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A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer

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Plato's Pharmacy

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Jacques Derrida

 

(from Dissemination Chicago, U Chicago P, 1981 trans. by Barbara Johnson)

 

[Note to the student: footnotes are designated by bold numbers in parentheses and have been moved to the end of the text instead of at the bottom of each page.]

 

Kolaphos: (1) blow to the cheek, knock, slap . . . (kolapto). Kolapto: 1. to go into, penetrate, esp., said of birds, to peck . . . hence, to slash open with the beak . . . by anal., said of a horse striking the ground with his hoof. 2. by extension, to notch, engrave: gramma eis aigeiron poplar Anrh. 9, 341, or kata phloiou bark, Call. fr. 101, an inscription on a poplar or on the bark of a tree (R. Klaph; cf. R. Gluph, to hollow out, scratch).

 

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception .

 

And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?

 

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading . There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking--which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught--the addition of some new thread. Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read. One must manage to think this out: that it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated

 

 

 

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(con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart.

 

One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this (du coup), would feel himself authorized merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam wouldn't hold. Reciprocally, he who through "methodological prudence," "norms of objectivity," or "safeguards of knowledge" would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the "not serious" as in the "serious." The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned.

 

 

 

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To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted. With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: within the textual, the textile, and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the histos (2) and the question of the histos of metaphor.

 

Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on awhile. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then write a bit: on Plato, who already said in the Phaedrus that writing can only repeat (itself), that it "always signifies (semainei) the same" and that it is a "game" (paidia).

 

1. Pharmacia

 

Let us begin again. Therefore the dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web. The example we shall propose of this will not, seeing that we are dealing with Plato, be the Statesman, which will have come to mind first, no doubt because of the paradigm of the weaver, and especially because of the paradigm of the paradigm, the example of the example writing--which immediately precedes it. (3) We will come back to that only after a long detour.

 

 

 

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We will take off here from the Phaedrus. (4) We are speaking of the Phaedrus that was obliged to wait almost twenty-five centuries before anyone gave up the idea that it was a badly composed dialogue. It was at first believed that Plato was too young to do the thing right, to construct a well-made object. Diogenes Laertius records this "they say" (logos {sc. esti}, legetai) according to which the Phaedrus was Plato's first attempt and thus manifested a certain juvenile quality (meirakiodes ti). (5) Schleiermacher thinks this legend can be corroborated by means of a ludicrous argument: an aging writer would not have condemned writing as Plato does in the Phaedrus. This argument is not merely suspect in itself: it lends credit to the Laertian legend by basing itself

 

 

 

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on a second legend. Only a blind or grossly insensitive reading could indeed have spread the rumor that Plato was simply condemning the writer's activity. Nothing here is of a single piece and the Phaedrus also, in its own writing, plays at saving writing--which also means causing it to be lost--as the best, the noblest game. As for the stunning hand Plato has thus dealt himself, we will be able to follow its incidence and its payoff later on.

 

In 1905, the tradition of Diogenes Laertius was reversed, not in order to bring about a recognition of the excellent composition of the Phaedrus but in order to attribute its faults this time to the senile impotence of the author: "The Phaedrus is badly composed. This defect is all the more surprising since it is precisely there that Socrates defines the work of art as a living being. But the inability to accomplish what has been well conceived is precisely a proof of old age." (6)

 

We are no longer at that point. The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words. It unties a whole sumploke patiently interlacing the arguments. What is magisterial about the demonstration affirms itself and effaces itself at once, with suppleness, irony, and discretion.

 

This is, in particular, the case--and this will be our supplementary thread--with the whole last section (274b ff.), devoted, as everyone knows, to the origin, history, and value of writing. That entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without. In truth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other.

 

Always with irony. But what can be said of irony here? What is its major sign? The dialogue contains the only "rigorously original Platonic myths: the fable of the cicadas in the Phaedrus, and the story of Theuth in the same dialogue." (7) Interestingly, Socrates' first words, in the opening lines of the conversation, had concerned "not bothering about" mythologemes (229c-230a). Not in order to reject them absolutely, but, on the one hand, not bothering them, leaving them alone, making room for them, in order to free them from the heavy serious naivete of the scientific "rationalists," and

 

 

 

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on the other, not bothering with them, in order to free oneself for the relation with oneself and the pursuit of self-knowledge.

 

To give myths a send-off: a salute, a vacation, a dismissal; this fine resolution of the khairein, which means all that at once, will be twice interrupted in order to welcome these "two Platonic myths," so "rigorously original." Both of these myths arise, moreover, in the opening of a question about the status of writing. This is undoubtedly less obvious--has anyone ever picked up on it?--in the case of the cicada story. But it is no less certain. Both myths follow upon the same question, and they are only separated by a short space, just time enough for a detour. The first, of course, does not answer the question; on the contrary, it leaves it hanging, marks time for a rest, and makes us wait for the reprise that will lead us to the second.

 

Let us read this more closely. At the precisely calculated center of the dialogue the reader can count the lines--the question of logography is raised (257c). Phaedrus reminds Socrates that the citizens of greatest influence and dignity, the men who are the most free, feel ashamed (aiskhunontai) at "speechwriting" and at leaving sungrammata behind them. They fear the judgment of posterity, which might consider them "sophists" (257d). The logographer, in the strict sense, is a ghost writer who composes speeches for use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence. In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of non-presence and of non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between the written and the true is clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out of themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song (259c).

 

But the issue is delayed. Socrates still has a neutral attitude: writing is not in itself a shameful, indecent, infamous (aiskhron) activity. One is dishonored only if one writes in a dishonorable manner. But what does it mean to write in a dishonorable manner? and, Phaedrus also wants to know, what does it mean to write beautifully (kalos)? This question sketches out the central nervure, the great fold that divides the dialogue. Between this question and the answer that takes up its terms in the last section ("But there remains the question of propriety and impropriety in writing, that is to say the conditions which make it proper or improper. Isn't that so?"

 

 

 

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274b), the thread remains solid, if not easily visible, all through the fable of the cicadas and the themes of psychagogy, rhetoric, and dialectics.

 

Thus Socrates begins by sending myths off; and then, twice stopped before the question of writing, he invents two of them--not, as we shall see, entirely from scratch, but more freely and spontaneously than anywhere else in his work. Now, the khairein, in the Phaedrus' opening pages, takes place in the name of truth. We will reflect upon the fact that the myths come back from vacation at the time and in the name of writing.

 

The khairein takes place in the name of truth: that is, in the name of knowledge of truth and, more precisely, of truth in the knowledge of the self. This is what Socrates explains (230a). But this imperative of self-knowledge is not first felt or dictated by any transparent immediacy of self-presence. It is not perceived. Only interpreted, read, deciphered. A hermeneutics assigns intuition. An inscription, the Delphikon gramma, which is anything but an oracle, prescribes through its silent cipher; it signifies as one signifies an order--autoscopy and autognosis. The very activities that Socrates thinks can be contrasted to the hermeneutic adventure of myths, which he leaves to the sophists (229d).

 

And the khairein takes place in the name of truth. The topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent. The themes, the topics, the (common-)places, in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site. They are dramatically staged, and in this theatrical geography, unity of place corresponds to an infallible calculation or necessity. For example, the fable of the cicadas would not have taken place, would not have been recounted, Socrates would not have been incited to tell it, if the heat, which weighs over the whole dialogue, had not driven the two friends out of the city, into the countryside, along the river Ilissus. Well before detailing the genealogy of the genus cicada, Socrates had exclaimed, "How welcome and sweet the fresh air is, resounding with the summer chirping of the cicada chorus" (230c). But this is not the only counterpoint-effect required by the space of the dialogue. The myth that serves as a pretext for the khairein and for the retreat into autoscopy can itself only arise, during the first steps of this excursion, at the sight of the Ilissus. Isn't this the spot, asks Phaedrus, where Boreas, according to tradition, carried off Orithyia? This riverbank, the diaphanous purity of these waters, must have welcomed the young virgins, or even drawn them like a spell, inciting them to play here. Socrates then mockingly proposes a learned explanation of the myth in the rationalistic, physicalist style of the sophoi: it was while she was playing with Pharmacia (sun Pharmakeiai paizousan) that the boreal wind (pneuma

 

 

 

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Boreou) caught Orithyia up and blew her into the abyss, "down from the rocks hard by,” "and having thus met her death was said to have been seized by Boreas . . . For my part, Phaedrus, I regard such theories as attractive no doubt, but as the invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied" (229d).

 

This brief evocation of Pharmacia at the beginning of the Phaedrus--is it an accident? An hors d'oeuvre? A fountain, "perhaps with curative powers," notes Robin, was dedicated to Pharmacia near the Ilissus. Let us in any case retain this: that a little spot, a little stitch or mesh (macula) woven into the back of the canvas, marks out for the entire dialogue the scene where that virgin was cast into the abyss, surprised by death while playing with Pharmacia. Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison. "Poisoning" was not the least usual meaning of "pharmacia." Antiphon has left us the logogram of an "accusation of poisoning against a mother-in-law" (Pharmakeias kata tes metryias). Through her games, Pharmacia has dragged down to death a virginal purity and an unpenetrated interior.

 

Only a little further on, Socrates compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). This pharmakon, this "medicine, " this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be--alternately or simultaneously--beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance--with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy--if we didn't have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.

 

Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one's general, natural, habitual paths and laws. Here, it takes Socrates out of his proper place and off his customary track. The latter had always kept him inside the city. The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon to push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out, even at the end, to escape the hemlock. They take him out of himself and draw him onto a path that is properly an exodus:

 

Phaedrus: Anyone would take you, as you say, for a foreigner being shown the country by a guide, and not a native--you never leave

 

 

 

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town to cross the frontier nor even, I believe, so much as set foot outside the walls.

 

Socrates: You must forgive me, dear friend; I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug (8) for getting me out (dokeis moi tel emes exocou to pharmakon heurekenai). A hungry animal can be driven by dangling a carrot or a bit of greenstuff in front of it; similarly if you proffer me speeches bound in books (en bibliois) I don't doubt you can cart me all round Attica, and anywhere else you please. Anyhow, now that we've got here I propose for the time being to lie down, and you can choose whatever posture you think most convenient for reading, and proceed (230d-e).

 

It is at this point, when Socrates has finally stretched out on the ground and Phaedrus has taken the most comfortable position for handling the text or, if you will, the pharmakon, that the discussion actually gets off the ground. A spoken speech--whether by Lysias or by Phaedrus in person--a speech proffered in the present, in the presence of Socrates, would not have had the same effect. Only the logoi en bibliois, only words that are deferred, reserved, enveloped, rolled up, words that force one to wait for them in the form and under cover of a solid object, letting themselves be desired for the space of a walk, only hidden letters can thus get Socrates moving. If a speech could be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth, without the detours of a logos were signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred possible, it would not seduce anyone. It would not draw Socrates, as if under the effects of a pharmakon, out of his way. Let us get ahead of ourselves. Already: writing, the pharmakon, the going or leading astray.

 

In our discussion of this text we have been using an authoritative French translation of Plato, the one published by Guillaume Bude. In the case of the Phaedrus, the translation is by Leon Robin. We will continue to refer to it, inserting the Greek text in parentheses, however, whenever it seems opportune or pertinent to our point. Hence, for example, the word pharmakon. In this way we hope to display in the most striking manner the regular, ordered polysemy that has, through skewing, indetermination, or overdetermination, but without mistranslation, permitted the rendering of the same word by "remedy," "recipe," "poison," "drug," "philter," etc. It will also be seen to what extent the malleable unity of this concept, or rather its rules and the strange logic that links it with its signifier, has been dis-

 

 

 

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persed, masked, obliterated, and rendered almost unreadable not only by the imprudence or empiricism of the translators, but first and foremost by the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty of translation. It is a difficulty inherent in its very principle, situated less in the passage from one language to another, from one philosophical language to another, than already, as we shall see, in the tradition between Greek and Greek; a violent difficulty in the transference of a nonphilosopheme into a philosopheme. With this problem of translation we will thus be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the very passage into philosophy.

 

The biblia that will draw Socrates out of his reserve and out of the space in which he is wont to learn, to teach, to speak, to dialogue the sheltered enclosure of the city--these biblia contain a text written by “the ablest writer of our day" (deinotatos on ton nun graphein). His name is Lysias. Phaedrus is keeping the text or, if you will, the pharmakon, hidden under his cloak. He needs it because he has not learned the speech by heart. This point is important for what follows, the problem of writing being closely linked to the problem of "knowing by heart." Before Socrates had stretched out on the ground and invited Phaedrus to take the most comfortable position, the latter had offered to reconstitute, without the help of the text, the reasoning, argument, and design of Lysias' speech, its dianoia. Socrates stops him short: "Very well, my dear fellow, but you must first show me what it is that you have in your left hand under you cloak, for I surmise that it is the actual discourse (ton logon auton)" (228d). Between the invitation and the start of the reading, while the pharmakon is wandering about under Phaedrus' cloak, there occurs the evocation of Pharmacia and the send-off of myths.

 

Is it after all by chance or by harmonics that, even before the overt presentation of writing as a pharmakon arises in the middle of the myth of Theuth, the connection between biblia and pharmaka should already be mentioned in a malevolent or suspicious vein? As opposed to the true practice of medicine, founded on science, we find indeed, listed in a single stroke, empirical practice, treatments based on recipes learned by heart, mere bookish knowledge, and the blind usage of drugs. All that, we are told, springs out of mania: “I expect they would say, 'the man is mad; he thinks he has made himself a doctor by picking up something out of a book (ek bibliou), or coming across a couple of ordinary drugs (pharmakiois), without any real knowledge of medicine'" (268c).

 

This association between writing and the pharmakon still seems external; it could be judged artificial or purely coincidental. But the intention and intonation are recognizably the same: one and the same suspicion envelops

 

 

 

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in a single embrace the book and the drug, writing and whatever works in an occult, ambiguous manner open to empiricism and chance, governed by the ways of magic and not the laws of necessity. Books, the dead and rigid knowledge shut up in biblia, piles of histories, nomenclatures, recipes and formulas learned by heart, all this is as foreign to living knowledge and dialectics as the pharmakon is to medical science. And myth to true knowledge. In dealing with Plato, who knew so well on occasion how to treat myth in its archeo-logical or paleo-logical capacity, one can glimpse the immensity and difficulty of this last opposition. The extent of the difficulty is marked out--this is, among a hundred others, the example that retains us here--in that the truth--the original truth--about writing as a pharmakon will at first be left up to a myth. The myth of Theuth, to which we now turn.

 

Up to this point in the dialogue, one can say that the pharmakon and the grapheme have been beckoning to each other from afar, indirectly sending back to each other, and, as if by chance, appearing and disappearing together on the same line, for yet uncertain reasons, with an effectiveness that is quite discrete and perhaps after all unintentional. But in order to lift this doubt and on the supposition that the categories of the voluntary and the involuntary still have some absolute pertinence in a reading--which we don't for a minute believe, at least not on the textual level on which we are now advancing--let us proceed to the last phase of the dialogue, to the point where Theuth appears on the scene.

 

This time it is without indirection, without hidden mediation, without secret argumentation, that writing is proposed, presented, and asserted as a pharmakon (274e).

 

In a certain sense, one can see how this section could have been set apart as an appendix, a superadded supplement. And despite all that calls for it in the preceding steps, it is true that Plato offers it somewhat as an amusement, an hors d'oeuvre or rather a dessert. All the subjects of the dialogue, both themes and speakers, seem exhausted at the moment the supplement, writing, or the pharmakon, are introduced: "Then we may feel that we have said enough both about the art of speaking and about the lack of art (to men tekhnes te kai atekhnias logon)" (9) (274b). And yet it is at this moment of general exhaustion that the question of writing is set out. (10) And, as was foreshad-

 

 

 

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owed earlier by the use of the word aiskhron (or the adverb aiskhrol), the question of writing opens as a question of morality. It is truly morality that is at stake, both in the sense of the opposition between good and evil, or good and bad, and in the sense of mores, public morals and social conventions. It is a question of knowing what is done and what is not done. This moral disquiet is in no way to be distinguished from questions of truth, memory, and dialectics. This latter question, which will quickly be engaged as the question of writing, is closely associated with the morality theme, and indeed develops it by affinity of essence and not by superimposition. But within a debate rendered very real by the political development of the city, the propagation of writing and the activity of the sophists and speechwriters, the primary accent is naturally placed upon political and social proprieties. The type of arbitration proposed by Socrates plays within the opposition between the values of seemliness and unseemliness (euprepeial aprepeia): "But there remains the question of propriety and impropriety in writing, that is to say the conditions which make it proper or improper. Isn't that so?" (274b).

 

Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is it done?

 

Of course not. But the answer is not so simple, and Socrates does not immediately offer it on his own account in a rational discourse or logos. He lets it be heard by delegating it to an akoe, to a well-known rumor, to hearsay evidence, to a fable transmitted from ear to ear: "I can tell you what our forefathers have said about it, but the truth of it is only known by tradition. However, if we could discover that truth for ourselves, should we still be concerned with the fancies of mankind?" (274c).

 

The truth of writing, that is, as we shall see, (the) nontruth, cannot be discovered in ourselves by ourselves. And it is not the object of a science, only of a history that is recited, a fable that is repeated. The link between writing and myth becomes clearer, as does its opposition to knowledge, notably the knowledge one seeks in oneself, by oneself. And at the same time, through writing or through myth, the genealogical break and the estrangement from the origin are sounded. One should note most especially that what writing will later be accused of--repeating without knowing--here defines the very approach that leads to the statement and determina-

 

 

 

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tion of its status. One thus begins by repeating without knowing--through a myth--the definition of writing, which is to repeat without knowing. This kinship of writing and myth, both of them distinguished from logos and dialectics, will only become more precise as the text concludes. Having just repeated without knowing that writing consists of repeating without knowing, Socrates goes on to base the demonstration of his indictment, of his logos, upon the premises of the akoe, upon structures that are readable through a fabulous genealogy of writing. As soon as the myth has struck the first blow, the logos of Socrates will demolish the accused.

 

2. The Father of Logos

 

The story begins like this:

 

Socrates: Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt there lived one of the old gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and the name of the divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata). Now the King of all Egypt at that time was Thamus who lived in the great city of the upper region which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes; the god himself they call Ammon. Theuth came to him and exhibited his arts and declared that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. And Thamus questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as Theuth enumerated, the King blamed or praised what he thought were the good or bad points in the explanation. Now Thamus is said to have had a good deal to remark on both sides of the question about every single art (it would take too long to repeat it here); but when it came to writing, Theuth said, "This discipline (to mathema), my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories (sophoterous kai mnemonikoterous): my invention is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom." But the King said . . . etc. (274c-e).

 

Let us cut the King off here. He is faced with the pharmakon. His reply will be incisive.

 

Let us freeze the scene and the characters and take a look at them. Writing (or, if you will, the pharmakon) is thus presented to the King. Presented: like a kind of present offered up in homage by a vassal to his lord

 

 

 

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(Theuth is a demigod speaking to the king of the gods), but above all as a finished work submitted to his appreciation. And this work is itself an art, a capacity for work, a power of operation. This artefactum is an art. But the value of this gift is still uncertain. The value of writing--or of the pharmakon--has of course been spelled out to the King, but it is the King who will give it its value, who will set the price of what, in the act of receiving, he constitutes or institutes. The king or god (Thamus represents (11) Ammon, the king of the gods, the king of kings, the god of gods. Theuth says to him: O basileu) is thus the other name for the origin of value. The value of writing will not be itself, writing will have no value, unless and to the extent that god-the-king approves of it. But god-the-king nonetheless experiences the pharmakon as a product, an ergon, which is not his own, which comes to him from outside but also from below, and which awaits his condescending judgment in order to be consecrated in its being and value. God the king does not know how to write, but that ignorance or incapacity only testifies to his sovereign independence. He has no need to write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices. Whether a scribe from his secretarial staff then adds the supplement of a transcription or not, that consignment is always in essence secondary.

 

From this position, without rejecting the homage, the god-king will depreciate it, pointing out not only its uselessness but its menace and its mischief. Another way of not receiving the offering of writing. In so doing, god-the-king-that-speaks is acting like a father. The pharmakon is here presented to the father and is by him rejected, belittled, abandoned, disparaged. The father is always suspicious and watchful toward writing.

 

Even if we did not want to give in here to the easy passage uniting the figures of the king, the god, and the father, it would suffice to pay systematic attention--which to our knowledge has never been done--to the permanence of a Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos, to the paternal position. Not that this happens especially and exclusively in Plato. Everyone knows this or can easily imagine it. But the fact that "Platonism," which sets up the whole of Western metaphysics in its conceptuality, should not escape the generality of this structural constraint, and even illustrates it with incomparable subtlety and force, stands out as all the more significant.

 

 

 

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Not that logos is the father, either. But the origin of logos is its father. One could say anachronously that the "speaking subject" is the father of his speech. And one would quickly realize that this is no metaphor, at least not in the sense of any common, conventional effect of rhetoric. Logos is a son, then, a son that would be destroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his father. His father who answers. His father who speaks for him and answers for him. Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing. At least that is what is said by the one who says: it is the father's thesis. The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father. Such an absence can of course exist along very diverse modalities, distinctly or confusedly, successively or simultaneously: to have lost one's father, through natural or violent death, through random violence or patricide; and then to solicit the aid and attendance, possible or impossible, of the paternal presence, to solicit it directly or to claim to be getting along without it, etc. The reader will have noted Socrates' insistence on the misery, whether pitiful or arrogant, of a logos committed to writing: “. . . It always needs its father to attend to it, being quite unable to defend itself or attend to its own needs" (275e).

 

This misery is ambiguous: it is the distress of the orphan, of course, who needs not only an attending presence but also a presence that will attend to its needs; but in pitying the orphan, one also makes an accusation against him, along with writing, for claiming to do away with the father, for achieving emancipation with complacent self-sufficiency. From the position of the holder of the scepter, the desire of writing is indicated, designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion. Isn't this pharmakon then a criminal thing, a poisoned present?

 

The status of this orphan, whose welfare cannot be assured by any attendance or assistance, coincides with that of a graphein which, being nobody's son at the instant it reaches inscription, scarcely remains a son at all and no longer recognizes its origins, whether legally or morally. In contrast to writing, living logos is alive in that it has a living father (whereas the orphan is already half dead), a father that is present, standing near it, behind it, within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person in his own name. Living logos, for its part, recognizes its debt, lives off that recognition, and forbids itself, thinks it can forbid itself patricide. But prohibition and patricide, like the relations between speech and writing, are structures surprising enough to require us later on to articulate Plato's text between a patricide prohibited and a patricide proclaimed. The deferred murder of the father and rector.

 

The Phaedrus would already be sufficient to prove that the responsibility

 

 

 

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for logos, for its meaning and effects, goes to those who attend it, to those who are present with the presence of a father. These "metaphors" must be tirelessly questioned. Witness Socrates, addressing Eros: "If in our former speech Phaedrus or I said anything harsh against you, blame Lysias, the father of the subject (ton tou logou patera)" (275b). Logos--"discourse"--has the meaning here of argument, line of reasoning, guiding thread animating the spoken discussion (the Logos). To translate it by "subject" {sujet}, as Robin does, is not merely anachronistic. The whole intention and the organic unity of signification is destroyed. For only the "living" discourse, only a spoken word (and not a speech's theme, object, or subject) can have a father; and, according to a necessity that will not cease to become clearer to us from now on, the logoi are the children. Alive enough to protest on occasion and to let themselves be questioned; capable, too, in contrast to written things, of responding when their father is there. They are their father's responsible presence.

 

Some of them, for example, descend from Phaedrus, who is sometimes called upon to sustain them. Let us refer again to Robin, who translates logos this time not by "subject" but by "argument, " and disrupts in a space of ten lines the play on the tekhne to logon. (What is in question is the tekhne the sophists and rhetors had or pretended to have at their disposal, which was at once an art and an instrument, a recipe, an occult but transmissible "treatise," etc. Socrates considers the then classical problem in terms of the opposition between persuasion {peitho} and truth {aletheia} {260 a}.)

 

Socrates: I agree--if, that is, the arguments (logoi) that come forward to speak for oratory should give testimony that it is an art (tekhne). Now I seem, as it were, to hear some arguments advancing to give their evidence that it tells lies, that it is not an art at all, but an artless routine. "Without a grip on truth," says the Spartan, "there can be no genuine art of speaking (tou de legein) either now or in the future."

Phaedrus: Socrates, we need these arguments (Touton dei ton logon, o Sokrates). Bring the witnesses here and let's find out what they have to say and how they'll say it (ti kai pos legousin).

Socrates: Come here, then, noble brood (gennaia), and convince Phaedrus, father of such fine children (kallipaida te Phaidron), that if he doesn't give enough attention to philosophy, he will never become a competent speaker on any subject. Now let Phaedrus answer (260e-26 la).

 

 

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It is again Phaedrus, but this time in the Symposium, who must speak first because he is both "head of the table" and "father of our subject" (pater tou logou) (177d).

 

What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to call a metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system. If logos has a father, if it is a logos only when attended by its father, this is because it is always a being (on) and even a certain species of being (the Sophist, 260a), more precisely a living being. Logos is a zoon. An animal that is born, grows, belongs to the phusis. Linguistics, logic, dialectics, and zoology are all in the same camp.

 

In describing logos as a zoon, Plato is following certain rhetors and sophists before him who, as a contrast to the cadaverous rigidity of writing, had held up the living spoken word, which infallibly conforms to the necessities of the situation at hand, to the expectations and demands of the interlocutors present, and which sniffs out the spots where it ought to produce itself, feigning to bend and adapt at the moment it is actually achieving maximum persuasiveness and control. (12)

 

Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet. In order to be "proper," a written discourse ought to submit to the laws of life just as a living discourse does. Logographical necessity (anangke logographike) ought to be analogous to biological, or rather zoological, necessity. Otherwise, obviously, it would have neither head nor tail. Both structure and constitution are in question in the risk run by logos of losing through writing both its tail and its head:

 

Socrates: And what about the rest? Don't you think the different parts of the speech (ta tou logou) are tossed in hit or miss? Or is there really a cogent reason for starting his second point in the second place? And is that the case with the rest of the speech? As for myself, in my ignorance, I thought that the writer boldly set down whatever happened to come into his head. Can you explain his arrangement of the topics in the order he has adopted as the result of some principle of composition, some logographic necessity?

 

 

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Phaedrus: It's very kind of you to think me capable of such an accurate insight into his methods.

Socrates: But to this you will surely agree: every discourse (logon), like a living creature (osper zoon), should be so put together (sunestanai) that it has its own body and lacks neither head nor foot, middle nor extremities, all composed in such a way that they suit both each other and the whole (264-c).

 

The organism thus engendered must be well born, of noble blood: "gennaia!," we recall, is what Socrates called the logoi, those "noble creatures.” This implies that the organism, having been engendered, must have a beginning and an end. Here, Socrates' standards become precise and insistent: a speech must have a beginning and an end, it must begin with the beginning and end with the end: “It certainly seems as though Lysias, at least, was far from satisfying our demands: it's from the end, not the beginning, that he tries to swim (on his back!) upstream through the current of his discourse. He starts out with what the lover ought to say at the very end to his beloved!" (264a). The implications and consequences of such a norm are immense, but they are obvious enough for us not to have to belabor them. It follows that the spoken discourse behaves like someone attended in origin and present in person. Logos: "Sermo tanquam persona ipse loquens," as one Platonic Lexicon puts it. (13) Like any person, the logos-zoon has a father.

 

But what is a father?

 

Should we consider this known, and with this term--the known-- classify the other term within what one would hasten to classify as a metaphor? One would then say that the origin or cause of logos is being compared to what we know to be the cause of a living son, his father. One would understand or imagine the birth and development of logos from the standpoint of a domain foreign to it, the transmission of life or the generative relation. But the father is not the generator or procreator in any "real" sense prior to or outside all relation to language. In what way, indeed, is the father/son relation distinguishable from a mere cause/effect or generator/engendered relation, if not by the instance of logos? Only a power of speech can have a father. The father is always father to a speaking/living being. In other words, it is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity. If there were a simple metaphor in the

 

 

 

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expression "father of logos," the first word, which seemed the more familiar, would nevertheless receive more meaning from the second than it would transmit to it. The first familiarity is always involved in a relation of cohabitation with logos. Living-beings, father and son, are announced to us and related to each other within the household of logos. From which one does not escape, in spite of appearances, when one is transported, by "metaphor," to a foreign territory where one meets fathers, sons, living creatures, all sorts of beings that come in handy for explaining to anyone that doesn't know, by comparison, what logos, that strange thing, is all about. Even though this hearth is the heart of all metaphoricity, "father of logos" is not a simple metaphor. To have simple metaphoricity, one would have to make the statement that some living creature incapable of language, if anyone still wished to believe in such a thing, has a father. One must thus proceed to undertake a general reversal of all metaphorical directions, no longer asking whether logos can have a father but understanding that what the father claims to be the father of cannot go without the essential possibility of logos.

 

A logos indebted to a father, what does that mean? At least how can it be read within the stratum of the Platonic text that interests us here?

 

The figure of the father, of course, is also that of the good (agathon). Logos represents what it is indebted to: the father who is also chief, capital, and good(s). Or rather the chief, the capital, the good(s). Pater in Greek means all that at once. Neither translators nor commentators of Plato seem to have accounted for the play of these schemas. It is extremely difficult, we must recognize, to respect this play in a translation, and the fact can at least be explained in that no one has ever raised the question. Thus, at the point in the Republic where Socrates backs away from speaking of the good in itself (VI, 506e), he immediately suggests replacing it with its ekgonos, its son, its offspring:

 

. . . let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good in itself, for to attain to my present surmise of that seems a pitch above the impulse that wings my flight today. But what seems to be the offspring (ekgonos) of the good and most nearly made in its likeness I am willing to speak if you too wish it, and otherwise to let the matter drop.

Well, speak on, he said, for you will duly pay me the tale of the parent another time.

I could wish, I said, that I were able to make and you to receive the payment, and not merely as now the interest (tokous). But at any rate receive this interest and the offspring of the good (tokon te kai ekgonon autou tou agathou).

 

 

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Tokos, which is here associated with ekgonos, signifies production and the product, birth and the child, etc. This word functions with this meaning in the domains of agriculture, of kinship relations, and of fiduciary operations. None of these domains, as we shall see, lies outside the investment and possibility of a logos.

 

As product, the tokos is the child, the human or animal brood, as well as the fruits of the seed sown in the field, and the interest on a capital investment: it is a return or revenue. The distribution of all these meanings can be followed in Plato's text. The meaning of pater is sometimes even inflected in the exclusive sense of financial capital. In the Republic itself, and not far from the passage we have just quoted. One of the drawbacks of democracy lies in the role that capital is often allowed to play in it: "But these money-makers with down-bent heads, pretending not even to see the poor, but inserting the sting of their money into any of the remainder who do not resist, and harvesting from them in interest as it were a manifold progeny of the parent sum (tou patros ekgonous tokous pollaplasious), foster the drone and pauper element in the state" (555e).

 

Now, about this father, this capital, this good, this origin of value and of appearing beings, it is not possible to speak simply or directly. First of all because it is no more possible to look them in the face than to stare at the sun. On the subject of this bedazzlement before the face of the sun, a rereading of the famous passage of the Republic (VII, 515c ff) is strongly recommended here.

 

Thus will Socrates evoke only the visible sun, the son that resembles the father, the analogon of the intelligible sun: "It was the sun, then, that I meant when I spoke of that offspring of the Good (ton tou agathou ekgonon), which the Good has created in its own image (hon tagathon egennesen analogon heautoi), and which stands in the visible world in the same relation to vision and visible things as that which the good itself bears in the intelligible world to intelligence and to intelligible objects" (508c).

 

How does Logos intercede in this analogy between the father and the son, the nooumena and the horomena?

 

The Good, in the visible-invisible figure of the father, the sun, or capital, is the origin of all onta, responsible for their appearing and their coming into logos, which both assembles and distinguishes them: "We predicate 'to be' of many beautiful things and many good things, saying of them severally that they are, and so define them in our speech (einai phamen te kai diorizomen toi logoi)" (507 b).

 

The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden illuminating, blinding source of logos. And since one cannot speak of that which enables one to

 

 

 

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speak (being forbidden to speak of it or to speak to it face to face), one will speak only of that which speaks and of things that, with a single exception, one is constantly speaking of. And since an account or reason cannot be given of what logos (account or reason: ratio) is accountable or owing to, since the capital cannot be counted nor the chief looked in the eye, it will be necessary, by means of a discriminative, diacritical operation, to count up the plurality of interests, returns, products, and offspring: "Well, speak on (lege), he said, for you will duly pay me the tale of the parent another time--I could wish, I said, that I were able to make and you to receive the payment, and not merely as now the interest. But at any rate receive this interest and the offspring of the good. Have a care, however, lest I deceive you unintentionally with a false reckoning (ton logon) of the interest (tou tokou)" (507a).

 

From the foregoing passage we should also retain the fact that, along with the account (logos) of the supplements (to the father-good-capital-origin, etc. ), along with what comes above and beyond the One in the very movement through which it absents itself and becomes invisible, thus requiring that its place be supplied, along with differance and diacriticity, Socrates introduces or discovers the ever open possibility of the kibdelon, that which is falsified, adulterated, mendacious, deceptive, equivocal. Have a care, he says, lest I deceive you with a false reckoning of the interest (kibdelon apodidous ton logon tou tokou). Kibdeleuma is fraudulent merchandise. The corresponding verb (kibdeleuo) signifies "to tamper with money or merchandise, and, by extension, to be of bad faith."

 

This recourse to logos, from fear of being blinded by any direct intuition of the face of the father, of good, of capital, of the origin of being in itself, of the form of forms, etc., this recourse to logos as that which protects us from the sun, protects us under it and from it, is proposed by Socrates elsewhere, in the analogous order of the sensible or the visible. We shall quote at length from that text. In addition to its intrinsic interest, the text, in its official Robin translation, manifests a series of slidings, as it were, that are highly significant. (14) The passage in question is the critique, in the Phaedo, of "physicalists":

 

Socrates proceeded:--I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence (ta onta), I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing

 

 

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and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only looking at the image (eikona) reflected in the water, or in some analogous medium. So in my own case, I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend them with the help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to the world of idea (en logois) and seek there the truth of things.... So, basing myself in each case on the idea (logon) that I judged to be the strongest . . ." (99d-lOOa).

 

Logos is thus a resource. One must turn to it, and not merely when the solar source is present and risks burning the eyes if stared at; one has also to turn away toward logos when the sun seems to withdraw during its eclipse. Dead, extinguished, or hidden, that star is more dangerous than ever.

 

We will let these yarns of suns and sons spin on for a while. Up to now we have only followed this line so as to move from logos to the father, so as to tie speech to the kurios, the master, the lord, another name given in the Republic to the good-sun-capital-father (508a). Later, within the same tissue, within the same texts, we will draw on other filial filaments, pull the same strings once more, and witness the weaving or unraveling of other designs.

 

3. The Filial Inscription:

 

Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo

 

Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons--although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000 according to Iamblicus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth--who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things. Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum...

--Jorge Luis Borges, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"

A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier woven wing, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

 

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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe--and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives--is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid . . .

--Jorge Louis Borges, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

 

Our intention here has only been to sow the idea that the spontaneity, freedom, and fantasy attributed to Plato in his legend of Theuth were actually supervised and limited by rigorous necessities. The organization of the myth conforms to powerful constraints. These constraints coordinate as a system certain rules that make their presence known, sometimes in what is empirically partitioned off for us as "Greek language" or "culture," and sometimes, from without, in "foreign mythology." From which Plato has not simply borrowed, nor borrowed a simple element: the identity of a character, Thoth, the god of writing. One cannot, in fact, speak--and we don't really know what the word could mean here anyway--of a borrowing, that is, of an addition contingent and external to the text. Plato had to make his tale conform to structural laws. The most general of these, those that govern and articulate the oppositions speech/writing, life/death, father/ son, master/servant, first/second, legitimate son/orphan-bastard, soul/ body, inside/outside, good/evil, seriousness/play, day/night, sun/moon, etc., also govern, and according to the same configurations, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian mythology. And others, too, no doubt, which we have neither the intention nor the means to situate here. In concerning ourselves with the fact that Plato has not merely borrowed a simple element, we are thus bracketing off the problem of factual genealogy and of the empirical, effective communication among cultures and mythologies. (15) What we wish to do here is simply to point to the internal, structural necessity which alone has made possible such communication and any eventual contagion of mythemes.

 

 

 

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Plato, of course, does not describe Theuth as a character. Not a single concrete characteristic is attributed to him, neither in the Phaedrus nor in the very brief allusion in the Philebus. That is at least how things appear. But in looking more closely, one comes to recognize that the situation he occupies, the content of his speeches and operations, and the relations among the themes, concepts, and signifiers in which his interventions are engaged, all organize the features of a strongly marked figure. The structural analogy that relates these features to other gods of writing, and mainly to the Egyptian Thoth, can be the effect neither of a partial or total borrowing, nor of chance or Plato's imagination. And in the simultaneous insertion, so rigorous and closely fit, of these traits into the systematic arrangement of Plato's philosophemes, this meshing of the mythological and the philosophical points to some more deeply buried necessity.

 

No doubt the god Thoth had several faces, belonged to several eras, lived in several homes. (16) The discordant tangle of mythological accounts in which he is caught should not be neglected. Nevertheless, certain constants can be distinguished throughout, drawn in broad letters with firm strokes. One would be tempted to say that these constitute the permanent identity of this god in the pantheon, if his function, as we shall see, were not precisely to work at the subversive dislocation of identity in general, starting with that of theological regality.

 

What then, are the pertinent traits for someone who is trying to reconstitute the structural resemblance between the Platonic and the other mythological figures of the origin of writing? The bringing out of these traits should not merely serve to determine each of the significations within the play of thematic oppositions as they have been listed here, whether in Plato's discourse or in a general configuration of mythologies. It must open onto the general problematic of the relations between the mythemes and the philosophemes that lie at the origin of western logos. That is to say, of a history--or rather, of History--which has been produced in its entirety in the philosophical difference between mythos and logos, blindly sinking down into that difference as the natural obviousness of its own element.

 

In the Phaedrus, the god of writing is thus a subordinate character, a second, a technocrat without power of decision, an engineer, a clever, ingenious servant who has been granted an audience with the king of the gods. The king has been kind enough to admit him to his counsel. Theuth presents a tekhne and a pharmakon to the king, father, and god who speaks or commands with his sun-filled voice. When the latter has made his sentence

 

 

 

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known, when he has let it drop from on high, when he has in the same blow prescribed that the pharmakon be dropped, Theuth will not respond. The forces present wish him to remain in his place.

 

Doesn't he have the same place in Egyptian mythology? There too, Thoth is an engendered god. He often calls himself the son of the god-king, the sun-god, Ammon-Ra: "I am Thoth, the eldest son of Ra.” (17) Ra (the sun) is god the creator, and he engenders through the mediation of the word. (18) His other name, the one by which he is in fact designated in the Phaedrus, is Ammon. The accepted sense of this proper name: the hidden. (19) Once again we encounter here a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting himself be represented by speech.

 

The configurative unity of these significations--the power of speech, the creation of being and life, the sun (which is also, as we shall see, the eye), the self-concealment--is conjugated in what could be called the history of the egg or the egg of history. The world came out of an egg. More precisely, the living creator of the life of the world came out of an egg: the sun, then, was at first carried in an eggshell. Which explains a number of Ammon-Ra's characteristics: he is also a bird, a falcon ("I am the great falcon, hatched from his egg"). But in his capacity as origin of everything, Ammon-Ra is also the origin of the egg. He is designated sometimes as the bird-sun born from the primal egg, sometimes as the originary bird, carrier of the first egg. In this case, and since the power of speech is one with the power of creation, certain texts speak of "the egg of the great cackler." It would make no sense here to ask the at once trivial and philosophical

 

 

 

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question of "the chicken or the egg,'' of the logical, chronological, or ontological priority of the cause over the effect. This question has been magnificently answered by, certain sarcophagi: "O Ra, who art in thy egg. " If we add that this egg is also a "hidden egg,” (20) we shall have constituted but also opened up the system of these significations.

 

The subordination of Thoth, the ibis, eldest son of the original bird, is marked in several ways: in the Memphitic doctrine, for example, Thoth is the executor, through language, of Horus' creative project. (21) He bears the signs of the great sun-god. He interprets him as a spokesman, a standard-bearer. And like his Greek counterpart, Hermes, whom Plato moreover never mentions, he occupies the role of messenger-god, of clever intermediary, ingenious and subtle enough to steal, and always to steal away. The signifier-god. Whatever he has to enounce or inform in words has already been thought by Horus. Language, of which he is depositary and secretary, can thus only represent, so as to transmit the message, an already formed divine thought, a fixed design. (22) The message itself is not, but only represents, the absolutely creative moment. It is a second and secondary word. And when Thoth is concerned with the spoken rather than with the written word, which is rather seldom, he is never the absolute author or initiator of language. On the contrary, he introduces difference into language and it is to him that the origin of the plurality of languages is attributed. (23) (Later, we will ask, turning back to Plato and to the Philebus, whether differentiation is really a second step and whether this "secondarity" is not the emergence of the grapheme as the very origin and possibility

 

 

 

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of logos itself. In the Philebus, Theuth is evoked indeed as the author of difference: of differentiation within language and not of the plurality of languages. But it is our belief that at their root the two problems are inseparable. )

 

As the god of language second and of linguistic difference, Thoth can become the god of the creative word only by metonymic substitution, by historical displacement, and sometimes by violent subversion.

 

This type of substitution thus puts Thoth in Ra's place as the moon takes the place of the sun. The god of writing thus supplies the place of Ra, supplementing him and supplanting him in his absence and essential disappearance. Such is the origin of the moon as supplement to the sun, of night light as supplement to daylight. And writing as the supplement of speech. "One day while Ra was in the sky, he said: 'Bring me Thoth,' and Thoth was straightway brought to him. The Majesty of this god said to Thoth: 'Be in the sky in my place, while I shine over the blessed of the lower regions. . . You are in my place, my replacement, and you will be called thus: Thoth, he who replaces Ra.' Then all sorts of things sprang up thanks to the play of Ra's words. He said to Thoth: 'I will cause you to embrace (ionh) the two skies with your beauty and your rays'--and thus the moon (ioh) was born. Later, alluding to the fact that Thoth, as Ra's replacement, occupies a somewhat subordinate position: 'I will cause you to send (hob) greater ones than yourself-- and thus was born the Ibis (hib), the bird of Thoth.” (24)

 

This process of substitution, which thus functions as a pure play of traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order of the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control; this substitution, which could be judged "mad" since it can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of substitutes, of substitutes for substitutes; this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence. One would not have understood anything of this "linguistic" "immanence" if one saw it as the peaceful milieu of a merely fictional war, an inoffensive word-play, in contrast to some raging polemos in "reality." It is not in any reality foreign to the "play of words" that Thoth also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. He helps the sons do away with the father, the brothers do away with the brother that has become king. Nout, cursed by Ra, no longer disposed of a single date, a single day of the calendar on which she could give birth. Ra had blocked from her all time, all the days and periods there were for bringing a child into the world. Thoth, who also had a power of calculation over the institution of the

 

 

 

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calendar and the march of time, added the five epagomenic days. This supplementary time enabled Nout to produce five children: Haroeris, Seth, Isis, Nephtys and Osiris, who would later become king in the place of his father Geb. During the reign of Osiris (the sun-king), Thoth, who was also his brother, (25) “initiated men into arts and letters," and "created hieroglyphic writing to enable them to fix their thoughts." (26) But later, he participates in the plot led by Seth, Osiris' jealous brother. The famous legend of the death of Osiris is well known: tricked into being shut up in a trunk the size of his body, he is dismembered, and his fourteen parts are scattered to the winds. After many complications, he is found and reassembled by his wife Isis, all except for the phallus, which has been swallowed by an Oxyrhynchus fish. (27) This does not prevent Thoth from acting with the cleverest and most oblivious opportunism. Isis, transformed into a vulture, lies on the corpse of Osiris. In that position she engenders Horus, "the child-with-his-finger-in-his-mouth," who will attack his father's murderer. The latter, Seth, tears out Horus' eye while Horus rips off Seth's testicles. When Horus can get his eye back, he offers it to his father--and this eye is also the moon: Thoth, if you will--and the eye brings Osiris back to life and potency.

 

In the course of the fight, Thoth separates the combatants and, in his role of god-doctor-pharmacist-magician, sews up their wounds and heals them of their mutilation. Later, when the eye and testicles are back in place, a trial is held, during which Thoth turns on Seth whose accomplice he had nevertheless once been, and confirms as true the words of Osiris. (28)

 

As a substitute capable of doubling for the king, the father, the sun, and the word, distinguished from these only by dint of representing, repeating, and masquerading, Thoth was naturally also capable of totally supplanting them and appropriating all their attributes. He is added as the essential attribute of what he is added to, and from which almost nothing distinguishes him. He differs from speech or divine light only as the revealer from the revealed. Barely. (29)

 

 

 

THE FILIAL INSCRIPTION 91

 

But before, as it were, his adequacy of replacement and usurpation, Thoth is essentially the god of writing, the secretary of Ra and the nine gods, the hierogrammate and the hypomnetographer. (30) Now, it is precisely by pointing out, as we shall see, that the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mneme (living, knowing memory) that Thamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns it as being of little worth.

 

In later episodes of the Osiris cycle, Thoth also becomes the scribe and bookkeeper of Osiris, who, it should not be forgotten, is then considered his brother. Thoth is represented as the model and patron of scribes, so important to the chancelleries of the Pharaohs: "while the sun god is the universal master, Thoth is his top functionary, his vizir, who stands near him in his ship in order to submit his reports.” (31) As "Master of the books," he becomes, by dint of consigning them, registering them, keeping account of them, and guarding their stock, the "master of divine words.” (32) His female counterpart writes, too: her name, Seshat, doubtless means she-who-writes. "Mistress of libraries," she records the exploits of the kings. The first goddess versed in the art of engraving, she marks the names of the kings on a tree in the temple of Heliopolis, while Thoth keeps account of the years on a notched pole. There is also the famous scene of the royal intitulation reproduced on the bas-reliefs of numerous temples: the king is seated beneath a persea-tree while Thoth and Seshat inscribe his name on the leaves of a sacred tree. (33) And also the scene of the last judgment: in the underworld, opposite Osiris, Thoth records the weight of the heart-souls of the dead. (34)

 

For it goes without saying that the god of writing must also be the god of death. We should not forget that, in the Phaedrus, another thing held

 

 

 

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against the invention of the pharmakon is that it substitutes the breathless sign for the living voice, claims to do without the father (who is both living and life-giving) of logos, and can no more answer for itself than a sculpture or inanimate painting, etc. In all the cycles of Egyptian mythology, Thoth presides over the organization of death. The master of writing, numbers, and calculation does not merely write down the weight of dead souls; he first counts out the days of life, enumerates history. His arithmetic thus covers the events of divine biography. He is "the one who measures the length of the lives of gods and men.” (35) He behaves like a chief of funereal protocol, charged in particular with the dressing of the dead.

 

Sometimes the dead person takes the place of the scribe. Within the space of such a scene, the dead one's place {la place du mort; also = the dummy, in bridge} then falls to Thoth. One can read on the pyramids the celestial history of one such soul: "'Where is he going?' asks a great bull threatening him with his horn" (we should note in passing that another name for Thoth, Ra's nocturnal representative, is the "bull among the stars"). "'He's going full of vital energy to the skies, to see his father, to contemplate Ra,' and the terrifying creature lets him pass." (The books of the dead, placed in the coffin next to the corpse, contained in particular formulas enabling him to "go out into the light of day" and see the sun. The dead person must see the sun: death is the prerequisite, or even the experience, of that face-to-face encounter. One thinks of the Phaedo.) God the father welcomes him into his bark, and "it even happens that he lets off his own celestial scribe and puts the dead man in his place, so that he judges, arbitrates, and gives orders to one who is greater than himself.” (36) The dead man can also simply be identified with Thoth: "he is simply called a god; he is Thoth, the strongest of the gods.” (37)

 

The hierarchical opposition between son and father, subject and king, death and life, writing and speech, etc., naturally completes its system with that between night and day, West and East, moon, and sun. Thoth, the "nocturnal representative of Ra, the bull among the stars,” (38) turns toward the west. He is the god of the moon, either as identified with it or as its protector. (39)

 

The system of these traits brings into play an original kind of logic: the figure of Thoth is opposed to its other (father, sun, life, speech, origin or

 

 

 

THE FILIAL INSCRIPTION 93

 

 

orient, etc. ), but as that which at once supplements and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites. If he had any identity--but he is precisely the god of nonidentity--he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. He is thus the father's other, the father, and the subversive movement of replacement. The god of writing is thus at once his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.

 

This god of resurrection is less interested in life or death than in death as a repetition of life and life as a rehearsal of death, in the awakening of life and in the recommencement of death. This is what numbers, of which he is also the inventor and patron, mean. Thoth repeats everything in the addition of the supplement: in adding to and doubling as the sun, he is other than the sun and the same as it; other than the good and the same, etc. Always taking a place not his own, a place one could call that of the dead or the dummy, he has neither a proper place nor a proper name. His propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play. Play, of which he is also the inventor, as Plato himself reminds us. It is to him that we owe the games of dice (kubeia) and draughts (petteia) (274d). He would be the mediating movement of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely preventing it, through this ironic doubling, from reaching some final fulfillment or eschatological reappropriation. Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own.

 

Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. This god of calculation, arithmetic, and rational science (40) also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography no less than of every other -graphy.

 

 

 

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Science and magic, the passage between life and death, the supplement to evil and to lack: the privileged domain of Thoth had, finally, to be medicine. All his powers are summed up and find employment there. The god of writing, who knows how to put an end to life, can also heal the sick. And even the dead. (41) The steles of Horus on the Crocodiles tell of how the king of the gods sends Thoth down to heal Harsiesis, who has been bitten by a snake in his mother's absence. (42)

 

The god of writing is thus also a god of medicine. Of "medicine": both a science and an occult drug. Of the remedy and the poison. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon. And it is writing as a pharmakon that he presents to the king in the Phaedrus, with a humility as unsettling as a dare.

 

 

 

Notes

 

 

1. TN. It should be noted that the Greek word KcrAol~pos, which here begins the essay on Plato, is the last word printed in Littre’s long definition of the French word coup, with which the Hors-livre has just playfully left off.

 

2. "Histos: anything set upright, hence: I. mast. II. beam of a loom, which stood upright, instead of lying horizontal as in our looms (except in the weaving methods used by the Gobelins and in India) to which the threads of the warp are attached, hence: 1. loom; 2. the war fixed to the loom, hence, the woof; 3. woven cloth, piece of canvas; 4. by anal. spider web; or honeycomb of bees. III. rod, wand, stick. IV. by anal. shinbone, leg."

 

3. "Stranger: it is difficult, my dear Socrates, to demonstrate anything of real importance without the use of examples. Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and

 

thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up, as it were, to find he knows nothing. Young Socrates: What do you mean by this? Stranger: I have made a real fool of myself by choosing this moment to discuss our strange human plight where the winning of knowledge is concerned. Young Socrates: What do you mean? Stranger: Example, my good friend, has been found to require an example. Young Socrates: What is this? Say on and do not hesitate for my sake. Stranger: I will--in fact, I must, since you are so ready to follow. When young children have only just learned their letters . . . (hotan arti grammaton empeiroi gignontai . . . )" (277d e, trans. Skemp). And the description of the interweaving (sumploke) in writing necessitates recourse to the paradigm in grammatical experience, and then progressively leads to the use of this procedure in its "kingly" form and to the example or paradigm of weaving.

 

4. TN. The basic English-language of Plato's dialogues to which I shall refer is The Collected Dialogues of Plato (ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns), Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). The dialogues have been translated by the following: Hugh Tredennick (Apology, Crito, Phaedo); Benjamin Jowett (Charmides, Laches, Menexenus, Lesser Hippias, Cratylus, Timaeus, Greater Hippias); J. Wright (Lysis); Lane Cooper (Euthyphro, Ion); W. D. Woodhead (Gorgias); W. K. C. Guthrie (Protagoras, Meno); W. H. D. Rouse (Euthydemus); R. Hackforth (Phaedrus, Philebus); Michael Joyce (Symposium); Paul Shorley (Republic); F. M. Cornford (Theaetetus, Parmenides, Sophist); J. B. Skemp (Statesman); A. E. Taylor (Critias, Laws, Epinomis); L. A. Post (Letters).

 

I have also consulted and sometimes partially adopted the renditions given in the following: Phaedrus, trans. W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Educational Publishing, The Library of Liberal Arts, 1956); Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960); Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Dialogues of Plato (New York: Washington Square Press, 1951); Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1941); The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin Books, 1970).

 

In addition, I have occasionally modified the wording or word order of the Platonic texts in order to bring them into line with the parenthetical Greek inserts. Some minor adjustments have also been made when it seemed necessary to achieve a closer parallel to the French version with which Derrida is working. The parenthetical numbers given after the quotations are the standard references to the Stephanus edition of Plato's works, traditionally reproduced in all translations.

 

5 . On the history of interpretations of the Phaedrus and the problem of its composition, a rich, detailed account can be found in L. Robin's La Theorie platonicienne de l'amour, 2d ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), and in the same author's Introduction to the Bude edition of the Phaedrus.

 

6. H. Raeder, Platons philosophische Entwickelung(Leipzig, 1905). A critique of this view, "Sur la composition du Phedre," by E. Bourguet, appeared in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 1919, p. 335.

 

7. P. Frutiger, Les Mythes de Platon (Paris: Alcan, 1930).

 

8. TN. Hackforth translates "recipe"; Helmbold & Rabinowirz, "remedy."

 

9. Here, when it is a question of logos, Robin translates tekhne by "art." Later, in the course of the indictment, the same word, this time pertaining to writing, will be rendered by "technical knowledge" connaissance technique.

 

10. While Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics, excludes or settles the question of writing in a sort of preliminary excursus or hors d'oeuvre, the chapter Rousseau devotes to writing in the Essay on the Origin of Languages is also presented, despite its actual importance, as a sort of somewhat contingent supplement, a makeup criterion, "another means of comparing languages and of judging their relative antiquity." The same operation is found in Hegel's Encyclopedia; cf. "Le Puits et la pyramide," (1-1968) in Hegel et la pensee moderne, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970, coll. "Epimethee.").

 

11. For Plato, Thamus is doubtless another name for Ammon, whose figure (that of the sun king and of the father of the gods) we shall sketch out later for its own sake. On this question and the debate to which it has given rise, see Frutiger, Mythes, p 233, n. 2, and notably Eisler, “Platon und das agyptische Alphabet," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, 1922; Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (art. Ammon); Roscher, Lexikon der griechischen und romischen Mythologie (art. Thamus).

 

 

12. The association logos-zoon appears in the discourse of Isocrates Against the Sophists and in that of Alcidamas On the Sophists. Cf. also W. Suss, who compares these two discourses line by line with the Phaedrus, in Ethos: Studien zur alteren griechischen Rhetorik (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 34 ff) and A. Dies, "Philosophie et rhetorique," in Autour de Platon (Paris: Garbriel Beauchesne, 1927) I, 103.

 

13. Fr. Ast, Lexique platonicien. Cf. also B. Parain, Essai sur le logos platonicien (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), p. 211; and P. Louis, Les Metaphores de Platon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945), pp. 43 44.

 

14. I am indebted to the friendship and alertness of Francine Markovits for having brought this to my attention. This text should of course be placed alongside those of books VI and VII of the Republic.

 

15. We can here only refer the reader to all the existing studies of the communications between Greece and the East or Middle East. Such scholarship abounds. On Plato, his relations with Egypt, the hypothesis of his voyage to Heliopolis, the testimony of Strabo and Diogenes Laertius, one can find the references and essential documentation in Festugiere's Revelation d'Hermes Trismegiste (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1944--54), vol. 1; R. Godel's Platon a Heliopolis d 'Egypte (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956); and S. Sauneron's Les Pretres de l'ancienne Egypte (Paris: Le Seuil, 1957).

 

16. Cf. Jacques Vandier, La Religion egyptienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), esp. pp. 64-65.

 

17 . Cf. S. Morenz, La Religion egyptienne (Paris: Payot, 1962), p. 58. This formulation is noteworthy, according to Morenz, through its use of the first person. "This rarity seems remarkable to us because such formulae are common in the hymns composed in Greek which involve the Egyptian goddess Isis ("I am Isis," etc.); there is thus good reason to wonder whether this does not point to some extra-Egyptian origin of these hymns."

 

18. Cf. S. Sauneron, p. 123: "The initial god had only to speak to create; and the beings and things evoked were born through his voice," etc.

 

19. Cf. Morenz, p. 46, and S. Sauneron, who provides the following account: "What his name signifies exactly, we do not know. But it was pronounced in the same way as another word meaning 'to hide,' 'to conceal oneself,' and the scribes played on that assonance so as to define Ammon as the great god who masks his real countenance before his children.... Some went even further than that: Hecataeus of Abdera records a sacerdotal tradition according to which this name (Ammon) is supposed to be the expression used in Egypt to call someone . . . It is indeed true that the word amoini means 'come,' 'come to me'; it is a fact, furthermore, that certain hymns begin with the words Amoini Amoun . . . 'Come to me, Ammon. The similarity of sound alone between these two words made the priests suspect that there was some intimate link between them--to see therein an explanation of the divine name: thus, in addressing the primordial god . . . as an invisible, hidden being, they invite and exhort him, calling him Ammon, to show himself to them and unmask himself" (p. 127).

 

20. Cf. Morenz, pp. 232-33. The paragraph that is about to end here will have marked the fact that this pharmacy of Plato's also brings into play {entraine] Bataille's text, inscribing within the story of the egg the sun of the accursed part la part maudite; the whole of that essay, as will quickly become apparent, being itself nothing but a reading of Finnegans Wake.

 

21. Cf. Vandier, p. 36: "These two gods Horus and Thoth were said to have been associates in the creative act, Horus representing the thought that conceives and Thoth the speech that executes" (p. 64). Cf. also A. Erman, La Religion des Egyptiens (Paris: Payot), p. 1 18.

 

22. Cf. Morenz, pp. 46 47; and Festugiere, pp. 70 73. As a messenger, Thoth is consequently also an interpreter, hermeneus. This is one, among numerous others, of the features of his resemblance with Hermes. Festugiere analyzes this in chapter 4 of his book.

 

23. J. Cerny cites a hymn to Thoth beginning in the following terms: "Hail to thee, Moon-Thoth, who made different the tongue of one country from another." Cerny had thought this document unique, but soon discovered that Boylan (Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt London, 1922) had quoted (p. 184) another analogous papyrus (“you who distinguished or separated the tongue of country from country") and still another (p. 197) ("you who distinguished the tongue of every foreign land"). Cf. J. Cerny, "Thoth as Creator of Languages, " Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 34 (1948): 121 ff; S. Saunerson, La Differenciation des languages d'apres la tradition egyptienne, Bulletin de l'institut francais d'Archeologie orientale du Caire (Cairo, 1960).

 

24. Erman, pp. 90 91.

 

25. Ibid. p. 96.

 

26. Vandier, p. 51.

 

27. Ibid. p. 52.

 

28. Erman, p. 101

 

29. Thus it is that the god of writing can become the god of creative speech. This is a structural possibility derived from his supplementary status and from the logic of the supplement. The same can also be seen to occur in the evolution of the history of mythology. Festugiere, in particular, points this out: "Thoth, however, does nor remain content with this secondary rank. At the time when the priests in Egypt were forging cosmogonies in which the local clergy of each area sought to give the primary role to the god it honored, the theologians of Hermopolis, who were competing with those of the Delta and of Heliopolis, elaborated a cosmogony in which the principal share fell to Thoth. Since Thoth was a magician, and since he knew of the power of sounds which, when emitted properly, unfailingly produce their effect, it was by means of voice, of speech, or rather, incantation, that Thoth was said to have created the world. Thoth's voice is thus creative: it shapes and creates; and, condensing and solidifying into matter, it becomes a being. Thoth becomes identified with his breath; his exhalation alone causes all things to be born. It is not impossible that these Hermopolitan speculations may offer some similarity with the Logos of the Greeks--at once Speech, Reason, and Demiurge--and with the Sophia of the Alexandrian Jews; perhaps the Priests of Thoth even underwent, well before the Christian era, the influence of Greek thought, but this cannot be solidly affirmed" (p. 68).

 

30. Ibid.; cf. also Vandier, passim, and Erman, passim.

 

31. Erman, p. 81.

 

32. Ibid.

 

33. Vandier, p. 182.

 

34. Vandier, pp. 136-37; Morenz, p. 173; Festugiere, p. 68.

 

35. Morenz, pp. 47 48.

 

36. Erman, p. 249.

 

37. Ibid. p. 250.

 

38. Ibid. p. 41.

 

39. Boylan, pp. 62-75; Vandier, p. 65; Morenz, p. 54; Festugiere, p. 67.

 

40. Morenz, p. 95 . Another of Thoth's companions is Maat, goddess of truth . She is also “daughter of Ra, mistress of the sky, she who governs the double country, the eye of Ra which has no match." Erman, in the page devoted to Maar, notes: " .... one of her insignia, God knows why, was a vulture feather" (p. 82).

 

41. Vandier, pp. 7 I ff. Cf. especially Festugiere, pp. 287 ff where a number of texts on Thoth as the inventor of magic are assembled. One of them, which particularly interests us, begins: "A formula to be recited before the sun: 'I am Thoth, inventor and creator of philters and letters, etc.' " (292).

 

42. Vandier, p. 230. Cryptography, medicinal magic, and the figure of the serpent are in fact intertwined in an astonishing folk tale transcribed by G. Maspero in Les Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne (Paris: E . Guilmoro, 1911). It is the tale of Satni-Khamois and the mummies. Satni-Khamois, the son of a king, "spent his days running about the metropolis of Memphis so as to read the books written in sacred script and the books of the Double House of Life. One day a nobleman came along and made fun of him. -'Why are you laughing at me?' The nobleman said: - 'I am not laughing at you; but can I help laughing when you spend your time here deciphering writings that have no powers? If you really wish to read effective writing, come with me; I will send you to the place where you will find the book which Thoth himself has written with his own hand and which will place you just below the gods. There are two formulas written in it: if you recite the first, you will charm the sky, the earth, the world of night, the mountains, the waters; you will understand what the birds of the sky and the reptiles are all saying, as they are; you will see the fish, for a divine force will make them rise to the surface of the water. If you read the second formula, even if you are in the grave you will reassume the form you had on earth; even shall you see the sun rising in the sky, and its cycle, and the moon in the form it has when it appears. 'Satni cried; 'By my life! let me know what you wish and I will have it granted you; but take me to the place where I can find the book!' The nobleman said to Satni: 'The book in question is not mine. It is in the heart of the necropolis, in the tomb of Nenoferkeptah, son of king Minebptah.... Take great heed not to take this book away from him, for he would have you bring it back, a pitchfork and a rod in his hand, a lighted brazier on his head.... ' Deep inside the tomb, light was shining out of the book. The doubles of the king and of his family were beside him, 'through the virtues of the book of Thoth. ' . . . All this was repeating itself. Nenoferkeptah had already himself lived Satni's story. The priest had told him: 'The book in question is in the middle of the sea of Copros, in an iron casket. The iron casket is inside a bronze casket; the bronze casket is inside a casket of cinnamon wood; the casket of cinnamon wood is inside a casket of ivory and ebony. The casket of ivory and ebony is inside a silver casket. The silver casket is inside a golden casket, and the book is found therein. [Scribe's error? the first version I consulted had consigned or reproduced it; a later edition of Maspero's book pointed it out in a note: "The scribe has made a mistake here in his enumeration. He should have said: inside the iron casket is . . . etc." (Item left as evidence for a logic of inclusion).] And there is a schoene [in Ptolemy's day, equal to about 12,000 royal cubits of

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