrida intended it as such, just like his stupid differance, a word that isn't a word, though he said it was just to make a fortune.

Derrida does not begin with an argument: He begins with the meaning of "introductions," and how they are incomplete at best, then proceeds to write about the inadequacy of words and language. This is a foundational work in Literary Theory, and may be applied to nearly every period of literary study.