Cast into the Abyss with Pharmacia's Friend

As Socrates and Phaedrus walk to the cool place under the trees so that they can begin their now famous dialogue, the topic of Pharmacia and Oreithyia is evoked. Phaedrus asks Socrates if they are near the spot where the two girls played before the north wind – Boreas – blew Oreithyia to her death on the rocks below. Socrates isn't so sure and even goes on to doubt the entire story. All of this seems to be a sort of detached preface to what is to follow, and much of Phaedrus deals with other matters. And yet Pharmacia continues to haunt the dialogues and speeches that ensue, for in her name we find the recurring motif of the pharmakon.

Throughout Phaedrus the word pharmakon slides with all its polysemic qualities. It denotes in Greek both poison and cure, as well as drug, recipe, and remedy. As such, pharmakon is that which inflicts addiction and yet also promises release. As Jacques Derrida puts it: ‘This type of painful pleasure, linked as much to the malady as to its treatment, is a pharmakon in itself. It partakes of both good and of ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable. Or rather it is within its mass that these oppositions are able to sketch themselves out.’ This, we argue here, is the quality of the pharmakon that allows the sense of apocalypse to exist.