Interfaces, Medien, Bildung: caves (Meyer)
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page 99: caves
Derrida wrote me - quoting Chris Marker I can now say - he wrote me: "Have you seen this map, the picture au dos de cette carte? I found it yesterday in the Bodleian (that's the famous library of Oxford), I'll tell you more. I stopped dead, with a feeling of hallucination (is he crazy or what? he has the names mixed up!) and of revelation at the same time, an apocalyptic revelation: Socrates writing, writing in front of Plato, I always knew it, it had remained like the negative of a photograph to be developed for twenty-five centuries -in me of course [1]." Then, the Bild* (image):
3.2.1: "The picture au dos de cette carte"
He continued: "Socrates, the one who writes - sitting crooked, hunched, a recorder or teachable copyist, Plato's secretary after all. He is in front of Plato, no, Plato is behind him, smaller (why smaller?) but standing upright. With the extended finger he looks as if he were pointing the way, denoting, showing or issuing an order - or dictating, authoritarian, magisterial, commanding. Almost treacherous and stubborn, don't you think?"[2]. ... and that he had not recovered yet from this apparent calamity until now: Plato behind Socrates. One would think that he was always behind him but not like that. He had known it all the time, and the two of them as well, according to him. What a couple. Socrates turns le dos (his back) to Plato, the one who made him write what he wanted pretending to receive it from him. This reproduction would be sold there as a post card, whether I had seen it, with greetings and address. Socrates, who writes that I should make that clear to myself, and on a post card ... [3]
Thus he wrote me that things were complicated concerning the authorship: no doubt, Plato had written the ancient post cards. However, in a certain way he had assigned the authorship to Socrates. He would be responsible. One would've always perceived it like that. The post card from the Bodleian would twist that one. Plato would use Socrates as a Zeugen* (witness) for what he wanted to say for himself - not the other way around, to bear witness to the things Socrates had said.
page 101: Zeugen* (to create/witnesses)
"After I took away Socrates' hat, I enforcedly had to replace the S with an s" [1].
Derrida abbreviates both names. "S." for Socrates, "p." - a small p - for Plato. It corresponds with the back side, above the figures' heads are their names: "plato." and "Socrates." Their headdresses inform about their proportions.
In which manner Plato is behind Socrates, can be expressed formally as S/p or P/s. You have the choice, Saussure or Lacan, signifier or signified.
Lacan has reversed the relation of signified and signifier opposed to Saussure's conception.
His formula is "Signified over Signifier" [2]. He clarifies the leading position of the signified over the signifier. The function of the signifier is not to bear witness for the signified in the sense of a representation. It implies the other meaning of bearing witness: The signifier is the Er-Zeuger* (creator), the one who bears something, who creates. The signifier is a Zeichenmacher* (master signifier). This misrepresentation or perversion of Zeugen* (creating) is mirrored in Derrida's expression "Facteur de la Vérité"[3] . The French word facteur derives from the Latin word factor (facere, factum) and refers only in the second instance to the mathematical factor as a cause, moment or wright, producer. In the first instance it means postman, mailman.
In Plato's opus there is a sentence that might induce quite a headache. On the backside of a postcard (the Bild* (image) on the front shows a social carousal) it was written that Zeugung* (creation) is eternity and immortality for mortals [4].
page 101: why Zeugen* (to create/witnesses
According to Plato, Derrida only handed the post card over [1]. He was only a postman. Supposedly he received it from Apollodor who had got it from Aristodem. Aristodem himself was present at the said carousal where Socrates had slipped him the post card. Socrates on the other hand had obtained it from the woman priest Diotima who had been absent at that time [2].
page 102: missing
The subject, which is supposed to know, is far fort* (gone). And it is female, which deserves attention in this text full of allusions to men's homosexuality. Diotima - D. (?) - is the other one, the absentee. The one, who is definitely missing in this group of men. She is not da* (there), not included. The fact that she is missing marks the lack which forms male (and female) gender as being opposite to the androgynous incompleteness. Plato describes in his Symposion (link symposion) - using Aristophanes as a Zeugen* (witness) - the gender of the androgynous ball-like human beings, "which was the communal aspect of both, of which the name was left over while itself disappeared" [1] . The Gestalt* (shape, form) of these human beings wasn't missing anything, it was "of one piece" and round.
"And each one had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond" [2]. They were perfect/whole and they didn't lack anything. The Gods punished the androgynous cutting them into two pieces because they had apparently become snooty due to their perfection. A similar cut serves as punishment for the arrogance of the constructing engineers of the Tower of Babel.
Julia Kristeva interprets: "This cut was a gender-differentiation. Henceforth each one is searching for the piece which was taken away from them and this searching is the actual motor/impulse for all actions and also for love". [3]
Even though, according to Aristophanes the androgynous claim seemed to be ridiculous/absurd, the conclusion of the gender differention's aftermath becomes manifest: "This paradisiacal imagination gets lost at the end of childhood, when the child is only the mother's penis and - as she or he becomes an adult - realizes the androgynous phantasm of a hysterical female creator." [4] Missing is left over as a hole within completeness: " Therefore each one is always looking for his or her other piece." [5] Kristeva commented: "The word "piece" translates into the Greek symbolon and naturally refers to the object cut into half, its two parts serving the owners to bear witness to their old bonds between themselves or their families; but it also means symbol, contract, meaning, thus something, that can't be deciphered without its counterpart. Every gender [...] is the "symbol" of the other one". [5]
When Diotima talks about Eros in the Symposion she speaks from the other side of the Chorismos, from the other border of the gaping wound, which the divine cut has left. She speaks from beyond the barrier, the bar (barre), which Lacan drew into the algorithm of Saussure [6]. Pazzini writes : "She is indeed absent, but all the more present." Diotimas speech is in the voice over.
