Week 9 Blogging Question!

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The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia (1801 painting by Nicolas-André Monsiau)

Thanks for an amazing class! Your responses to the blood bot's latest tweet highlighted with your usual lucidity and perspicacity myriad phono-centric, logocentric and pharmacological elements in Jacques-Louis David's eighteenth century neoclassical painting.

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787, oil on canvas)

Your insights regarding how Socrates' drinking of the hemlock might constitute at once a submission to the law and an act of resistance to it were, moreover, thoroughly in tune with Derrida's attentiveness to the ambiguities, contradictions and undecidable aspects of texts, works of art and other human creations.

Egyptian hieroglyphs on a stela in the Louvre (circa 1321 BCE)

I hope my review of the emergence of writing as a fundamental technological development in the history of our species helped to give some wider archaeological and anthropological context to the Egyptian myth of writing's invention recounted by Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus.

Thoth (Theuth) on Papyrus (circa 1250 BCE) in the British Museum
 
As we discussed in class, Derrida underscores the double-meaning of the Greek word pharmakon in his project of deconstructing phono-centric and logocentric metaphysical binaries such as those favouring speech over writing, presence over absence, original over copy, reality over appearance, nature over artifice, and signified over signifier. I'm hoping we can continue to draw inspiration from these ideas as we delve more deeply into the question of religion in the coming weeks.

Saint Jerome Writing in his Study (by Caravaggio, circa 1605 - 1606)

For this week's blogging assignment, I'd like you to identify and describe a religious phenomenon (it can be the same one you analyzed for your week 8 blog, or a different one) or a technology. Let me know how your chosen phenomenon might exhibit pharmacological dimensions. Does it have facets, presuppositions and/or implications which could be understood to be (simultaneously or successively) both beneficial (curative) and harmful (poisonous) to the people with whom it is entwined?

As always, if you prefer, please feel free to articulate one question which arose for you in relation to this week's reading, lecture and/or tutorial.

I look forward to learning from your blogs!