Untitled Document

BESIDE

(Female voice on pre-recorded tape)

Parasite is one of those words which calls up its apparent opposite. It has no meaning without that counterpart. There is no parasite without its host. At the same time both word and counterword subdivide. Each reveals itself to be fissured already with itself . . . Words in para, like words in ana, have this intrinsic property. Para as a prefix in English indicates alongside, near, or beside, beyond, incorrectly, resembling or similar to, subsidiary to, isometric or polymeric to. In borrowed Greek compounds para indicates beside, to the side of , alongside, beyond, wrongfully, harmfully, unfavorably, and among. Words in para form one branch of the tangled labyrinth of words using some form of the Indo-European root per. This root is the the base of prepositions and preverbs with the basic meaning of forward, through, and a wide range of extended senses such as in front of, before, early, first, chief, toward, against, near, at, around.

If words in para are one branch of the labyrinth of words in per, the branch is itself a miniature labyrinth. Para is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in para, moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them. It also forms an ambiguous transition between one and the other. Although a given word in para may seem to choose univocally one of these possibilities, the other meanings are always there as a shimmering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in a sentence. The word is like a slightly alien guest within the syntactical closure where all the words are family friends together. Words in para include: parachute, paradigm, parasol, the french paravent (windscreen), a parapluie (umbrella), paragon, paradox, parapet, parataxis, parapraxis, parabasis, paraphrase, paragraph, paraph, paralysis, paranoia, paraphernalia, parallel, parallax, parameter, parable, paraesthesia, paramnesia, paramorph, paramecium, paraclete, paramedical, paralegal and parasite. and of course paranormal but not mentioned by Miller.

Parasite comes from the Greek parsitos, beside the grain, para, beside (in this case) plus sitos, grain, food. Sitology is the science of foods, nutrition, and diet. A parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you beside the grain. Later on, parasite came to mean a professional dinner guest, someone expert at cadging invitations without ever giving dinners in return.

. . . . There is no parasite without a host. The host and the somewhat sinister or subversive parasite are fellow guests beside the food, sharing it . . . The word host is of course the name for the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist, from Middle English oste, from Latin hostia, sacrifice, victim.

J. Hillis Miller, The Critic as Host,

in Deconstruction and Criticism

All change enters the field of history as a quasi-event.

Paul Ricoeur

The intrusion of the thinglike into human life is precisely a criterion of the mythical universe.

Walter Benjamin,

Marxism and Form, F. Jameson.

In some sense humans live their lives according to their understanding of what is going on somewhere else. However much they believe that their decisions well up from self, the model is elsewhere.

Freud went to considerable lenghts to show that the excess to the speakers intention revealed other intentions, unconscious intentions. A pertinent question here is whether there are other minds, minds whose other intentions disturb the subjects intention to express his thought or feeling. We would then want to know whether these other minds were human or inhuman; for if there is an intentionality that is radically other, in the sense of not being that of other people, then we would be able to exit humanism.

Stuart Schneiderman.

An Angel Passes:

How the Sexes Became Undivided.

The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity.

. . .

By its flash, the miracle separates the indistinct moments of day to day life, suspends nuance, interrupts uncertainties, and reveals to us the tragic truth, that absolute and absolutely divided truth, whose two parts solicit us without pause, and form each side, each of them requiring everything of us and at every instant.

. . .

The everyday breaks down structures and undoes forms, even while ceaselessly regathering itself behind the form whose ruin it has insensibly brought about.

Maurice Blanchot,

Everyday Speech,

Yale French Studies #73

In a secularized culture, desire for otherness is not displaced into alternative regions of heaven or hell but is directed towards the absent areas of this world, transforming it into something other than the familiar comfortable one. Instead of an alternative order, it creates alterity, this world replaced and dis-located. A useful term for understanding and expressing this process of transformation and deformation is paraxis. This signifies par-axis, that which lies alongside the main body. Paraxis is a telling notion in relation to the place, or space, of the fantastic, for it implies an inextricable link to the main body of the real which it shades and threatens.

. . .

Structured upon contradiction and ambivalence, the fantastic traces in that which cannot be said, that which evades articulation or that which is represented as untrue and unreal.

. . .

Heidegger described as uncanny that empty space produced by a loss of faith in divine images.

Rosemary Jackson,

Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.

five things about surfaces and faces:

First, neither surfaces nor faces are entities nor things that typically exist by themselves, at least in the spatiotemporal world as distinct from the conceptual realm investigated by mathematicians.

Second, neither a face nor a surface is, in general, identical with the whole object of which it is the face or surface.

Third, surfaces and faces are not hidden in the way that what lies under the surface or behind the face may be . . .

Fourth, both are expanses, that is, something like sheets spread out over an area. Nothing can be either a face or a surface if it is concentrated into a point.

Fifth, faces can be squeezed, compressed, scratched, touched, washed, thought about, remembered, and all of these things can be said about surfaces.

It holds that depending on the contextual situation, it will be sensible (and sometimes true, sometimes not) to say that one who looks at, gazes at, stares at, etc., an object may be said to be seeing the object, to be seeing the whole object, to be seeing all of the object, to be seeing each and every part of the object, to be seeing the object itself; and (taking a breath) to be seeing the surface of the object, each and every part of the surface of the object, all of the surface of the object, only the surface of the object, and part of the surface of the object; and (taking another breath) sometimes to be seeing the surface, all of the surface, the whole surface, etc., of the object, and at the same time, to be seeing the object, all of the object, all of the object, the whole object, and so on; and (taking another) sometimes to be seeing each of these items directly and sometimes not.

Surfaces,

Avrum Strom.