Derrida - Plato's Pharmacy

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According to Derrida, that it is not used by Plato does not indicate that the word is necessarily absent, or rather, it is always-already present as a ‘trace’. Certain forces, tendencies of linguistic association unite the words that are ‘actually present’ in a text with all the other words in the lexical system, whether or not they appear as words in such text. Derrida points out that the textual chain is not simply ‘internal’ to Plato’s lexicon. It is possible for one to claim that all the ‘pharmaceutical’ [another] words do actually make themselves present in the text, although always hidden at the back, always showing stealth. ‘It is in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions between conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech and language, that these textual ‘operations’ occur’.[7] What is in stake here is the very idea of the inside/outside dichotomy; if the word pharmakos that Plato does not use still resonates within the text, then there can be no possibility of closure as far as a text is concerned. If the outside is always-already part of the inside, at work on the inside, then what is the status of the concepts ‘present’ and ‘absent’, ‘body’ and ‘soul’, ‘center’ and ‘periphery’? However, it is important to remember that Derrida classifies pharmakos as something ‘in the back room’; in other words, ‘outside’ present in ‘inside’ never becomes a pure presence, but remains hidden as a ‘trace’, a hint, an ‘aporia’. Through his dogged insistence in this, he avoids the trap of what he called “Metaphysics of Pure Presence”, or ‘Logocentrism’.[8] Ignoring this would put the whole Deconstructive project of Derrida in terrible jeopardy. A student of Plato has just finished reading the Phaedrus. In contemplating Socrates's overall argument and especially the work's epilogue--in which Socrates
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