Dissemination Notes
George Hartley • English 399
“Plato’s Pharmacy” pp. 61-171
a text
the law of its composition
the rules of its game
secret - present - perception - disappearances
I.
1. Pharmacia pp. 65-75
dissimulation
woven texture
reading is writing
supplement and the logic of play
!.1
p. 71 speech and presence
detours of a signifier
polysemy
overdetermination
2. The Father of Logos pp. 75-84
p. 76 paternity, Platonism, Western Metaphysics
p. 77 graphein vs. logos
The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of
the father.
p. 79 What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to
call a metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system.
organism
p. 83 by means of a discriminative, diacritical operation
supplements, differance, diacriticity
logos as that which protects us from the sun
3. The Filial Inscription pp. 84-94
p. 85 governing oppositions
internal, structural necessity
contagion of mythemes
86 deeply buried necessity
History
87 a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting himself be represented by
speech
--[speech, therefore, is also representation, already caught up in the differential
play characterizing writing.]
89 displacement, subversion, substitution **
92 death
93 the figure & its other **
4. The Pharmakon pp. 95-117
98 anagram and textuality
103 opposition as such
104 excess as displacement--alien
105 phusis/psuche; pleonastic proposition
107 today = eve of Platonism
108 crossing the border
109 the space of writing, the dangerous supplement, the representative of a
the representative, self-relation
contamination
110 the phonic vs. the graphic,
symptom
externality, structure that makes supplementarity possible
repetition and system
anamnestic movement of truth
112 the inseparability of sophistics and philosophy
economy of signs
115 logos as pharmakon
116 logos itself is already ambiguous, indeterminate
117 the pharmakon is comprehended in the structure of the logos
5. The Pharmakeus pp. 117-119
II.
121 dialectics
122anamnesic dialectics, dialectics as counter-poison
poiein
dialectics is also an art of weaving, a science of the sumploke.
123 eidos and repetition
the truth of the eidos as that which is identical to itself
The eidos is that which can always be repeated as the same.
124 The Socratic word does not wander.
Socratic pharmakon vs. Sophist pharmakon
The philosophical, epistemic order of logos as an antidote, as a force inscribed
within the general economy of the pharmakon
Best of all medicine: knowledge
125 the whole of the bpody can only be cured at the source—the soul
Philosophy thus opposes to its other this transmutation of the drug into a remedy,
of the poison into a counterpoison.
Complicity of contrary values
126 ambilvalence
127 this chiasmus is authorized (crossed connection-making)
the invisible and the visible
The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of)
difference.
Opposites, differends, difference
128 We will watch it infinitely promise itself and endlessly vanish through
concealed doorways that shine like mirrors and open onto a labyrinth. It is
also this store of deep background that we are calling the pharmacy.
6. The Pharmakos pp. 128-134
128 the rules of this gameparasite
an accessory, an accident, an excess
129 the chain of significations
It is in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions
between conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary,
speech and language, that these textual “operations” occur.
chain concealed from author, word never used by Plato
LANGUE—But what does absent or present mean here? Like any text, the text
of “Plato” couldn’t not be involved, at least in a virtual, dynamic
lateral manner, with all the words that composed the system of Greek language.
130 They communicate with the totality of the lexicon through their syntactic
play
one should simply be able to untangle the hidden forces of attraction linking
a present word with an absent word
system of language
pharmakos— wizard, magician, poisoner,
SCAPEGOAT The evil and the outside, the expulsion of evil, its exclusion out
of the body (and out) of the city
purifications of the city,
131 Oedipus, ostracism: In the person of the ostracized, the city expels what
in it is too elevated, what incarnates the evil which can come to it from above.
In the evil of the pharmakos, it expels what is vilest in itself, what incarnates
the evil that menaces from below. By this double and complimentary rejection
it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and what transcends
the known: it takes the proper measure of the human in opposition on one side
to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and monstrous.
132 death, genital organs cut off from the space of the city
133 The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around
the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it
with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its
territory the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative
represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside
by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is
nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen,
kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside.
played out on the boundary line between inside and outside
The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected
and projected.
prepare for surprise (Bush and Taliban)
7. The Ingredients: Phantasms, Festivals, Paints pp. 134-142
evil and death, repetition and exclusion
Socrates ties up into a system all the counts of indictment
transforming the mythos into logos.
135 two moments of repetition: a repetition of truth (aletheia) which presents
and exposes the eidos; and a repetition of death and oblivion (lethe) which
veils and skews because it does not present the eidos but re-presents a presentation,
repeats a repetition.
truth/death
136 Republic X and painting
137 mimesis
The order of knowledge is not the transparent order of forms and ideas, as one
might be tempted retrospectively to interpret it; it is the antidote. Long before
being divided up into occult violence and accurate knowledge, the element of
the pharmakon is the combat zone between philosophy and its other.
phantasm, simulacrum
139 self-inadequation
140 The antidote is still the episteme.
Bewitchment is always the effect of a representation.
the differential elements of nominal language — Saussure
writing-painting makes the corpse presentable
all are part of the festival that subverts the order of the city
8. The Heritage of the Pharmakon: Family Scene pp. 142-155
theater
And yet, within his very explanations, another scene slowly comes to light,
less immediately visible than the rpeceding one, but, in its muffled latency,
just as tense, just as violent as the other, composing with it, within the pharmaceutical
enclosure, an artful, living organization of figures, displacements, repetitions.
143 mother? ghosts
144 writing = democracy
145 orphan
146 patricide
the father’s death opens the reign of violence
Socrates represents the father
148 Plato’s writing
149 the legitimate brother
writing on the soul (a metaphor)
But it is not any less remarkable here that the so-called living discourse should
suddenly be described by a “metaphor” borrowed from the order of the
very thing one is trying to exclude from it, the order of the simulacrum. Yet
this borrowing is rendered necessary by that which structurally links the intelligible
to its repetition in the copy, and the language describing dialectics cannot
fail to call upon it.
good writing/bad writing
a seed scattered wastefully, dissemination
150 outpouring of sperm
art, enjoyment, and unreserved spending
152 liquid, trace
153 the transgression of the law is a priori subject to a law of transgression
155 from presence/trace to dialectical trace/nondialectical trace
9. Play: From the Pharmakon to the Letter and from Blindness to the Supplement
pp. 156-171
157 the theological assumption of play into games
158 why Plato wrote so much, contradiction; the simultaneous affirmation of
the being-outside of the outside and of its injurious intrusion into the inside
159 what always makes itself apparent is the law of difference, the irreducibility
of structure and relation, of proportionality, within analogy
we define the origin of the world as a trace, that is, a receptacle
160 matrix, womb, mother space
161 khora
the constitution of structurality
163 differential unity
The scriptural “metaphor” thus crops up every time difference and
relation are irreducible, every time otherness introduces determination and
puts a system in circulation.
164 parricide
166 the very condition of discourse—true or false—is the diacritical
principle of the sumploke.
168 repetition, difference, appearance, generalized writing
169 Which means that one can no more ‘separate” them from each other,
think of either one apart from the other