Derrida’s Pharmacy: Unreading the Prescription

The purpose of this essay is to read Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ critically on three different levels. Firstly, the critical approach evaluates over the fact –implied by Plato himself in his letters– that Platonic dialogues are only a scenario staging philosophia and they are not themselves philosophy as such, and that the reader being only an audience has only mimetic relation to what is being staged. Hence, the intellectualization of philosophy over rational faculty by way of textual reading is the most common attitude the later thinking has taken since Aristotle, which in turn –together with the whole tradition of philosophy after Plato in that sense– invalidates Derrida’s post-structural textual reading approach called “deconstruction.” Secondly, Derrida’s interpretation of Platonic logos as a living being is criticised over the fact that examples given by Derrida are nothing but a misreading if not an unreading of the Platonic dialogues. Thirdly, Derrida is criticised in terms of his reading of Platonic mē on as ‘absence’ which is totally irrelavant for Platonic ontology as is obvious from the relevant passages in Sophistes dialogue as well in his basic claim “diffêrance” when it comes to reduce identity to a materialized sign which in itself is a reversed metaphysical formula and as such remains so