Theuth?

by J. P. Mohan

Theuth is the Egyptian god used by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus to demonstrate the inferiority of writing, in an epilogue appropriately titled "The Inferiority Of The Written To The Spoken Word." Theuth is the son of Ra, the sun god, and Socrates describes him as follows:

They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the mentory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who accquire [writing] will cease to excercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory . . . ( Phaedrus, 95-96)

In "Plato's Pharmacy," Derrida elaborates upon the myth of Theuth, taking the god far beyond Socrates's comparatively simplistic narrative. In the following complex passage, Derrida describes how Theuth exhibits the ability to substitute, reassemble, and multiply the parts of a whole--even body parts. What's key in this passage is the first paragraph's chaotic disintegration of order and cohesion, and then the second paragraph's deference to Theuth as the reconstructor who, in an appropriate phraseology, "sews" everyone back together:

It is not in any reality foreign to the "play of words" that [Theuth] also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. . . . The famous legend of Osiris is well known: tricked into being shut up in a trunk the size of his body, he is dismembered [by his brother Seth], and his fourteen parts are scattered to the winds. After many complications, he is found and reassembled by his wife Isis, all except the phallus, which has been swallowed by an Oxyrhynchus fish. This does not prevent [Theuth] from acting in with the cleverest and most oblivious opportunism. Isis, transformed into a vulture, lies on the corpse of Osiris. In that position she engenders Horus, "the child-with-his-finger-in-his-mouth," who will attack his father's murderer. The latter, Seth, tears out Horus's eye while Horus rips off Seth's testicles. When Horus can get his eye back, he offers it to his father--and this eye is also the moon: [Theuth], if you will--and the eye brings Osiris back to life and potency.

In the course of the fight, [Theuth] separates the combatants and, in his role of god-doctor-pharmacist-magician, sews up their wounds and heals them of their mutilation. (Dissemination, 89-90)

Derrida characterizes Theuth as a god of deconstruction, per the following passages from Plato's Pharmacy. Note the use of cherished terms one will encounter often in Derrida: words like "play," "floating," "unstable," etc.

• "Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card . . . a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play . . . " (Dissemination, 93).

• "His propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play" (93).

• "He would be the mediating movement of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely preventing it, through his ironic doubling, from reaching some final fulfillment or eschatalogical reappropriation. [Theuth] is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own" (93).

• "Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence" (93).

• "[Theuth] extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of [Theuth] takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites [emphasis mine]. If he had any identity--but he is precisely the god of nonidentity--he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again" (93).