"[T]ranslational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon [and to identify it as either "cure" or "poison"] actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable.
Bernard Stiegler argues that "the hypomnesic appears as that which constitutes the condition of the anamnesic"[4]—in other words, externalised time-bound communication is necessary for original creative thought, in part because it is the primordial support of culture.
[c] Persson uses the several senses of pharmakon to "pursue a kind of phenomenology of drugs as embodied processes, an approach that foregrounds the productive potential of medicines; their capacity to reconfigure bodies and diseases in multiple, unpredictable ways.
"[11] Highlighting the notion (from Derrida) that the effect of the pharmakon is contextual rather than causal, Persson's basic claim – with reference to the body-shape-changing lipodystrophy experienced by some HIV patients taking anti-retroviral therapy.
"[12][e] Zabala further remarks: "I believe that finding a pharmakon can be functionally understood as the goal that many post-metaphysical philosophers have given themselves since Heidegger, after whom philosophy has become a matter of therapy rather than discovery[.]"