The Pharmakon: Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice ed. by Hermann Herlinghaus

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Reviewed by: The Pharmakon: Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice ed. by Hermann Herlinghaus Laurence M. V. Totelin Hermann Herlinghaus, ed. The Pharmakon: Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2018. viii + 392 pp. €38.00 (978-3-8253-6740-4). The ancient Greek word pharmakon has three main meanings: that of healing drug, that of poison, and that of magic potion. Since the third meaning is relatively close to that of "poison," one can say, together with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that pharmakon is a dipole concept. Its two poles, however, cannot be construed simply in terms of bad and good; the Greeks did not conceive of the pharmakon in a moralizing, dogmatic way. This volume takes the Greek notion of pharmakon as a way of entry into a reflection on the complexities of the "pharmacological imagination," a reflection that avoids the simplistic logic of good versus bad. It aims to challenge and problematize a narrow understanding of the notion of "drug"—a narrow "pharmacologicalism"—where drugs are reduced to their bio- and neurochemical effects, and where their use is classified as good (under medical supervision, controlled) or bad (addiction). Instead, the notion of "drug" must be contextualized and historicized, its appearances in literature and philosophy must be analyzed. In the opening chapter Mike Jay demonstrates that the pejorative meaning of "drug" as an illegal psychoactive substance is relatively new. He shows that the concept was codified in law only in the twentieth century, starting with the [End Page 453] Hague International Opium Conference in 1912 and culminating with the 1961 UN Single Convention on Drugs, where drug addiction was termed an "evil." Very soon, however, with the rise of the counterculture, the consensus around "bad" drugs began to fracture. The pharmakon always resists simplistic moralizing conceptualizations. There follow thirteen varied and thought-provoking chapters, exploring themes as diverse as the north-south and transatlantic dynamics in the conceptualization of tobacco (Hermann Herlinghaus and Arne Romanowski); the Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston as a voice of the 1960s counterculture (Agniezka Soltysik Monnet); narratives of courtly love written in the twelfth century (Cornelia Wild); the theme of intoxication in the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire's work (Diemo Landgraf); and the nineteenth-century experimental project with hashish conducted by the French psychiatrist Moreau de Tours (Katrin Solhdju). Like the pharmakon, the volume cannot be easily summarized and classified. The four sections into which Herlinghaus divided the essays (renarrations into the twentieth century; hemispheric scenarios—cultural explorations; aesthetics and poetology; interfaces) are relatively loose and flow into each other in a fruitful way—rigidity would be counterproductive here. A personal highlight was the chapter "Promise and Deceit: Pharmakos, Drug Replacement Therapy, and the Perils of Experience" by Todd Meyers (which had been previously published in Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 38 [2014]). Here the author explores the lies he dealt with in his anthropological fieldwork among adolescents abusing heroin, with a focus on the touching story of "Megan" and "Cedric." Meyers argues that the Greek notion of pharmakos, the scapegoat that cleansed a city of its evil, is good to think with when studying addict-patients. He movingly writes "the pharmakos-pharmakon (pharmakeus) is a lie told in order to make the act of healing possible. And the patient-subject is, by necessity, ruined" (p. 334). Plato's Phaedrus and Derrida's "La pharmacie de Platon" (1972) quite naturally play a prominent role in this collection of essays. Martin Treml offers a good chapter on the topic of the pharmakon in ancient Greek traditions. The volume, however, could perhaps have included more on the ancient world. At times, authors appeared to derive their knowledge of the Phaedrus mostly from Michael Rinella's Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens (2010)—there is a wealth of other scholarship on the topic. Nor did the editor settle for a single spelling of "Phaedrus" and other frequently mentioned Greek names. But it is perhaps facile for a historian of ancient medicine to pick on such small points. Generally, I found the volume engaging and stimulating. I particularly enjoyed seeing the theme of love as a drug emerge in several...