| As the initiator of deconstruction, no doubt Derrida has a great influence. His works are extensive and profound, but they are, at the same time, hard to understand. He has shaken the foundation of the entire humanities——he questioned many concepts and theories that people were familiar with, and even the western cultural tradition itself. But he denies taking deconstruction as a kind of theory. In his eyes, deconstuction just uses another discourse system, which is different to the old one, to think about things. Derrida always focus on something not primary in the very work he is reading (e.g. annotation or metaphor, etc.). Pondering carefully, trying to discover the complicated significance hidden in some unremarkable words or phrases, he decomposes the text which is made up of these unremarkable words or phrases, and makes the certainty of the significance collapsed and the significance disseminated. His paper "Plato’s Pharmacy" published in1968is an excellent model of deconstruction. In this work, he reread Plato’s "PHAEDRUS", and analyzed the word "pharmakon" which is throughout the whole text but meanwhile not a core concept in Plato. Through "pharmakon", Derrida finally held the keys of Plato’s text. He hit the right nail on the head of philosophy, and finished the mission of so-called deconstruction:to analyze the Platonic self-contradictory, he finally made a series of metaphysical opposition disappear.By rereading Derrida’s famous text "Plato’s Pharmacy", not only can we understand how his deconstruction works, but also we can notice the difficulty of it. This successful case offers us a better understanding of his general strategy of deconstruction. Derrida criticized logocentrism and metaphysics of presence, but he himself seems to still not completely out of the metaphysical thinking. We can see the shadow of metaphysics behind his grammatology. His "Plato’s Pharmacy", his grammatology, and even all of his writtings, is also an indeterminate "pharmakon". |
