ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Derrida complicates the overall status of Dissemination in his 'Outwork'. It also looks at how Derrida addresses the complex issue of Plato's understanding of philosophy, embodiment and meaning through an analysis of the text which immediately follows the 'Outwork' in Dissemination, 'Plato's Pharmacy'. This text has received widely differing interpretations and it looks at Catherine Pickstock's influential critique of Derrida from a Radical Orthodoxy standpoint, which she elaborates in her text After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. In her preface to Dissemination, Barbara Johnson begins with a definition of grammatology, of the 'science of grammatology': 'a science of writing which would study the effects of difference which Western metaphysics has repressed in its search for self-present truth'. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is Mallarme who is Derrida's chosen interlocutor from the avant-garde in Dissemination. Elizabeth McCombie notes Mallarme's 'extraordinary reinvention of poetic expression'.
