Thinking our “being-with”: hosts and parasites in Ali Smith’s fiction

Abstract

While Ali Smith’s entire œuvre conducts a reflection on “our communal existence” (Smith), this article proposes to examine the prominent role it gives to the parasite, a figure that offers a complex approach to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls our “being-with”. Contrary to the mere visitor, the parasite involves the notion of a wrong that challenges an entirely peaceful conception of sharing. As she revisits the topos (mainly in The Accidental and There but for the) Smith foregrounds the “interruption” that the parasite produces – a key notion in Michel Serres’s analysis of the parasite as well as in the reflection on community developed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. In a way, the parasite underscores the “tension between what is shared and what is impossible to share” (Rancière) always present in the “in-common”. An “accident” or an agent that interrupts relations, the parasite also sheds light on the permanent basis of these relations – on what is already there, even if one keeps forgetting it. Place thus becomes a starting point to think the “in-common”. In Smith’s text, this place is not just a house or a dinner-table, it is the habitat made up of words where Smith’s characters live side by side. More than a simple character, the parasite becomes a figure of the text: it is to be found in an overall form that can be called hospitable and unleashes itself as a force that potentially undoes and renews at every step the sharing of meaning.