READING GROUP I

At the initiative of WP 2 and WP 5, Irena Charwilska, Rick Dolphijn and Raul Matta set up a monthly close-reading seminar which will be used to give rise to the key concepts of the CONVIVIUM PROJECT, to read those texts in which it is creatively launched and to get inspiration from artworks that somehow deal with these issues and make us think💡.

The first seminar was on parasitism in which we read a chapter from Michel Serres’ book ‘the Parasite’. Rick Dolphijn chaired the session: “With ‘the Parasite’, Michel Serres offers us a radically new theory of power. It has nothing to do with the Master and the Slave, the opposition which we, more than ever, tend to use in order to analyse hieraries in society. Parasitism offers us ‘the host and the parasite’, in which the host might be bigger and more ‘powerful’, but also blind to the parasite, loving it, and giving to it endlessly, till its own death. The parasite on the other had, stays invisible, takes, and disturbs. The idea of the parasite therefore gives us a lot to think about when it comes to capitalism and extractivism, to property and to profit. Parasitism somehow concerns so many relationships that CONVIVIUM is studying. It tells us a lot about the global food system, about ecology, and also warns us for what happens when it is discovered and the ‘host’ (for instance the earth) decides to set up a different relationship with life (we can think of the ecological crises of today). Parasitism, much more than idealist models of power, tells us a lot about the way we have (ignorantly) organized our world, and opens our eyes to the many disturbances, that must be addressed.