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Showing posts from September, 2020

Supplement, excess and the other

Discussing in my class today the gestures of Derrida in the Pharmacy of Plato ( La dissémination ). The pharmakon creates a logic that differs from the logic of presence (ousia), a logic of the writing, of supplement. The supplement is an addition - that as a scapegoat (pharmakos) promotes an addiction as it brings about a non-preexisting incompleteness - and as such an excess. In order to preserve and restore the eidos, the presence, one needs to add something like the logos or the writing which acts like a pharmakon, the words Socrates repeatedly uses when refering to written texts in the Phaedrus. The pharmakon is a supplement that at the same time enables the accummulation of excess - the supplement is at the same time excess and a plattform to consign excess so that it can be accummulated. (Thinking this with Bataille, we can consider how accummulation has a price and a risk - that of the pharamkon of writing - and also the price and the risk of the introduction of money as a