Dror Pimentel (Bio)

Writing, or the First Artifact

It is within the intention of this presentation to follow Derrida’s brilliant analysis of Plato’s fable of writing in the Phaedrus, as fleshed out in his “Plato’s Pharmacy”. As Derrida shows, the pharmakon of writing is reversed: rather than assisting in the production of knowledge and memory, writing instead increases ignorance and forgettenness. As such, it is not situated at the peripheral outskirts of memory, that is, within the archive (hypomnesis); rather, it penetrates the very heart of memory itself (mneme), thereby sabotaging the free flow of the living remembrance of eidetic presence within it. It is from this insight that Derrida derives his key notion “arch-writing”. That is to say, the artificial prosthesis of writing is not external to presence, augmenting or reinforcing it from the outside. Rather, it is always-already operative at the very heart of presence itself. This argument carries far-reaching implications: It is not only writing—as a form of techne—but rather technology at large that always-already inhabits the core of human existence. Following Derrida’s notion of “psychic writing” as formulated in Dissemination, this presentation seeks to expand the notion of writing beyond material inscription to include non-material instantiations, such as writing of the mind and of perception. This will facilitate a leap beyond Derrida toward a broader definition of writing: Namely, writing as the instantiation of limit and limitation as such. In this broader sense, writing is to be related to the instances of economization, quantification and algorithmization, that are largely at play in our times.