Abstract:

In this study, based on Derrida's reading of Plato, the concept of pharmakon is discussed within the framework of literary theory and on the relationship between information theory and entropy; on the one hand, the entropic potential of literature, on the other hand, its negentropic possibilities are tried to be revealed. Derrida deconstructs the texts of Plato, which excludes writing opposing speech and argues that writing, as a bad copy of speech and as a poison, weakens memory. He re-reads the pharmakon, which he extracts different and opposite meanings of it from these texts, in such a way that contains poison and remedy meaning at the same time and its value cannot be decided. Writing is also a pharmakon in this sense. Besides, the pharmakon in the writing remains implicitly hidden for a long time under the pressure of external meaning impositions as a continuation of the Platonic tradition. At a historical moment when writing has severed its Platonic connection, its function is no longer to substitute speech, and its message is directed toward itself, the pharmakon is revealed. At this moment, on the one hand, literature has the potential for a total liaison which opens from the inside to the outside by canonization with mother tongue in process of nation-building. On the other hand, it opens infinite singular liaison possibility with minor literature which comes out from mother tongue and challenges canon formally by deterritorializating language. This possibility tends to being minor by excluding the “anxiety of influence” and it is attached to a collective value in that it transforms the smallest private issue into the biggest problem of society by making it public. However, in this study, it is argued that this pharmacological ground where mother tongue and minor literature encounter can be built on the entropic-negentropic contexts located at the intersection of thermodynamics, information theory and philosophy; not on the ethical contexts of pharmakon such as poison or remedy, as inherited from Ancient Greek.