Auerbach’s Wine-Cellar in Leipzig

Harmony of the Pharmakon and Addictive Etymologies

SIEBEL. Now take a deep breath and roar out a chorus 
in praise of the grape oh jolly Bacchus.
Come, all together with a rollicking round-o!

ALTMAYER. Stop, stop, man, I’m wounded, someone fetch me some cotton,
the terrible fellow has burst me an eardrum!

Siebel’s exclamation of joy in the form of song becomes the opposite of music to Altmayer: noise. One man’s treasure, another man’s trash. Siebel’s noisy rendering of joy far from negates the revelry, but further stokes it, creating an energetical valence that propels this chapter of Faust into the next. Any good song is necessarily a pharmakon. 

Pharmakon translates to both panacea and poison. These are not two distinct meanings, but rather, the doubleness of its translation is the meaning of the word itself. In postmodern thought, the term has come to communicate the inefficacy of language, its ability to always mean the opposite of itself - but our notion of a word’s self is itself elusive. If the meaning of a word were fixed, if a word meant in of itself, its meaning would be rendered nothing at all. It would be a mimetic fakery, an idol idling time.

A word’s double valence can be its meaning insofar as meaning is constituted by the life of a word. A life is nothing other than a story, a journey through time, in which the actor is propelled by forces opposing it, consuming and ultimately becoming those opposite forces, becoming its own opposite in an effort to become a “new” and transcendent ideal. Words; ideas; the history of. 

A life, however, is not just any story - the word’s capacity for meaning is that it propagates its own. Some words survive as renewable energy, and others perish in rust. There are in fact entire languages that were never written down, some languages that we will never know. So in using a word meaningfully, it becomes a story which is presently happening. When we write, we are always continuing a story that was previously believed to have ended. Goethe’s eulogy of the enlightenment is as much a continuation of it as Nietszche’s proclamation of god’s death was just passing a Promethean torch into the hands of a new god. These utterances which were so shocking then are now taken for granted, are now sublated into the contemporary story. Nothing really ends, but you, the descendent of a story, already know this. With every apocalypse a new revelation; an old uncovering. 

The history of valence is therefore the history of noise. It is necessary that any music, however harmonious, can be equally conceived of as noise. To burst out in song in a dark movie theater is equally disturbing as yelling FIRE. This is the history of language as pharmakon, as idol, as god’s shadow self, as the devil, Faust’s toxic friend and life-giving foe. The devil is himself in that he contains contradictory multitudes: he is man and beast, angel and specter, the antidote to boredom that is poisonous to rationality. And yet, he is so intelligent, well-read, and cunning. Much like the artist, the devil turns whatever he consumes into toxic waste, equally repulsive and intriguing. 

While the rational one might frown on Mephistopheles’ chasing of his addictions, it is his acknowledgement of them that makes him more than his addictions, more than the sum of his parts. To acknowledge one’s addictions is to acknowledge that one can never satisfy them, and in this way, to admit powerlessness is to ascend to spiritual power. Addiction is its own fire, lit by its own prurient existence, by the movement of its own wax and wane, each phase garnering the opposite. The devil knows that any attempts to put out the fire only make it burn greater. We become addicted to the meaning of words, cling to an arboritic etymology which attempts to render the experience of language singular, that which attempts to end the life of a word by locating it on a point of a linear story. This is an impossible condition to cure, one that we can only acknowledge. If nothing else, this is poetry: when we choose to acknowledge the power language has over us, to accede to the consumptive energy of that fire, apocalyptic and elliptical. 

Uncovered: an unturnable condition.