Foucault and the Pharmakon
by J. P. Mohan
If looking at the pharmakon in relation to a Platonic text is too abstract, a more immediate and societal example can be found within the works of Michel Foucault, a post-structuralist and mentor to Derrida during the 1950s. The obvious differences between the two theorists' respective schools of thought (structuralism and deconstruction) led to a bitter falling-out in 1963, when Derrida accused his former teacher of "structuralist totalitarianism." Foucault's response did not come until 1971, when he described deconstruction as a "minor pedagogy."
In his famous work Discipline And Punish, Foucault conducts an in-depth analysis of the modern criminal justice system, contrasting it against the grisly 18th-century execution of a French regicide named Damiens.
Foucault's main dilemma in summarizing the criminal justice system's procedure lies with the modern style of execution in which the utmost care and consideration is devoted to the comfort of the prisoner who will ultimately be killed by that very same institution anyway. Foucault states, "Beneath the increasing leniency of punishment, then, one may map a displacement of its point of application; and through this displacement, a whole field of recent objects, a whole new system of truth and a mass of roles hitherto unknown in the exercise of criminal justice" (Discipline and Punish 22-3).
The key word here is "displacement." This word is linked by association to two other important "d" words--"dispersal" and, of course, "deconstruction"--all processes exacted upon unsuspecting texts like the Phaedrus, and, according to Foucault's analysis, the history of criminal punishment.
What has happened to punishment, according to Foucault, is what happens in the Phaedrus when speech is converted into writing. In the beginning, we have sold, clear speech--the original, according to Plato, and for our purposes, something analogous to the original form of punishment: Damiens's execution, a horrifyingly vivid display meant to illustrate for all the consequences of civil malfeasance. Fast forward a hundred or two hundred years, and we have developed a very complex and multifaceted criminal justice system, managed by an intricate network of judges, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, etc. (A "body politic," perhaps?) The dispersal of authority, responsibility, and guilt. Our modern system of punishment is bastard son of the brutally direct father who executed Damiens.
Likewise, the identity of the accused undergoes a similar transformation. Punishment two hundred years ago meant the direct infliction of bodily harm: torture, plain and simple. Now, as Foucault shows, the target of justice is no longer the body, but the soul: "The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations" (16). And so what hte modern penal system is concerned with is not so much the body as the soul. The soul is a much less tangible target, of course; the same dispersal of punishment described above has also occurred with the accused--a sort of deconstruction of the body into the soul, a blurring of the target.
So, we can make a couple of analogies to speech/writing at this point:
the body of the condemned : the soul of the condemned :: speech : writing
These relationships--between new and old punishment, body and soul, speech and writing--lead to the pharmakon, the belligerant embodiment of the sort of contradiction that Foucault finds in modern execution: "When the moment of execution approaches, the patients are injected with tranquillizers. A utopia of judicial reticence . . . " (11). The modern judicial system seeks to alleviate pain right up to the moment of death. The pharmakon, our most beloved contradiction, is at work here: punishment as both cure and poison. "We punish, but this is a way of saying that we wish to obtain a cure" (22).
And so, pharmakon = poison + cure = punishment.