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former I will not really pay much attention, not because it does
not hold any meaning for me but because it does not hold any
meaning for me here. Of the latter, my basic interest is not
with Neel’s interpretation of Derrida’s fundamental theories of
language and discourse but, curiously enough, with Neel’s
interpretation of Derrida’s interpretation of Plato. It is
there that I believe you can witness at work the Certainty of a
supposed Uncertainty wrestling with the Uncertainty of a
supposed Certainty. But in order to explore such a thing, I
would offer the briefest summary of the conclusions Neel arrives
at with his reading of Plato.
In that first part of Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Neel
interprets Plato’s Phaedrus as “reducible to an aporia – a set
of gaps, dead ends, complexities, and contradictions so
entangled as to render the text if not void at least so
undecidable as to disregardable” (5), exemplified by the fact
that the Greek philosopher set down his condemnation of writing,
“effectively exclud[ing] writing from the highest forms of
thinking, understanding, and communicating” (3), in writing.
And like Covino, Neel sees this as an utterly purposeful thing,
explaining that “[R]eaders who take Phaedrus seriously find
themselves in the system of Platonic philosophy, a system that
always promises final revelation of truth [but that] denies
access to writing [which would] reveal the truth of the system’s
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