In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Seguidvuestro Jefe: The Polemic Supplement and the Pharmacotic Presidency
  • Larry N. George (bio)

“I hate irony!”

“Theodore Roosevelt” quoted in Gore Vidal, Empire. 1

Pharmakon and Polemic Supplement

What will we call the symptom that has turned twentieth-century American presidents into enemies of irony (and of its political homologues contingency, heterodoxia, and agonistic pluralism)? This essay will suggest that this symptom is something that exudes from war, that supplements war in ways that presidents have learned to exploit in order to protect their presidencies from the escalating problems attending the postmodernization of American politics. I will call it the polemic supplement, and will show how it serves as the characteristic pharmakon of the postmodernizing American presidency. The essay will explore how twentieth-century presidents have increasingly come to depend on this pharmakon - in ways simultaneously advantageous and perilous for their presidencies and for the country — giving rise to what I call the pharmacotic presidency. It will then trace the evolution of this pharmacotic presidency across the century, through a brief genealogy of the political effects of the polemic supplement from the McKinley presidency through the Bush and Clinton administrations.

Derrida has surveyed some of the ways that the family of modern European words etymologically descended from the ancient Greek root ‘pharmakon’ disclose a variety of interesting political relations. By analytically reversing the genealogical descent of these terms, he discloses an originary structure of (what appear to us to be paradoxical or contradictory) meanings held together by the pharmakon. Among the more intriguing affiliations of meaning that gathered around the original Greek word (and the related terms ‘pharmakos’ and ‘pharmakeus’) included those of medicine, remedy, seducer, magician, sacrificial victim, magic charm, and text for interpretation, as well as “a means of deliverance, a way toward salvation, a cathartic power”. 2 The pharmakon can also refer to “an attack of demoniac possession” or a curative against such an attack; an “armed enforcement of order”, “a planned (or failed) overthrow”, or a coup d’etat. The pharmakon can be an “anxiogenic” and a tranquilizer, and, finally, an addictive narcotic and poison. 3 An exploration of the ways that this cluster of meanings is held in place by what Derrida calls “the strange logic” of the pharmakon 4 illustrates how techniques of deconstruction can disclose otherwise obscure aspects of political phenomena, in this case the increasingly pharmacotic structure of the American presidency.

The pharmacotic presidency is entrapped within a political structure that has the form of an addiction. It both draws power from, and is increasingly dependent upon, a thanatotic form of what Derrida elsewhere calls “supplementarity”: the way that efforts to represent or simulate, and thereby control, the meanings of objects of desire simultaneously substitute for the satisfaction of that desire and exclude the possibility of the unity and the presence (the unmediated reality) of the desired object itself. 5 In Derrida’s account, this supplement performs for Rousseau an erotic function in both writing (and the process of simulation generally), and more obviously during masturbation, by generating libidinal energy whose satisfaction remains dependent on the supplement itself - i.e. on the very unattainability of the unity and completion of identity promised by the simulated object of desire.

In this paper, I link this notion of supplementarity to another term of more recent interest to Derrida, — “polemic” — in order to disclose an obverse, hitherto largely ignored thanatotic dimension of the danger posed by the supplement. “Polemic” here refers simultaneously to war, to civil and political strife, and to the process of differentiation itself. 6 The term “polemic supplement,” then, is intended to suggest among other things the surplus meanings, patriotic enthusiasms, social catharses, political capital, and political dangers that accompany heroic war spectacles. Over the course of the 20 th century, this thanatotic or polemic supplement becomes simultaneously a remedy, addiction, and poison for the pharmacotic presidency - a seductive, evanescent simulation of a solution to the chronic problems facing the presidency, but one which exceeds the capacity of presidents and other political elites to control, regulate, or subordinate entirely to their purposes. It is analogous in this way to the supplementarity generated in auto-eroticism by the fantasy simulation and domination of...

Share