Still more on Rorty on Derrida -- and his "playful and poetic style"
by Steve Rodgers
Rorty is right to stress this side of Derrida. To ignore Derrida's play, and more important, his poetry, is to deny that there is something undeniably kinetic about his work. According to Derrida, words do not have fixed meanings, and the only way we can confront them and explore their "corridors of meaning" (Dissemination 95) is by manipulating them, watching them "fold back" upon themselves, and delighting in that movement. And, if we can take it a step further, only a kinetic and playful style can deal with them on their own terms and bring them to life.
Derrida's writing, then, becomes a game of sorts, designed to force us into the spiral of meanings and to extend our perceptions "by force of play" (Dissemination 65). The first line of "Outwork" is a useful example: "This (therefore) will not have been a book" (3). This sentence raises several questions (as he intends it to). First of all, if this is not a book, then what is it? What makes it not a book? The "therefore" implies a continuation of some other thought. What was that other thought? Why don't we get to read it? Do we need to read it in order to understand what follows? What, then, preceded this "book"? Where has the book actually begun? Has it begun at all? And finally, why is "therefore" placed in parentheses? This is the folding back process at work; these are the very questions Derrida wants us to ask. In the same vein, Derrida opens Chapter 1 of "Plato's Pharmacy" with this sentence: "To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say" (65). I won't explore all the corridors of meaning this opens up, but one can only imagine how dizzying they might be.
To facilitate this game (or maybe just to frustrate our search for the definitive reading), Derrida often presents two opposing arguments and shows that they simply cannot be resolved. In "Plato's Pharmacy," he discusses the translation of the Greek word pharmakon which, as he demonstrates, can mean at times writing, drug, remedy, son, and even scapegoat. Derrida feels the translation by "remedy" is limited; yet after rigorously explaining at some length why that is, he adds that it can "thus be neither accepted nor simply rejected" (99). By this he means to say that pharmakon's "translation" must of necessity retain all its varied and contradictory meanings; only then can it dance, so to speak, and only then are we really "gaming."
He also shows us how certain pairs of words have subtly different meanings: "[The message] is a second and secondary word" (Dissemination 88). In addition, added hyphens break down the meaning of compound words and create new meanings: health is "auto-nomous" and "auto-matic" (Dissemination 101), the "folding back" process is called a "re-mark" (Dissemination 104), writing is a process of "dis-covering" (Dissemination 154). Derrida also uses a very metaphorical language: the text becomes a tissue; meaning, a web or a tapestry; the process of writing and reading, a circle. What's more, he expresses the same idea with different metaphors or, even better, dismantles one of his own to prove his point--namely, that "a word should not too hastily be considered a metaphor, unless the metaphorical possibility is allowed to retain all its power of enigma" (Dissemination 102).
Derrida's writings, however, not only move--in the sense that they encourage re-reading and multiple meanings--but they also move us. The fable that ends "Plato's Pharmacy" is an excellent example. It describes how Plato, after having closed up the pharmacy, struggles to distinguish between the binary oppositions ("two repeptitions") he has so carefully and so assuredly constructed. You need only skim the fable to get a sense of its highly poetic language.
A couple of passages are worth pointing out. About halfway
through the fable Derrida writes:
Derrida likes to insert dialogues like this in strange places. But we never really know who's speaking. Perhaps this is all Plato, "speaking" to himself, trying--trying!--to figure out why he can't seem to distinguish between these repetitions when he ought to be able to. Maybe, then, the "precisely" suggests that he has figured it out, that he's had a mini-epiphany of sorts. Or perhaps the first two lines of dialogue are Plato and the last is Derrida himself, invading Plato's consciousness (across time) with an almost smug response to Plato's confusion: "Precisely . . ." And what about the first line? If this is Plato, too, then we sense his frustration even more. But if it's Derrida, then the line takes on an almost sarcastic quality. Either way, there is something very riveting about these lines, something almost haunting--perhaps because they hover there like ghosts.
The final section of the fable is just as haunting:
Edgar Allan Poe eat your heart out. This passage raises more questions than we can even begin to pose here. But suffice it to say that the extreme urgency, the image Derrida creates of Plato scrambling to destroy all of his writings, his letters, so that they will not be disclosed, will not be misinterpreted by centuries and centuries of later writers and philosophers; of Plato perhaps, doubting, saving a copy for himself so he won't forget what he's written; and of that single copy, in only one night, disseminating and returning back to him from elsewhere (from Derrida perhaps), in the form of knocks at the door--all of this is very powerful, and very moving.
For more on Derrida's playful style, and another reading of the fable from "Plato's Pharmacy," click here.