On Pharmacotic War

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

“…The theory of pharmacotic war was originally proposed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to account for the relation between foreign wars and the internal ontopolitical dynamics then unfolding within the USA. It does so by exploring how political order and the political relations among internal groups and subjects are reconstituted before, during, and after wars through: (1) the targeted demonization and scapegoating of subaltern groups; (2) the normative social and political reconstruction, reframing, and redefinition of moral categories, and of related norms and standards of innocence, guilt, and responsibility that coalesce affectively around relations of sacrifice, victimization, and culpability generated through various kinds and forms of sacrificial political violence; and (3) processes of interpellation and subjectification productive of new, reconstructed/reconstituted individual and collective moral and political subjects (Debrix and Lacy, 2009: 34–53; George, 2002, 2003, 2005).…”

“…The term ‘pharmacotic’ is derived from the etymologically related ancient Greek words pharmakos – the victim in a purification ceremony involving ritualized human sacrificial expulsion from the community – and pharmakon , which meant both ‘medicine’ and ‘poison’, as well as ‘addictive narcotic, hallucinogenic substance’, ‘magic potion’, and what would now be called a performance-enhancing drug (George, 2003: 150). The political and philosophical implications of these complex semantic relations are explored in Derrida’s ([1972] 2016) essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, which traces the paradoxical, ambiguous, and ultimately invidious societal effects of pharmacotic rituals performed as a mode of exorcism aimed at the (re)instantiation of the logos .…”

“…While we do not claim a linear or causal history, we argue that illustrative resonances are perceptible in the ongoing logic of ritual sacrifice that help make sense of the present:The persistence of pharmacotic violence into the twenty-first century reminds us that all modern polities are politically descended, however distantly, from communities that practiced sacrificial pharmacotic rituals, and suggests the extent to which those communities remain haunted by the originary structuring effects of those practices. (George, 2003: 154)…”

“…The persistence of pharmacotic violence into the twenty-first century reminds us that all modern polities are politically descended, however distantly, from communities that practiced sacrificial pharmacotic rituals, and suggests the extent to which those communities remain haunted by the originary structuring effects of those practices. (George, 2003: 154)…”