Pharmakon

Pharmakon in Philosophy

Derrida writes of the Socratic pharmakon in Dissemination. The pharmakon refers to a kind of power hidden in words that allows them to function as both poison or remedy. This power/metaphoric substance - or rather anti-substance - resembles a drug since it suggests a depth while revealing an ever changing surface (70). Efforts to determine its play result in indeterminacy. Derrida gives Phaedrus as an example text whose entire dialectical play amounts to a series of repetitions.

As pharmakon, writing represents a discursive supplementarity whose meaning indefinitely defers itself into other meanings. Accordingly, when Socrates tells the story of how the north wind carries Oreithyia away as she plays with Pharmacea (229c-d) he dismisses the myth only to reintroduce another later in the text. Because of its resemblance to a drug and an unpredictable one at that, there is something about writing that turns out to be dangerous and explains something of Socrates' reservations about speaking and writing; for these have "the power to break in, to carry off, to seduce internally, to ravish invisibly. It is furtive force per se" (116). In its power to force discursive divergence (while not seeming to), writing as pharmakon sets off an endless deferral of meaning in language as well as revealing its hidden power of reversal.