Thoroughly postmodern Pynchon

[Terrance]

Actually, it's a bit more linguistic theory than logic.
Can't be philosophy, because philosophy is dead. Isn't
he/she? And Doug, being a tri-lingual individual, a very
complex set--French, English, Chinese--Mandarin, knows quite
a lot about it. 
Perhaps, I should not speak for him, but... in that Platonic
sense, recall the slave boy who knows geometry because his
soul is immortal, and perhaps even more so  in the sense of
down to earth pragmatism, Dixon,   his suspicion of
"language"  that is a meta-language, grammars and so forth,
and theories, lest we forget, these are theories, 
may be attributed to his practical use of words.   

"Just a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine/poison go
down. The remedy go down boys, the poison go down.  

Please see, first Plato and then and only then Derrida, Ha!
Ha! 
And I will have to check out that book on Poe, Lancan,
Derrida et al. 


The word, here rendered as "remedy" is in the original
"phármakon," which the lexicons define as alternatively a
curative medicine, or a poison. Indeed, the two meanings are
preserved in two Modern Greek cognate words: phármakon now
means medicine alone, while the verb pharmakóno is to
poison. 



Now according to Derrida, this apparent ambiguity renders
the meaning of the word "undecidable."  Let us have a look.  
First, within the context, "phármakon" clearly carries its
positive meaning,
right? Why would Theuth attempt to persuade the king by
offering him a poison? 



 As a "Player", he realizes the folly of this
one, but he wants to argue that the other opposed meaning
insinuates itself upon the intended meaning. Suppose we
examine the word's use in the language to settle this
Meaningful question? 

And,  what if the apparent double-meaning is not a binary
opposition operating solely
within a closed linguistic system?  

Isn't pharmakon linked to features of
the extra-linguistic material world? 


It was Paracelsus who said it, long before Derrida and even
before Plato, "it depends only upon the amount whether a
poison is poisonous or not." 

So much for  a Saussurean semantic opposition within a
single signifier What we are playing with is only a common
folk way: a small dose may Remedy, while a large dose will
poison.

    There was a king reigned in the East:
    There, when kings will sit to feast,
    They get their fill before they think
    With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
    He gathered all the springs to birth
    From the many-venomed earth;
    First a little, thence to more,
    He sampled all her killing store;
    And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
    Sate the king when healths went round.
    They put arsenic in his meat
    And stared aghast to watch him eat;
    They poured strychnine in his cup
    And shook to see him drink it up:
    They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
    Them it was their poison hurt.
    --I tell the tale that I heard told.
    Mithridates, he died old.

A. E. Housman

Terence this is stupid
.