Plato's Pharmacy --
"Pharmakos"
"Offscourings" --- Pharmakos (n.),
a human scapegoat.
During the Thargelia, but
also during adverse periods
such as plague and famine,
Athenians and Ionians
expelled scapegoat(s), who
were called 'offscourings',
in order 'to purify' the cities.
The Cat sat on The Ma'at.
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
"Now, Derrida -- Foucault was the teacher of Derrida at the E.N.S. --Foucault took Derrida with him to visit the inmates at the mental hospital of St. Annes.
Derrida has been somewhat less publicly flamboyant than Foucault but he is no less of an irrationalist he's probably a more effective one;
He is the child of a Serpharic Jewish Family living in Algeria -- he was very young, when he had the experience of being buried alive --
He was locked in a coffin-shaped Cedar Chest by his sister; he later managed to escape alive, but he was traumatised by the belief that he had died and been brought back from The Dead....
From this grew his identification with The Isis-Osiris Myth in which Isis of course brings Osiris back from The Dead; but this also implied fora an obsession with castration, which he told his students had suggested to him the the title for one of his early books, "Disseminations".
Derrida's irrationalism was later fuelled by the mystical writings of the Kabbalah -- very important -- and by his devotion to the satanic degenerate Antonin Artaud, of The Theatre of Cruelty, some people may remember this, too.
He was somebody who had spent about a decade of his own life in a mental institution. Derrida was jailed in 1981 by the Czechoslovakian Communist Regime on on charges of drug trafficking, but these these charges were never proven --
Some of the best one-liners about Derrida come from Foucault, during the period when these two were quarreling -- During the 1970s Foucault said that Derrida was a terrorist and an obscurantist who deliberately wrote in such a way as to be impossible to understand, so he could then lash-out at his critics, as cretins who were incapable of understanding the profoundness of his Thought;
The best summary from Foucault : -- "Derrida is the kind of philosopher, who gives bullshit a bad name."
Now we can we can turn the lights on we don't need this at the moment we have one more deid DA's opaque doctrines are a philosophy of anglo-american destabilization from the word go his big publishing breakthroughs came in 1967 and ke lectures were delivered at the height of the May 1968 riots that led to the overthrow of General Charles deal the best government that France had seen in many Ages
Derrida was a Leading Light of the click around the magazine Tel Kel which was one of the theoretical mouthpieces of this Rebellion now deconstruction deconstruction is an attack on the judeo-christian Western European civilization it is an attack that is powered Above All by rage DEA hates and resents reason and creativity in these he identifies with the Epic of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality that is from his book on grammatology in other words derida hates Plato he hates Apostolic Christianity as exemplified by St John St Paul St Augustine and other patristic writers he hates the entire edifice of Western Civilization based on Christian platonism and in this he follows mentors like n who claim to be Socrates in Reverse or diogenes who defined himself as Socrates gone mad
Most of all Derrida hates The Logos -- this in the Greek means word or discussion, perhaps ordering, lawfulness but finally reason -- The Logos is reason.
In Plato's Dialogues, The Spoken Word is The Path to refining and improving The Logos or Reason — later, Christ came into The World as The Word of God; and in another moment of The Christian Trinity, The Holy spirit is the logos which proceeds from The Son of God and which abides with human beings — Derrida wishes to reject all of this, and all of the implications --
Derrida says that Western European culture is guilty of Logocentrism -- The Western cultural Paradigm has contained within it, the aspiration to be based on reason : this has to be rejected.
The Western cultural-Paradigm also gives priority to speech and to The Spoken Word -- you can compare this to to other cultures around The World, but this is not the case;
Most literature was originally designed to be read aloud or or even sung, from Plato's dialogues to Dante to Petrarch to Shakespeare to Schiller --- and this is the hated Phonocentrism, which Derrida also wants to get rid of ---
Derrida delves into Plato in an attempt to show that the overtones of The Platonic Logos are exclusively paternal and male-dominated -- this gives rise to the further charge of phalogocentrism, and of course soon enough that turns into phalocentrism in the writings of the Menads of Feminist literary Theory today --
Derrida follows his Nazi Guru Heidegger in concluding that the real problem in The West is that our culture is permeated by what he calls 'metaphysics' -- Heidegger had railed against the metaphysics of presence and against metaphysics in general.
For Derrida, 'metaphysics' evidently means anything that cannot be boiled-down to Sense-Certainty.
Derrida seems sees 'metaphysics' as The Enemy that must be destroyed and under this heading he lumps God, The Self, The Soul, The Human Individual, Causality, Substance Essence, Idea, Action and virtually any concept of any importance turns out to be 'metaphysical' -- these have to go, of course for reasons that are never really uh explained --
And of course for Derrida, Language is this self-contained formal system of signs with no connection to any reality, concept or thing --
Back during the Weimar Republic in the 20s and 30s in Germany the pro-Nazi Heidegger and others referred to their battle against 'metaphysics' with the name destrution or destruction -- and destruction was the first name that Derrida ever gave to his own method....
Parallels have been drawn from Deconstructionism to Zen and above all to The Sufism of Al-Gazali whose destruction is in effect a deconstruction of Al-Farrabi and Ibn Sinna attempting to play on their supposed self-contradictions and writers on postmodernism have called attention to this --
a dozen years ago larouche authored a new standard American English curriculum for Effective US public schools in which he outlined the requirements for illiterate language setting out to express the geometric complexity of reality according to larouche this would include seven grammatical cases nine tenses five moods an active and passive voice non-reflexive and self-reflexive features and a vocabulary of 50,000 to 100,000 words including a very well-developed verb system this would therefore mean the ability to express at least 1,260 degrees of geometric freedom
But of course, for the radical nominalist, paranoid-schizophrenic Derrida,
Language has nothing
to DO with reality —
Derrida sides above all with the Linguistics of Ferdinand of Geneva, which accomplished a massive deterioration in these Language Studies by abandoning all idea of Historical analysis —
For Derrida, The Word as A Sign does not lead to A Concept or An Object, but it only leads you to other signs — take for example, the word “cat”.
Okay, “cat” is A Word that leads you to the furry feline, right?
Right, but no — according to Derrida, this word by itself means nothing, it only means something because it's different from other words, like “bat” or “rat” or “hat”.
It’s therefore a Negative and Relational Axiom of Duesur;
For Derrida The Word seems to promise Meaning, but its definition always sends us through an endless chain of other words when we look for the definitions, so the promise of Meaning is indefinitely postponed, delayed, deferred according to this nonsense — each word in a text points to a NeverEnding series of other, older texts — The Chamber of Texts of Derrida.
This is Derrida’s jargon word of “differance”;with a big “a” in the last syllable, which packs ‘difference’ and ‘delay’ into the same baggage —
Now, for Derrida,
The Author is Dead,
by definition, he never existed —
The Human Self and The Human Ego have collapsed into an ‘X’ marking the spot where they once were;
This is the so-called “Subject Position” :
There is no perception,
all that Derrida is willing
to talk about, is A Text —
A written text of black on white,
with punctuation, typefaces, paragraphs, margins, codons, copyrights, logoes — logoes, but No Logos — and so forth.
This is what he calls ‘writing’ or ‘L’ecriture’ and this writing is primary over Speech — primary with respect to The Spoken Word, which is another purely arbitrary and absolutely absurd assertion;
Everything is a written text, in the sense that every thought, utterance or discourse — watch out when you hear ‘discourse’, because That’s THEM — uh
Anything,
any Discourse
is simply
"A Story that
We Tell each other
about something that exists"
(uh well, something that that
may or, may not exist)
— and best way for
A Discourse to be there
is, as a written text.
So as Derrida says,
“There is NOTHING
outside of The Text”;
everything is A Text —
there are no more Works of Art;
ALL black writing on white paper is A Text, be it Shakespeare, the telephone book, Mickey Mouse, the racing form, The US Constitution, the Jupiter Symphony all of those are Texts, and every one of of them is exactly equivalent to any other —
As you can see, what Derrida tries to do, is to draw you into A Labyrinth of Jargon — he's always shifting The Jargon, allegedly to keep from falling back into the hated ways of 'Metaphysics' —
He uses words like “trace”, “sediment” and “iteration” to show that words evolve and change their meanings, as they are used again and again — it's like barnacles on a ship's Hull or the way a coin might be worn when it goes through circulation;
For example, if we hear the word “crook” — Who do we think of think of?”
So, the idea is that each one of these words becomes freighted with a trace, a sediment of something, because of the way that they've been used, and this is always there and may not be under control…
These are overtones, connotations, associations, you can think of them as etymologies if you want to --
They become the key to Derrida practice of what he calls 'dissemination' : -- the scattering of Meanings through Free Play;
The Point is always to show that writing is the product of some kind of a compulsion, some kind of a determinism, it is not free -- one example is Derrida's deconstruction of his favourite target, Plato.
This is the deconstruction of the Phaedrus dialogue in the book "Disseminations", by Derrida --
Derrida attempts to show through a textual analysis of the of The Dialogue, words that Plato uses, one is Pharmaca;
This is a Proper Name; it is a Nymph who was present when one of her companions was blown off a cliff and died on the Rocks below;
Then we have the word Pharmakon; this can mean either a Medicine which gives Life or a Poison which gives Death;
Then we have Pharmakos; Plato refers to Socrates as Pharmakos -- it has the overtone of A Sorcerer or A Medicine-Man, used ironically -- "Socrates, I do apprehend you to be A Wizard! --"
Derrida points out, that although Plato goes through this series Pharmacea, Pharmakon, Pharmakos -- he does not use a closely-related word which is a synonym of the last one, which is Pharmakos and Pharmakos is the sacrificial victim or scapegoat --
This is the person, for example who would be ceremonially killed in Athens, in the event of a plague or some other natural disaster, or some disaster of another type -- so, scapegoat is of course what Socrates later became;
This is the person, for example who would be ceremonially killed in Athens, in the event of a plague or some other natural disaster, or some disaster of another type -- so, scapegoat is of course what Socrates later became;
So Derrida goes through this, with the idea of showing you that Plato was also not free; he was compelled, he was controlled by some kinds of subconscious psychological factors,
and THEREFORE :
The Text says, what
Plato could not have meant;
....and this is the obvious
Deconstructionist conclusion :
All reading is misreading;
All reading is misreading;
the Phaedrus dialogue and
any other piece of writing
is hopelessly contradictory
and completely indecipherable --"
"They had rocked The Boat;
they had upset The State;
they had failed to maintain Ma'at.
"The Temple walls
[of The New Kingdom]
will depict The King as
going on military campaigns
to increase Ma'at, Divine Order --
and the notion here is,
Foreign Peoples and Places
are a source of CHAOS : so,
The King must bring
ORDER to these people,
and it's for their own Good.
So The King is functioning as
an insurer of Ma'at and
the temples themselves should
be regarded as FACTORIES,
if you will, of this Divine Order.
At the same time, another
of the old gods of the
Egyptian pantheon, Sutekh,
the embodiment of confusion
and disorder, had become
incredibly connected with
the gods of foreign lands.
Any remaining religions practices
of The Hyksos had also been
incorporated into this deity and
would have remained A Problem
for any King trying to maintain Ma'at.
Despite King Ahmoses' termination
of The Hyksos' political rule
around 1550 BCE, the deities
of The Semites remained.
Even Queen Hatshepsut, nearly
a century later, commented that
The Hyksos ruled without Ra --
Her claim to have restored Order
might hint at the very reason for her
non-attendance on The King's List.
That, or the unorthodox
nature of Her Rule....."
