The Pharmakon
Origin: Plato (Phaedrus), via Derrida and Bernard Stiegler
Definition
Pharmakon is a Greek word meaning both the remedy and the poison. In the Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the Egyptian myth of the invention of writing: the god Theuth presents it as a remedy for memory, but Thamous, king of the Egyptian gods, responds that it is a poison, because it dispenses with the effort of memorization and substitutes a semblance of knowledge for real knowledge. Writing is neither good nor bad in itself: it is both simultaneously and inseparably.
Derrida and then Stiegler take up and generalize this concept: all technology is constitutively ambivalent. It can neither be condemned wholesale nor adopted without examination. It always produces, at the same time, contrary effects whose balance depends on the conditions of use, the milieu in which it is embedded, and the collective choices that orient its deployment.
In my writings
The pharmakon is the cornerstone of my reading of generative AI. Generative AI is a pharmakon of modern times: it frees cognitive time while threatening the formation of knowledge; it increases the speed of access to information while reducing the need to activate one’s own retentions. It promises the augmentation of capacities while operating a progressive dispossession of know-how.
This ambivalence prohibits any binary position. Neither technophilia (which ignores the poison) nor technophobia (which refuses the remedy) can adequately think what is happening. The pharmakon demands a permanent pharmacology: a critical attention to the conditions under which the tool becomes remedy rather than poison, and a vigilance about what one delegates and what one retains.
This is also why the “therapeutic practices” I describe are responses to the pharmakon, not definitive remedies.
Articles where this term is used
- AI is a transformation
- Ethics and compliance. Beyond the hype.
- Knowing without doing. Doing without knowing.
- Grammatize and observe.
- Phenomenology of a practice with generative AI (2026)