… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?
… Who am I? Unique, filled with lots of information, complicated, unexpected, thrown in the whirlpool of the aleatory, my body is a memorial.
This is from The Parasite by Michel Serres (originally published in 1980):
… A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it. Over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function, and no value. Ball isn’t played alone. Those who do, those who hog the ball, are bad players and are soon excluded from the game. They are said to be selfish [personnels]. The collective game doesn’t need persons, people out for themselves. Let us consider the one who holds it. If he makes it move around him, he is awkward, a bad player. The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it. It is the subject of the body, subject of bodies, and like a subject of subjects. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves.
… This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructor of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. “We”: what does that mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of “I.” The “I” in the game is a token exchanged. And this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection. I am I now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for “I” and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. The “we” is made by the bursts and occultations of the “I.” The “we” is made by passing the “I.” By exchanging the “I.” And by substitution and vicariance of the “I.”
That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his “I,” and the “we” is built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No. Everything happens as if, in a given group, the “I,” like the “we,” were not divisible. He has the ball, and we don’t have it any more. What must be thought about, in order to calculate the “we,” is, in fact, the passing of the ball. But it is the abandon of the “I.” Can one’s own “I” be given? There are objects to do so, quasi-objects, quasi-subjects; we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings or end of relations. By them, the principle of individuation can be transmitted or can get stuck. There is something there, some movement, that resembles the abandon of sovereignty. The “we” is not a sum of “I”s, but a novelty produced by legacies, concession, ,withdrawals, resignations, of the “I.” The “we” is less of a set of “I”s than the set of the sets of its transmissions. … Participation is just that and has nothing to do with sharing, at least when it is thought of was a division of parts. Participation is the passing of the “I” by passing. It is the abandon of my individuality or my being in a quasi-object that is there only to be circulated. It is rigorously the transubstantiation of being into relation.
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… If parasitism in general supposes that the host is a milieu or that the productions of the host constitute the environment, the niche necessary to the survival of the one placed there or who moves around there, we are all parasites of our language(s).
… I feed myself endlessly at the buffet of my language; I shall never be able to give it what it gave me. I am the noise of its complicated harmony, or its wail. I would die from not writing; I would die of not taking my feast of words with a few friends, from whom, somehow, I get my language. I shall never be weaned from it.
… I shall never be able to be nourished by a language of money, a flat, tasteless language like a big bank note. No smell, no taste, shiny, viscous — lots of these are found. When language converges on money, it monotonizes its flow; it tends toward the whitest and flattest quasi-object. It extends its empire at the same time as money. It builds temporary, soft collectives. Its power is parallel to its viscosity.
One does not simply eat the words of a language; one tastes them as well. Those who eat as quickly as possible find that a bit disgusting and repugnant. There are gourmands, however.
… at the Last Supper, everyone is a parasite at the master’s table, drinking the wine, eating the bread, sharing and passing it. The mystery of transubstantiation is there; it is clear, luminous, and transparent. Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?
… Who am I? Unique, filled with lots of information, complicated, unexpected, thrown in the whirlpool of the aleatory, my body is a memorial.
… We are tesserae and locks. Beings or recognition, like semaphores. Tokens, be they true or false. The false kind can adapt to everyone, whorish, fitting like an old shoe. My whole body is a memorial of you. If I love you, I remember you.
My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.
-Julie
