Reading Questions for Jacques Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"
You may find Derrida's writing challenging. Read with a good dictionary on hand (the Oxford English Dictionary is the standard). Use context to account for terms that do not appear in the dictionary (Greek terms, Derrida's own inventions, abbreviations, and so on). Derrida often makes cursory reference to Greek or Latinate roots (on, episteme, mneme, zoon, hypo and so on). Some of these you will recognize from their modern English applications (in words like "ontology," "epistemology," "amnesia," "zoology," and "hypodermic," for example). Keep track of whatever vocabulary does not become clear to you from context. Underline any sentences you do not understand, and return to these after reading through the whole of the chapter. Anything that remains unclear should be brought up in class. You will not be alone.
1. According to Derrida's discussion of "ghost writing" (68), what is the Socratic position on the relationship between writing and truth?
2. What is the truth value of the frame of the Phaedrus, the kharein?
3. For Derrida, how does the myth of Orithyia, introduced in the kharein, complicate the idea of the frame's truth value (69-70)? How does it foreshadow the concerns of the rest of the Platonic dialogue?
4. How is the myth of Orithyia an instance of rhetoric or persuasion? In what respects are pharmakon and rhetoric similar? What is the relation between pharmakon, seduction, and exodus (70-71)?
5. How does Socrates respond to the question of whether writing is seemly (74)? What strategy does he employ, and what does this approach reveal? How do the answers to these questions help introduce the issue of writing's moral value for Derrida?
6. How does Ammon's response to Theuth introduce patriarchal power into the determination of truth?
7. What does Ammon's name mean (87n.19)? How does the meaning of Ammon's name introduce a paradox? What do you make of the all-powerful father-figure comprising such a paradox? What does Derrida make of it?
8. What does Derrida mean by "coincidentia oppositorum" (93)?
9. What are the two meanings of pharmakon? How is their opposition a by-product of pharmakon itself, according to Derrida (103-5)?
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