Derrida in Postcards questions the relationship of Plato and Socrates, the two fathers of meaning in Western thought. It is through Plato that we know Socrates. (470 - 399BC) Socrates never wrote; he was written by Aristophanes his enemy, Xenophon and Plato.

The Dialogue opens with Phaedrus, a student of Lysias (born 458 BC seven years before Plato), the celebrated rhetorician, meets Socrates as they both are walking outside the wall of Athens. The enthusiastic Phaedrus is anxious to share the speech he has just heard by Lysias.

The dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus takes place as they walk outside the walls of Athens on the riverbank of Illissus near the place where according to Athenian mythology, a young maiden Orithyia was abducted by the god Boreas. Socrates rationally explains the disappearance of Orithyia along the riverbanks of the Illissus. "...a blast of Boreas, the north wind, pushed her off the neighboring rocks as she was playing with Pharmacea, and that when she had died in this manner she was said to have been carried off by Boreas."

'The word pharmakon is caught in a chain of significance' (Dissemination 95)

pharmacia

is

a drug a healing medicine a poison allurement a young maiden forbidden games a loss of virginity

pharmakon writing

is seduces

a concept writing pharmakon dissemination like a dangerous drug is repeating without knowing is not real thinking is mythos a scapegoat

pharmakos

was

civil a purification act human sacrifice use of scapegoats sacrifice of deformed humans burning of sacrificial humans producer of ashes of sacrificed humans

Socrates expounds on those who refrain from writing for fear of being accused of being sophists; and on the relative virtues of speaking and writing.

Socrates continues, explaining that statesmen and other speakers of rhetoric hope to be written, to be approved and to have that approval recorded. The proud, ambitious statesmen aspires to be immortalized through writing like the great Darius. Socrates uses a myth to discredit myth over logos. In Socrates' version of the Thamus disparaged Theuthfor inventing writing along with alchemy, geometry, astronomy, calculations...Theuth is the Greek name for Thoth son of Amon Ra. Derrida posits that by representing Ra in speech and writing Theuth has replaced the god himself.