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PHARMAKON
Chase Allen
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Ryder Robinson
Zachary Nguyen
Blake James
Caleb Harris
Eli Bailey
Hudson Reyes
Jonathan Collins
What I’ve gotten so far is that Derrida is pointing out a very subtle thing Plato is doing in the dialogue Phaedrus. Specifically in recounting the story of the Thoth who invents, amoung other things, writing. The king says this will make people forgetful, true knowledge is within memory, it is present. This creates a situation of usurpation, between the priest and the king, the word for the active memory, representation for revelation. What Plato seeks to show is that writing does indeed usurp, but, it also has the potential to usurp itself, by showing itself to itself, this has something to do with the dialectic, this gets Philosophy moving. It’s not that writing is not dangerous, it is absolutely, but within writing itself is something that is neither good or bad, it is the the thing that gets the play of oppositions in movement. Reminds me of Hegel’s Notion. This play is what’s crucial. Let us play for awhile.
Aiden Flores
Phaedrus is just “video games cause school shootings” for Ancient Greece.
Thomas Rivera
>”Whence the pharmakon’s (writing) two misdeeds: it dulls the memory, and if it is of any assistance at all, it is not for the memory but for sign (reminder). Instead of quickening life in the original, “in person,” the pharmakon can at best only restore its monuments. It is a debilitating poison for memory, but a remedy or tonic for its external signs, it’s symptoms, with everything this word can connote in Greek: an empirical, contingent, superficial event, generally a fall or collapse, distinguishing itself like an index from whatever it is pointing to. Your writing cures only the symptom, the King has already said, and it is from him that we know the unbridgeable difference between the essence of the symptom and the essence of the signified; and that writing belongs to the order and exteriority of the symptom.”
Jaxon Parker
good pic
First of all, I got to say that this has been a great exprience. Getting to do a reading with other anons, and more that this - seeing their own motivations for that, especially for a text outside of the daily interest of this board, for me brings out the subtle joy of communing.
The chapter begins with the very familiar taste of Derrida's method. Picking out points of tension, probing etymologies to spread out nuances. Even for the generally interested in ancient philosophy, this text could serve as a exercise in reading - the miracle of milking water out of a stone.
This critical aproach to reading and it's shadow (writing), could be traced in the text itself. There are a lot of little things I loved in the themes of the text - the idea of diesease as a natural thing and of medicine as a usurper, makes me think of today's pharmaceutical business, in which the line between medicine and poision, natural and unatural is distressingly blurred. Another thing, is of course, the traditional deconstructivist suspicion towards language. What exactly is said, when a word is uttered or seen? How to establish the hidden intention?
And this last point could bring us back in the text being discussed. As Plato's suspicions grew more evident - the same questions that are thrown at the reader in the begining of the chapter, began to haunt me. Why does he write? Why does he uses stories and dialogues? How does he even has the motivation or the courage to walk on a path in which every stone is unsure or misleading?
As (nice trips btw) said, it is to fight the diesease with itself. As medicine is created out of poision, the posion is created out of the medicine itself. This is a very modern turn of thinking, one that dangerously leads back to it's own tail.
This brings us to two points, that I want to leave open for the forthcoming discussion.
The first, could serve as a pseudo-answer of the first.
As Derrida points out, with his quotes of Gorgias - knowing on itself is no more imperfect than knowing-via-writing. And just as the famed writing in the temple of Apollo - "know thyself" - the writing serves as a mirror, to which the known is held to a test. A mirror which distorts and misleads, but in which the one who can fight the natural disease of ignorance, could win his own cure.
The second - something that TripsAnon, pointed out. Where does philosophy stand in this vicious circle? Derrida has some answers to this scattered in his other text. Writing produces difference and in difference is truth. In otherness, there is understanding.
But how? What is the methodology behind this turning-on-itself? It could be implied that this is deconstruction. As Heidegger used the word - a return to the word of what is the same of it's meaning. In other words, erasing the line between signifier and signified.
But is there a nunc stans in this? a point of stillness, of truth, of sureness? Or is this the lesson?
Ethan Fisher
It turns out that it's more like a violent video game about how “video games cause school shootings”, in which you somehow discover that uncritical reception of video games is bad, and so is bullying emotionaly unstable people.
Only that the last part is actually okay and sophists suck.
Aiden King
...
Nathaniel Martinez
Did you do a reading of this? I read it a long time ago and I think it's kind of a great introduction to Derrida's style of inquiry and themes.
To be honest I'm surprised people didn't just mock this effort since Jackie doesn't have a great reputation around here.
Hudson Thomas
>the idea of diesease as a natural thing and of medicine as a usurper, makes me think of today's pharmaceutical business, in which the line between medicine and poision, natural and unatural is distressingly blurred.
>writing in the temple of Apollo - "know thyself" - the writing serves as a mirror, to which the known is held to a test. A mirror which distorts and misleads, but in which the one who can fight the natural disease of ignorance, could win his own cure.
Absolutely based observations user
Thank you for contributing. At the end you brought up the question of deconstruction. Someone said, that Derrida said, that the best way to deconstruct something is to write a rigorously detailed history of it.
I haven’t finished the essay, still going strong
Justin Ross
>since Jackie doesn't have a great reputation around here.
Leave Jordan Peterson to me.
Leo Hill
good post from that thread yesterday
Gabriel Thomas
Just want to post that I love the ending section of Plato's Pharmacy (not in op's excerpt). Probably the closest he came to writing fiction, together with the letters in The Post Card.
Colton Rodriguez
>The pharmakon (writing) is that which “carries away” thus creating an absence where it itself was supposed to fill the absence of the father, the sun, the good, and thereby supplement it. The listener, or rather, reader is thus made absent in presence to make present the absence of the father, the sun, the good, capital.
This, joined with idea of infinite regress, makes me really interested in whether Derrida might see the infinite as “the transcendent signifier”, but because of the danger of the symptom, makes it safe by saying “there is no transcendental signifier” but still mirroring like user was saying about Delphi, in stating the absence of a transcendental signifier, he is pointing to it beyond the symptom, securing its safety from the disease
Angel Garcia
>But is there a nunc stans in this? a point of stillness, of truth, of sureness?
There is none. A text, the whole text (by which I mean the entire philosophical endeavour since it's inception, if not the entirety of culture) it's always deconstructing itself. That's why Derrida turns away from Heidegger when he reaches for something outside of metaphysics.
Later in his years, during his, let's call it ethical turn, Derrida came to call something "un-deconstruible", It's in the place from which ethics springs, in suffering and its recognition, in the appeal to justice. There's truth in there insofar this recognition it's an event, a transformation. It is not stillness, and it is not sureness. Derrida goes as far as saying that sureness it's the death of ethics, the moment in which we're sure of decision to make we're no longer thinking ethically. We're no longer thinking in general.
I think this is the lesson we must take from Derrida : tensions and ambiguity are the things from which philosophy starts and perpetually tries to repress and hide.
Isaiah Thompson
>might see the infinite as “the transcendent signifier
I think the infinite is the absence of a trascendent signifier. not itself. This perpetual motion of intepretation it's the symptom of this absence.
Jackson Miller
>"un-deconstruible"
justice, the gift, hospitality, forgiveness
>I think this is the lesson we must take from Derrida : tensions and ambiguity are the things from which philosophy starts and perpetually tries to repress and hide.
Absolutely. “The memory of something that never was and the promise of something that will never be.”
My favorite Derrida is when he says “I’m dreaming of a poem that no one can translate”
Derrida’s White Mythology is also really interesting
Nicholas Lee
>Derrida’s White Mythology
I think it is one of his more deep and rewarding essays of his. It really cuts deep at the core of this whole thing we call western philosophy.
>“I’m dreaming of a poem that no one can translate”
Care to tell me where this is from? I honestly think Derrida was a very gifted writer. He's always accused of being hermetic and obtuse, and to certain extent he is, but there's a reason for that and that's what escapes most people when reading him. Language (and philosophical language especially) it's full of the trappings of metaphysics.
I also find his style fun and engaging, sometimes even humorous so there's that,
Elijah Perry
>write a rigorously detailed history of it.
This is what Heidegger uses the term for - a postive regress down through the history of a term of an idea in which, at the end, truth (aletheia, a term we can see in the now discussed essay), reveals itself, like something forgotten in the bottom of a well.
I giggled, when I remembered that masturbation was a topic in OG.
Thanks for that. It links my idea if of the mirror, with the notion of absence. In a sense, the "image" in the mirror is always absent, until something to be mirrored appears in front of it. this would make the mirroring pretty transcendental I guess (since, the poor mirror is more than grounded-in-here). But this opens a new question. Am I alone in the mirror, what is my difference, my other?
Repress and represent I guess. Thanks for the overview. I've caught glimpses of this way of thinking in a interview with him on terrorism. It's seems that the event, the happened, it's what is sure. And you can take that from his texts as well. No matter how hard he tries to pass the ball back ad infinitum, the text always culminates in a point, sublimating epistemology into ethics.
>I also find his style fun and engaging
I finally got how tense he was when I read Writing and Difference this year. You really do need this kind of complexity when you have to built on top of the tradition you are trying to work with.
Samuel Hall
The in-between chapters of Writing and Difference (it's annoying when I have to bring up the same book over and over again), about the rabbis were great too. Overall Dissemination seems really interesting and helpful for someone interested in Plato in general.
I was wondering about any books on the link between Plato and Egyptian and Alexandrian Gnosticism.
Owen Kelly
I didn't get much from reading this. I might have to read it again or read the full text definitely going to have to read this once or twice more to get a better grasp on what is being said, but i'll just add my intial thoughts
the absence of the logos' genetical proginetor, viz, the absence of the father's presnce in disseminating the logos- the necessity to leave that dissemination to writing- seems to be a direct erosion of the authority of the father who depends on presence to lend legitimacy to the logos.
"memory always requires signs to recall the non present"... maybe the sign generated by the pharmakon, unlike the sign of the present king, is one that that threatens the father's function as the defender of his logos? the newly present sign- like Thoth and the moon, signifies a new world where the logos subsists through time without being tied to a singular paternal sign. presumably this extends to capital as well. the symptom writing belongs to, imo, is the one where the inscribed sign may continue to exist in the absence of any kind of present father to remind the recipient of the pharmakon that it is tied to his works specifically.
I question the above interprtation, though, I mean I have not read the Phaedrus itself, but is it not the case that the pharmakon is known to have been written by Lysias? if Lysias himself is not directly available, than there is nobody to account (lol) for the written logos... that alone does not threaten Lysias' authority, instead, it seems to just push the defense of the pharmakon onto those who are familiar with him. but it is easy to see how that well can dry up.
Austin James
You need to subvocalize or, better yet, read Derrida aloud to get him.
Jaxon Ross
>No matter how hard he tries to pass the ball back ad infinitum, the text always culminates in a point,
I tend to agree with this. But with a caveat.
This point is never an object of theory, it is a void I think. Derrida it's kind of a negative theologian in this sense.
Joshua White
is this for the express purpose of adding my own presence to the text?
to anyone in particular: does Derrida assign moral status to presence? is it better to be present when articulating logos or is it better to to supplement it with writing?
Henry Young
Philosophy (or mataphysics which here are the same) does. Logocentrism is a value judgement, one tied to a series of value judgement, that's why he later in his years he talks of Carnophallogocentrism. Speech, Masculinity, Light, Humanism are the victor of battle that was never fought. Speech it's seen as better than writing (like in Plato) even though this superiority is expressed though writing.
This is the point of decostruction to make this polarities, theis asymmetrrical dialectic emerge as the core of philosophy.
In short for Derrida there is something immoral in preferring Speech over Writing, as ther'es one in choosing Man over Animal, or Male over Female. The moral act is showing how the First always needs the Latter to extert this superiority
Grayson Ortiz
Is there anyone who can put forth a Lacanian understanding of this? I feel as if that might be useful given the connection of dialectic to Hegel and Hegel to Lacan.
Also what would a Heidegerrian apporach to reading Phaedrus look like?
Michael Roberts
>Also what would a Heidegerrian apporach to reading Phaedrus look like?
Gadamer
Henry Ramirez
It is worth saying here he does not propose any simple revolution that privileges writing over speech, the exterior over the interior, etc., either.
Jayden Rogers
Interesting Lacanian take on the subject. I wish I wasn't 2am here, so I can think clearer.
You are right. Theory is unfolding, a point in a sense is not only the last in a series of folds made, but an implosion. Makes sense that it's the last thing to come in texts like Derrida's. In a certain sense, it's even outside the text.
And I got the opposite idea in Of Gramatology. As far as I remember (how I've understood it), writing was first, since it represent the symbolical act that creates the possibility of language. Writing is present even is speech. Than again, you aren't saying anything against this point, but showing how hegemony rules over an other, by putting it in itself as an other. The same logic that Foucalt and Agamben use.
Anyway, I had lots of fun today and I'm really glad how this turned out. We should stay on this text for some time now, at least until we select another text to read and think how we should approach a derrida general.
and are two laconic lacanian approaches to the text. I read Phaedrus in January and it seems that my mnemotechnics suck hard, since I don't remember lot's from it. Maybe the thread can benefit from expanding into the text as well to open up the discussion.
Hope to read you all tomorrow!
Ethan Howard
Sure. Putting the whole thing on it's head, a simple reversal wouldn't escape that logic. It would reinforce it
>And I got the opposite idea in Of Gramatology. As far as I remember (how I've understood it), writing was first, since it represent the symbolical act that creates the possibility of language. Writing is present even is speech.
You're right I kind of handwaved away the whole Arch-writing thing cause it's counterintuitive to certain extent
Matthew Rodriguez
Where precisely is the distinction made between the written word and preformed speech in the Phaedrus or in Derrida's Essay?
It seems to me that one could easily consider the act of reading a piece of writing as a performance. Why should we distinguish between the two? What is the significance of Derrida's post-structuralist tradition applied to the idea that there exist divine ideal objects? Should we consider Thot (thought, as in writing and speaking) some demiurgic entity that separates us from the divine by offering us instead a pure simulacrum of it (Pharmakon)?
Kevin Peterson
Bumping.
Good thread. Good material.
Hudson Barnes
Jack Sanders
>Care to tell me where this is from?
43:20
Michael Campbell
e/lit/e
Dylan Reed
Damn, I just lost 2000 words, when I accidentally closed my browser.
To briefly put it, speech and writing refer to mneme, and trough that to logos and alethieia - knowledge and truth.
Writing is something exterior to oneself and hides the possibility of distortion.
When you recall from writing, you have to depend on it, and in order to gather knowledge you have to hoard scriptures. This could be compared to a men who stays healthy not by natural means like exercises and diet, but through constant use of medicine. For such a men, you woun't say he is healthy at all. All a sophist knows is his books, he is blind to the world and more than that he is blind for ideas, since writing as a techne (art) present a mimesis of logos.
I wanted to use this quote from Boethius that I found yesterday to show how all of this is related to truth. This is from Consolation.
The seed of truth does surely cling within, and can be roused as a spark by thefanning of philosophy. For if it is not so, how do ye men make answers true of your own instinctwhen teachers question you? Is it not that the quick spark of truth lies buried in the heart’s lowdepths? And if the Muse of Plato sends through those depths the voice of truth, each man has notforgotten and is but reminding himself of what he learns.’
(Page 45 documentacatholicaomnia.eu
There's a note in the end of the quote - "Plato’s doctrine of remembrance is chiefly treated of in his Phædo and Meno"
This leads us full circle. I wanted to point out how this makes philosophy a rather personal affair, in which one seeks the truth in himself, through himself. Knowledge in that sense isn't a mass of information you can quote, but a power of perceiving - the sight for ideas. Writing distorts that, since it creates a barrier in understanding through the need to refer to, but also with the idea that knowledge is somewhere else.
Boethius should be suspected of distortion on his part too, because as a christian theologian, he is after a certain point as well, and I'm no scholar of Plato to be able to discuss matters such as this freely.
To further some points you make in your post. The figure of Thoth, could be compared to Prometheus, whose gift of fire is no more harmful, than useful. In Theogony I think, it brings for the humans the end of the golden age and it takes eternal life from them. This makes it a pharmakon as well. There's also the suspicion that simulacrum are pure in sense that they don't have a essence by themselves. A simulacrum refers to everything, it's a non-object, something whose being is exactly beign-not-itself. This is what could lead to distortion. The word of the King is tied to him and he guarants it and is able to take responsibility. It is his word, so it's his truth in a sense. The truth of the one chose to rule, should be enough.
Lastly, about ideals objects.
Ethan Brooks
I'm anxious to talk about the subject, since I'm not familiar with Derrida's ideas in the topic, but in my experience, it seems that from formalism onward, metaphysics begins to be treated as this unscientific field of operation, which kind of ruins the wet-dream of post-saussurian academics of making philology a hard science.
What he have with Derrida is his grant concept of difference, that sorts of points out to those question, but not exactly. and other posts related to those, bring up those matters.
It seems that there are no ideal objects for him, only signs that multiply and mutate, but in this constant motion could be seen something ideal, the movements of ideas and concepts, that are sunken underneath the murky waters of languages and systems, but whose waves are still perceivable for the eye. The play of those waves is as close as we can get to something ideal it seems. This separation reminds me of the separation between language systems and social systems in Saussure. Language is it's own thing, ruled by it's own organic rules, that could be seen as random, since they are motivated by inner factors that are set for certain goals. There may be certain rules that apply and describe this motions, but they are only historical and in the best case, could only give us a faint idea of what's to come.
And about performance. You say, "as a performance" and this is a key concept. If you use speech or writing in this way, there's always a suspected purpose to it, even if it's absurd. And purpose for Plato is a very dangerous thing, since it's so hard for it to be perfect.
The case of poetry in the Republic is very similar to that. Since it presents presentations, such a performance eschews the ideas it is trying to present.
Better than making a play about how we should be good men, be a good men, and show through example how it's done. Art could be interpreted in a lot of ways and this works both ways. Not only does it make it easier to distort (like with laws - a written law, could proof a lot more noneffective, than the judging of the wise ruler), but also serves to distort the writing on itself. Derrida's essay serves to give an example of this, since we need complicated skills in textual analysis that require of us a lot of intertextual knowledge and exercises in etymology to get to point of just one word.
I hope other people have clearer answers.
Wyatt Morris
To Derrida the repeatability of signs lends to an ideal form that can be called upon to produce the repeated sign, even though metaphysically (traditionally) the 'ideal' is something that the sign points towards, and is supposed to produce the sign in a one-to-one relation. The arbitrariness of the sign in Saussure is something that divorces the production of the signifier from the signified and instead locates the ideality in its repeatability rather than the concept to which the sign refers.
Daniel Rogers
I get a clearer picture now, about how Derrida's thinking is revolutionary to metaphysical thinking. Thanks! It also makes some ideas of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition clearer.
Luke Evans
>It seems that there are no ideal objects for him, only signs that multiply and mutate,
It's not the that there aren't ideal objects. There as we make always use of them. LIke the idea of triangle for example in geometry. . But ideality exists not despite materiality but because of the iteration of materiality.
Ideality is the search for a perfect presence, objective and a-temporal. But every presence it's a sign. In the sense that for it exists there's a need for repetition, repetition guaranteed by signs.
But, here's the catch, a sign the it's need for a prefect presence is in itself founded on an absence, the abscence of he object it signifies.
The sign is both to put in Kantian tem a condition of possibility and impossibility at the same time.
This is a crucial theme in early Derrida and his work on Husserl's epistemolgy. And then goes on later to radicalize this position in an full fledged ontology
Andrew Cooper
Thank you for clarifying that. As I said, i'm no expert, and I really want to avoid misleading people into certain readings of the author.
I've read some Husserl - The Paris Lectures, Cartesian Meditations. It's hard for me to wrap it in my head, since I don't have any actually grounding in philosophy, but from what I've remember, those postulates of Derrida are pretty far from the clear, ideal evidentiality Husserl prescribes to the phenomenon.
Those clear concepts, like the colors Husserls uses as example, are still nothing but signs to certain things that are still left hidden. The redness of red, is still just signified in the color. Essence is left unfathomable. Interesting.
I'll ask you not to delve on my implied question as not to derail the thread.
I wanted to return to Phaedrus, but I won't be able to read it this week at all. I hope other people join in, to spar up the discussion. Also, and I don't want to be too eager and ambitious, but we should think about where to move on in the second discussion. I'll leave the more experienced readers to voice their opinions. As for me, I'll just say that I'll gladly dig myself into platonic topis, even if my reading list (Time and Narrative, Lacan Semniars 1 & 2, Postmodernism and the cultural logic of . . . ) are not too close on those subjects.