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On Politics, Irony, and Plato’s Socrates as Derrida’s Pharmakon

journal contribution
posted on 2021-04-01, 00:00 authored by Matthew Sharpe
This paper challenges the reading of Derridean deconstruction as a
necessarily antiauthoritarian version of “hermeneutics as politics.” It does so by critically rereading Derrida’s 1968 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Part 1 reconstructs Derrida’s key claims in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” turning on the ambiguous signifier “pharmakon” and the treatment of writing in the Phaedrus. Part 2 examines Derrida’s three claims in “Plato’s Pharmacy” concerning the political, putatively antiauthoritarian significance of his deconstruction of “platonism.” Part 3 contests these claims, arguing that Derrida cannot comprehend Socratic irony since he is blind to the political shaping of Plato’s dialogic writing, as the artful attempt to present and inspire philosophical inquiry within the city, while avoiding the condemnation directed against Socrates by the men of Athens in 399 BCE. Finally, I argue that Derrida’s indebtedness to Heidegger underlies these shortcomings in his reading of Plato.

History

Journal

Review of Politics

Volume

83

Issue

2

Season

Spring

Article number

1

Pagination

1 - 21

Publisher

Cambridge Core

Location

Cambridge, Eng.

ISSN

0034-6705

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

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