The article considers some problems with the pairing of joking and disability, and then questions whether the world of the ill is pseudotheological, as Stronach and Allan quote Kundera saying it is. Aspects of Kundera's argument that Stronach and Allan omit suggest a more complex relation between disability, the body and the presence of the person in the multiple texts that end up being involved: Stronach and Allan's text, autobiographical texts such as Robert Murphy's, and the text of several jokes, (...) including one of my own which frames the article. (shrink)

In this paper, we sketch out a simple scheme to evaluate different ways in which Western society has coped with the momentous and hidden problem of envy; afterward, we consider the consequences for the constitution of the social space that these changes entail. We will argue that envy, when considered as a primal feeling, can shed light on René Girard’s notion of metaphysical desire and on diasparagmos rituals. Then, taking into account Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s endogenous fixed point thesis—concerning the constitution of (...) autotranscendent social structures that configure themselves around an attractor, a fixed point, revealed to be a product of the process of constitution, an effect and not a cause—we will consider envy as the main feedback in the system. Starting from this theoretical scenario, we will envisage three steps—on a line sketched according to mimetic theory—marked by the particular conditions and role of the feedback. We will show what kind of balance was guaranteed to Athens (taken as an exemplar archaic society, starting from its self-representation as given by Sophocles in Oedipus the King) by the complementary rituals of pharmakos and ostrakos; what equilibrium was offered to Christian medieval social structures by the doctrine of the deadly sins; and, finally, we will take a look at our own secularized society. Our aim is to apply René Girard’s theory systematically, to show how the philosophy of history that we can infer from his works can help us to detect a curious and at the same time quite dramatic change as far as the homeostatic equilibrium of our society is concerned. Thanks to this exercise, we will be able to show how the transcendental social space— by which we mean the region of possible outcomes, in terms of constraints and possibilities, of a human life in a social context—is constituted through the victimage mechanism as defined by Girard and how this constitution is affected by the performative unveiling of the mechanism itself. (shrink)

The essay continues the discussion on democracy begun in Derrida Today 4:2, interrogating the associations between the nature of the pharmakon and democracy ‘itself’, seen as ‘the sovereignty of the people’. Starting with Derrida's notion of writing (and grammatology in general) as what he calls the ‘errant democrat’, shared by – and indeed defining – all, and at the same time prior to the demos, Bernard Stiegler makes the further claim that this foundation of democracy, the pharmakon, is not simply (...) a dialectical site of poison and remedy, as it is often seen, but rather a neutral space or referent that simultaneously connects and disconnects through Stiegler's wider sense of grammatisation, which includes Derrida's sense but extends to all tertiary memory, those external mnemonic devices that not only articulate but guide and indeed anticipate culture and its evolution. The implications of a pharmako-democracy are enormous in a hypertechnological epoch in technics as a tool has emerged as a controlling cultural force. In this sense pharmacopolitics are the only politics. The essay considers how Derrida's exploration of this pharmako-neutrality is at work in Specters of Marx as well as ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, and how it provides a frame for and a bridge to Jean-François Lyotard's related sense of desire in Libidinal Economy, where pharmacological neutrality must also be seen as excess or, in Lyotard's word for it, ‘inascribable’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Myth and Investigation in Oedipus RexPeter T. Koper (bio)René Girard's rich interpretations of Attic drama include his discussion in Violence and the Sacred of the sacrificial and reciprocal nature of the mythic violence that underlies Oedipus Rex. "In the myth, the fearful transgression of a single individual is substituted for the universal onslaught of reciprocal violence. Oedipus is responsible for the ills that have befallen his people" (Girard 1977, (...) 77). Girard sees that "the tragedian's version of the Oedipus story differs radically from the myth" (72). The paradigmatic "exchanges of mutual incriminations" (72) between Oedipus and Teiresias raise the question of "whether the accusation [by Teiresias] is simply an act of reprisal arising from the hostile exchange of a tragic debate" (71) rather than a prophetic truth. The play is an investigation of killing. In the myth, the killer is Oedipus, "unequivocally" (72). How Sophocles's play departs from the myth, whether the play is an investigation that confirms the claims of the myth or whether it dramatizes the persecution of an innocent pharmakos is a question Girard leaves suspended, noting that Oedipus cannot be "both incestuous son and parricide and at the same time pharmakos" (122), since a scapegoat is by definition an innocent, chosen arbitrarily. Sandor Goodhart pursued the possibility that Oedipus "may not have killed Laius" (56) in a 1978 article, and Girard returned to the matter in The Scapegoat in 1986. Goodhart's case is based on the report of the surviving servant that Laius was killed by robbers.The servant's account, if accurate, exonerates Oedipus, who was alone when, as he himself reports, he killed every member of a group that included at least three travelers (Sophocles 1960a, 801–834; see Jebb 1893, 150; and Kammerbeck 1967, 164–65) at a "place where three roads meet" (Sophocles 1960a, 716). Oedipus, seeking the murderer of Laius, is worried by Jocasta's account of Laius's death because it reminds him of a fight he himself has had at that place. But Jocasta assures Oedipus that the servant who returned to Thebes and reported the killings said that they were done by robbers. If this is true, then Oedipus is indeed innocent of the charge levied against him by [End Page 87] Teiresias. As the next step in his effort to learn the truth, Oedipus immediately sends for the servant whose testimony appears, at this stage of Oedipus's thinking, to be decisive, for "one man cannot be the same as many" (1960a, 845). When the servant finally arrives, he is never asked the crucial question about the number of murderers. Instead, he is asked to confirm that he did give an infant child to a servant of the king of Corinth instead of abandoning him on the hillside of Mt. Cithaeron as he had been ordered to do. In the usual interpretation of the play, this omission is not decisive. Events have overtaken the investigation, and Oedipus is now not concerned with the identity of the murderer of Laius, or even with whether Oedipus is the murderer (Kammerbeck 1967, 22). He is, rather, concerned with who he is, and, explicitly, with the confirmation of his parricide and incest.Goodhart holds that the discrepancy between the servant's account and that of Oedipus is a decisive indication of Sophocles's intention in the play. In this view, the play uses a traditional myth in which Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and then rules Thebes, but the play is not a development of that myth into a heroic intellectual quest in which a man who is the paradigm of the Greek enlightenment pursues and learns the truth. It is rather a play about ambiguity and the impossibility of knowledge. "Rather than an illustration of the myth, the play is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by which an arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth" (Goodhart 1996, 35). The arbitrary fiction in this case is the opinion that Oedipus killed Laius. A community and an individual, in the midst of the plague, hear a prophecy. They believe it. One individual is the source of the city... (shrink)

What is the relationship between art history and its objects? Responding to Jaś Elsner’s claim that art-historical writing is inevitably ekphrastic, this essay revisits a site of intense disciplinary anxiety—Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso and its revised version in his 1764 History of Ancient Art. Description has been cast as the “scapegoat” (or pharmakos) of Winckelmann’s art history—that which must be excised yet is fundamental to the operations of the whole. But although it often serves (...) as a site of perceived excess and sublimation in his work, the ekphrastic elements of Winckelmann’s prose are nevertheless some of the most historicist aspects of his scholarship, shaped by a deep engagement with Greco-Roman ekphrastic literature. Description, in this sense, serves as a Platonic pharmakon—both affliction and cure for classical art history’s medial and ontological separation from its ruined and fragmented objects. In Winckelmann’s description of the torso, ekphrasis holds out the potential for the statue’s “completion” (Ergänzung). But understood according to eighteenth-century practices of visual restoration, this raises the question of whether such “whole-making” should be understood as proper or supplemental to the original image. What does it mean to “re-member” the Belvedere Torso through ekphrastic strategies drawn from antiquity itself? And what does this imply for our own textual (and pharmacological) mediations of the visual? (shrink)

The Greek words `pharmakon' and `pharmakos' allude to the complex relations between political violence and the health or disorder of the body politic. This article explores analogies of war as disease and contagion, and contrasts these with metaphors of war as politically healthy and medicinal - as in Randolph Bourne's notion of war as `the health of the state'. It then applies these to the unfolding US `War on Terrorism' through the concept of `pharmacotic war', by way of examining (...) the disturbing political implications of both unfolding US military actions abroad and the scapegoating of internal `enemies' within the United States. The article then critiques various strategies for interrupting the momentum towards a catastrophic `clash of civilizations' between the US and the Islamic world, and proposes a strategy of broadly based, grassroots political mobilization for opposing this trend. (shrink)

Este trabajo apunta a realizar un análisis a partir de la lectura de Derrida del Fedro platónico en su ensayo La pharmacie de Platon. En tres apartados, Derrida trabaja los conceptos de phármakon, pharmakeus y pharmakós. No obstante, pareciera que el concepto de phármakon se presenta como un fenómeno jerárquico frente a los otros dos términos. La riqueza de este concepto radica en su ambigüedad e imposibilidad para ser traducido, ya que cuenta con una doble ‘naturaleza’: la de veneno y (...) la de remedio. Nos interesa mostrar que, a pesar de la indecibilidad, polisemia e intraducibilidad del concepto de phármakon, existen razones para pensar al pharmakós, concepto que Platón no utiliza en su obra, pero que no por eso se encuentra ausente, como la otra cara del phármakon. El pharmakós es conocido como el ‘chivo expiatorio’, aquel sujeto que, como parte de un ritual de purificación comunitaria propio de la religión griega, se expulsa de la ciudad para extirpar los males que la aquejan. Se busca, entonces, rescatar la importancia del pharmakós, encarnada en la figura de Sócrates, entendida como una existencia parasitaria que, por medio del phármakon, se elimina de la ciudad. (shrink)

In this essay, one of Derrida’s early texts, Plato’s pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida’s other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud’s texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida’s analysis of writing in Plato’s pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between (...) Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s texts and Freud’s study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida’s contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato’s texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this ‘early’ text of Derrida and his ‘later’, seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato’s pharmacy, with its investigation via ‘writing’ of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality. (shrink)