Richard
FLETCHER nihil amplius spectari debet
quam…Derrida at
the Theatre
'While
reading in a certain way, one can, I won't say try to
hear &endash; because I don't think one can really hear
Plato &endash; but one can pose the question of Plato's
signature, even if it is inaccessible, one can pose the
question of this dramaturgy of signatures and voices.'
&endash; Derrida 'Dialanguage'
The
relationship between Plato (his 'dramaturgy of signatures
and voices') and Platonism (as an effect of the texts
signed by Plato) is a constant tension in Derrida's work
and is based on the imagery of a family drama of father
(Plato) and son (Platonism). Derrida's readings of Plato
and Platonism operate within the Nietzschean inspired
reversals of Platonism prevalent in the theoretical
climate of post-war France. The works of Derrida, Deleuze
and Foucault, all respond in differing ways to the
theatrum philosophicum of
Platonism and the part it has played in the staging of a
metaphysics of presence. It is the basic assumption of
Derrida's attack on logocentrism that the privileging
presence of the speaker and the audience in the speech
act is an offspring of the Platonic tradition of
philosophy. Nevertheless, while his critics have returned
to the paternity of Plato's texts to pre-empt Derrida's
ideas, little work has focused on the traditions of
Platonism, in their filial translation of the father
Plato, to critique Derrida's family drama of Platonism.
This paper listens in on such a moment in the history of
Platonism: Apuleius' Florida 18.
In this text, Apuleius the philosophus Platonicus
is holding forth (dissertare)
before an audience at the theatre in Carthage. Beginning
with reference to specific stage directions to his
performance, he states that when in a theatre what ought
to be looked at (in auditorio hoc genus spectari
debet…) is not the
physical layout of the theatre, the genre of the
performance (tragedy, comedy) nor even the actors on the
stage, but above all of these things, what ought to be
looked at is the ratio of the audience and the oratio
of the speaker (sed istis omnibus superessis nihil
amplius spectari debet quam conuenientium ratio et
dicentis oratio). While
commentators have pointed to the importance of the
combination ratio et oratio
in this text (and the Florida as a whole) as a translation of the Greek logos, mirroring Apuleius' own highlighting of the object of
interpretation, they have failed to appreciate the
radical procedure of their split between audience and
speaker for the history of Platonism.
Apuleius' performance causes some severe problems to
Derrida's celebrated critique of Western metaphysics
through its privileging of the spoken over the written
word, by uncovering the theatricality of his project and
going beyond the limits of the family scene. Derrida's
grammatology, from the scene of writing to Plato's
pharmacy as theatre, incorporates several motifs of
dramatic imagery. However, despite Derrida's
representation of the Platonic logos
at the centre stage of the Platonic tradition, he does
not account for the translation of this scene onto the
audience.
This paper will interrogate the idea of the object of
interpretation in the theatrical motifs of Derrida's
showy critique of logocentrism through the notion of the
splitting of logos
(between the ratio of an
audience and the oratio of a speaker) in the Latin tradition (and translation) of
Platonism as represented by Apuleius.