PLAY AND PLATO'S ALLERGIES,
OR PERFORATING THE SLASH

by Seth Warren

Of the many key terms in Jacques Derrida's language, perhaps the most intriguing, and certainly one of the most important, is "play." Regardless of what "importance" we assign this particular term in understanding Derrida's special breed of deconstruction, how can we help but wonder at his choice, and endless recycling of this loaded term? We want to play with it ourselves and try to unravel all of its implications. What is it in opposition to? Where is its play-ground? Who exactly is it playing with? How does it play? Is it something someone (Derrida) does, or something operating "of itself so," as Taoism might describe The Way?

In answering these questions, Derrida might begin by saying that the questions themselves are already off the mark. Certainly the first (and last) snare of the term "play" is that, like any term (or thought, thing, body, concept etc. etc.), one's tendency is to solidify it, to fix it as something stable, to freeze it with meaning. At the very least we might start by saying that play is more of a process than a fixed entity or idea. Play is an activity that a (deconstructionist) reader engages in when analyzing a given text, and it is a kind of intrinsic condition, or situation, of the text itself, of language. But already this distinction, between reader and text, will not stand up in the arena of deconstruction, is not tenable in the playground of play, for it is precisely such distinctions that the inevitability of play unhinges, toys with, disseminates.

And that is Derrida's forte: dissemination. Derrida is so highly regarded, and disliked, because he is considered largely responsible for turning the entire western metaphysical/philosophical tradition on its head, roughly beginning in 1966 when he delivered his paper "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of The Human Sciences" at a conference at Johns Hopkins University. With his paper he introduced (or revealed) "play" to academic/literary circles in the U.S. and helped usher in the deconstruction "movement." In presenting this paper, then, he was largely answering the question posed above: what is play in opposition to? In his paper and subsequent books, he was primarily critiquing the ingrown tendency of the western metaphysical tradition to think rigidly in terms of centers and binary oppositions, rather than recognize and account for the interpenetration of any two concepts, meanings, entities, or words.

But the interdependence of words was not a notion introduced by Derrida. Although he was well aware of such theories, he was intent on furthering the discussion of their implications. An emerging "school" loosely called structuralism was also analyzing language and perforating the slash between binaries, looking at the relations between words rather than at the words themselves. A given word, they saw, had no inherent meaning in and of itself, but only in relation to every word other than it. Thus language could be understood in terms of difference. But the structuralists (Levi-Strauss and de Saussure for example) went further to claim that "beneath" language, just as with culture, there was a kind of unified, governing structure, in essence, what Derrida would recognize as a kind of center. Thus Derrida largely borrows from the structuralists in that he sees language as characterized by "difference," yet he breaks with them because he felt they too fell prey to boxing up and centering language, thus viewing it as a kind of closed system.

Derrida is a great skeptic of closed systems, and he devotes much of his work to cracking open various systems thought to be unified and/or isolated in some way in order to expose the reality and activity of play; their spuriousness, their interrelation with things considered outside and other than them, their fluidity, their openness. To show that language is not a closed system he shows that a text is not a closed system by showing that even a single word in a text is in no way closed, but rather multi-meaningful, insidiously indeterminate, and infinitely interpretable. Such is the essence of play, except that above all, as he will explain, play has no essence. But that at least is precisely what makes this no-thing such a playful non-entity; by its very (lack of) nature it creates or allows an endless game of possibilities and interpretations.

To get a sense of play at work, or, the working of play, we can try examine two of Derrida's most important examples of this phenomenon, the phenomenon of the pharmakon, and the figure of Thoth as they appear in Plato's text Phaedrus. What is the pharmakon? Pharmakon is "simply" a word to begin with, but when Derrida is done with it, we will see that it is in fact a manifestation of play. It is play. The pharmakon is also, in a sense, the weapon, the means that Derrida uses to deconstruct the text "Plato," that is, not only Plato's writing per se, but his thinking; Plato's paradigm, which is also, significantly, ours.

The myth of Thoth as told by Socrates in Phaedrus is another important deconstructive tool for Derrida's work. Thoth is the god of writing in Egyptian mythology and like the term pharmakon, Thoth and all of the implications that come with him as a representative of writing make him a complicated figure, more so than Plato is content to disclose. Basically, Plato tries to make Thoth, and thus writing out to be some kind alien foe, a kind of arch-enemy to Logos and dialectics. As with the pharmakon, in the Phaedrus, Plato tries to limit and solidify the meaning and definition of Thoth in support of his argument, while in "Plato's Pharmacy" Derrida's argument principally consists of breaking open these imposed limitations to the force of play. Indeed, Derrida chooses to attack Plato and especially his Phaedrus because in many ways Plato is a prototypical proponent of Logocentricism (which the editors of Critical Theory Since 1965, Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, define as "the notion of some anchor of being behind language, which is its ultimate truth or referent" p. 8), and because in Phaedrus he is explicitly pronouncing the superiority of speech over writing (which Derrida calls "phonocentricism"), as well as Logos (reason) over myth, seriousness over play, and a host of other slash-ridden binaries. Plato provides plenty of perforation and dissemination to be done by Derrida.

Like Thoth, the term pharmakon is slippery when wet, and Derrida is happily spilling water all over it, and all of Plato's Phaedrus (Pharmacy). Spilling water on Plato's text reveals the contradictions he is to blame for as well as those which, if we don't blame language itself, if we don't blame play, then no one is truly to blame for. Largely by using the myth of Thoth, Plato attempts to explain how writing is bad. By following ambiguity of the pharmakon, Derrida shows how Plato's explanation is itself bad, that is, full of self-defeating complications, a victim of play. Plato is angry at Thoth, Derrida is angry at Plato. This is because Thoth, being the pernicious (parricidal) joker that he is, tried to sell the pharmakon (writing) to the king in the myth only as a remedy. But noticing the latent ambiguity that Thoth tries to conceal, Plato then becomes suspicious of writing as both a poison and a remedy, and consequently goes even beyond his concern with the good/bad opposition to create the even more rash inside/outside distinction, at which Derrida cringes. Derrida looks to other texts (still analyzing the "text" Plato), such as Timaeus to uncover more evidence of Plato's perception of writing as a separate entity from the man of reason, from truth, from the distinct language of logos. Derrida reveals Plato's notion of writing as a kind of disease, and thus something that the logos-healthy individual might be allergic to. What Plato is allergic to, Derrida says, is the fact that the pharmakon is always both ambiguous and other, not simply that it is bad. Referring back to the myth he states "It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance" (103).

Notice the verbs "master" and "dominate" (this is where the slant of the slash becomes apparent, see centers and binaries). In a sense we are dealing with a power struggle here, but it is an interesting one not so much because it is between Derrida and Plato, but because it is between Plato and Plato's own writing, language itself: "Plato thinks of writing, and tries to comprehend it, to dominate it, on the basis of opposition as such" (103). However, Derrida playing at and beginning to "define" play suggests,

writing--far from being governed by these oppositions, opens up their very possibility without letting itself be comprehended by them . . . it can only be out of something like writing--or the pharmakon--that the strange difference between inside and outside can spring . . . writing as pharmakon . . . leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it. (103)

The word pharmakon is caught in a chain of significations. The play of that chain seems systematic. But the system here is not, simply, that of the intentions of an author who goes by the name of Plato. The system is not primarily that of what someone meant-to-say [un vouloir-dire]. Finely regulated communications are established, through the play of language, among diverse functions of the word and, within it, among diverse strata or regions of culture. (95)

Thus the pharmakon, Plato's text, is not just a product of Plato but a product of culture, which is largely defined by language. Language is at play whether Plato exists or not, whether he is actually writing or not. The funny thing is, he did. Plato wrote against writing, he sold out to Thoth, what a joker.

But Derrida is, and in a sense must be, a joker himself. We can say that he too (more happily and consciously) sold out to Thoth, that he concocts and/or prescribes and/or is a patient of the pharmakon. But all we really want to say is that, appropriately, Derrida himself is at play. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of play at work is to see its effect on the patron saint of the term itself. Though some concerned with Derrida may not agree (i.e. Norris and Gasche) It seems that his words would carry little weight if he did not freely admit that he too was a patient of play. (Or should we call him a victim, since play is "not lacking in violence" [89]?) Just as Derrida "rigorously prescribes" the "logic of play" to Plato, play must also prescribe itself to the phony-parent-patient of play (65). Derrida must play at his own game. And he does. Why should we believe him if he too posed as a philosopher trying to flesh out his argument in a systematically cut-and-dry, this-and-that, manner? Well, he doesn't.

The evidence that Derrida is not merely a pseudo-systematic, binary-brainchild--arguing as if untouched by the mischievous play of language --is his style. It is not that Derrida is unconcerned with explicating a logical, rational, meaningful argument, but since what he is trying to argue is the inevitability of an irrational, even invisible kind of play when dealing with texts, he has no qualms about showing the effect such play has on his own argument. Like Nietzsche, Derrida readily engages in a kind of creative/poetic philosophical discourse. This does not by any means imply an emotional free-for-all dressed up in academic terminology. It means that Derrida is trying not to be a hypocrite, and that he is reveling in the very acts of play he is describing and prescribing, but not at the expense of intellectual, meaningful and even logical rigor. Thus Derrida will have no qualms beginning "Plato's Pharmacy" as enigmatically as he does, denying the beginningness, the endness, and in a sense the very 'textness' of the "text" itself. Thereafter he will have no qualms about taking the reader on a tangentially erratic analytical ride inside, outside and all around the text. And thus he will delight in ending the "essay" with an image of Plato as the mad scientist (logocentrician), and a pseudo-narrative of his possible demise: being overrun and enveloped by his own research, the philosopher king as a victim of a deconstructionist, self-destructing doom.