This article contains an analysis of a short passage about Don Quixote from Michel Serres’ philosophical dialogue entitled La Légende des Anges. He claims that the generally accepted view of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa as a binary, hierarchical pairing is an illusion. In fact, Cervantes deconstructs the familiar opposi-tions of the carer and his subordinate in need of care, the rational thinker and the dreamer, the main character and his associate. As the two protagonists continually ex-change their roles, theirs is a story of creating and upholding new kind of bond. In describing the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Serres alludes to the figure of the parasite (from his 1980 book Le Parasite), i.e. a third party or position, an (invisible) go-between or middle ground that makes the relationship possible but also messes things up. Serres acknowledges the dynamics of this configuration on the formal level and makes it the structural axis of his text, which is just a piece of dialogue between a nurse and an air traffic controller. Their interaction seems to be fully inscribed in the binary model, yet, he insists, there is more to it. This may well be the case with the pair of characters in Cervantes’ novel.

This analysis of selected novels and short stories by Józef Bogdan Dziekoński – Pająk [ The Spider], Siła woli [ Willpower], Piosnka [ A Simple Song], and Wyzwolenie zapaleńca [ The Liberation of Enthusiast] – shows that they share similar narrative structure based on the interception of messages sent by the narrator to an absent ideal recipient by an eaves-dropping intruder who gradually displaces the original addressee. Working within the framework of a romance story Dziekoński develops a philosophy of desire which accepts incompleteness, contingency and disillusionment. They combine in an affirmation of life and an opposition to morbid phantasies or the idea of irreplaceability of love in the myth of l'amour tristanien.