Pharmakon

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.

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.

In Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee, the title character, a twelve-year-old girl, entered the white, cube-like space in which I waited with a dozen more people. She explained she was part of a tradition of Ann Lee characters that/who were animated through different media and asked us two questions: ‘What’s the difference between a sign and melancholia?’ and ‘Would you rather be too busy or not busy enough?’. Her utterances and demeanour were entirely strange. In this article, I suggest that the two questions are the crux of the work and reveal Ann Lee as the subject par excellence of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. I begin by looking at the history of the work and drawing out the connections between animism, animation, and capitalism. Following a close examination of the questions, I propose they point to the melancholy of our times: the first reveals a subject that suffers emotionally because it no longer knows how to ‘do the social’ and does not ‘feel at home’, but instead feels constantly displaced, audited and measured, while the second, as a supplement to the first, expresses its suffering that arises from the imposition of precarity and unmanageable workloads. I argue that the questions and the work as a whole point to the manner in which the contemporary subject is animated by the pathologies of our time, which are consequences of capitalism’s acceleration, overproduction of signs, precarity, and appropriation of animism as a resource for the economization of social relations. Following a consideration of proposed pharmaca – in the curative sense of the word – for this predicament, I question the potential pharmacological role of animism and suggest that Sehgal’s Ann Lee has the capacity to animate us by setting in motion the ‘soul’, again, by allowing us to imagine, dream, and desire a world beyond the present.

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.

A partir do conceito grego de pharmakon, que unifica o uso de uma substância medicamentosa às orientações gerais do tratamento dadas pelo médico, explora-se como melhorar a adesão e os resultados dos tratamentos psicofarmacológicos. Com base em uma retórica derivada da antiga ars medica e a partir das transferências iniciais na relação médico-paciente, busca-se um vínculo com o paciente que propicie uma aliança terapêutica, melhorando assim a eficácia da farmacoterapia psiquiátrica.

(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.

Few observers of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe have noted that the power relations it laid bare between debtor countries and their creditors stemmed from the very nature of money itself. This chapter considers money’s status as a social institution from the point of view of the democratic values of liberty and equality. Building on Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s critiques of money’s alleged neutrality as a simple appendage of market exchange, the chapter establishes that money constitutes a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon. Money’s myth of origin in barter, and its actual relation to debt, warrant a comparison with the gift, this primitive form of exchange whose potential toxicity was pointedly noted by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. Following the latter’s analysis of the “pharmakon,” the chapter concludes by sketching out how monetary reform could foster collective autonomy.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?