Claims & Pharmakon Warning:

  Information presented this site meant for nutritional benefit and as an educational starting point only, for use in maintenance and promotion good health in cooperation with a common knowledge base reference...Furthermore,it based solely on the traditional and historic use or legend of a given herb from the garden of Adonis. Although every effort has been made to ensure its accurate, please note that some info may be outdated by more recent findings and developments!

  The pharmakon is comprehended in the structure of logos.This comprehension is an act of both domination and decision......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....the effect of speech(tou logou dunamis) upon the condition of the soul is comparable (ton auton de logon) to the power of drugs (ton pharmakon taxis) over the nature of bodies.

  Differance,...efnrecfida....the disappearance of any originary presence,is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth.At once."At once" means that the being-present (on) in its truth,in the presence of its identity and in the identity of its presence,is doubled as soon as it appears, as soon as it presents itself.It appears,in its essence,as the possibility of its own most proper non-truth,of its pseudo-truth reflected in the icon,the phantasm,or the simulacrum.What is is not what it is,identical and identical to itself,unique,unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such.And its identity is hollowed out by that addition,withdraws itself in the supplement that present it.

  The "pharmakon" is the same precisely because it has no identity.And the same (is) as supplement.Or in differance.In writing.If he had meant to say something,such would have been the speech of Theuth(Ammon) making of writing as a pharmakon a singular present to the King Thamus of Egyptian Thebes.But Theuth,it should be noted,spoke not another word.The great god's sentence went unanswered......After closing the pharmacy,Plato went to retire,to get out of the sun,he took a few steps in the darkness toward the back of his reserves,found himself leaning over the pharmakon,decided to analyze....of Phaedrus or simulacrum-writing,the fear of death is what gives all witchcraft,all occult medicine,a hold. The pharmakeus is banking on that fear.Hence the Socratic pharmacy,in working to free us from it,corresponds to an operation of Exorcism......Magic and Science,the passage between life and death,the supplement to evil and to lack: the privileged domain of Thoth had,finally,to be medicine....Thoth,the god of writing,thus also a god of medicine....and it is writing as a pharmakon that he presents to the King Thamus in the Phaedrus,with a humility as unsettling as a dare.......

  Theuth(Ammon): "I am Thoth,the eldest son of Ra...This discipline (to mathema),my King,will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories (sophoterous kai mnemonikoterous): my invention is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom..."

  Phaedrus: Do you mean the discourse of a man who really knows(tou eidotos logon),which is living and animate?Would it be fair to call the written discourse only a kind of ghost(eidolon) of it?

  Socrates: Precisely.

  As from Jacques Derrida's view point,as a living thing,logos issues from a father.There is thus for Plato no such thing as a written thing.Writing is not an independent order of signification;it is weakened speech,something not completely dead:a living dead,a reprieved corpse,a deferred life,a semblance of breath.The phantom,the phantasm,the simulacrum of living discourse is not inanimate;it is not insignificant,it simply signifies little,and always the same thing.This signifier of little,this discourse that doesn't amount to much,is like all ghost:errant....Writing and speech have thus become two different species,or values,of the trace......the cure or restoration of internal purity must thus reconstitute,recite that to which the pharmakon should not have had to be added and attached like a literal parasite:a letter installing itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to distort [like static,="bruit parasite"] the pure audibility of a voice.Such are the relations between the writing supplement and the logos-zoon.In order to cure the latter of the pharmakon and rid of the parasite,it is necessary to put the outside back in its place...Writing must thus return to being what it should never have ceased to be: an accessory,an accident,an excess.the cure by logos,exorcism,and catharsis will thus eliminate the excess.But this elimination,being therapeutic in nature,must call upon the very thing it is expelling,the very surplus it is putting out,the pharmaceutical operation must therefore exclude itself from itself....the evil that had affected the inside of the city from the outside, was thus returned to the outside in order to protect the inside,similar as Socrates,a Magician(wizard) and a scapegoat to the Athens,that is Socrates's Death and Life.

  (Dissemination.Plato's Pharmacy,Part II.7.The Ingredients:Phantasms,Festivals,and Paints,138cf. Part I.4.The Pharmakon,p116~117.Part I.3.The Filial Inscription:Theuth,Hermes,Thoth,Nabu,Nebo.p94.Part II.9.Play:From the Pharmakon to the Letter and from Blindness to the Supplements.p168~169,Part II.6.The Pharmakos.p128.Part II.8.The Heritage of the Pharmakon:Family Scene.p.142,143,152.etc.Jacques Derrida).