The Parasite MICHEL SERRES Is Professor of the History of Science at Paris I Sorbonne
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The Parasite MICHEL SERRES is professor of the history of science at Paris I Sorbonne. He is the author of Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, also from Johns Hopkins. LA WRENCE R. SCHEHR teaches French at the University of South Alabama. I If Michel Serres Translated, with notes, by Lawrence R. Schehr THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore and London Copyright © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Serres, Michel. The parasite. Translation of: Le parasite. I. Schehr, Lawrence R. II. Title PQ2679.E679P313 7848'.91407 81-19277 ISBN 0-8018-2456-7 AACR2 2'13 .Qft/f)1 S48S ? ').)3 '18.1. Contents Translator's Preface vii Translator's Introduction ix I. Interrupted Meals Logics Rats' Meals Cascades 3 Satyrs' Meals Host/Guest 15 Diminishing Returns The Obscure and the Confused 17 Decisions, Incisions The Excluded Third, Included 22 The Lion's Share The Simple Arrow 26 Athlete's Meals Difference and the Construction of the Real 28 Picaresques and Cybernetics The New Balance 34 Pentecost 40 II. More Interrupted Meals Technique, Work Rats' Dinner Diode, Triode 51 Logic of the Fuzzy 56 The Master and the Counter-Master 58 More Rats' Meals Machines and Engines 61 The Means, the Milieu 66 Spaces of Transformation 71 Lunar Meals 74 Meals of the Lord in Paradise 77 Work 86 Insects' Meals 91 Energy, Information 94 The Gods, the Perpetual Host 98 v VI Contents In te rlude Full-Length Portrait of the Parasi te Confessed Meals 103 J ean-Jacques, Lawmaker'sJu dge 116 Noises 121 Music 129 III. Fa t Cows and Lean Cows Economy Salad Meals Stercoral Origin of Property Rights 139 Meals of Satire Exchange and l\loney, the Exact and the Fuzzy 147 Meals among Brothers Theory of the Joker 155 Meals of Chestnuts The Sun and the Sign 165 The Cows Come out of the River Stocks 175 Cows Eat Cows Theory of the Line 182 The Best Definition 190 Of Sickness in General 197 IV. Midnigh t Suppers SoC£ety Impostor's Meals Analyze, Paralyze, Catalyze 20 1 The Proper Name of the Host Masters and Slaves 209 Theory of the Quasi-Object 224 The Empty Table On Love 235 The Devil On Love 246 The Worst Definition 252 Stories, Animals 255 Translator's Preface Michel Serres, the polymath, presents his translator with an extremely arduous task. A difficult style, multilingual puns, a wealth of knowledge and references-all combine to make the text not at all easy to elucidate. Two words merit brief mention in this preface. The first is the title, parasite. In French, the word has three meanings: a biological parasite, a social parasite, and static. The English parasite corresponds only to the first two meanings in French. Thus the reader should always be aware of this additional resonance in the French that is not trans latable into English. The second word is hate, which corresponds to both host and guest in English. I have used guest and host in English where one of the two meanings was implied more than the other, but the other word is always implicitly present. At times, I have used the two together to reinforce the double meaning. I should like to thank Michel Serres for his help with certain passages. vii Translator's Introduction Verne, Leibniz, Carpaccio, Musil, Lucretius, Turner, and now La Fontaine: a heterogeneous list united only by the fact that they have all been objects of Michel Serres's acute observations. Fueled by his varied background, his capacious knowledge of many disciplines, and his perceptive insights, these studies, along with many others, have been widely greeted as seminal, if not to say revolutionary, works. A selection of his earlier works has recently been translated and published as Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, edited by Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Most of these essays deal with communication in a general sense : with the translation or interference (inter-reference) of two seemingly distinct fields. Serres analyzes the fundamental sys tems at work in a text as well as how these systems are analogous to those of another text from a diffFrent discipline: Turner and Carnot, or Zola and the theory of thermodynamics. For Serres, the human sciences, notably literature, painting, and philosophy, are not as far removed from the hard sciences, especially physics and mathematics, as the practitioners in one or the other of these disciplines might believe. With the publication of Hermes IV: La Distribution and La Na issance de la physique dans Ie texte de Lucrece in 1977, Serres enters a new and more radical phase in his work. Radical: the root, the be ginning, the origin; radical: the revolutionary. In La Distribution he begins to ask questions and give answers about origins and roots-of language, of time, and of space. La Naissance de la physique is ostensibly a text on the beginning of atomist theory in Lucretius's De natura rerum. Serres shows modern science, that is to say, physics and its theories, to be older than had been thought; its roots are not in the Renaissance but in Rome. But in one long text in this book on Lucretius, IX x Translator's Introduction in a chapter entitled "Violence et contrat" (included in the collection of translated essays), Serres goes even further back in his speculations and investigations. He begins to examine the threshold of culture, its origin, inception, root, and dire ction. It is an origin grounded in violence and polarization, in inclusion and exclusion. And this chapter is also a first sketch for Serres of his theory of human relations, a theory that takes shape in this book, The Parasite. The Parasite starts with an author, as do many of Serres 's other works ; in this case it is Jean de La Fontaine, the author of the Fables. Serres develops his theory of human relations, the theory of the para site-be it noise, guest, leech, or all three-with the support of a series of texts including La Fontaine, Rousseau, Moliere, and the Acts of the Apostles. For Serres, the parasite is the primordial, one-way, and irre versible relation that is the base of human institutions and disciplines: society, economy, and work; human sciences and hard sciences; religion and history. All of these have the parasitic relation as their basic and fun damental component. Serres demonstrates this for each with equal facility and equal virtuosity, speaking the language of each of these fields and in the many-tongued, pentecostal language that for him is capable of discussing all these disciplines and institutions: the language of philosophy. C The parasite is a microbe, an insidious infection that takes with out giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel. These seem ingly dissimilar activities are, according to Michel Serres, not merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinstally related and, in fact, they have the same basic function in a systemJWhether it produces a fever or just hot air, the parasite is a thermal exciter. And as such, it is both the atom of a relation and the production of a change in this relation. Through a careful and cogent analysis of these various threads, Michel Serres produces an elegant theory of human relations and institutions, all of which have the same common factor : the parasite. Part One Interrupted Meals Logics Rats'Meals Cascades The city rat invites the country rat onto the Persian rug. They gnaw and chew leftover bits of ortolan. Scraps, bits and pieces, left overs: their royal feast is only a meal after a meal among the dirty dishes of a table that has not been cleared. The city rat has produced nothing and his dinner invitation costs him almost nothing. Boursault says this in his Fables d'Esope, where the city rat lives in the house of a big tax farmer. Oil, butter, ham, bacon, cheese-everything is available. It is easy to invite the country cousin and to regale oneself at the expense of another. The tax fa rmer produced neither oil nor ham nor cheese; in fact, he produced nothing. But using power or the law, he can profit from these products. Likewise for the city rat who takes the fa rmer's leftovers. And the last to profit is the country rat. But we know that the feast is cut short. The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic : an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was the noise really a message? Wasn't it, rather, static, a parasite? A parasite who has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order. Let's go to the country where we eat only soup, but quietly and without interruption. The tax farmer is a parasite, living off the fat of the land: a royal feast, ortolans, Persian rugs. The first rat is a parasite; for him, leftovers, the same Persian rug. Nothing is missing, says La Fontaine. At the table of the first, the table of the farmer, the second rat is a parasite.