Jag hade väl inte tänkt kommentera något dock, utan mest tipsa om en intressant artikel av Catherine Pickstock – PLATO’S DECONSTRUCTION OF DERRIDA. Kanske kan vara av intresse? Den publicerades i Telos vårnummer 1996.

Utgångspunkten är följande: ”In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recognizes sophism’s threat to civic life and warns against the nihilistic consequences of its severing of ontology from transcendence. In so doing, he attacks the earliest fore-shadowing of contemporary secular modernity or postmodernity. In defense of the latter, Jacques Derrida has tried to show how Socrates’ critique falters over the issues of speech and writing. Socrates’ preference for the former, claims Derrida, is a defence of ‘metaphysical presence.’ Once this preference is deconstructed, his entire case collapses and an even more radical sophistry triumphs. Socrates’ preference for speech over writing, however, is not a defense of ‘metaphysical presence’ but the opposite: an attack on presence. His critique of writing and rhetoric does not entail a supralinguistic logos, independent of time and place. On the contrary, he associates this with the sophist vision of a purely commercial reality. As heir to this vision, Derrida’s insistence on the transcendental written character of language turns out to be a rationalist attempt to suppress embodiment and temporality.”

”Thus sophistic consciousness is positioned in relation to the object as capital, of which it sees nothing but infinite variations of an equivalent measure. Such instrumentalized ’seeing’ is presented as a parodic version of the philosophical gaze, which is compared with that of the possessed poet who sees the events of the past as though he were present at their inception, and that of the lover who, on seeing his beloved, recognizes in his beauty a flicker of the good. While the sophistic assessment is fastened to oscillations of value and opinion, and remains entirely alien to its object, the philosophical gaze, in its exercise of Mneme (recollection), is a penetrative, essential recognition which links the seer to the seen without abolishing the distance of the ‘object’ from the subject. In this way, the Socratic ‘object’ acquires a transcendent quality before which the philosopher abases himself.”

Jag kan dock inte avgöra vem som har rätt; Derrida eller Pickstock. Även om jag rent intuitivt känner mest affinitet med den senare.

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Och som av en slump hittade jag Gérard Genettes Mimologiques för fyrtio kronor igår, vilket fynd va? Den behandlar ju mimologin från Platons Kratylos fram till idag, spännande julläsning!!!