THE PHARMAKON: GROUNDS FOR PLAY

by J. P. Mohan

A student of Plato has just finished reading the Phaedrus. In contemplating Socrates's overall argument and especially the work's epilogue--in which Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the inferiority of writing to speech--the student becomes deeply puzzled. Writing the inferior to speech? But writing is all we have of Plato's work. Writing is what Phardrus used to lure Socrates into the countryside. What is going on here?

At the risk of further entangling oneself in a thicket of lofty academic theorizing, a good place to turn would be an essay written in 1968 by notorious French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. This analysis of the Phaedrus, titled "Plato's Pharmacy," uses Derrida's prized method of "play" to lay the cornerstone for an edifice that will be simultaneously erected and--as is the penchant of deconstruction--demolished, all within a playfully dense 110 pages or so.

Derrida's main tool in deconstructing the Phaedrus is the pharmakon, the Greek word translating to "medicine" but meaning both "cure" and "poison," and embodying a host of other roles as well, such as that of scapegoat, imitation, magic--the literary presence of ambivalence, playfulness, transience, facsimiles, paradox, etc. Derrida embraces the pharmakon for these very faculties, for it is the pharmakon that facilitates his method of deconstruction. Derrida gives the pharmakon a hero in the form of the Egyptian god Theuth, a character who--in being the bastard son of (and replacement for) his father Ra (the sun)--represents replication, subversion, and obscurity (Derrida 89-92).

For Derrida, the pharmakon is the vehicle for his very special brand of "play"--the game of intrigue that Theuth and Derrida play with all they are given--a play on words, certainly--but also a play with logic, the tangible world, and the supposedly sacrosanct and empirical truths that philosophers like Plato and Socrates established so long ago. One of the main ideas that Derrida refutes in "Plato's Pharmacy" is that of "binary opposition" or "coincidentia oppositorum" (Derrida 93). As the god of deconstruction, Theuth manages to evade classification according to opposition by being two opposing elements at once: "he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again" (93).

But as a deconstructionist, does Derrida really want to have recourse to a binary opposition like the coincidentia oppositorum? Surely the human mind does. In order to make sense of the world around us, our logic can barely help but classify everything in a series of oppositions--binary oppositions that place each thing, concept, word, and person against another. Our instinct is to try and understand a concept by acquainting ourselves with its opposite. The pharmakon represents the breakdown of these binary oppositions. Countless (post)modern thinkers have riffed on this human tendency, from Nietzsche to Saussure to Foucault. The pharmakon represents the breakdown of these binary oppositions.

Later in "Plato's Pharmacy, Derrida shows--quite playfully--how writing acts as a pharmakon and threatens to blur the distinctions between good and evil, soul and body, invisible and visible: "This double participation, once again, does not mix together two previously separate elements; it refers back to a same that is not the identical, to the common element or medium of any possible dissociation" (Derrida 127). The pharmakon is acting, then, not only as a bridge between two supposedly opposite elements, but also as a subversive device which erases the distinction between the two elements it bridges and assumes both their identities simultaneously:

If the pharmakon is "ambivalent," it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other [emphasis mine] . . . The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the differance of difference. It holds in reserve, in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and the differends that the process of discrimination will come to carve out. Contradictions and pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacritical, differing, deferring, reserve. Already inhabited by differance, this reserve, even though it "precedes" the opposition between different effects, even though it preexists differences as effects, does not have the punctual simplicity of a coincidentia oppositorum [emphasis mine]. It is from this fund that dialectics draws its reserves. (Derrida 127)

So what happens when Derrida wields the pharmakon against the heretofore sacrosanct ideas of the classical philosphers? Plato's flaws are exposed and Derrida plays with them. Derrida agrees with Plato to the extent that writing often confuses, plays with, and renders ambiguous ideas that could supposedly be transmitted clearly through speech. But rather than condemning these characteristics, Derrida embraces them and celebrates writing's anarchisitc nature, since deconstruction is primarily concerned with just this sort of play, this turning of "the word on its strange and invisible pivot" (97). "The pharmakon produces a play of appearances which enable it to pass for truth, etc." (104). This refutation of Platonic distinction will of course culminate in Derrida's assertion on pages 117-119 that Plato is no different from the sophists--the very group from which he tries so hard to distinguish himself. Derrida blurs Plato's sophist/philosopher distinction by asserting that one can't be fully allied with one and not the other.