Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Derrida’s purpose for “deconstructing” Plato is to
deconstruct Western rhetoric and, through it, the West’s
perspective upon “reality” and “truth.” As Neel writes,
"Derrida sees Platos' depreciation of writing in Phaedrus and
the ‘Seventh Letter’ as the inaugural move in the entire history
of Western metaphysics” (184). After recounting how Derrida
undertakes such a thing, Neel explains what meaning he makes of
those proceedings from Of Grammatology. Neel writes:
By showing that truth exists only in its absence,
that metaphors operate both by representing inexactly
and by playing infinitely, in short, by showing the
problems that language creates, Derrida hasn't
deconstructed Phaedrus. At best, he has (1) merely
outlined some of the complexities that Plato
obviously knew he had to deal with, (2) destroyed the
ground on which a naive reading that seeks the
closure of truth in Phaedrus could be built, and thus
(3) described the ever-open dialectic nature of the
process of reading Phaedrus, a process that surely
would not have surprised Plato, this consummate
writer who hid himself everywhere in his texts.
(193-4)
Despite all of this, however, according to Neel, “[’Plato’s
Pharmacy’] believes itself capable of asserting control over
Plato’s text” (194). He claims that, “[T]hough [Derrida] claims
to have shown how Plato’s text exceeds Plato’s control, Derrida
himself appears calmly in control of his own text, almost to the
point of complacency” (193). Derrida’s very certain denial of
Plato’s authorial control while, at the very same time, not so
subtly announcing his very own is an utter irony that, for Neel,
is very telling. Upon this, he explains:
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