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i am not and refuse to be treated as a spectacle or commodity to be revealed/rendered simply and efficiently categorized into increasing narrow schemas. so, rather than speaking of myself, which, if curiosities emerge, may be spoken about directly, i'd prefer to share a selection from serres:
"The word and the history are only paper. But the experience,
especially the experience of suffering. Open your eyes and ears, open
your door, open the leaves of your table, open your heart, open your
homes, your arms. Open what philosophers most often seek to close.
Everything but the mouth. Give what they hold back. So? So : the noise
for your ears, stereotyped behavior for your eyes, the crowd who eat
the last scraps from your table. The noise of their chewing produces a
a noise in the organized cloud of those whom I can only call parasites.
We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more
or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment. We live in
that black box called the collective; we live by it, on it, and in it. It so
happens that this collective was given the form of an animal: Leviathan.
We are certainly within something bestial; in more distinguished terms,
we are speaking of an organic model for the members of a society. Our
host? I don't know. But I do know that we are within. And that it is
dark in there.
Hosts and parasites. We live, in the city or in the country, in the
space of the two rats.
One might have sought the formation and distribution of the lines, paths,
and stations, their borders, edges, and forms. But one must write as
well of the interceptions, of the accidents in the flow along the way
between stations-of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be
a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes,
from being sent. Like a hole in a canal that makes the water spill
into the surrounding area. There are escapes and losses, obstacles and
opacities. Doors and windows dose ; Hermes might faint or die among
us. An angel passes. * Who stole the relation? Maybe someone, somewhere
in the middle, made a detour. Does a third man exist? It is not
only a question of the logicial. What travels along the path might be
money, gold, or commodities, or even food-in short, material goods.
You don't need much experience to know that goods do not always
arrive so easily at their destination. There are always intercepters who
work very hard to divert what is carried along these paths. Parasitism is
the name most oftengthesenumerousanadiverseactivities, and
I fear that they are the most common thing in the world.
One has to speak of Prometheus from the bird's-eye view-that
of the eagle. Prometheus is one and the same as this greedy creature
who finally, at the end of an evolutionary process, made its nest within
the thoracic cavity of the producer in chains, now devoured.
Saying that this system includes the telephone, the telegraph,
television, the highway system, maritime pathways and shipping lanes,
the orbits of satellites, the circulation of messages and of raw materials,
of language and foodstuffs, money and philosophical theory, is a way of
speaking dearly and calmly. And looking to see who or what intercepts
these different flows is also a way of speaking clearly and calmly. It is a
complicated way of speaking, but it is really an easy way. I shall answer
the question, for it can be answered.
And if the system in question were the collective as such? What
relations do we really have with each other? How do we live together?
What really is this system which collapses at the slightest noise? Who or 'v
what makes this noise? Who or what prevents me from hearing whom,
from eating with whom, from sleeping with whom? How can I love, whom should I love? Whom could I love and who will love me? Who forbids love? Is this noise both the collective and the sound coming from the black box?
Look again at the diagram based on the story of the rats, paying
attention to the succession of parasites in stepladder formation, and ask
yourself if it is something added to a system, like a cancer of interceptions,
flights, losses, holes, trapdoors-if it is a pathological growth in
some spot or if it is quite simply the system itself. The rats climb onto
the rug when the guests are not looking, when the lights are out, when
the party's over. It's nighttime, black. What happens would be the
obscure opposite of conscious and clear organization, happening behind
everyone's back, the dark side of the system. But what do we call these
nocturnal processes? Are they destructive or constructive? What happens
at night on the rug covered with crumbs? Is it a still active trace of (an)
origin? Or is it only a remainder of failed suppressions? We can,
undoubtedly, decide the matter: the battle against rats is already lost;
there is no house, ship, or palace that does not have its share. There is. This constant is a law. But how so?
Someone once compared the undertaking of Descartes to the
action of a man who sets his house on fire in order to hear the noise the
rats make in the attic at night. These noises of running, scurrying, chewing,
and gnawing that interrupt his sleep. I want to sleep peacefully.
Good-bye then. To hell with the building that the rats come to ruin. I
want to think without an error, communicate without a parasite. So I
set the house on fire, the house of my ancestors. Done correctly, I rebuild
it without a rat. But in order to do that, as a mason I must work
without sleeping, without turning my back, without leaving for a
moment, without eating. But at night, the rats return to the foundation.
I was thinking yesterday, What did you do in the meantime? You slept,
if you please, you ate, dreamt, made love, and so forth. Well, the rats
came back. "they are, as the saying goes, 'Yays already: thert;. Part of
the building. Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of
knowledge; noise is part of communication, part of the house. But is it
the house itself? A system is often described as a harmony. Maybe it's the same
word, the same thing. In fact, what use is it to discuss matters, what use
is it to be concerned with a system in disequilibrium, a system that does
not function right? Yet we know of no system that functions perfectly,
that is to say, without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors, accidents,
Interrupted Meals 1 3
opacity-a system whose return is one for one, where the yield is maximal, and so forth. Even the world itself does not work quite perfectly."
The distance from equality, from perfect agreement, is history. Every- thing happens as if the following proposition were true: it works because it does not work. That must shock the old-school rationalism, but the rationalists of the generation before my own had the same relation to the rational [la raison] as old bigots have to virtue. It was more morality than research, more a social strategy than an intellectual one. I think it
was a certain relation with cleanliness; but where do we put the dirt?
Fluctuation, disorder, opacity, and noise are not and are no longer affronts
to the rational; we no longer speak of this rational, we no longer
divvy things up in isms, simple and stiff puzzles, strategic plans for the
final conflict. Thus a system has interesting relations according to what
is deemed to be its faults or depreciations. What then about its noises
and parasites. Can we rewrite a system, in the way Leibniz understood
the term, not in the key of preestablished harmony but in what he
called seventh chords? Not with the equilibrium he loved to mention in
mind but with the waves and shocks on the line in mind? Not with the
taste of the exact pleasures of sapidity, that is to say, wisdom [sapience ] ,
but etched in acid, with a bitter, astringent taste? On the other side of
the Theodicy where it was a question of the rare harmony. The classical
system immediately fills these differences and distances, believed to
make the enchantment of the perfect chords of their differential grow.
Thus the rational resembles the system of numbers. Yet the irrational
infinitely keeps its differences and distances without ever ceasing to be
mathematic. Okay. The book of differences, noise, and disorder would
only be the book of evil for someone who would prohibit the Author
of the universe, through calculation, from a world that is uncorruptibly
dependable. This, however, is not the case. The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical
origin of things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism
damned It to hell.
Maybe we should construct the fable of the rats in reverse. At
the door of the room, they heard a noise ....
Yet noise has a subject, the one who makes the noise, in the
fable. No doubt it is the farmer, the parasited one. One of the first in
the chain, he was thus cheated on behind his back. Awakened by the
noise of the rats, cutting and nibbling, he suddenly opens the door. He
jumps behind those who were eating behind his back and chases them.
One of the first, he jumps to \ the last position. But the one in the last position wins this game."
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