Quotes About Pharmakon

Alternately and/or all at once, the Socratic pharmakon petrifies and vivifies, anesthetizes and sensitizes, appeases and anguishes.

Nici un cuvânt nu a acoperit atât de vine ca "religie" deubla semantic? a lui "pharmakon": leac ?i otrav?.

Once the aberrant logic of the pharmakon is let loose, it poisons the fixity and clarity of the other oppositions grouped around it. For instance, Plato's argument relies on father/son, Egyptian/Greek, original/derivation. Can we be sure of these? In Derrida's hands, they start to unravel. He turns to the "original" Egyptian myth where the characters are Thoth and King Ammon. Thoth is the son of the sun god, Ammon.

Every act of his is marked by an unstable ambivalence. He is the god of calculation, arithmetic and rational science; and he also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon…

I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint.