More on the "communication of play"

by Steve Rodgers

Two words: "communication" and "play." I'll take them up separately.

In both of these passages, someone is communicating with someone else--or something else. In "Plato's Pharmacy," it is Plato and the tradition of Egyptian myth. In the "Envois" to The Post Card, it is Plato and Socrates. The correspondences between these two correspondences are so obvious that to point them out may be pedantic. However, I'll touch on them briefly.

In both correspondences Plato "calls upon" something that precedes him. Whether he realizes it or not, he is engaged in a continuous dialogue with the past; in Derrida's words, what we have here is "the empirical, effective communication among cultures and mythologies" (Dissemination 85). However, in neither case has Plato simply borrowed something from the past, be it Theuth's identity or Socrates's words. These correspondences are more complicated than that. As Derrida explains it in "Plato's Pharmacy," "One cannot, in fact, speak--and we don't really know what the word could mean here anyway--of a borrowing, that is, of an addition contingent to and external to the text. Plato had to make his tale conform to structural laws" (85).

There is, therefore, a sense that nothing we say, write, or send can ever by truly original. Because, like Plato's story of Theuth and Socrates's "messages" to Plato, it is destined to become just another link in a series of back and forth correspondences--not only, as in "Plato's Pharmacy," bound by certain rigorous structural laws, but also, as in the "Envois," as much a part of the sender as it is a part of the addressee.

Now, play. I've already mentioned that each of these passages playfully makes its point. More specifically, each plays with the double meanings of words. In the paragraph from "Plato's Pharmacy," "the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for [my italics]" (93). In the "Envois," Socrates, "taking dictation, pretends to invent--writes, right?" (490). Also notice how in the same passage, the phrase "makes his (a)way" creates another type of double meaning; here Derrida forces us to reread the sentence so that we can catch both its meanings.

Most important, both passages play around with the same word: "card." In the "Envois," Derrida explains how even before a "card" is written and addressed, "everything is messed up . . ., cards on the table" (489). In "Plato's Pharmacy," the god of writing becomes a "card" (i.e., a clown, a ham, a joker) and a "card" (i.e., a "wild card," the joker): "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). Notice the double use of the word "play" here as well.

As a final note, I can't help but wonder if the real joker in this scenario, the real card, is Derrida himself--"neither king [philosopher] nor jack [poet]."