Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato

2. Derrida’s Plato

85 Chapter Two Derrida’s Plato “I asked a hundred painters and a hundred poets how to paint sunlight on the face of life Their answers were ambiguous and ingenuous as if they were all guarding trade secrets Whereas it seems to me all you have to do is conceive of the whole world and all humanity as a kind of art work a site-specific art work an art project of the god of light the whole earth and all that’s in it to be painted with light And the first thing you have to do is paint out postmodern painting” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Instructions to Painters & Poets” in How to Paint Sunlight. 85 w 86 Questioning Platonism “Thus, at least, spoke Zarathustra. We have refrained from substituting Nietzsche’s name for his, as if, from one ghost to another, it never came down to the same one.” —Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 288. As is clear from my discussion of Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato just completed, my most general objection to Heidegger’s reading of Plato is his failure to take with adequate seriousness the philosophic significance of the dialogue form, his failure genuinely to integrate that significance into his interpretation of Plato’s philosophy. As the present chapter will demonstrate, my problems with Derrida’s often rich interpretations of passages from this or that dialogue center on the same failure. Nevertheless, since Derrida is a very different thinker from Heidegger, let me introduce the problematic of the dialogue form in this chapter in a somewhat different way than I did in the case of Heidegger, one that I hope will appropriately prepare us for Derrida’s readings of Plato. How shall we write if we call ourselves philosophers? As professional philosophers today, we hardly need think about that any more. For what I will call the treatise format, writing discursively in the first person (singular or plural) has become so deeply canonical for writers of philosophy that, quite literally, we do not need to think about it when we decide to write. We need think, to be sure, about the specific content, perhaps about the specific style of writing—will we be formal ? Informal? Playful or serious? As direct as possible or strategically allusive? But the content of our writing and its style will be framed within a treatise format, because that is the way, the almost exclusive way, that philosophic writing has been done for over two millennia, since Aristotle at least. So dominant has this writing format become in philosophy that we have largely forgotten that there might be other, very different ways of writing philosophically. A sure sign of this forgetting is that now, when confronted occasionally by those other ways of philosophic writing—and most of all by the dialogues of Plato—we simply read them as if they, too, were treatises, concealed treatises, perhaps, but treatises nonetheless. Die Schreibvergessenheit! Almost all of us today, including those who write about the dominance of the treatise format, as I am doing, write in the shadow of this forgetfulness. But this forgetfulness, this literally thoughtless decision that we all make to write our philosophic works in the treatise format, is not without warrant. It presupposes a certain conception of philosophy itself, and so of philosophic writing, that we have all more or less Heidegger’s Plato 87 accepted. Or even if some of us have dared to call that conception of philosophy into question, we have not yet dared to change our writing format accordingly. So we need to ask, what is that underlying conception of philosophy that makes the treatise format so utterly, deeply, unproblematically appropriate for philosophic writing? Suppose, first, that every person who calls herself a philosopher has certain philosophic positions. My philosophic position in this chapter is, or will be, that Derrida reads Plato’s dialogues, always reads Plato’s dialogues, inappropriately. Derrida has positions that involve a certain interpretation of language, an interpretation that leads to a strategy of reading and thinking that he calls “deconstruction,” and that subsequently involves the deconstruction of texts of many of the canonical writers in the history of philosophy, certainly including Plato. Virtually all philosophers who write today write to express their positions . So, first, I, Derrida, we, have philosophic positions. Even if, as some of us including Derrida insist, those positions are not asserted dogmatically but ventured tentatively, questioningly, playfully, they are...