Pharmakon

Lo scopo di questo intervento è analizzare la cura attraverso i logoi in Antifonte e Gorgia. Antifonte ha composto una technē alupias, una pratica per eliminare il dolore attraverso i logoi. Gorgia, dal canto suo, ha dedicato parti significative del suo Encomio di Elena alla  forza dei discorsi che sono in grado sia di eliminare il dolore sia di originare il piacere. Entrambi i sofisti sembrano conoscere molto bene l'aspetto performativo dei logoi: le loro speculazioni mostrano come la filosofia antica abbia riflettuto sull'uso della lingua in quanto metodo per curare sia il dolore psicologico che la sofferenza fisica degli uomini. Il testo è una rielaborazione della lezione tenuta l'11 dicembre 2020 all'interno del VII Corso di formazione per docenti e studenti Tradurre e commentare i classici della filosofia, organizzato dall'Associazione Achille e la Tartaruga con la collaborazione scientifica della Società Filosofica Italiana.

EN
Imagination was conceived as a mediating power way before the concept of media became a hot topic of philosophy. One might refer not only to Plato, but also to Aristotle or to Stoic phantasia kataleptike, or to Hume, and especially to Kant, for whom imagination was a mediating agent as long as it provided the synthesis of sensory manifold. According to Kant, the schematism of perception was supposed to be the function of imagination. Einbilidungskraft actualizes the function of transcendental schematism, i.e., accumulates the multitude of varying experiences into sketches of meaning, creating the initial models for perception. It is namely because one imagines, ones manages to orientate through mediation; or – to  be more precise – the mediation and imagination coincide.

The paradox is that the process of the strong identification, through obeying the “will of bombarding multiplicity of images”, coincides with the distanciation of any unity. Human mind merges with the virtual, losing any connection to the world, that presumably remains alien to any technological impact. However, natural, organic, biological, subconscious, alien is not supposed to be rediscovered outside technological, but namely through it, by intensifying the disrupting power of machineries, by provoking the virtual fields to reshape their preconceived order, or by intermediating the media. Interruption of flux always presents itself as a call for undetermined, unexpected, unforeseen.

Reconsideration of the problem of the imaginary effaces the distinction between interiority and exteriority, redefining he field of interaction between sensorial and super-sensorial. The renewed understanding of the imaginary extends the analysis of the imagination, unleashing it from problem of subjectivity as well as disclosing the intertwining between ontological and epistemological realms. Cornerstone of such a concept can be found in Derrida’s spectral hauntology: both false consciousness and ideological mystification are not the products of dissociating phantasies, but refer to the irreducible field of the spectral – the third dimension, which is the creative force that cannot be equated with an individual mind. The ghost unveils the uncertainty as the irreducible realm where the imaginary manifests itself not through the repetition or representation of reality, but rather functioning as creative factor or the generative matrix of reality itself.

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LT
„Įsivaizduojamybė“ yra filosofinis bandymas permąstyti vaizduotės problemą atsietai nuo vidujybės ir išorybės perskyros. Sankirtoje tarp technologijos, meno ir filosofijos, ši knyga iškelia klausimą apie pilkąsias zonas, kuriose neįmanomos griežtos ontologinės skirtys. Šiame kontekste ir meno kūrinys suprantamas kaip įvykis, kurio virtualioji plotmė išlieka tiek pat reali, kiek ir aktualioji.

Atsisakius psichologizuotos sampratos, pagal kurią vaizduotė tėra dar vienas „vidinis sugebėjimas“, įsivaizduojamybė atsiskleidžia savo tranzityvų pobūdį, steigiantį perėjimus, kaitas ir mutacijas. Atsiliepdama į perfomatyviąją plotmę, vaizduotė veikia tiek kuriant vaizdus, tiek juos patiriant. Šis kūrybos veiksmas sąlygoja vaizdų atsiradimą, bet kartu turi būti vaizduotėje pratęstas ir išžaistas juos suvokiant. Būtent todėl, kad vaizduotė keistu būdu nuolat siejasi su pačiu pasauliu, dažnai negalime tiksliai pasakyti, kur prasideda, o kur baigiasi įsivaizdavimo veikimo laukas.

Sumišimas, buvimas „tarp“, įstrigimas nevisavertėje būtyje, kurią reikia išspręsti nebūtimi, yra mąstymo apie įsivaizduojamybę išeities pozicija. Ja remiantis vaizduotė atsiskleidžia ne kaip būties imitatorė ir kopijuotoja, bet kaip egzistavimą atrandantis ir įgyvendinantis veiksnys. Būtent tuomet tarpinė sritis, kurios negalime suvokti tuomet, kai tikrovę redukuojame į griežtą parmenidišką perskyrą tarp Būties ir Niekio, atskleidžia savo protėjišką pirmapradiškumą ir galią.

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?

Book Review of Dominic Pettman's "Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media" (Cambridge: Polity, 2016)

Full Reference:

'Pettman, Dominic, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2016', Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 63, 1 (2016), 75-77

I offer a translation, with commentary, of Odyssey 4.219-234. Noticing that her husband and the son of Odysseus have started weeping during a conversation, Helen of Troy surreptitiously throws a drug (pharmakon) into the wine they are drinking. This drug, made in Egypt, not only banishes grief, pain, and anger, but it also allows the conversation about Odysseus to continue. It prompts Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, to stop weeping, obtain a good night’s sleep, and be able to think more clearly about his situation. Helen thus performs what may be the first documented example of psychopharmacology combined with psychotherapy. Later writers, recalling this passage, often called the drug by the name nepenthe, memorialized, for many of us by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven.”

Homer’s Odyssey, in a passage relating Helen of Troy’s surreptitiously giving a drug to her husband and to Telemachus, appears to be a major source for William Shakespeare’s description in Othello (1603–4) of the handkerchief given to Desdemona, which ultimately leads to her murder. Othello’s handkerchief alludes to Helen of Troy’s drug, for example, through including the fact that it was dyed with “mummy,” a medical substance from Egypt, and through Othello’s lack of reaction to the death of his brother in battle. Shakespeare’s Othello is enriched by subtle allusions to Helen of Troy, Odysseus, Polyphemus, and the machinations and deceit of Ulysses in his earlier Troilus and Cressida.

" I will put none of these diseases upon Thee (…) for I am the Lord that healeth Thee". Christ  as a Pharmacist and Healer in Iconography and Literature of Late Mediavel and Early Modern Times [In:] The Apothecary’s Chest: Magic, Art and Medication, eds. Konstantina Georganta, Fabienne Collignon, Anne-Marie Millim, CSP, Newcastle upon Thyne 2009, pp. 107-118.


The aim of this paper is to briefly present the history of the motif of Christ as a physician and apothecary, to indicate its biblical sources and to study its development in the literature and iconography of medieval and early modern times.

In Arabic literature, fever has been the subject of several literary works including that of the Abbasid poet al-Mutanabbī to which he dedicated an entire poem. This essay argues that, far from being a mere poetic description, al-Mutanabbī’s fever structures the poetic narrative. The pathological and metaphorical structure of fever, which contains a narrative of illness and recovery, mimics a traditional bildungsroman or rite de passage narrative. However, al-Mutanabbī’s poem challenges the linearity of fever’s narrative and the duality of poison and cure. Drawing on a close reading of the poem, an etymology of ḥummā, and Derrida’s analysis of the pharmakon, a theoretical framework emerges through which fever is conceptualized as a mode of literary narration that is non-linear, erratic, and repetitious. This theoretical framework opens up new ways to read narrative in contemporary Lebanese Civil War fiction. In both Hudā Barakāt’s My Master and My Lover and Rashīd al-Ḍaʿīf’s The Tyrant fever is not only revealed as a liminal space, mediating between death and recovery, but also shown to permit momentary intervention where movement can be imagined and narrative can be generated. In this essay pre-modern and modern literature are read side-by-side, with a focus on the linguistic and philological threads that tie these bodies of literature together, while respecting their independent historical contexts.

This commentary considers efforts to turn psychedelics into medications that can be administered through healthcare systems as examples of "medicalization." I draw on ethnographic research both inside and outside of university-based clinical trials from 2014 to date, together with analogous examples from psychiatry and drug research and development. Rather than taking a normative stance on medicalization, I situate it in a wider political, economic, and cultural context to better understand its logics and effects. I begin by suggesting the resurgence of psychedelic science has been concerned with medicalization from the outset, recently prompting a crisis in the "psychedelics community" over its self-identity and values. Next, against the confident public messaging surrounding psychedelics, I consider how attempts to scale up and market psychedelic-assisted therapy could end up undermining the safety and efficacy of the therapy itself. I then outline the movements to decriminalize, legalize, and minimize the harms and risks of using psychedelics in their currently illicit therapeutic and recreational modalities. Finally, I explore how working toward psychedelic medicalization over the coming years may influence the movements toward decrimi-nalizing and legalizing psychedelics use, focusing on the underarticulated ways in which medicalization may disregard or even hinder, rather than help, decriminalization and legalization efforts. I call attention to how the cost of gaining approval for therapies incentivizes the development of diluted-yet-profitable forms of psychedelic-assisted treatments, and how frameworks developed for "proper use" demarcate what counts as "abuse" and enable those with newly sanctioned access to psychedelics to condemn afresh their illicit use.

Although Kingston only began to write in the mid-1970s, the spirit and aesthetic lessons of the counterculture and its specific and sacramental use of hallucinogens permeate her work like no other American writer of this period. Neither a wide-eyed promoter nor an uninformed skeptic, Kingston helps us see the complexity and richness of psychedelic experience in the 1960s counterculture. As the Liddel-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon has it, the word pharmakon can mean, in addition to “remedy,” “poison,” and “scapegoat,” also “a means of producing something.” In the 1960s, a whole generation undertook to produce something new through a deliberate course of dismantling the assumptions and perceptions they saw as rooted in their social conditioning. In their place, 1960s psychedelic experimenters sought to found a new, more gentle and more just society, one based on the boundary-blurring insights of LSD experience. A major landmark in the cultural history of the pharmakon, the counterculture built its philosophical, political and aesthetic practice around the ultimate psycheledic principle that “all is related to all.”

Abstract: The notion of pharmakon (remedy) does not only refers to any substance capable of causes harmony of health, healing, or even lethality, depending on the occasion (kairós) of its action or dosage. Words, spoken or written, are also capable of acting as a potent drug on the psyche, as proposed by Gorgias, in Helena's Praise. In this work, Gorgias establishes an analogy between language and remedies, approaching the fields of poetic and medical knowledge, to analyze the power of human language. Based on passages of the Hippocratic Corpus, the reflections developed in this article are the result of a mapping and investigation of the occurrences of pharmakon in ancient Greek medicine, with the purpose of analyzing the proximity between this ancient art and the philosophy practiced in Classical Greece.
Keywords: Philosophy; Ancient Greek Medicine; Pharmakon; Language

Resumo: A noção de phármakon (remédio) não diz respeito somente a qualquer substância capaz de provocar a harmonia da saúde, a cura, ou mesmo a letalidade, dependendo da ocasião (kairós) de sua ação ou de sua dosagem. As palavras, faladas ou escritas, também são capazes de agir como uma droga potente sobre a psiquê, tal como propõe Górgias, no Elogio de Helena. Nesta obra, Górgias estabelece uma analogia entre a linguagem e os remédios, aproximando os campos de saber poético e médico, para analisar a potência da linguagem humana. Norteadas por passagens do Corpus Hipocrático, as reflexões desenvolvidas neste artigo resultam de um trabalho de mapeamento e de investigação das ocorrências do phármakon na medicina grega antiga, com o propósito de analisar proximidades entre essa antiga arte e a filosofia praticada na Grécia Clássica.
Palavras-Chave: Filosofia; Medicina Grega Antiga; Phármakon; Linguagem.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between rhetorical and medical fields in Plato's dialogues through the lens of myth as a "useful remedy". For Plato myth is a middle way between truth and lie, as well as health and disease, justice and injustice, good and evil. In this way, it can have both an educational and a therapeutic function in the ideal city only after a "surgical" selection of the typical contents of traditional poetry. Plato also criticizes traditional rhetoric and medicine: while rhetorical persuasion is aimed only at itself, Hippocratic medicine is unqualified to be the highest techne because it deals only with the body and not with the soul, unlike philosophy. The rhetoric-medicine link gets more complicated considering the refoundation of a healthy mythology, as the myth of "noble lie" shows. The noble lie constitutes a necessary political remedy to preserve city health and aims to persuade rulers and citizens (regarded as patients) to have a common ancestry and different tasks to be undertaken within the city. However, in the last century, this complex intersection between rhetoric and medicine gave rise to mystifications and misunderstandings of Plato's intentions, as Popper and the following debate demonstrates.

This article takes Cigna-Santi and Mozart's opera Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770) as a case study for opera seria's engagement with French neoclassical spoken tragedy and the Enlightenment revisionist approach to tragic principles. Far from inheriting a stable source text, the opera adapts a highly contentious play – Jean Racine's 1673 tragedy Mithridate – which became the exemplar for Antoine Houdar de la Motte's contentious new genre of " prose tragedy " in the early eighteenth century. Against the large body of scholarship disparaging Mozart's relationship to his neoclassical predecessors, I argue that the operatic Mitridate undertakes targeted revisions to the original Racinian drama, and moreover that these modifications reflect a tragic theatre in flux rather than in decline.

As Bernard Stiegler claims in his piece “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema,” cinema is, in the Derridean sense, the pharmakon of being: both the poison and the cure. Holy Motors embodies this paradoxical role and effect, as a piece which allows the director, Leos Carax, to “impress as an expression and to express an impression at the same time;” that is, to represent a transitional state, both in form and in content.  In particular, the physical setting of Holy Motors remains liminal: the story itself is posited as a dream within a dream, as opposed to any recognizable concrete reality.

This paper represents a critical engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical and prescriptive exposition of the condition of existence within current Western ‘hyper-industrial’ societies. I contend that Stiegler’s oeuvre is permeated by a complicity with capitalist distinctions, practices and forms of exploitation, as he restricts agency and the possibility for social transformation to the Western middle-class. The argument is developed thus. I proceed by offering the reader, through a Stieglerian approach, an illustration of the pharmacological dimensions and aporetic effects of the digital news media upon memory, work and proletarianisation. I then identify Stiegler’s prescriptions and motivations for a deproletarianised future as being shadowed his depoliticised outlook, as he seeks to oppose consumerism, leaving capitalist and colonial social relations untouched. Finally, I highlight the ethnocentricity and classism which permeate Stiegler’s work, impeding possibilities for emancipatory politics.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR for short) is an online movement that has recently moved from peripheral freakiness to mainstream weird.

You know. Those videos of people, usually women, whispering sweet nothings into your ear whilst tapping on an exfoliating brush, going through painstaking efforts to make you feel relaxed. Many of you will probably think it strange or fetishistic — which it is, and also isn't. Hear me out.

The movement promises relief from anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other symptoms that are increasingly becoming more common to those living in late capitalist's risk society. I analyze ASMR as pharmakon (Bernard Stiegler), as being at once a cure and a poison. ASMR plays into the very crisis of care it promises relief from through the uncritical adoption of stereotypical caring roles, which perpetuates devalued feminized care labor, the participation in the highly lucrative (exploitative) self-help industry, which perpetuates the resilient subject (Sarah Bracke), as well as by playing into economy of attention through sh*t like commodity fetishism and IKEA... Dear Lord, IKEA..........

But the ever-growing popularity of ASMR indicates that there is a need for... what, exactly? We are currently living in an age of chronic crisis, in a society that is utterly devoid of care. In order to make care indispensable, the concept needs to be taken out of the gendered private. I question how the popularity of ASMR urges us to rethink our social contract on the basis of care ethics. What do concepts like care and protection mean in an age where social neglect has become the norm?

PS. Yes, the title is an ode to George Michael. I will love him forever.

Die Verdinglichung der Dinge – Der Beitrag des Rechts zur Autonomisierung der Mate-rialität The reification of things – Law's contribution to the autonomization of materiality Zusammenfassung: Über verschiedene soziologische Paradigmata hin-weg wird die moderne Gesellschaft charakterisiert durch Individualisie-rung, Bürokratisierung und funktionale Differenzierung. Dieser Beitrag geht von der These aus, dass die moderne Gesellschaft zusätzlich sich auszeichnet durch einen spezifischen, nämlich " verdinglichten " Materia-litätszugriff und fragt nach dem Beitrag des Rechts in dessen Genese. Im Sinne eines Forschungsstands wird zunächst aufgezeigt, wie Recht und Rechtssoziologie seit dem 19. Jahrhundert auf eine sich ändernde gesell-schaftliche Materialität reagieren. Um dem analytisch näher nachgehen zu können, wird vorgeschlagen, die Systemtheorie ausgehend vom frü-hen Sinnbegriff Luhmanns materialitätstheoretisch zu erweitern. Die Wirkung des Rechts in einer Verdinglichung der Materialität wird mit Hilfe dieses erweiterten Analyserahmens anhand zweier Fälle exemplifi-ziert, dem Pharmakon und der Terra. Es zeigt sich, dass und wie Materia-lität in beiden Fällen von konkreten persönlichen Interpretationen oder Garantieleistungen unabhängig fungibel wird. Abschließend werden mögliche Implikationen dieser gesellschaftstheoretischen Überlegungen etwa mit Blick auf Nachhaltigkeit diskutiert. Abstract: Across a variety of sociological paradigms, modern society is characterized by individualization, bureaucratization, and functional dif

Abstract: The article examines Polish translations of the Derridian term différance. Polish philosophical discourse uses the following renditions of différance: róż (ni (c) oś) ć by Bogdan Banasiak, różNICa by Tadeusz Sławek, gra-na-zwłokę-o-różnicę by Stanisław Cichowicz and the most popular: różnia by Joanna Skoczylas. Should a mistake be deliberately committed in Polish, as it was done in the original? Or should it be corrected, and if so–how to explain the correction?

Preserved in the archives of the National Historic Archive in Madrid, the life story of Catalina Muñ oz uncovers the ways in which she, as a triply marginalized subject-black, woman, and slave-obtained power and social clout by capitalizing on the fame she acquired because of her role as spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious community of Sanct Martín Church. This essay positions Catalina as an astute agent and spiritual advisor who navigated with savvy the intricacies of Valencia's sixteenth-century religious elite. In doing so, the article aims to reassign and parse Catalina's agency as a prophet. It is through the caveat of prophecy where Catalina obtains her power and position by capitalizing on the fame-often referred to as 'escá ndolo' ['scandal']-she acquired as a spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious communities.  (2019) 10, 36-49.

Through the example of the Portuguese poet Cesário Verde (1855–86), this article interrogates the relationship between the space of the nineteenth-century European capital city and the literary figure of the flâneur. Specifically, it considers in the first place the role of this aimless, noctambulist observer in a city (Lisbon) that differs in numerous ways from the better-studied locales of Paris and London. Second, it argues for an expansion of the understanding of the flâneur as passed down since Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire. Specifically, Cesário, owing both to his career as a physician and to his extremely understated, self-effacing poetic style, allows readers to glimpse the otherwise unnoticed psychological and physiological effects of the wandering, nocturnal observations that characterize the flâneur genre. Using Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, a drug that both cures and poisons, this article makes the case that the flâneur, rather than a potentially subversive optic for social observation, represents instead an unending, constraining and addictive practice that is dictated by the very social and technological forces that enable his noctambulism. In this light, the otherwise free-wheeling and plotless text of the flâneur can instead be read as a narrative of capture, confinement and obligation.

En los últimos años se ha extendido el léxico de lo tóxico. La palabra impregna una gran cantidad de situaciones, desplazándose desde los "desperdicios tóxicos" hasta las "relaciones tóxicas", desde las "sustancias tóxicas" a las "masculinidades tóxicas", desde los "ambientes laborales tóxicos" hasta las "políticas tóxicas". De hecho, toxic fue elegida por el diccionario Oxford la palabra inglesa más usada del año 2018. Pero la metáfora toxicológica se nos aparece, en sí misma, como tóxica: es tan contagiosa como ambivalente y requiere ser tratada con el cuidado con el que se tratan los residuos tóxicos.
Este ensayo, que es una investigación léxica sobre la metáfora de lo tóxico, muestra el parentesco de ésta metáfora con el phármakon antiguo. El phármakon no solo designaba al remedio y al veneno a la vez. También refería, metafóricamente, a la víctima sacrificial de los ritos griegos arcaicos. Trayendo este triple sentido al presente, nos preguntamos qué relación guarda la lógica de lo tóxico con la expulsión violenta de aquello que amenaza con contaminar las relaciones sociales. Para ello, recapitulamos la lógica de lo inmunitario y lo comunitario planteada por Roberto Esposito, poniéndola en relación con el doble movimiento de las sociedades de mercado descripto por Karl Polanyi, así como con el double bind pensado por Gregory Bateson.
La metáfora de lo tóxico nos ofrece una vía de acceso privilegiada para explorar el problema de la acumulación de desechos en las sociedades contemporáneas. Desde la agricultura a las finanzas, desde la relaciones éticas a las tecnologías cibernéticas, la omnipresencia de lo tóxico manifiesta la existencia de una crisis ecológica que abarca tanto a la naturaleza, a la sociedad y a la psique. En esta crisis de lo común, las montañas de basura se agolpan a las puertas de las ciudades, excediendo toda posibilidad de reciclaje. Pero lo tóxico, al dejar de poder ser localizado en sitios específicos, comienza a perturbar las ilusiones liberales de propiedad, seguridad e higiene, invadiendo todos los ámbitos de la sociedad.
Al final, y como epílogo, recapitulamos los temas tratados, relacionándolos con la crisis mundial del coronavirus, acaecida cuando estábamos terminando de escribir este ensayo.

THERAPEUTIC AESTHETICS focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of cognitive capitalism – for example, anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a collective and conflictual manner. Moving through a range of philosophers and theorists (Bernard Stiegler, Steven Shaviro, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, Lauren Berlant, Eva Illouz, and D.W. Winnicott, etc.), I propose that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, I use the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. In a pharmacological therapeutics, remedy and poison are not opposites but, as Stiegler determines, two poles in a passage between meanings. This approach enables me to maintain the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of conflict that may offer another kind of self-determination than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.

(http://liseuse.harmattan.fr/978-2-343-21975-2) Un grand corpus sur l'oeuvre de Derrida s'est accumulé depuis la parution de ses trois grands livres en 1967. Aujourd'hui, des ouvrages et des articles se focalisent sur des aspects différents de son oeuvre. Néanmoins, les recherches sur la question de la technique chez Derrida sont encore rares. Cet ouvrage vise à penser la question de la technique dans son rapport profond avec l'écriture. La pensée de Derrida ne permet pas la secondarisation de la technique par rapport à une prétendue originarité pré-technique. Elle ouvre une voie à repenser la technique au-delà de l'opposition nature/technique qui s'accompagne des oppositions telles que présence/non-présence, propre/impropre ou original/copie. Il s'agit d'une nouvelle pensée de la technique.

Despite its rapid proliferation over the past fifteen years, genocide and atrocity crimes prevention studies are often blinded by normative assumptions and conceptual blinder. This essay argues that any effort at prevention must begin with a first critical lesson, one revealed in the essay’s opening line and writing style. This first lesson suggests a path toward a more critical prevention studies, one involving critique, archeology, and pharmakon. In addition to discussing such conceptual bases for a critical prevention studies, this essay also models how literary strategies, ranging from narrative to poetic form, may help with such a critical endeavor, opening up spaces of reflection instead of closing them with too often dry and linear expository academic prose. Indeed, such openness and reflexivity – too rarely seen in the highly normative and prescriptive prevention literature -- is at the heart of this key first lesson for critical genocide prevention studies.

https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol13/iss3/11/

Hinton, Alexander L. (2019) "The First Lesson in Prevention," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 13: Iss. 3: 128-144.

By drawing on the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, the phenomena of mechanical (a.k.a. artificial, digital, or electronic) intelligence is explored in terms of its real significance as an ever-repeating threat of the reemergence of stupidity (as cowardice), which can be transformed into knowledge (pharmacological analysis of poisons and remedies) by practices of care, through the outlook of what researchers describe equivocally as "artificial stupidity", which has been identified as a new direction in the future of computer science and machine problem solving as well as a new difficulty to be overcome. I weave together of web of "artificial stupidity", which denotes the mechanic (1), the human (2), or the global (3). With regards to machine intelligence, artificial stupidity refers to: 1a) Weak A.I. or a rhetorical inversion of designating contemporary practices of narrow task-based procedures by algorithms in opposition to "True A.I."; 1b) the restriction or employment of constraints that weaken the effectiveness of A.I., which is to say a "dumbing-down" of A.I. by intentionally introducing mistakes by programmers for safety concerns and human interaction purposes; 1c) the failure of machines to perform designated tasks; 1d) a lack of a noetic capacity, which is a lack of moral and ethical discretion; 1e) a lack of causal reasoning (true intelligence) as opposed to statistical associative "curve fitting"; or 2) the phenomenon of increasing human "stupidity" or drive-based behaviors, which is considered as the degradation of human intelligence and/or "intelligent human behavior" through technics; and finally, 3) the global phenomenon of increasing entropy due to a black-box economy of closed systems and/or industry consolidation.

Bu sunumda yapay zeka meselesi teknoloji üzerine açılacak bir felsefi soruşturma güzergahı içinde ele alınacaktır. Yapay zekanın etkileri basit ve tek yanlı değildir, zira genel olarak teknoloji gibi yapay zeka da farmakondur, hem ilaç hem zehirdir. Yapay zekanın ilave/ikame (supplément) karakteri üzerine de düşüneceğimiz bu sunumda Jacques Derrida düşüncesi özel bir hareket noktası oluşturmaktadır.

Bernard leaves behind many orphans like me, in whom his personal and philosophical generosity helped cultivate a certain courage of truth. I am one of many to whom he gave philosophical wings, like the flying fish he used as a mascot for his School, École de philosophie d’Épineuil-le-fleuriel. These orphans, as was my case, were often from unphilosophical backgrounds and saw his writings, but also his backstory, as proof that we too, perhaps, could dare to think.

Głównym celem artykułu jest podjęcie refleksji nad problemem przekładu pojęcia "différence" Derridy na język polski. Błąd ortograficzny popełniony przez francuskiego filozofa może zostać przetłumaczony dwojako: rużnica/rórznica. Rozpoczynając od analizy powstałych dotychczas propozycji translatorskich (B. Banasiaka, T. Sławka, S. Cichowicza oraz J. Skoczylas) autor stara się podjąć namysł nad próbą oddania "différence" w języku polskim z właściwym jej błędem ortograficznym. Następnie zastanawia się, czy należy na gruncie rodzimej myśli poprawiać błąd celowo popełniony przez filozofa, a także czy jego korekta w tym przypadku jest w ogóle uzasadniona. Autor rozważa, jakie konsekwencje oraz perspektywy interpretacyjne mogłoby nieść ze sobą tłumaczenie (différance/différence) wysuwające na pierwszy plan iterację. Jednocześnie docieka, czy ten nietypowy, inny przekład współgra z takimi pojęciami Derridy jak "suplement", "farmakon", "clinamen", "odwleczenie", "rozsunięcie", "ślad", "rozplenianie". Propozycja, by ten kontrowersyjny termin Derridy tłumaczyć za pomocą polskiego nowo-tworu, neografizmu "rórznica", ma szansę według Autora stać się pomysłem niezwykle płodnym, pozwalającym na udaną krytykę logocentryzmu i fonocentryzmu i przede wszystkim otwierającym na wielość interpretacji.

Resumen: Nuestro trabajo se sitúa en el terreno de las discusiones contemporáneas sobre la normatividad del discurso filosófico, específicamente respecto de las tesis de Jacques Derrida sobre una cierta lógica suplementaria. Dicha cuestión se abordará a partir de su lectura del texto platónico, suscitada por la imponente presencia de una polémica que marcó el devenir de la filosofía en la Grecia clásica, y cuya intensidad contenciosa se expandió por todo el mundo y la historia de occidente: el enfrentamiento entre dialéctica y retórica, dentro de los márgenes del discurso filosófico. El siguiente trabajo expone de modo esquemático el paralelo entre las concepciones sofísticas y las platónicas respecto de la retórica y la dialéctica, en torno al carácter persuasivo de ambas, a partir de la noción de phármakon-droga-vocablo de equívoca significación utilizada en algunos textos de Gorgias (Tratado del no-ente y el Encomio a Helena) y otros de Platón (Fedro, Gorgias, El sofista, entre otros). Se espera probar mediante este paralelo que, aun cuando dialéctica platónica y retórica sofística parecen opuestos irreconciliables, hay una cierta comunicabilidad entre ellos, lo que permite desestabilizar dicha división y jerarquía. A partir de aquí, la cuestión será esbozar, siguiendo los análisis de J. Derrida, cómo esta la retórica de la droga en cuanto "retórica de la retórica" tiene cierto rendimiento político, pues permite pensar lo retórico como suplemento

From Leif Randt’s collective drugs in “Planet Magnon” (2015), Neill Blomkamp’s dystopian phantasmagoria on viral infections and immune responses in “District 9” (2009) to Dietmar Dath’s transgenic microorganisms in „The Abolition of Species“ (2008), contemporary science fiction is seething with genetically modified materials, barely visible, non-human agents and poisonous, precarious substances. We are constantly made aware that the ’pharmakeia’ in contemporary science fiction are not marginal, but minoritarian. They occupy a strategically important place and help to generate the fantastic worlds and subjects in which they circulate. They infect and control both singular and collective bodies and, in doing so, inevitably set the stage for far-reaching bio-political and, more important, pharmaco-political questions: How do potent and non-potent substances govern today’s bodies? How are poisons and remedies being used? What are their effects and side-effects that in turn constitute or devastate the world? What forces and opposing become mobilized?

The presentation’s launching pad is the inference that our bio-technological circumstances are reflected or impregnated in these and many other fictions of the future. Contemporary science fiction describes trans or even post-human bodies that no longer function as self-contained and fixed entities, but instead as sensitive and flexible codes with permeable borders, able to be programmed and reprogrammed through biotechnology and moreover pharmacology, and to which we can prescribe value.

As a result, literary, filmic and artistic expression takes on both a symptomatic as well as a diagnostic quality. As part of the social sphere – that is to say, as that, which Castoriadis classifies as the ”collective imaginary“ –, the aesthetic expression of this ”collective imaginary“ is not only representative, but can only be dealt with or rendered discursive through artistic means and anticipated or conceptualized with in the light of a still unknown future.

In this sense, the lecture attempts to trace two perspectives inherent to ”pharmakos.” The first perspective touches on the topoi of the bio-political. Particularly in light of Foucault, the question then arises as to how the governance of life is organized, produced and lead by precarious substances. The second perspective has a bearing on the field of fiction, imagination, and aesthetic practice. It asks how we respond to the bio-technological developments of the present and to the ensuing power effect through a different, poetic practice, that like an aesthetic anti-laboratory can serve to create matter and bodies. In the works of Paul B. Preciado – the Spanish philosopher and queer-theorist who connects pharmaco-political analysis with the practices of intoxicating himself with testosterone for one year –, these two perspectives become interwoven.

Este curso propone un acercamiento a algunos temas medievales tratados por el recientemente fallecido polígrafo italiano, para, con ello, intentar de precisar cuál era la Edad Media que él concebía y su relación con el mundo y la literatura actuales. (Todos los jueves de agosto, 18-20 hrs. Biblioteca Central Estatal “Wigberto Jiménez”, León, Gto., México).