Download Pharmakos copy

6. The Pharmakos pp. 128-134
128 the rules of this game
parasite
an accessory, an accident, an excess
129 the chain of significations
It is in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions between
conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech
and language, that these textual “operations” occur.
chain concealed from author, word never used by Plato
LANGUE: But what does absent or present mean here? Like any text, the text of “Plato”
couldn’t not be involved, at least in a virtual, dynamic lateral manner, with all the words
that composed the system of Greek language.
130 They communicate with the totality of the lexicon through their syntactic play
one should simply be able to untangle the hidden forces of attraction linking a present
word with an absent word
system of language
pharmakos: wizard, magician, poisoner,
SCAPEGOAT: The evil and the outside, the expulsion of evil, its exclusion out of the
body (and out) of the city
purifications of the city,
131 Oedipus, ostracism: In the person of the ostracized, the city expels what in it is too
elevated, what incarnates the evil which can come to it from above. In the evil of the
pharmakos, it expels what is vilest in itself, what incarnates the evil that menaces from
below. By this double and complimentary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is
not yet known and what transcends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human
in opposition on one side to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and
monstrous.
132 death, genital organs cut off from the space of the city
133 The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its
inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of
the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat
or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect
or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside
is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept,
fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside.
played out on the boundary line between inside and outside
The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and
projected.
prepare for surprise (Bush and Taliban/Iraq/Bin Laden)