Pharmakos

Well, here’s an interesting coincidence (pointed to by Derrida, still in “Plato’s Pharmacy”): Derrida is discussing the ritual of the pharmakos , which he is connecting to Plato’s various uses of pharmak – words in discussions of knowledge, language, and other issues. The pharmakos rite was a scapegoat ritual, annually repeated in Athens into the time of Plato, in which victims were sacrificed and sometimes burned outside the city walls in order to purify the city. Derrida talks about this as the very origin of the difference of intra muros and extra muros . Then the coincidence: “the date of the ceremony is noteworthy: the sixth day of the Thargelia. That was the day of the birth of hm whose death ?Eand not only because a pharmakon was its direct cause ?Eresembles that of a pharmakos from the inside: Socrates.” It is as if Jesus had been born on the Day of Atonement. The two founding deaths of Western civilization, which I have commented on in a recent article in First Things (which was largely a summary of Hamann’s account of Socrates), are uncannily similar ?Ewhile yet utterly different.