Thoth, God of the Slash
by Seth Warren
Here's (part of) the myth in the words of Socrates:
Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt there lived one of
the old gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and
the name of the divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers and
calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and
above all writing. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus who lived
in the great city of the upper region which the Greeks call the Egyptian
Thebes; the god himself they call Ammon. Theuth came to him and exhibited his
arts and declared that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. And
Thamus questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as Theuth
enumerated, the king blamed or praised what he though were the good or bad
points in the explanation. Now Thamus is said to have had a good deal to remark
on both sides of the question about every single art (it would take too long to
repeat it here); but when it came to writing Theuth said, "The discipline, my
King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories: my
invention is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom. But the king
said, "Theuth, my master of arts, to one man it is given to create the elements
of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and usefulness it will have
for those who are going to employ it. And now, since you are father of written
letters, your paternal goodwill has lead you to pronounce the very opposite of
what is their real power. The fact is that this invention will produce
forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not
need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, using
the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves, rather than, from
within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind. So it's not a remedy
for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom,
your equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.
(Plato, Phaedrus 102)
Like pharmakon, the figure Theuth, or Thoth, in the myth about the
truth of writing that Socrates tells, is for Derrida an apt metaphor for play.
Thoth is not merely the god of writing. As Derrida will show he already has
manifold functions in Egyptian mythology itself and is then, by implication, an
artfully complex figure. Just as writing is only a supplement to speech, Thoth,
is only a supplement to the sun god Ra and all that he represents: "As a
substitute capable of doubling for the King, the father, the son, and the word,
distinguished from these only by dint of representing, repeating and
masquerading, Thoth was naturally also capable of totally supplanting them and
appropriating all of their attributes" (90). Thus Thoth's replacing and
supplementing skills can also be more "poisonous" than medicinal, as he also
"frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp
the throne" (89). In fact, Derrida points out that the god of writing is also
the god of death, who writes down the weight of dead souls, "counts out the
days of life", and generally "behaves like a chief of funeral protocol, charged
in particular with the dressing of the dead" (92).
All of these traits of the
god of writing only serve to strengthen Socrates' case against writing, deeming
it something first of all lesser than Truth, The Good, Logos --ideals equated
with the sun king Ra--but also something insidious, diminishing, distorting,
and thus a threat not only to memory as the king (Thamus) in the myth declares,
but also to the quest for Truth as a whole. Thoth (the pharmakon) is
precisely
the force that could drag down to death the virginal purity of Logos, and jot
down the particulars in his little black book.
It is fitting for Plato to use this myth, as long as he uses it in
order to set up such stark oppositions: myth/logos, dark/light, dead memory
(using writing)/living memory (using dialectics), death/life, writing/speech
etc., in which the left-hand side of the slashes are instances of the wrath of
Thoth. And this is what he does.
But what Derrida is doing is showing that the
star of the myth cannot possibly be confined to such a polarized role. Thoth is
too slippery, too playful to be stopped by a silly slash. Instead this
chameleon-god walks the line of the slash, straddles it, erases it, makes it a
hyphen, makes it a circle, a ring, for his shifty circus. Essentially Thoth is
the slash, except that he cannot ultimately be called any-thing. Speaking of
the binary system that Plato attempts to set up using the myth, Derrida
explains, "The system of these traits brings into play an original kind of
logic [that is, according to the traditional western knack for clean binaries]:
the figure of Thoth is opposed to its other (father, son, life, speech,
origin or orient etc.)" (92). However, he says,
By the same token, the figure of Thoth 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 . . . The god of writing is thus
at once his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed spot
in the play of differences. (93)
But Derrida is careful to carry the description further, so that we do not give
Thoth too much character, too much substance. "Always taking a place not his
own . . . he has neither a proper place nor a proper name. His propriety or
property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that
allows for substitution and play" (93, emphasis mine). And here is
where we
are reminded that the god of the slash is not even that: "He would be the
mediating movement of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely
preventing it, through this ironic doubling, from reaching some final
fulfillment or eschatological reappropriation. Thoth is never present. Nowhere
does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own" (93). Derrida
aptly describes the conniving effect Thoth can actually induce while
paradoxically and simultaneously suggesting his non-essence:
Sly, slippery and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither
king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild
card, one who puts play into play. (93)
And to top it all off Derrida notes the remarkable connection between Thoth and
the pharmakon. It turns out, not only is Thoth a stringent rational scientist,
calculating lives, marking calendars and weighing souls, but he is a specialist
in the occult as well. Thus he "who knows how to put an end to life, can also
heal the sick. And even the dead" (94). He is the god of "medicine": both a
science and an occult drug. Of the remedy and the poison. The god of writing
is the god of the pharmakon" (94).
revised February 24, 1997
mail to Seth Warren