Tranformation of Words

I find that as I read The Parasite I commonly come across things that remind me of earlier work done by Derrida. This idea of interpretation and messages being sent from sender to receiver, and the transformation that takes place within these words from the time being sent to the time being received.

In The Parasite the author talks about how as soon as the “the medium” takes its place as an interference we only see so much of what is out there. In the authors words

“we only see because we see badly. It works only because it works badly. Every system is a set of messages; in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to the sender.”

Not that we necessarily see badly what Derrida says about the transformation of words from sender to reciever, but the fact that this is a possibility is the coincidence. For Derrida “the medium” is the idea that the receiver is not present when the message is sent, therefore acting as an interruption in the conversation. Much like The Parasite Derrida understands that there is no way for the exact message of the sender to be received by the receiver, as The Parasite shows in the quote above, this is an impossible act unless one is sending a letter to themselves. Its clear that the interruption whether it be time, location etc. the messages become skewed.

In The Parasite the author discusses that when there is two of you, there is three. I put this in the context of Derrida seeing the subject of sending a letter being the third person (the space between the sender and receiver). Serres makes a good point that in many cases there is a third that we may not be aware of that makes all the difference when it comes to communication. This “system” of communication is never stable. We must look at it as what it is. We constantly see things from different views that others all based on this idea of interpretation. Serres says:

“the system is nonknowledge. The other side of nonknowledge. One side of nonknowledge is chaos; the other, system. Knowledge forms a bridge between two banks. Knowledge as such is a space of transformation.

This directly relates to Derrida’s concepts of the transformation of worlds. Knowledge is what allows us to distantly communicate with one another. Yet this form is not always successful, thus causing the delay of the message to transform our own words.

In The Parasite the author gives the example of the master of the home waking up to the rats feasts. He awakes and goes to find out what the noise is. When the rats here the footsteps they of course scurry off, thus the master believes, bad dream. This was not a bad dream, he did in fact hear the rats feasting, but this delay of time it took for him to reach where the rats were, causes him to change his mind about what he may have heard.

Its fascinating how quickly a message can be transformed if you really think about it. Most of the time we don’t even think that we need to think about it, much like the master and his belief the sounds he heard were a dream.