The doctorate presents an inquiry—through text and image—into mimesis (and the problem of the image/ text), which are anchored through their relation to a reconsideration of the pharmakon. The fiction of a student doctor, seeking a medicine (or pharmakon) for that which is deemed the pathology of ‘the contemporary condition’, is a metaphorical device, through which the work explores the notion of a world which emerges through mimesis—a world made of sameness-difference—giving birth to kinds (or spe- cies) of writing/image making, and so too kinds of knowing, bringing to the foreground a relation between art and episteme, allowing for reflection upon the problem of the ‘practice-led’ PhD itself. Different kinds of knowledge/knowing/perceiving, through varying registers of writing and image making, explore the axis techne/poesis, which are held together via paradox, demonstrated, in this case, via the form of the pharmakon; a form which is substantiated through its status as both medicine and poison.