Dissemination Notes
“Plato’s Pharmacy” pp. 61-171
63 a text
the law of its composition
the rules of its game
secret - present - perception & disappearances
dissimulation
risk
64 reading is writing: rip apart the is
The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities
of a game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be
accorded and attuned.
I.
1. Pharmacia pp. 65-75
dissimulation
woven texture
web
reading is writing
supplement and the logic of play
†66 badly composed?
note 3: interweaving (sumploke)
67 affirms itself and effaces itself at once
myths & mythologemes
68 khairein, logography, and sophists (the man of non-presence and non-truth)
writing vs. truth
great fold that divides the dialogue
69 in the name of truth
Delphic gramma
Pharmacia
70 Orithyia blown into the abyss while playing with Pharmacia
philosopheme
pharmakon (seduction of written text)
71 speech and presence
detours of a signifier = seduction
polysemy
overdetermination
strange logic
72 translation: the transference of a nonphilosopheme into a philosopheme (the very
passage into philosophy)
Lysias’s speech = a pharmakon under Phaedrus’s cloak
73 the book & the drug
the myth (of Theuth) presents the truth
relationship between pharmakon & grapheme -->
intentional/unintentional, voluntary/involuntary
74 writing & the proper
writing = repeating without knowing
75 writing/logos & myth/dialectic
2. The Father of Logos pp. 75-84
p. 76 paternity, Platonism, Western Metaphysics
p. 77 graphein vs. logos
father ( logos (son)
orphan & patricide
The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father.
p. 79 What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to call a
metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system.
organism: logos = zoon
82 The distribution of all these meanings can be followed in Plato’s text.
the sun as blinding light (see p.92)
†[This means that the problem with the good is not its failure to shine forth as beauty
does but rather its shining forth too brightly, blindingly.]
p. 83 by means of a discriminative, diacritical operation
supplements, differance, diacriticity
logos as that which protects us from the sun
3. The Filial Inscription pp. 84-94
p. 85 governing oppositions
internal, structural necessity
contagion of mythemes
86 deeply buried necessity
mythos vs. logos
History
87 a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting himself be represented by speech
[speech, therefore, is also representation, already caught up in the differential play
characterizing writing.]
†88 we shall have constituted but also opened up the system of these significations
89 displacement, subversion, substitution **
supplementing = supplanting
transcendental signified
90 He [Thoth] is added as the essential attribute of what he is added to
91 hypomnesis vs, mneme
91-92 death
92 Thoth also god of death
The dead person must see the sun: death is the prerequisite, or even the experience, of
that face-to-face encounter. [see p. 82]
93 the figure & its other **
repetition ( replacement
a floating signifier, one who puts play into play
the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play
Plato’s goal: final fulfillment, eschatological reappropriation
Cryptography
94 the god of writing = the god of medicine
4. The Pharmakon pp. 95-117
95 pharmakon: intention or systematic play of chain of significations?
Finely regulated communications are established, through the play of language, among
diverse functions of the word and, within it, among diverse strata or regions of culture.
96 impossibility of mastering entire textual system
powers of displacement
97 problems with translating pharmakon as remedy
ambiguities, context
“remedy” says the transparent rationality of science, technique, and therapeutic causality
excludes hard-to-control magic virtues ( science vs. magic
expulsion and ostracism: cast out beyond the borders
98 anagram and textuality
Plato’s anagrammatic writing: when a word inscribes itself as play of the relations
interwoven among different functions of the same word in different places, relations that
are virtually but necessarily “citational.”
remedy blocks this play
Textuality being constituted by differences and by differences from differences, it is by
nature absolutely heterogeneous and is constantly composing with forces that tend to
annihilate it.
99 Derrida’s thesis: 1. Plato decides in favor of a logic that does not tolerate polysemy; 2.
Yet his use of the term pharmakon constitutes the original medium of that decision; 3.
Translation, as the heir of Western metaphysics, violently destroys the pharmakon by
analyzing it, interpreting it; 4. Such interpretive translation destroys the pharmakon but at
the same time forbids itself access to it, leaves it untouched in its reserve.
There is no such thing as a harmless remedy: 1. always hurtful; 2. always artificial, from
the outside.
100 Let the disease live its natural life
In both cases [disease and writing] what is supposed to produce the positive and eliminate
the negative does nothing but displace and at the same time multiply the effects of the
negative, leading the lack that was its cause to proliferate.
The necessity for this is inscribed in the sign pharmakon [indissociably a signifier and a
concept signified].
101 natural illness is an allergy [a reaction to an outside invader]
102 pharmakon = supplementary parasite
excluded by maintaining the boundary
103 binary oppositions: mastering ambiguity
on the basis of opposition as such ( externality (inside/outside)
excluded element = general equivalent: And one of the elements of the system (or series)
must also stand as the very possibility of systematicity or seriality in general.
104 excess as displacement--alien
105 death
phusis/psuche; cryptogram = pleonastic proposition
“They [the tupoi] do violence to the natural, autonomous organization of the mneme, in
which phusis and psuche are not opposed. If writing does belong to the phusis, wouldn't it
be to that moment of the phusis, to that necessary movement through which its truth, the
production of its appearing, tends, says Heraclitus, to take shelter in its crypt?
‘Cryptogram’ thus condenses in a single word a pleonastic proposition.”
memory and truth cannot be separated
The movement of aletheia is a deployment of mneme through and through.
writing has no essence or value of its own:it plays within the simulacrum
the mime of memory
106 true enemy = sophistics
sophist = the imitator of him who knows
107 The sophist thus sells the signs and insignia of science: not memory itself (mneme),
only monuments . (hypomnemata). . . . Not memory but memorials.
mneme vs. hypomnesis
dialectics = anamnesia = truth in the process of (its) presentation
anamnesia = aletheia
today = eve of Platonism
108 BORDER front line = a systematic indecision
Platonism and sophistics borrow from each other, on the same side
crossing the border
NOT back-to-the-sophists
109 the space of writing, the dangerous supplement, the representative of a the
representative, self-relation
The outside is already within the work of memory. The evil slips in within the relation of
memory to itself, in the general organization of the mnesic activity.
contamination
supplement is not, has no being
Its slidings slip it out of the simple alternative presence/absence. That is the danger.
[Supplementarity] is linked to the ideality of the eidos as the possibility of the repetition
of the same.
writing = process of redoubling, representative of a representative
110 the phonic vs. the graphic,
symptom
externality, structure that makes supplementarity possible
intimate vs. alien
infect
111 opposition between mneme and hypomnesia = birth of philosophy
repetition and system
Sophistics (hypomnesia) vs. Dialectics (Anamnesia)
anamnestic movement of truth
true = the repeated in the representation
The true is the presence of the eidos signified.
112 the inseparability of sophistics and philosophy
The difference between signifier and signified is no doubt the governing pattern within
which Platonism institutes itself and determines its opposition to sophistics.
economy of signs
Plato: laws must be written down
113 legislator = writer judge = reader
115 logos as pharmakon for Sophists
116 logos itself is already ambiguous, indeterminate
117 the pharmakon is comprehended in the structure of the logos
5. The Pharmakeus pp. 117-119
II.
121 dialectics
122anamnesic dialectics, dialectics as counter-poison
poiein
dialectics is also an art of weaving, a science of the sumploke.
123 eidos and repetition
the truth of the eidos as that which is identical to itself
The eidos is that which can always be repeated as the same.
124 The Socratic word does not wander.
Socratic pharmakon vs. Sophist pharmakon
The philosophical, epistemic order of logos as an antidote, as a force inscribed within the
general economy of the pharmakon
Best of all medicine: knowledge
125 the whole of the bpody can only be cured at the source:the soul
Philosophy thus opposes to its other this transmutation of the drug into a remedy, of the
poison into a counterpoison.
Complicity of contrary values
126 ambilvalence
127 this chiasmus is authorized (crossed connection-making)
the invisible and the visible
The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference.
Opposites, differends, difference
128 We will watch it infinitely promise itself and endlessly vanish through concealed
doorways that shine like mirrors and open onto a labyrinth. It is also this store of deep
background that we are calling the pharmacy.
6. The Pharmakos pp. 128-134
128 the rules of this game
parasite
an accessory, an accident, an excess
129 the chain of significations
It is in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions between
conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech
and language, that these textual “operations” occur.
chain concealed from author, word never used by Plato
LANGUE: But what does absent or present mean here? Like any text, the text of “Plato”
couldn’t not be involved, at least in a virtual, dynamic lateral manner, with all the words
that composed the system of Greek language.
130 They communicate with the totality of the lexicon through their syntactic play
one should simply be able to untangle the hidden forces of attraction linking a present
word with an absent word
system of language
pharmakos: wizard, magician, poisoner,
SCAPEGOAT: The evil and the outside, the expulsion of evil, its exclusion out of the
body (and out) of the city
purifications of the city,
131 Oedipus, ostracism: In the person of the ostracized, the city expels what in it is too
elevated, what incarnates the evil which can come to it from above. In the evil of the
pharmakos, it expels what is vilest in itself, what incarnates the evil that menaces from
below. By this double and complimentary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is
not yet known and what transcends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human
in opposition on one side to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and
monstrous.
132 death, genital organs cut off from the space of the city
133 The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its
inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of
the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat
or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect
or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside
is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept,
fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside.
played out on the boundary line between inside and outside
The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and
projected.
prepare for surprise (Bush and Taliban)
7. The Ingredients: Phantasms, Festivals, Paints pp. 134-142
evil and death, repetition and exclusion
Socrates ties up into a system all the counts of indictment
transforming the mythos into logos.
135 two moments of repetition: a repetition of truth (aletheia) which presents and exposes
the eidos; and a repetition of death and oblivion (lethe) which veils and skews because it
does not present the eidos but re-presents a presentation, repeats a repetition.
truth/death
136 Republic X and painting
137 mimesis
The order of knowledge is not the transparent order of forms and ideas, as one might be
tempted retrospectively to interpret it; it is the antidote. Long before being divided up
into occult violence and accurate knowledge, the element of the pharmakon is the combat
zone between philosophy and its other.
phantasm, simulacrum
139 self-inadequation
140 The antidote is still the episteme.
Bewitchment is always the effect of a representation.
the differential elements of nominal language : Saussure
writing-painting makes the corpse presentable
all are part of the festival that subverts the order of the city
8. The Heritage of the Pharmakon: Family Scene pp. 142-155
theater
And yet, within his very explanations, another scene slowly comes to light, less
immediately visible than the rpeceding one, but, in its muffled latency, just as tense, just
as violent as the other, composing with it, within the pharmaceutical enclosure, an artful,
living organization of figures, displacements, repetitions.
143 mother? ghosts
144 writing = democracy
145 orphan
146 patricide
the father’s death opens the reign of violence
Socrates represents the father
148 Plato’s writing
149 the legitimate brother
writing on the soul (a metaphor)
But it is not any less remarkable here that the so-called living discourse should suddenly
be described by a “metaphor” borrowed from the order of the very thing one is trying to
exclude from it, the order of the simulacrum. Yet this borrowing is rendered necessary by
that which structurally links the intelligible to its repetition in the copy, and the language
describing dialectics cannot fail to call upon it.
good writing/bad writing
a seed scattered wastefully, dissemination
150 outpouring of sperm
art, enjoyment, and unreserved spending
152 liquid, trace: writing and speech have thus become two different species, or values,
of the trace.
153 the transgression of the law is a priori subject to a law of transgression (chiasmus)
155 from presence/trace to dialectical trace/nondialectical trace
9. Play: From the Pharmakon to the Letter and from Blindness to the Supplement
pp. 156-171
156 As soon as it comes into being and into language, play erases itself as such.
157 the theological assumption of play into games
158 Play is always lost when it seeks salvation in games.
why Plato wrote so much, contradiction; the simultaneous affirmation of the beingoutside of the outside and of its injurious intrusion into the inside
159 what always makes itself apparent is the law of difference, the irreducibility of
structure and relation, of proportionality, within analogy
we define the origin of the world as a trace, that is, a receptacle
160 matrix, womb, mother space
161 khora
the constitution of structurality
162 In the political order, structure is a sort of writing.
163 differential unity
The scriptural “metaphor” thus crops up every time difference and relation are
irreducible, every time otherness introduces determination and puts a system in
circulation.
164 parricide
Writing [like pharmakos] is not named, but still remains part of the system
166 the very condition of discourse—true or false—is the diacritical principle of the
sumploke.
168 repetition, difference, appearance, generalized writing
Differance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at once the condition of
possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth.
169 Which means that one can no more “separate” them from each other, think of either
one apart from the other
Conceived within this reversibility, the pharmakon is the same precisely because it has no
identity.