The Witchcraft of Salem Village

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 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 DEA 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 deida wishes to reject all of this and all of the implications Dera says that Western European culture is guilty of logos centrism 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 others 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 chaer to Shakespeare to Schiller and this is the hated phonocentrism which derida also wants to get rid of derida 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 phogo centrism and of course soon enough that turns into phow centrism in the writings of the Meads of feminist literary Theory today deida follows his Nazi Guru haiger in concluding that the real problem in the west is that our culture is permeated by what he calls metaphysics haiger had railed against the metaphysics of presence and against metaphysics in general for Dera metaphysics evidently means means anything that cannot be boiled down to sense certainty deida 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 language is this self-contained formal system of signs with no connection to any reality concept or thing back during the viar Republic in the 20s and 30s in Germany the pro-nazi haiger and others referred to their battle against metaphysics with the name destrution or destruction and destruction was the first name that Dera ever gave to his own method parallels have been drawn from deconstruction ISM to Zen and above all to the Sufism of Al gazali whose destruction is in effect a deconstruction of alfar rabi and iban CA 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 Dera language has nothing to do with reality Lou's geometric requirements for literate language were rooted in the efforts of Dante and petrara to create languages as the necessary premises for nation building see Dante's de vulgari eloquencia larouche was also in the German tradition of historical philology associated with vilhelm f hbal France buop and the Grims derida is a part of the adversary school that grew up in the linguistic School of Geneva this Geneva school was designed to combat the influence of German historical philology deid 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 and 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 leads you to the furry fine right but no according to theur this word by itself mean 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 desur for Dera 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 chamber of texts of der this is der's jargon word of differance with a big a in the last syllable Which packs difference and delay into the same baggage now for Dera 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 Dera is willing to talk about is a text a written text of black on white with punctuation type faces paragraphs margins copons copyrights logos logos but no logos and so forth this is what he calls writing or l and this writing is primary over speech primary 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 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 the best way for a discourse to be there is as a written text so as deras 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 the Nan constantinopolitan Creed all of those are texts and every one of of them is exactly equivalent to any other as you can see what der 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 Trace 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 maybe recent US presidents it's a hint Nixon all right Nixon well Nixon I think Nixon is the one however if we think of males males Carter thank you good very very a little bit uh well educated uh group the males right the Jimmy Carter's males how about prudent it's it's it's clear 

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 Pharmaca 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; 

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; 

the Phaedrus dialogue and 

any other piece of writing 

is hopelessly contradictory 

and completely indecipherable --"