I ought to begin by confessing my very modest ambitions here. And I would indeed begin on that note if only such confessions were not too often taken to be understatements, according to the rhetoric of false modesty, and thus essentially to be false confessions. And then they are apt to produce the reverse effect of raising rather than lowering expectations. So let me say simply that I plan to interrogate two sets of terms, two notions, or two practices that are deployed across Derrida's great essay “Plato's Pharmacy,” the terms/notions/practices of composition and displacement. I will necessarily do this selectively, following out only a small sample of ways one could be led to think about and with these key notions or terms, as much by what the essay says as by what it does—assuming, which I do not, that this distinction can stand up precisely to what the essay is saying and doing, saying about what it is doing or doing with what it is saying. Beyond this proposal to isolate and read a few fragments of “Plato's Pharmacy,” I do have one further ambition. It is to gather enough momentum from this selective reading to execute a leap beyond that essay, originally published in 1968, and land, without accident I hope, closer to the other end of Derrida's oeuvre, traversing thereby what is now often referred to as the division between his early and late work.