Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The word pharmakon — and this is already the difficulty — cannot be reduced to a single meaning without violence to what it is. When Theuth presents writing to the king as a pharmakon, he turns the word on what I called its "strange and invisible pivot," presenting it from one pole only, the most reassuring: the pole of remedy, of benefit, of that which repairs and accumulates and remedies, increasing knowledge and reducing forgetfulness.1
But the translation of pharmakon as "remedy" (remède) already performs this reduction, this erasure of the other pole. To say "remedy" is to invoke the transparent rationality of science, technique, therapeutic causality — and to exclude from the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject.2
The pharmakon is, more profoundly, harmful precisely because it is artificial. It goes against natural life — not only life unaffected by illness, but even sick life, the life of the sickness itself. Plato follows the doctors of Cos here: natural disease, like logos in the Phaedrus, must be allowed to develop according to its own norms and rhythms.
The pharmakon disturbs this natural progress and is thus the enemy of the living in general, whether healthy or sick.3 So when writing is proposed as a pharmakon, the logic already turns against it: far from supplementing memory, writing makes one more forgetful; it does not reinforce mnémé but only hypomnésis — the external, technical aide-mémoire rather than living memory.
What was supposed to produce the positive and eliminate the negative does nothing but displace and multiply the effects of the negative, leading the lack that was its cause to proliferate.4 But what makes the pharmakon philosophically decisive — and not merely an interesting ambiguity of Greek vocabulary — is that it cannot simply be assigned a site within the system of oppositions it appears to inhabit.
Plato tries to comprehend writing, to dominate it, on the basis of opposition as such: good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside. For these contrary values to be in opposition, each term must be simply external to the other, which means the opposition between inside and outside must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.5
But the pharmakon — far from being governed by these oppositions — opens up their very possibility without letting itself be comprehended by them. It cannot be subsumed under the concepts whose contours it draws. It leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it.6 There is something further still.
Plato seems to place no emphasis on the word pharmakon at the precise point where writing's effects swerve from positive to negative, when poison appears as the truth of the remedy. The chain of significations is concealed — and concealed, to an inappreciable extent, from the author himself.7 In Greek, pharmakon also means paint: not a natural color but an artificial tint, a chemical dye that imitates the chromatic scale given in nature.
The word thus gathers remedy, poison, and artificial coloring — each of these senses active in Plato's text, none of them declared, the chain hidden in what I called the back room, the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions between conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary.8 The pharmakon is, in this sense, an undecidable — not in the vulgar sense of something we have not yet decided, but in the rigorous sense of a structure that resists and precedes the decision between its poles.
It plays the role in my reading of Plato that supplément plays in the reading of Rousseau: both name the point where the text's declared logic is exceeded by what the text cannot account for in its own terms.9
he turns the word on its strange and invisible pivot, presenting it from a single one, the most reassuring, of its poles.Dissemination, pp. 129–130
remedy says the transparent rationality of science, technique, and therapeutic causality, thus excluding from the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject.Dissemination, pp. 129–130
The pharmakon goes against natural life: not only life unaffected by any illness, but even sick life, or rather the life of the sickness... the pharmakon is thus the enemy of the living in general, whether healthy or sick.Dissemination, p. 133
writing does not answer the needs of memory, it aims to the side, does not reinforce the mnémé, but only hypomnésis... 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.Dissemination, p. 133
In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.Dissemination, pp. 136–137
writing as a pharmakon cannot simply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot be subsumed under concepts whose contours it draws, leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it.Dissemination, pp. 136–137
Plato seems to place no emphasis on the word pharmakon at the point where writing's effects swerve from positive to negative, when poison, under the eyes of the king, appears as the truth of the remedy... the chain is concealed, and, to an inappreciable extent, concealed from the author himself, if any such thing exists.Dissemination, p. 162
in Greek, pharmakon also means paint, not a natural color but an artificial tint, a chemical dye that imitates the chromatic scale given in nature.Dissemination, p. 162
With a few precautions, one could say that pharmakon plays a role analogous, in his reading of Plato, to that of supplément in the reading of Rousseau.Dissemination, pp. 129–130