Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

94Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsonce the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility oftruth.” 58The opposition between speech and writing is thus open for deconstruction;speech is not really the autonomous primary term that writing istrying to reproduce, but, instead, we have here two kinds of writing. The legitimateone (speech) is good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible,internal, speaking), and stands linked by its opposition to its other(the written text) that is bad – “moribund, ignorant, external, mute artificefor the senses,” as Derrida lists. 59 Furthermore, there exists a Greek termetymologically closely related to pharmakon – pharmakos – that Derrida employsin his reading. Pharmakos has been compared to a scapegoat; it wasused of “wizards, magicians, poisoners,” but also of sacrificial victims thatwere ceremoniously driven outside the city, fustigated (aiming at their genitalorgans), and sometimes killed to purify the city. This old ceremony wascarried out when a great calamity, like famine or pestilence, threatened thecity. As a ceremony of purification, it took place at the boundary limitingcity from the threatening other; it addresses the internal/external divisionand casts the unlucky pharmakos into the role of evil, “both introjected andprojected.” 60 The working of boundaries had a cathartic and calming role, asit addressed those elements of the collective self (the city) that could be thecause of alarm; Derrida suggests that the logos of Socrates operated analogously.He is called affectionately pharmakeus in Platonic dialogues: a wizardand master of words which have surprising and unsettling consequences, asmuch as they have curative or reassuring power. 61 Reason is therefore itself asort of pharmakon, an ambiguous kind of cure (exorcism) as it is simultaneouslyalso taking part in the demonic aspects of language it tries to deliver usfrom. “The demonic speech of this thaumaturge [Socrates] (en)trails the listenerin dionysian frenzy and philosophic mania […].” 62 Socratic/Platonicreason, therefore, denounces writing defensively; writing is cast in the roleof pharmakos and it is identified with the “evil” aspects of language, but actuallyphilosophic reason can never purify itself from its other completely.“The expulsion of the evil or madness restores sôphrosunê [wisdom],” 63 butit has to be repeated again and again. Derrida notes that the ritual of pharmakoswas reproduced every year in Athens, up through the fifth century. 64Derrida’s reading is remarkable, but it is also decisively one-sided: hestrategically refuses to recognise and read the integrative, or healing dimensionof Socratic text. 65 Nevertheless, I maintain that these two moments are58 Ibid., 168.59 Ibid., 149.60 Ibid., 133.61Ibid., 134.62 Ibid., 118. Derrida’s reference is to the Symposium, 218b.63 Ibid., 133.64Ibid., 134.65 Derrida can hardly be out-smarted as a textual reader of Plato, and this is not in myinterests here. The question is rather of giving several elements in the dialogue an empha-