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Who speaks? Who writes?

Dialogue and authorship in the Phaedrus

This paper argues that the concepts of writing and authorship in Plato are associated with monologism and absence rather than presence. The Phaedrus objects to writing precisely insofar as it creates that unre sponsive figure in the field of discursive which we have subsequently called the 'author'. The dialectical preference for question-and-answer is designed to resist anything resembling an author from entering the field of knowledge: the Socratic method resists monologism on epistemological and ethical grounds. However, the Platonic dialogues are split in their signature between a Socrates who speaks and a Socrates who writes. As the Platonic oeuvre increases, so it moves from graphic representation of the oral methods of Socrates to the status of a writing in its own terms. The Phaedrus is a crucial statement in this cultural tran sition. So, far from simply condemning writing, the dialogue accepts Plato's growth as an author of written compositions and his growing sense of himself as an author. What tradition has registered as 'the Socratic problem' can be reviewed according to this competition between the orality of the master and the writerly practices of his pupil. Between dialogism and monologism, speech and writing, absence and presence, Socrates and Plato, the concept of the author is generated. The Plato of the Phaedrus wants to grasp, to theorize, this new figure emerg ing on the chirographic horizons, one whom he would recognize less in Socrates, 'Homer' or Pythagoras than in the mirror of his own text.

Key Words: authorship • dialectic • dialogue • Plato • speech/writing

History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 10, No. 3, 40-55 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/095269519701000304


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