In essays on literature, film, capitalism, and the university, this book illuminates and deepens the understanding of the parasite as a metaphor for cultural and social critique.
While symbiosis may harm the host to the benefit of the parasite, humans have nonetheless developed complex networks to rationalize intra-species parasitism. From influence to borrowing to the “creativity” of AI, and from more obvious historical discourses of appropriation, like colonialism and imperialism, parasitical logic has distinct cultural genealogies. The ubiquity of parasites seems to cheat substantial theorization, but this collection offers lively and suggestive essays on parasitical logic from global and interdisciplinary perspectives with a particular spotlight on its human and posthuman impress.
Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society assesses this condition via three complementary modes. First, it focuses on literary texts, which offers parasitism as a paradigm of cultural symbiosis through the artistic mutualism of the reader/writer. The second section approaches visual media, inspired by Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019), with essays that probe the representation of the parasite as a visual logic with both socio-political effects and challenges to genre and history. The third section concerns the provocative theme of parasitism in institutional structures, including within the US Army and the privatized university.
Authors in this collection ask how ideas dedicated to the diminution of exploitation might confront the power of parasitism in the production and reproduction of inequality in everyday life. Should one fight parasitical social and cultural structures or aim to live their contradictions as a universal norm? Or, does a force of nature simply condemn humanity to, as a poet once put it, prey on itself like monsters of the deep?
Acknowledgments Introduction: Parasites! Peter Hitchcock (Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY, USA) Part One: Textuality 1. Beyond the Parasitical Logic in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling Debarati Biswas (New York City College of Technology, CUNY, USA) 2. Leeching off the Duniya: Queer Futures in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Shoumik Bhattacharya (Metropolitan State University, USA) 3. Wholly, Holey Insufficient: Parasitism as a Critique of Meaning Tess J. Given (Indiana University, USA) Part Two: Mediations 4. Fruiting Bodies, or, Nostalgia Is a Form of Decay Joseph Boisvere (Graduate Center, CUNY, USA) 5. Post-Work Lumpen: Inequality and Deprivation in Contemporary Society in Amarelo Manga Márcio Valença (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil) 6. Adapting the Parasite: The Politics of Master-Servant and Host-Guest Representations in The Servant, Parasite, and Ripley Rebecca Dyer (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA) 7. The New Parasite: Nishida Kitaro and Michael Snow Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto, Canada) Part Three: Structures 8. Historicizing Parasites: Fictions of the Incubus and the 1898 Wilmington Massacre Justin Rogers-Cooper (Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, USA) and Scott Henkel (University of Wyoming, USA) 9. Olga Ravn’s The Employees and the Limits of Labor Management Christian Gerzso (Pacific Lutheran University, USA) 10. Parasites, Neoliberalism, and the Death of the University Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA) 11. The Language of Insurrection: The Indexicality of a Parasitical Society Renata Archanjo (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil) Notes on Contributors Index
Peter Hitchcock is Distinguished Professor of English, Film and Media Cultures, and Women's and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College, City University of New York, USA. He is author or editor of, most recently, Seriality and Social Change (2025), Biotheory: Life and Death Under Capitalism (2020, co-edited with Jeffrey Di Leo), The Debt Age (2018, co-edited with Jeffrey Di Leo and Sophia McClennen), and Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (2017).
Reviews for Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society
A useful book at a time when ‘extractionism’ has become epochal. Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society shows that the parasite is with us not only biologically, socially, and economically, but more persistently ‘logically’: methodo-logically, anthropo-logically, and philo-logically. Parasitism is a ‘perfect logic,’ as one contributor points out, but it can coexist with other logics, for example that of mutualism. * Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Professor of Philosophy, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait * This book compellingly demonstrates that metaphors of parasitism are ubiquitous in our world, from zombie video games to Marxist political theory. More than that, it reveals that thinking parasitically is a way to unlock exciting new interdisciplinary insights. * Macs Smith, Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, University College London, UK *
