The Myth of Theuth

In the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates extols a panegyric to speech as the superior vehicle of truth in condemnation of writing, and does so by recounting the myth of Theuth, the Egyptian inventor and god of writing (Derrida 2004, 95-7; Plato 1973).

Socrates argues for the ‘purity of presence and self-presence as speech’, as the immediate, ‘living’, and verifiable logos, and in doing so Derrida identifies a ‘kinship of writing and myth’ (Derrida 2005, 369, 2004, 80). As we have seen, both myth and writing exemplify an Other logic embed­ded within the psharmakon, erring and oscillating between falsifiability and non-falsifiability. The pharmakon reflects this play between presence and absence, constituting incommensurable opposites, and is therefore an exemplar of the undecidable. Being both cure and poison, and yet neither, each depends upon their essential ambivalence.

Transcendental truths, manufactured by ‘philosophy as logos, can only be understood through an unending oscillation with mythos’ (Spitzer 2011, 85, 117). But the irreducible ambiguity of the pharmakon and its possible meaning is beyond any control or synthesis, whether by kings, gods, or philosophers. Any attempt at imposition or domination is met with resis­tance and evasion. The pharmakon is, therefore, a helpful term for better comprehending mythos as a remedy and poison by making meaning both possible and impossible whilst maintaining its essential ambiguity.

To take a particularly illustrative example, it is in these dual senses that Horkheimer and Adorno are able to construct their dual thesis: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xviii).⁴ On the one hand, mythology had contributed to progress and enlightenment through the dialectic, and was still valuable in so far as it could continue to contribute to progress. Whilst on the other hand, mythology could also be considered one of the dangers of Enlightenment thinking, which could eventually regress towards ideology and violence. The critical capacities of reason become instrumentalised, reverting to mythology with new orthodoxies and new dogmas. Sisyphus’ pinnacle, the point at which enlightenment ‘reverts’ and rolls back down the mountain and into irrationalism, is born of reason itself. These differences can be seen as suggestive of a return to the logic of the supplement. However, their desire for more remedies (progress) and fewer poisonous tendencies (regress) is equally indicative of constructing myth as a pharmakon.

The signifiers of remedy/poison, good/bad, presence/absence, memory/forgetfulness, and progress/regress are never stable and always changing with each variation in subject, space, or time. As such, any foun­dational definition is futile (in a logocentric sense). However, we might complement the pharmakon by taking inspiration in nomenclature from Ricreur’s distinction between living and dead metaphors, through which we might distinguish between living and dead myths.

The Rule of Metaphor is itself a translation; the original French title being La Mctaphore Vive. Ricreur’s position is a question of hermeneutics, a matter of increasing possible interpretation. He argues that ‘metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination’, through the very capacity to coin new metaphor itself, which enables the ‘possibility’ Ricreur craves. Dead metaphor, by comparison, is considered insignificant as ‘common meaning and add[ed] to the polysemy of lexi­cal entities’.

The death of metaphor therefore demands a revitalisation, a reopening of the possible, a conscious and hopeful remythologisation. For the pur­poses of this chapter, however, in which knowledge is treated with much greater suspicion than hope, this formulation must be somewhat inverted. Metaphor does not die as it enters the general lexicon because, as has already been argued, the literal is always already metaphorical. Its power as the trace reflects its place as the ‘active’ yet effaced element underpinning language. In being understood as literal, the unrecognised metaphor runs parallel to the unrecognised myth of facticity.

Instead, those myths which are ‘dead’ are recognised as myths and lose their ontological and epistemic power. In being labelled a ‘myth’ they begin to signify the simplistic notion of absence as fictions or lies. Simply put, they are no longer believed and, therefore, are no longer used to resolve contradictory principles, whilst those which are ‘living’ continue to evade and deflect tension away from their absurd ‘reality’. A myth can be considered living by virtue of the extent to which it vivifies and breathes possibility (and in the same instance its impossibility) into the notion of knowledge through its silent play. Those like the myth of mythless- ness (or indeed, the myth of logocentric ‘myth’ and the belief that myths can somehow be abolished, overcome, or made less) are in this case still strong. But there must also always be an oscillating play between the living and the dead.

In this sense, death disrupts the possibility of possibility, but it is not a simple closure of difference. Living/dead is not a binary between dis­closure and closure, because it is closure which dis-closes, and myth constructed as either fact or fiction are both forms of metaphysical clo­sure.

This is because the living element is the trace, as the infinite movement of differance. ‘Death’, on the other hand, ‘is the movement of difference to the extent that that movement is necessarily finite’. But, as already out­lined, the imposition of finity (re)produces infinity and, in this respect, death also ‘inaugurates life’ (Derrida 1997, 143). And as such myth is always to some extent both living and dead—mythos is undying.

How such a definition of this nomenclature would work in practice is ambiguous, but that is how it should be. It has less to do with methodol­ogy and more with one’s approach towards myth. Such categories, and those categorised within, could never be final, and to exclude any one dimension of myth would not only impose an especially violent decision but would reduce the possibility of how mythology varies between the level of the conscious and unconscious, as well as between theory and praxis. By applying this distinction to the previous example, Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘enlightenment’ thesis, we also see how recognition of myth as ‘myth’ need not necessarily commit one’s knowledge to the point of existential crisis before resolution but can act and elude through much subtler supplements.

The living myth here is ‘progress’. Horkheimer and Adorno expose the undermining undecidability of the pharmakon underpinning the enlightenment whilst simultaneously masking it again through a dialec­tical disguise.

Enlightenment is precisely able to elude because it exists within an inter- textuality of myth. Living myth may supplement itself within more myth to mask any perceivable points of tension: in this case by supplementing with a remedy where there is poison, such as barbarism or ‘positivist decay’. This is done without denying the possibility of either remedy or poison, as enlightened/mythic creation and destruction, by harnessing the onto­logical power of the very pharmakon in which the enlightenment is made absurd. But rather than acknowledge the absurdity underpinning their thesis, Horkheimer and Adorno continue to seek a dialectic with synthesis, a transcendental point of enlightenment which exists as a virtue between two extremes of mythologisation. Enlightenment must exist both within and without myth.

However, despite writing one of the most disparaging critiques of modernity within the twentieth century, such an approach is indicative of a less ambitious ethic of muddling about with the same, albeit more critically. They seek to do this by reapplying the Hegelian principle of ‘determinate negation’, which ‘discloses each image as script’ and ‘teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 18). Horkheimer and Adorno seek to take the dialectic out of Hegel’s hands to reclaim it from the forces of regression, from fear. They argue that the irra­tionality of reason stems from the fear of the unknown, which they see as determining the ‘path of demythologisation’: ‘humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 11). However, the two equally succumb to similar fears in their own attempts to remedy and reclaim the possibility of progress, ‘that which distinguishes enlightenment’, from the ‘decay’ to which Hegel had ‘consigned it’. Although averse to the ‘self-satisfaction of knowing in advance’, and the securities of specific knowledge, Horkheimer and Adorno instead still subscribe to the myth of knowledge as an abstract entity (2002, 18). Their compounded dialectical approach anticipates a necessary direction (even if not a necessary outcome) for the myth of progress to ‘progress’, deferring the absurd tension towards a reified and enlightened future.

A mythography able to accept the absurd and undecidable move­ment of mythos is in need of an ethic fundamentally different from that of Horkheimer and Adorno.