The Pharmakon and the Phaedrus

by Seth Warren

Plato's Phaedrus is a dialogue between Phaedrus and the renowned gadfly Socrates, who decide to journey out of the hot city to the countryside in order to discuss a written speech by the sophist Lysias, and consequently the virtues of the written word over speech and myth over reason and logic (logos), among other things. Two aspects of the beginning of the story become very important starting points for Derrida's lengthy, exhaustive unraveling to come. The first is that upon arriving at the banks of the river Illissus, Phaedrus proceeds to tell a story about the area using the language of myth. Not surprisingly, Socrates is quick to correct him, and recast the story in more rational terms (language of logos): it wasn't that the God Boreas swept Orthyia from these banks, Socrates tells him, it was that another maiden, by the name of Pharmacia, brought her here to and the wind swept her into the abyss.

This is itself important for two reasons. One, for all his insistence on the language of logos and his marginalizing of myth, Socrates will soon go on to describe the "truth" about writing to Phaedrus precisely by telling him a myth, the Egyptian myth of Theuth. Two, Derrida picks up on the name of the virgin Pharmacia which "just happens" to signify the administering of the drug, the pharmakon, which is the word that Socrates will equate with writing. "Through her games," Derrida says, "Pharmacia has dragged down to death a virginal purity and an unpenetrated interior" (70). "An unpenetrated interior"? Why not just say virgin and be done with it? What is important about the story of Pharmacia is not only that it shows how Socrates will contradict himself, but it serves as a kind of metaphor of the ambiguities Derrida will trace throughout the text. It is precisely ideals of speech (dialectics), logos (reason), Good and other metaphysical delights that Plato will try and hold fast to as "unpenetrated interiors", and that Derrida will show are in many ways always already penetrated by the very things they seem to necessarily "keep out." It is exactly a term like pharmakon that Plato tries to keep virginal, and that Derrida will show to be hopelessly deflowered.

Like Pharmacia, who in some sense first allured and then "dragged down to death a virginal purity," pharmakon is paradoxical: it's a word for "drug," which means both "remedy" and "poison." Not yet mentioned is that Socrates, gadfly that he was, was primarily a city-fly and kept his buzzing localized. It is significant then that it was the written text (and not the spoken word, or even "cat calls" for that matter) concealed under Phaedrus's cloak that lured him outside of the city to the banks of the Illissus. Socrates himself compares writing, the written text, to a pharmakon. "You seem to have discovered a drug for getting me out," he says, "A hungry animal can be driven by dangling a carrot or a bit of greenstuff in front of it; similarly if you proffer me speeches bound in books I don't doubt you can cart me all around Attica, and anywhere else you please" (230d-e).

Derrida notes, "This pharmakon, this "medicine," this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence" (70). Derrida points out that the problem of restricting the multiple meanings of a given word is clearly a problem of translation, for the translator must choose, as in the case of pharmakon, to either translate it as remedy or as a poison. But Derrida is more concerned with this practice within a given language. What is important to him is that even in the original text Plato himself was bending the term to fit his needs, namely, stressing the caustic side of the "drug" in association with writing (and myth) to belittle it in the face of speech. Of course, Derrida does not let this sleeping binary lie.

For another (perhaps more concrete) example or metaphor for the pharmakon as found in Michel Foucault's work click here.