Dialectical oppositions of pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus

Abstract

Taking as the starting point the ambiguity contained in the pharmakonmetaphor associated with writing in Plato's Phaedrus, in this article we aim at examining the contexts in which this word appears in this dialogue. Our goal is to understand the use of the pharmacological metaphor for the determination of writing, and how the different oppositions that it engenders collaborate to understand the dialectical movement itself. By means of explaining these oppositions, we intend to show how the written words in Plato are permanently subject to a renversementof meanings, and that the fruit of these disassociations and congruences is the very exemplification of  dialectics itself. For this, we also consider Derrida's (2004 [1972]) reading of the passage, but we transcend it in that, when we consider the different dialectical oppositions contained in the dialogue, we do not recognise any centrality given to writing (or to orality) as an effect of the Platonic pharmakon.