The Pharmakon

In Rhetoric of Cool, you'll find a reference to the word "pharmakon."

I thought this website might help to clarify the curious tension in the word (remedy and poison). Can you think of examples where the poison is the cure?



The Pharmakon
Excerpted from:

http://www.cobussen.com/proefschrift/200_deconstruction/220_undecidables/221_pharmakon/pharmakon.htm


[1] No single word in English captures the play of signification of the ancient Greek word, pharmakon. Derrida traces the meanings assigned to pharmakon in Plato's dialogues: remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint. The word pharmakon is overdetermined, signifying in so many ways that the very notion of signification gets overloaded. A translation problem? Yes and no. In choosing one meaning translators often decide what in Plato's texts remains undecidable. But as indicated above, the problem is inherent in its very principle, situated less in the translation from one language to another, than already within the Greek language itself. And adopted within philosophical discourse, pharmakon does not suddenly become unambiguous, ready and suited for dialectic operations. (In Phaedrus, Socrates tries to distinguish between two kinds of words, the unambiguous - words about which we all agree - and the ambiguous - words about which we are at variance. In Plato, Derrida and Writing, Jasper Neel argues that in fact there are no unambiguous words.) Instead, words like pharmakon threatens the philosophical process, threatens dialectics from within. Plato's text itself is thus already the battlefield of an impossible process of translation.
Plato's systematic and pure reasoning (followed by Platonism and the entire Western tradition of philosophy) experiences great difficulty with this undecidability. It wants to put a stop to this constant shift from one meaning to another and back again. Still, Plato cannot escape the ambiguity of pharmakon either. In Phaedrus, writing is first presented as a useful tool, a beneficial drug (pharmakon). It later proves to be a harmful substance, benumbing to the soul, memory and truth, a poison (pharmakon). In Phaedo, the reverse happens: first, the hemlock is presented to Socrates as a poison (pharmakon). Yet it is transformed, through the effects of the Socratic logos, into a cathartic power (pharmakon), helpful to the soul that it awakens to the truth of eidos.