… We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? …
Last post from The Parasite by Michel Serres (originally published in 1980):
… History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about.
… The noise heard at the door temporarily stops the rats from eating the leftover ortolans. Why is it always the rats’ point of view? Why don’t we think of what happens to the host? He never sees that there are rats there. The door opens: no one is there. The table is immobile and the obscurity is quiet. Nothing has happened. The host closes the door and goes back to bed. The noise starts again, the noise of chewing, history. He gets up again. He opens the door suddenly. There will never be any rats.
The observer makes the observed disappear by bringing along his noisemakers. His sandals make the floorboards creak. He told his wife that he was going to see what was going on.
People always talk about the light that is indispensable for seeing and observing. Even Maxwell’s demon needs this light.
People hardly ever talk about the noise attached like a string to the tongue, indispensable for speaking; people hardly ever talk about the signal attached to the sign. Noise of the mouth, of the teeth, of the lips, so close to the repulsive noise of the eater.
[illustration from Wikipedia]… Intuition speaks silently or speaks softly enough so as never to scare things, to tame them a bit. Oil the door and silence one’s steps to surprise the rats a bit before they leave. Perhaps film them among the bones and scraps. But only parasites have this genius for being invisible.
… The observer is perhaps the inobservable. He must, at least, be last on the chain of observables. If he is supplanted, he becomes observed. Thus he is in a position of a parasite. Not only because he takes the observation that he doesn’t return, but also because he plays the last position.
… From the beginning, we have moved from discourse to discourse, either written or told; we have gone from box to box; each is empty and contains the following; the explanation or the reading goes from implication to implication; we are out of breath, waiting, in suspense. Finally the black box is there, finally the true one, the true banquet, that of the gods, no longer that of ideas or of genres/genera, no longer that of allegories, of figures of style or speech, of useless words, but the banquet, where one really drinks the drink of immortality, where good really wins, where love is finally love and no longer a punishment, where wine is not drink for illusions and hangovers, but where ambrosia finally gives the invariability of what is. We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? The door itself. They made fun of us. The only information that comes out of the black box is that there is a channel through which information passes. The only message that comes out of the path is that there is a path by which messages pass. A thread comes out of the box. The only thing that passes in the channel is the name of the channel.
My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.
-Julie
