Abstrakt
Starting with Grammatology (1967), Derrida recurs to the Socrates of Plato's dialogue as a spokesman of the living voice, a philosopher who not only criticizes writing for its incapacity to co-operate in revealing its intended sense, but is himself, in his activity, resistant to the rigid protocols of all written record. On the other side, as Derrida points out in Voice and Phenomenon (1967), it is the same Socrates who enacts the original "decision of philosophy in its Platonic form" by insisting on the necessary fixity of true definitions and their objects.
Hence the obvious tension arises: how, on Socrates' own criteria, could definitions not be fully recordable, how could they escape a repeatable fixation independent of whether they are written down or transmitted in a spoken dialogue? In Dissemination with its more developed but also more varied treatment of Socrates (1972), Derrida makes this tension into something stranger and richer: Socrates now takes on his many colors whose mixture cannot be resolved into simple polarities of voice and written word or presence and absence. The chapter revisits this strangeness, which is proper to the most singular man who nevertheless says always the same things about the same matters (Gorgias 490e), in the light of both Derrida's writings and Plato's dialogues including the Apology, Phaedrus, Symposium and Philebus.
It concludes that, far from using Socrates as a prop for his alleged rejection of logocentrism, Derrida tends to appropriate Socratic motifs for subtler ends.