The Parasite ians form one popula dden anguish: it seems to rk is general. Yes, these oties, and behaviors are Noises ————-——_——__— We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly, No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks! no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked, This one here speaks leamedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave: he doesn’ careif people hear him. Another, more jovial, Plays a strong role that he deaely holds onto: he spreads his good humor through his discourse. The third, an initable pipsqueak and always on his high horse, terorizes those around him; they all play ther favorite instrument, whose name is their own. All that should produce cacoph ony; I admit that it makes noise. And Leibniz is right, monads are closed; they neither hear one another nor listen to one another. And yet, Sometimes, there is agreement. The most amazing thing in the world is that agreement, understanding, harmony, sometimes exist Leibniz supposed God for this law miracle He said: here isan orchestra Each musician plays his instrument a if he were alone in the world. He likes only his English hom, this English hom is he himself in person, He plays his part of the scoresand when he has finished, at the very end of the page, he puts down his things and leaves the theater, But only to die. How could the fist viola bein harmony with him, for the frst viola has never thought of any. thing but his four strings? Leibniz answered: God created the viola $0 that at 2 certain predetermined and wellfixed time, it would produce the note preformed harmonically to that of the English hom. God for. sees harmony and God is harmony. History is programmed; everyone has a score. Others say that they are in the same linguistic milieu to- sether. Words have to find each other, since they are part of the same set. And this isthe same solution: there isa conductor or a common text to play. Someone or something awa 121122 The Parasite ‘That doesn't resolve the problem but only gives the answer. We give ourselves the answer in the form of person or a pre-text. The probability of harmony is weak in the multiple distribution of senders land the qualitative weakness of reception. Harmony is not a laws itis not regularity. Harmony is rarity itself. Iti quite precisely, a miracle. 1 call a miracle a very great improbability. When the miracle occurs, from an improbable accord, it produces a new song, so very rare that it is forbidden for repetition to have ever occurred for as long asthe peri ood of time was before the mecting, This agreement is negatively en- tropic; it isa producer; itis perhaps production itself—its definition and its dynamism, ‘In any case, repetition is death, Is the fall into the similar, lke the fixéd identity of the too-well-known. If the only coneert() in the Sild Game from the already written, the world would quickly become 4 pale hell where shades floated about. It is often like that, I know. But ‘were truth and reality always prescribed, everything would, be trans Formed into the sepulebral, The always already is only & cemetery where Giatropy rots matter away. Fortunately, the rare exists, exceptions come Hout, novelty appears—the improbable miracle. Through this rarity, the world comes into existence, we live, and we think, These three events are improbable but are there nevertheless. The preformed and the everrepeated are this text of death bearing the disappearance of the real. Another incamation of thanatogenic philosophy that seeks to transform the world intoapillar of salt or a plain bestrewn with corpses. If there already is a text or a conductor, if there have been enough repe- titions (enough practic), then the world is a hell and we are but shades init. Then death has won the game, aided in its work by philosophy. Of habitual cacophony. The participants send more or less ccanonic sounds here, and sometimes they make sense. The sum or the product or the composition of these sources is heard as caricatural, inaudible, unfelt. The meal last night was ordinary. The jovial man spoke loud and recited; the leamed man perorated, sufficient unto himself; the man of doctrine screeched the truth and nothing but the truth; the irritable man boomed out about power; the vain man spoke well of him: self; the wise man kept quiet, taciturn, waiting for fatigue to set in so he could have the last word. Amidst this chaos, Thad the cheese course served. Let us say that I was the host and that the goat cheese [cha bignol] was delicious. It was divided from hand to hand, but it remained identical to itself until it disappeared. The plate held the stable ready to disappear; the air vibrated with noise and disagreement. It would not have been customary for the jovial man to listen to doetrine ot for a vain man to listen to the leamed man; it would have been miraculous SS Interlude 128 certainly have been able to resolve some ancient difficulty: a theorem, a text, or even a thing, would suddenly have entered the room, like a wind proper for bending our heads, and would have alit on the table amongst us. When a closed monad hears a shut monad, when a deaf man listens to a mute, together they produce something living that is entirely new, that is never a repetition, This birth is a proof. Our naivete—that is to say, the newborn come to light—is a proof, and a decisive one at that, of the fantastic negative entropy of the plighting of woth, Suddenly, there is production. The only new is naivete. The only new is the miraculous. But this miracle comes froin agreement. “If You are naive, you will be the child of novelty, But also, listen, you will have children. Here childbirth has come in beauty, in the middle of the banquet. We know nothing of composition, of the product, of the sum, of the integral of monads or of individuals, however their society or as- sociation is named, We know nothing of the simplest or most direct operations—addition, multiplication, composition, combination—when it has to do with us. Alas, we can only subtract, analyze, kill. The col is a black box. The set makes noise. Even if each element plays ine or sends meaning, the set together produces a false, dangerous, senseless-clartior. The collective is white noise itself; we do not know ‘Whit an Srehisira is or how a chorus harmonizes. The collective is not a preestablished harmony, or to put it another way, it is not the always already there, Noise comes out of the black box. Noise and shivarees. ‘The politican pretends to understand, as do the scientist and the theoretician, The religious man pretends to understand, as do the soldier, the inspector, and the militant, Each social function is a known and pinpointed variety of black ignorance intelligently disguised as white expertise. But the reversal of real noise into theatrical harmony, of the killing of meaning and sound into an accord that is at least represented is not the only benefit here. Every social function from the judge to the professor and from the artist to the president, every function that is classified or classifiable in some theory of classes or functions, every function, I say, eats and lives on the aforementioned ignorance. It ap. pears as soon as the black box must be closed. And this operation is paid for rather dearly, so that the holder of the key lives well off it. The one who holds a key does not necessarily have knowledge as well; he ‘ean also guard a lock and forbid it to be opened. Each social function is, the guardian of a door of the ark, and of a dangerous door, so it would We understand nothing of the collective nor of the set, We must admit that this ark is full only of shadows and chat only an untrane/ ( ; - 14 The Parasite the ark from which someone could hear or translate or see. That we are in the ark and if we are outside, we are no longer ourselves. The col lective is not an ordinary object, itis not susceptible to definition oto “vision or to exteriority. Nor is it a subject: who, among us, would be ‘a subject? Who would this “we” be? Who is it? What does it say? Where is it? This set is not a subject; it is not an object i is thus outside the function of knowledge. We do not know what “we” means nor what ‘constitutes it. We do not know what happens between us and what passes between us. If there is no knowledge, how could there be will? ‘This will s an automorphism, and by that word I mean the projection ‘or the reproduction of what was thought to happen within me in this ‘new mythical subject, the “we.” It is a retranslated egology. Who can assure that the “we” has the same attributes and the same faculgies as the ego? A thought, an intelligence, a will, Why not desires, appetites, or sexuality? We have made the same error about the cBlleetive a8 about ‘Gia We made it in the image of the ego. OF my soul sometimes, when iris given will, inteect, the power of decision, when one goes from the personal cogito to the cogitamus or from the monadic volo to valumus, but often of my body: great beast, mystical body, Leviathan, biological models, the Beast. No, we know nothing of the “we except for what ‘we think we know of the ego, body and soul. In sum, we know nothing, and once more, the collective is black and makes noise. What is not discussed? What is there no dispute about? What do ‘we immediately agree about? (On a point of law, there isa contract, Law is our rather stable existence; politics is our unstable history (in principle, fot ip fact the pprofessfonals fish to” stabilize it Tor their oh profit). The theoretical ociah contict-is-written-in tatters inTaw books. Put together, they refer to an unwritten text, that, were it written, would teach us what being together means, But this text is not written and perhaps cannot be. In any case, we are not discussing law, except on the edge of juris prudence. We are not discussing law beeause of the policeman, We fear the force on which itis based. We agree somewhat and obey a lot. For Wwe are afraid, afraid of the dark ——— a rar oranizes our Concrete life as a group, as a family, as well as relations among peoples. It is full of details and meaning. It varies from one culture to anothers specialists seek to connect the differences; all these efforts, differences, and similarities fluctuate according to the circumstances of history. The agreement is lst. There is, however, a corpus which is agreed on, as if by miracle— the mathematical compus. It is debated only at its limits, by researchers