Literature and the Parasite

Literature and the Parasite Anders M. Gullestad University of Bergen Abstract J. L. Austin’s claim that language ‘used not seriously’ is ‘parasitic’ upon ‘normal use’ has proved a puzzle to literary scholars, who have often taken this to mean that they are not allowed to apply the insights of speech-act theory to their own object of research. This article explores how, when read together, Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite as a ‘thermal exciter’ and Deleuze’s concept of ‘minor literature’ bring out the hidden potential inherent in Austin’s claim. More specifically, the article argues that Austin’s reference to literature as a parasitic entity might become a promising conceptual gift, allowing us to generate a new model for approaching the world-shaping potential of literary texts. Keywords: parasite, parasitic, literature, J. L. Austin, Michel Serres, Ilya Prigogine, Richard Dawkins For those who would like to explore the world-shaping abilities of literary texts, the set of conceptual tools offered in J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) is in many ways gefundenes Fressen, allowing us to pursue the question of how language plays a part in the creation of reality. However, literary scholars who want to apply these tools to their own object of research immediately encounter a serious problem: Austin specifically forbids them from doing so. More precisely, in distinguishing between language which is meant to be taken literally and the sort which is not, he casts the latter – of which literature is perhaps the best example – outside the boundaries of speech-act theory: as utterances our performatives are also heir to certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances. And these likewise, though again they might be brought into a more general account, we are deliberately at present excluding. I mean, Deleuze Studies 5.3 (2011): 301–323 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0023 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls 302 Anders M. Gullestad for example, the following: a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance – a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances. (Austin 1980: 21–2) To the frequent consternation of literary scholars, literature is here not just claimed to be a terra incognita for speech-act theory (at least ‘at present’), but also ‘in a peculiar way hollow or void’, as well as of a parasitic nature. Not surprisingly, this claim has proved a puzzle, and has for example – as every reader of the heated debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida will know – caused a great deal of ink to flow from both sides of the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy: in 1977, Glyph published a translation of Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’ (later reprinted in Limited Inc), where the question of parasitism was raised in order to criticise Austin’s lack of attention to language being defined by its ability to be repeated in all sorts of contexts, non-serious ones not excluded. This provoked a reply from Searle, who argued that Derrida had completely misunderstood Austin’s attitude towards ‘parasitic discourse’: Derrida supposes that the term ‘parasitic’ involves some kind of moral judgement; that Austin is claiming that there is something bad or anomalous or not ‘ethical’ about such discourse. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. The sense in which, for example, fiction is parasitic on nonfiction is the sense in which the definition of the rational numbers in number theory might be said to be parasitic on the definition of the natural numbers, or the notion of one logical constant in a logical system might be said to be parasitic on another, because the former is defined in terms of the latter. Such parasitism is a relation of logical dependence; it does not imply any moral judgement and certainly not that the parasite is somehow immorally sponging off the host (Does one really have to point this out?). (Searle 1977: 205) Searle’s claim is far from convincing. Not only does it ignore the very widespread and strongly negative connotations attached to the term ‘parasite’, it also overlooks Austin’s use of the word ‘etiolations’. Pointing out that the latter means ‘making pale, sickly, by exclusion of sunlight’, Jonathan Culler, for example, argues that the quotations’ fusion of the two terms ‘activates the negative connotations of “parasitic”: literature as sickly parasite on healthy normal linguistic Literature and the Parasite 303 activity’ (Culler 2007: 146). To say the least, if Austin’s intention was to convey the idea that non-serious utterances were no better and no worse – just different – from those ‘issued in ordinary circumstances’, the choice of terms can hardly be said to be successful. As such, coming from somebody otherwise known for his eloquence, this awkward wording would in itself merit interest. To give an example from the opposite camp, in her The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (1980), Shoshana Felman takes Austin’s analytic followers to task for not realising that the statement is (or at least could be) a joke: It is on the basis of such quotations that Austin is deemed to be caught redhanded defending ‘seriousness,’ what is ‘considered normal,’ as opposed to the ‘parasitism,’ the ‘unseriousness’ of poetry, play, or joking, which thus find themselves excluded. However, when Austin says, using his favorite firstperson rhetoric, ‘I must not be joking, for example,’ is it certain that we must – that we can – believe him? Coming from a jester like Austin, might not that sentence itself be taken as a denegation – as a joke? (Felman 2003: 95) Felman is certainly correct that one would have to be pretty humourless not to even consider that someone as thoroughly irreverent and funny as Austin – and moreover, someone so fond of supporting his claims with examples that by his own criteria would have to be counted as parasitic – might be joking. This is especially so if one takes into account that in his article ‘A Plea for Excuses’ (1956), Austin had argued that the abnormal is much more interesting than the normal, as well as capable of explaining the latter.1 It might very well be asked why the same should not also hold for the relationship between ‘abnormal’ literary language and ‘normal’ serious language. As such, there is good reason to at least hold open the possibility that Austin’s own intentions might be far from what later analytic philosophers have made them out to be. Even though I agree more with Felman than with Searle in this regard, I here want to propose an altogether different solution: instead of trying to explain away the fact that Austin labelled literature ‘parasitic’ – either by saying, as Searle does, that he did not mean anything bad by it, or, as Felman does, that he was only joking – what if we were actually to take him at his word? What would happen if, rather than concentrating on his intentions, we set to work exploring where the concept of literature as parasitic can take us and what new insights might be gained in the process? 304 Anders M. Gullestad As I will argue, one of the things a model based upon the relationship between parasite and host might be capable of is to let us approach anew the world-creating ability of literary texts through the creation and installation of aesthetic affects in the readers. The fact that this creative potential inherent in Austin’s claim has not yet been realised very likely has to do with the widespread understanding of parasites as worthless, degenerate creatures; a view which, in fact, is a remnant from the early phase of parasitology in the last half of the nineteenth century. Even though later scientists have realised that such a view is extremely simplified, bordering on the outright erroneous, they have not managed to shake off the very deeply ingrained negative associations the term still brings to mind. Rather than let these negative connotations continue to function as a barrier limiting thought, what we should do is directly confront them. In the following, I will therefore argue that Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite opens the way for an understanding more nuanced and better adjusted to the realities of parasitical relations in nature than the common-sense, negative one. Elaborating on this through a closer look at Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the ‘becomingminor’ of literature – both in his own texts and in those written together with Félix Guattari – I will show how the Serresian approach to the parasite intersects in a number of interesting ways with the concept of ‘minor literature’. Reading them together might therefore help shed new light on both, as well as help us better understand what actually happens when literature does function in such a way as to play a part in the creation of newness. Before this can be accomplished, though, there is one fundamental question that will have to be addressed: when we refer to parasites, what exactly is it we are talking about? I. What is a Parasite? The answer might at first seem rather straightforward. A fairly standard attempt at a definition can for example be found in Bernard E. Matthews’ An Introduction to Parasitology (1998), where it is claimed that ‘for our purposes I suggest we consider parasites as being animals that live for an appreciable proportion of their lives in (endoparasites) or on (ectoparasites) another organism, their host, are dependent on that host and benefit from the association at the host’s expense’ (Matthews 2005: 12). Even if Matthews strangely omits plants, his description might still be seen as a good working definition. Even so, there are certain problems it is not capable of properly dealing with. As we will see, this Literature and the Parasite 305 is something it has in common with most (if not all) other attempts to clearly distinguish between parasites and non-parasites. First, one could ask what Matthews means by the term ‘animals’. Coming from the Latin term animalis – meaning ‘with soul’ – it usually refers to the members of the kingdom Animalia, to which Homo sapiens belongs. Does this mean, then, that humans can be parasites? While the definition certainly seems to point in this direction, most of those working in the natural sciences would probably agree that this is not the case, or at least not in the same sense as with other animals. A common view would be that while one can very well talk of people as parasites, this is only a figure of speech, not a description of reality, as in the case of lice or tapeworms. In other words, if man is a parasite, he would seem to be so only by metaphorical association, as attested to by the following part of the definition of a (social) parasite from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘a person whose behaviour resembles that of a plant or animal parasite’ (OED Online).2 This view, though, overlooks how the content of the term ‘parasite’ has drastically changed throughout history. Readers of J. Hillis Miller’s seminal article ‘The Critic as Host’ (1979), for example, will be well acquainted with the etymology of the word. Stemming from the Greek parasitos, consisting of para (besides) and sitos (the grain), the word originally referred to someone who was next to the food along with the host: ‘A parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, there with you beside the grain. Later on, “parasite” came to mean a professional dinner guest, someone expert at cadging invitations without ever giving dinners in return’ (Miller 2004: 179).3 While not an entirely precise description – Miller neglects to mention that the parasite was originally a holy figure in Greek antiquity, and has little to say about its important role as a stock character in Greek and Latin comedy – the point is otherwise succinct: what was originally viewed positively over time became known as the opposite, namely a guest, often of the uninvited sort, out to acquire a free dinner.4 As a matter of fact, until the mid-seventeenth century (when it also came to designate plants living on other plants), the term ‘parasite’ was used solely for people, and it was only after the natural sciences of the early nineteenth century adopted the term that it became applied to sponging animals and insects.5 In combination with various important scientific advances, this adoption eventually resulted in the creation and institutionalisation of the new scientific field of parasitology sometime during the last half of the century.6 What this means is that the 306 Anders M. Gullestad foundation upon which the scientific study of non-human parasites rests was adapted from relations among humans: it is not the human parasite which was modelled on the animal one, but the other way around. This can also be seen in how the scientific language of parasitology is suffused with remnants of the human origins of its object of study; as Michel Serres puts it in his The Parasite (1980): The basic vocabulary of this science comes from such ancient and common customs and habits that the earliest monuments of our culture tell of them, and we still see them, at least in part: hospitality, conviviality, table manners, hostelry, general relations with strangers. Thus the vocabulary is imported to this pure science and bears several traces of anthropomorphism. (Serres 2007: 6) The supposedly clear-cut distinction between human and non-human parasites is further complicated if one also takes into account what is known as ‘the immunological problem of pregnancy’, formulated by British zoologist Peter Medawar in his ‘Some Immunological and Endocrinological Problems Raised by the Evolution of Viviparity in Vertebrates’ (1953). Since all mammals share half of their genes with each parent, this means that the human embryo has to find its habitat in and draw its nourishment from a being whose immune system would normally consider it a threat to be disposed of – just as it would with any foreign body. Later scientists working along similar lines have pointed out that the relationship between embryo and mother can therefore be said to resemble that between parasite and host. Luis P. Villarreal, for example, argues that embryos actively suppress the mother’s immune reactions much the same way as parasites do when they manage to outsmart their hosts: Mammals, being viviparous, pose an interesting immunological dilemma. They have highly adaptive immune systems that fail to recognize their own allogeneic embryos. In a sense, mammalian embryos resemble parasites that must suppress their mother’s immune recognition systems to survive. (Villarreal 1997: 859) The implications are clear: contrary to the common-sense view where social parasitism is seen as a metaphorical extension of a biological phenomenon, not only were humans the original carriers of the title parasite, but we also all start our lives in such a way that scientists will have a hard time explaining why exactly we (at least prior to birth) should not be considered as full members of the class of parasitic entities. In addition, there are also other reasons for the difficulty of reaching an unambiguous definition. For even if one solely focuses on non-human Literature and the Parasite 307 spongers, parasites are not a natural class or group, but must be defined by other criteria. One consequence is that in the case of closely related species – such as different species of wasps – some might be considered parasites, while others are not. The inverse is also true: creatures that in themselves have almost nothing in common – such as the barnacle Sacculina carcini and the cuckoo – are both defined as parasites. What is more, the commonalities that do exist between the two only come into view if you treat these creatures in relation to those species upon which they sponge – the common crab, in the case of the former, any bird in whose nest it can deposit its eggs, in the case of the latter. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues, parasitism therefore is relational, through and through: Rare for biology, here is a subdiscipline devoted not to a natural class of living things but, rather, to a relationship between two quite different species of plants or animals. It is the character of the difference and the mode of relationship that supplies both the key characteristics for classification and the central topics for disciplinary thought. (Smith 2004: 253) The question of where and how to draw the line between membership and non-membership in the category is further complicated when one points out that parasites will often go through non-parasitic stages during their lifecycles, leading to the question: how much of one’s time has to be spent sponging on a host organism to qualify as a proper parasite? And what about such creatures – certain leeches, for example – that are part-time predators (on smaller animals) and parttime parasites (on larger ones), how should they be defined? Obviously, answering such questions requires a certain degree of approximation, to say the least. Then there is also the question of which branches of the tree of life are to be included in definitions: traditionally, only eukaryotes have been, but in fact – as there is no fundamental difference between the modes of existence of parasitic eukaryotes and those of bacteria and viruses – this was so only by convention.7 Since viruses are not really alive at all, a more internally coherent definition would therefore cause the set of parasitic entities to be extended all the way across the divide between life and non-life. But even without counting bacteria and viruses, the number of parasites is still vast; in the words of Carl Zimmer: ‘Scientists . . . have no idea how many species of parasites there are, but they do know one dazzling thing: parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology’ (Zimmer 2001: xxi). 308 Anders M. Gullestad Combining all the aspects discussed so far, one begins to grasp the immense difficulty of properly defining clear criteria for distinguishing parasites from non-parasites. In practice, of course, this is seldom a problem for those working in the field – they recognise a parasite perfectly well when they see one. It is only when they are forced to attempt a definition that they run into problems. A perfect example of this can be found in Parascript: Parasites and the Language of Evolution (1993) by Daniel R. Brooks and Deborah A. McLennan: starting out by running through a wide range of historical attempts at finding characteristics that would unambiguously define parasites, as well as pointing out the inherent failures of each of these, in the end, the authors see no other way out of the problem than joking it away: ‘We conclude, only somewhat tongue in cheek, that the only unambiguous definition is that parasites are those organisms studied by people who call themselves parasitologists’ (Brooks and McLennan 1993: 5). One definition they do not touch upon in their list is the one found under the heading ‘The Best Definition’ in Michel Serres’ The Parasite. As part of a truly idiosyncratic approach to the topic in question, it reads as follows: ‘The parasite is a thermal exciter’ (Serres 2007: 190). Differently put, to Serres it is an element which causes the temperature to rise in a thermodynamic system. While probably of little use to most parasitologists, what I want to argue is that by focusing on what the parasite brings about, rather than on how it differs from non-parasites, Serres actually manages to avoid many of the problems more orthodox definitions are bound to run into. As such, his definition also allows us to come to terms with a problem that the parasitologists of today have inherited from their predecessors: that of the low status of their object of research.8 Briefly summarised, what happened when the term parasite was taken up by the natural sciences was that first the negative ethical implications of an unequal relationship among humans were transposed to nature, causing many nineteenth-century scientists to understand non-human parasites as somehow engaged in an unethical activity.9 Then, in a circular movement, the term was applied as a metaphor for humans acting in a similar manner to these biological spongers. In the process, people claimed to be like parasites were judged as no better than biological entities perceived to be of the very lowest and most useless kind. Besides the ease with which this new conception could be taken advantage of by those in power as a rhetorical tool for dehumanising their opponents,10 there is an additional problem with such a view: Literature and the Parasite 309 whereas people such as Drummond and the famous evolutionary biologist E. Ray Lankester were confident that parasites were the primary example of an evolutionary tendency whereby too easy an access to food and shelter would lead to a degenerative reduction of complexity,11 later scientists have realised that such an understanding has very little to do with parasitical relationships as they are found in nature – relationships that are far more complex than this thoroughly prejudiced conception is capable of grasping. One could for example ask, as does Claude Combes, why it is that the simplification of a structure should necessarily be seen as a negative aspect from an evolutionary perspective: The losses of organs have led to the frequent discussion of evolutionary ‘regression’ in parasites. We should be wary of this term because it is not obvious why abandoning organs that have become useless in order to allocate the energy thus saved to other functions should not be perceived as progress, from the standpoint of adaptation. Although parasites give the impression of being morphologically simplified, they have only become progressively adapted to their lifestyle, and they are in fact more highly evolved than their free-living ancestors. (Combes 2005: 34)12 As Combes stresses, being a successful parasite involves a very high degree of specialisation, as well as the ability to constantly modify your behaviour in order to adapt to an ever-changing habitat bent on your destruction. Those that are not able to do so will finally be exterminated by their hosts, whose immune systems are in a constant battle with the intruders. As such, parasites do not only have to evolve if they want to stay ahead, they can also be seen as forcing their hosts to do the same. While some parasites do indeed cause a lot of damage, even – in the case of parasitoids – killing their hosts, a lack of parasites should therefore not be understood as a sign of health, but rather the opposite, pointing to a world out of balance.13 The problem is that this has not registered with wider audiences, who have still not been able to shake off the image of the parasite – both human and animal – that came into existence alongside the scientific field of parasitology in the last half of the nineteenth century. This is where Serres may be of help. In his analysis, he distinguishes between three different meanings of the word ‘parasite’. In French it can refer to people (as social parasites), non-humans (biological parasites) and to noise, as in the expression bruit parasite (background noise). Building on the way systems theory understands noise, this third meaning allows Serres to stress the important role of foreign bodies in causing the systems 310 Anders M. Gullestad they are introduced into to evolve. He thereby opens the way for an understanding that allows us to see that parasites bring a very important contribution to the table of the host: The parasite is an exciter. Far from transforming a system, changing its nature, its form, its elements, its relations and its pathways the parasite makes it change states differentially. It inclines it. It makes the equilibrium of the energetic distribution fluctuate. It dopes it. It irritates it. It inflames it. Often this inclination has no effect. But it can produce gigantic ones by chain reactions or reproduction. (Serres 2007: 191) Serres’ definition thus allows us to see the parasite as a motor of evolution, causing newness to come into being, and life to endlessly proliferate through bringing about yet new (re)configurations. In itself, this is neither good nor bad – whether a given mutation is valuable or not can only be decided in retrospect and on a case-by-case basis. For this reason my argument should not be understood as entailing a heroicisation of parasites. What is important is that defining them a priori as ‘bad’ and ‘degenerate’ simply will not do, precisely because it blinds us to the properly creative element involved in their work. II. The Becoming-Minor of Literature If one takes such an understanding into account, Austin’s claim – no matter what his intentions may or may not have been – suddenly begins to make more sense, giving us a new framework from which literature’s active, world-shaping capabilities might be pursued. One of the best ways of exploring what insights such a model might generate is via Gilles Deleuze, whose perhaps foremost contribution to literary studies lies in the way he pursued the fundamental insight that literature should be understood not in terms of what it is, but of what it does and how it functions – how it is involved in the continual creation of the new or the not-yet. In his own words, in ‘Literature and Life’ – the first chapter of Essays Critical and Clinical (1993): ‘Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the liveable and the lived’ (Deleuze 1997: 1). As he then goes on to explicate, echoing his earlier writings on the topic, the becoming in question is of a special sort: ‘Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible’ Literature and the Parasite 311 (Deleuze 1997: 1). What the examples Deleuze refers to have in common is that they are all stages of one and the same process. As such, they can be seen as different versions of what he termed becoming-minor, representing a fundamental openness towards the open-ended. It is therefore not a question of moving towards a given telos. On the contrary, becoming is without any goal other than the continual affirmation of the creativity of life and its possibility of entering into new connections: what counts is the process itself. The minor can thus be seen as that which undermines the prerogatives of the given and fully formed. Through setting itself up as a norm, such a major or majoritarian mode will end up limiting or, at the extreme, stopping altogether the process of becoming. To put it in somewhat over-simplified terms: whereas the major equals stagnation, the minor equals continual movement. The following description of becoming-animal from Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) can therefore be said to hold just as well for becoming-minor as such: To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (Deleuze and Guattari 2006: 13) What Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature shows is that the creation of literature and art should be seen as part of the very same general process of the becoming of life. It is here that the concept of a ‘minor literature’ is introduced as new way of understanding Kafka’s oeuvre. Refusing to treat the content of a given work as crucial, Deleuze and Guattari instead stress the question of expression, which for them is related to how the continual, non-personal becoming of life lets itself be known and felt, rather than to any individual expressing his or her feelings:14 Only expression gives us the method. The problem of expression is staked out by Kafka not in an abstract and universal fashion but in relation to those literatures that are considered minor, for example the Jewish literature of Warsaw and Prague. A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. (Deleuze and Guattari 2006: 16) Due to the fact that Kafka was a Jew living in Prague, yet writing in German, such references to ‘minorities’ as found in the quotation can easily be misunderstood, seeming to indicate that minor literature is in some way bound up with social groups that are not politically 312 Anders M. Gullestad dominant. That this is not the case becomes increasingly clear in Deleuze’s subsequent writings; as Ronald Bogue puts it: ‘already in Dialogues it is evident that for Deleuze minor literature is less a specific subdivision of literature than a name for literature when it functions as it should’ (Bogue 2003: 162). Properly speaking, it is not a question of numerical minorities and majorities, but of managing to use any given language in a minor way: for Deleuze, this is the real criterion for deciding which writings deserve to be grouped under the title ‘minor literature’ (or simply ‘literature’) – and as he indicates, this is fairly rare.15 It would perhaps even be possible to go as far as saying that, to him, a truly minor usage of language should be seen as a defining mark of literary greatness: as an actualisation of what is yet only virtual, becoming-minor is indeed the case for all masterpieces of literature. So far, the exact relationship between a major language and a minor usage has not been clarified: in practice, how are we to distinguish between the two? One way of doing so is by looking at Deleuze’s use of spatial imagery. For example, in ‘Literature and Life’ – referring to Proust’s claim that ‘Great books are written in a kind of foreign language’ – he states that literature ‘opens up a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorisation of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system’ (Deleuze 1997: 5). To Deleuze, minor literature is therefore not external, but internal to a major language, yet at the same time ‘foreign’ to it – it is both identical and not identical to language, both an integral part of it and a foreign body. Minor literature is internal to language because it is made up of it, since it is bound to find at least most of its tools in the latter: words, expressions, syntax, and so on. What separates the two – indicating the foreign character of minor literature – is that the minor approach will apply these raw materials in new and unexpected ways, purposefully breaking and bending the rules of normal speech for artistic effect. Especially in those cases where it is taken the furthest, a minor use of language will constantly be in danger of being perceived as utter nonsense, madness or as noise, and thereby defined as void of meaning, belonging in the same category as animal sounds, the glossalalia of the infant and the ramblings of the mad. On the other hand, if a minor style is not radical enough, it will easily end up being assimilated into the major which it tries to set in motion through its flight. In terms of the reading experience, for us to return to certain books, there must be something in them that draws us back, something which eludes our Literature and the Parasite 313 attempts at understanding or arriving at a final definition. Yet, on the other hand, neither should the work be perceived as totally without meaning, so that we feel there is nothing to be gained by making the effort. Optimally, then, minor literature should straddle the divide between inclusion into and exclusion from major language in such a way that it be perceived as pure nonsense no more than as sense. As Deleuze puts it in regard to Louis Wolfson’s schizophrenic writings: ‘the problem is not go beyond the bounds of reason, it is to cross the bounds of unreason as a victor’ (Deleuze 1997: 20). There is no one way of doing so, rather different authors must find their own, individual ways – in his analyses, Deleuze enumerates several: Kafka, who ‘abandon[s] sense, render[s] it no more than implicit; he will retain only the skeleton of sense, or a paper cutout’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2006: 20–1); or Lewis Carroll, who ‘allowed nothing to pass through sense, but . . . played out everything in nonsense’ (Deleuze 1997: 22), etc. What is important is that, for Deleuze, when literature manages to be truly minor, it functions as an inner ‘exciter’ – as an irritant, causing language as a whole to be set in motion in new directions: ‘Language seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows’ (Deleuze 1997: 5). This movement is directed against the borders of language, pointing to its outside: ‘a foreign language cannot be hollowed out in one language without language as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions . . . are not outside language, but the outside of language’ (Deleuze 1997: 5). They are not outside language, because they are made up of it, but they are ‘the outside’ because their content does not confirm to the structures by which language shapes our understanding of reality. Minor literature thus performs a form of violence on language as a whole, forcing it to shift and expand its borders through a hollowing out from within.16 III. The Parasitism of Minor Literature We are now in a position to begin to understand why Serres’ notion of the parasite is intimately related to the Deleuzian one of ‘minor literature’, criss-crossing and intersecting with it in a number of interesting ways, and why taken together the two may help us understand Austin’s claim in a new light. A hypothesis may even be ventured: the defining mark of the relation between a major language and minor literature is that it is parasitic, in Serres’ sense of the word. 314 Anders M. Gullestad If we were now to explicate some of these similarities, first it should be pointed out that in both cases – both when it comes to the (endo)parasite in regards to its host, and minor literature in regards to major language – it is a question of an entity which is part of (something perceived as) a totality, yet without properly belonging to it. As we have seen, minor literature straddles the border between language and its outside, and similarly, parasites are both a part and not a part of the host’s body, neither entirely self nor non-self. Endoparasites, in particular, can be said to represent a special challenge to any Cartesian conception of the subject as a stable and coherent entity: believing man is the sovereign lord of his own manor can become quite difficult if it turns out that one is carrying around, say, a tapeworm nourishing itself in and on your intestines, especially if this guest is capable of fending off the counter-attacks launched by your immune system or even of modifying your behaviour to its own ends. Just as with minor literature, if the parasite is to spread, it should be neither too easy to read for the host (in which case it will eventually be defeated) nor too difficult, so that it comes to completely eradicate its habitat: evolutionary speaking, it is not in the parasite’s best interest to be too detrimental to its host population as a whole, as can be seen when changes which result in access to hosts becoming more difficult cause parasites to become less virulent.17 The most interesting similarity, though, is the way in which Serres’ definition allows us to more clearly perceive the effects of minor literature: standing in a parasitic relation to major language, the minor forces it into a state of continual becoming. In itself, it does not change language, but it ‘dopes’ it, ‘irritates’ it or ‘inflames’ it so as to make it flow in other directions, just as the effect of the parasite on the host is one of irritating it into evolving still further on a road with no end. As such we can be said to be hosts to parasitic entities on several different levels – biological ones affecting our bodies, as well as textual ones affecting our minds. This can help explain why equilibrium is no more common in language than in nature; or as Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers – influences on, as well as influenced by both Deleuze and Serres – argue in their Order Out of Chaos (1979): ‘In the world that we are familiar with, equilibrium is a rare and precarious state’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 128).18 Both parasitic minor literature and the biological parasite should therefore be seen as agents ensuring that any equilibrium, be it in language or in nature, is bound to be of an unstable kind, likely to deteriorate, forcing its host or its host system to constantly readjust. Since this relationship does not follow a causal logic, exactly what sorts of creative becomings these agents will set in Literature and the Parasite 315 motion cannot be told in advance.19 This is of less importance than the fact that they happen, and can therefore be used as a model for thinking about how all sorts of language acts – and perhaps especially the type that Austin termed parasitic. So far, we have been looking only at the relationship between literature and language as a whole, without saying anything about the role of individual readers and authors in the process by which language comes to be pushed beyond its boundaries. This question of how literature, along with the other arts, can be said to act concretely upon those perceiving it was addressed by Deleuze and Guattari most thoroughly in their last collaborative work, What is Philosophy? (1991). Here they clarify how the differences between philosophy, science and art can be thought of in terms of their respective relationships to chaos, understood as ‘a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 118). In other words, chaos is the totality of all that is, yet in a state in which nothing is foregrounded, where everything is equally important or unimportant. It is existence in its unbearable fullness, and for us to be able to make sense out of this existence, chaos has to be reduced by imposing some sort of order to it. Through the creation of concepts, philosophy attempts to do so by ‘giving the virtual a consistency specific to it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 118). With the help of functions capable of calculating regular states of affairs, science, on the other hand, tries to slow chaos down to a manageable speed. Finally, what art does is to capture a slice of chaos in a specific material, so as to make it concrete and tangible: ‘Art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it sensory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 205). It preserves a given combination of sensations or intensities, the artist endowing these with a life of their own, so to speak ripping them out of the progress of time (at least until the material in which they have been given life should be destroyed). To Deleuze, what art offers is therefore exactly such combinations, made up percepts and affects, which have acquired an existence of their own: ‘What is preserved – the thing of the work of art – is a block of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 164). Torn free from its creator, it is this autonomous block, then, which can be said to act upon those experiencing the work of art or literature. While no noticeable reaction will often occur, in certain cases the work 316 Anders M. Gullestad will have a strong physical impact, almost as if the reader had been violently torn out of quotidian life.20 Our ‘molar’ identities are thus dislocated, opening up for the emergence of something else. Rather than saying that it is minor literature as such which is parasitic, perhaps it would therefore be better to say that it is the percepts and affects it produces which makes it function in a parasitic manner. This allows us to see interesting similarities with, but also important differences from, Richard Dawkins’ theory of the meme, first formulated in his The Selfish Gene (1976). The meme was here introduced as the cultural equivalent of a gene, that is, as a cultural product capable of replicating and spreading. Just as evolution can be viewed from the gene’s point of view – namely, as a continual progress through which genes manage to replicate themselves for their own sakes and not for that of their host organisms – so can culture be viewed from the standpoint of our ideas and practices. Meme theory therefore inverts the ordinary way of viewing the relation between people and ideas: rather than seeing the latter simply as tools that we use for our own ends, Dawkins proposes treating them as entities which use us in order to spread as effectively as possible. Very effective memes might even cause people to behave in ways not beneficial for themselves, as in the case of a suicide bomber who is willing to give his own life for the propagation of the ideas he serves. Interestingly, Dawkins explicitly describes the process by which a meme manages to copy itself into a new brain in terms of the parasite: ‘When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell’ (Dawkins 1989: 192). Now, this is very similar to what happens when a work of minor literature manages to implant a specific block of sensations into the minds of those who perceive it, but here the differences between Deleuze and Dawkins start to come into view. Even though the latter – through his insistence on replication as an imperfect process where divergences and errors are eventually bound to appear – can account for the fact that memes will often end up changing over time, for him, the process through which they spread is still thought of in terms of imitation: ‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation’ (Dawkins 1989: 192).21 Dawkins’ theory can therefore be said to be bound to a mimetic view which might be capable of explaining how ‘ordinary’ ideas with a clear and reproducible Literature and the Parasite 317 content spread, but equally incapable of approaching the functioning of art, where it is a question of shaping a concrete material through the artist’s individual style in order to transmit sensations, rather than of transmitting a specific content.22 Or to put it differently: what matters in art – or at least in art the way Deleuze understands the term – is not the similarity to an original, as in Dawkins’ view of replication, but rather the creation of something radically new and dissimilar. For this reason, describing the effects of art’s blocks of sensation as parasitic might actually be more correct than in the case of Dawkins’ replicating memes. This has to do with the fact that a successful parasite, as previously indicated, has to be able to constantly adapt to its living habitat in order not to be eradicated by the host’s immune system – in other words, as Marlene Zuk has put it in regards to the sneaky strategies of parasitic pathogens, such as STDs, ‘from the parasite’s perspective, it is best not to have too obvious an effect on one’s host. . . . So it should pay for the pathogen to become cryptic’ (Zuk 2007: 114).23 For a potential host, it would therefore be easier to avoid memes which fulfil Dawkins’ third criteria for a ‘high survival value’ – what he terms ‘copying-fidelity’, the ability to replicate as accurately as possible – than to avoid the parasitic blocks of sensation created by minor literature, which might not correspond to anything the host has come across before. This leads us to one of the most important questions for Deleuze in regards to literature and art: the question of health. For as he reminds us, addressing the relationship between literature and medicine: ‘the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health’ (Deleuze 1997: 3). To him, literature has this role exactly because it enables life to flow, removing blockages, letting it be fuller and richer than it would otherwise be. Similarly, the existence of parasites is crucial to the health of the ecosystem; in Carl Zimmer’s words: ‘A healthy ecosystem is riddled with parasites, and in some cases, an ecosystem may even depend on parasites for its health’ (Zimmer 2001: 218). We need parasites, just as we need minor literature, for what they achieve, which actually amounts to the same thing – causing life to renew itself. Now, there is nothing to indicate that any of this was on Austin’s mind when he gave the lectures that were to become How to Do Things with Words, but this is of less importance than the fact that he unwittingly offered literary scholars a promising conceptual gift – one which, even though it is as yet unwrapped, enables a radically different approach to that very question he opens up, only to seemingly close off when 318 Anders M. Gullestad delimiting the boundaries of speech-act theory: that of the ways in which literature can be said to act in the world, bringing newness into being. Austin’s error was therefore not to have labelled literature as parasitic. On the contrary, his error lies in having drawn the conclusion that this meant literature could safely be excluded from consideration, when he should have realised that precisely these parasitic traits constitute one very good reason why literature should be studied. Read with an awareness of the immense importance of parasites to the continual evolution of life, Austin’s claim therefore allows us to conceptualise the truly parasitic aspects of that literature which deserves the name ‘minor’. In fact, there is a precise correspondence between his ‘doctrine of the etiolations of language’ and Deleuze’s description of minor literature’s ‘hollowing out from within’ of language: is not such a carving out from within exactly the work performed by the parasite – be it biological or textual – when it causes its host to set off along ever new ‘lines of flight’? Notes 1. As he puts it: ‘[T]o examine excuses is to examine cases where there has been some abnormality or failure: and as so often, the abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us to penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act’ (Austin 2007: 179–80). 2. When scientists address the question of the ontological status of man as a parasite (in a metaphorical sense), as opposed to ‘real’ parasites, the result is often a fundamental ambiguity. For example, in The Art of Being a Parasite (2001), Claude Combes claims that ‘if we extend the concept of parasitism to all cases of a lasting exploitation of one organism by another, we would not hestitate to classify as intraspecific parasitism well-known cases among several birds . . . in which females deliberately lay several eggs in the nest of a neighboring pair. And one would surely be licensed to study “social parasitism” among humans, the subject of several generations of social scientists’ (Combes 2005: 7, emphasis added). As the wording shows, Combes here manages to avoid properly answering the question by simultaneously saying that a) humans can be studied as parasites, and b) but that to do so, one both has to ‘extend’ the concept and somehow also receive ‘license’ for this (probably from those dealing with the ‘authentic’ parasites). 3. Miller’s starting point in ‘The Critic as Host’ is M. H. Abrams’ citation of Wayne Booth’s claim that the ‘deconstructionist’ reading ‘is plainly and simply parasitical’ on the obvious reading of a text (Miller 2004: 177). While Miller does not mention Austin in the article, in a later work he connects the two: ‘Austin’s use of the term “parasitic,” I note in passing, may conceivably be the source of Meyer Abrams’s well-known assertion that a deconstructive reading is parasitic on the “normal,” commonsensical reading, to which I tried long ago to respond’ (Miller 2001: 36). 4. The specifics of the parasite’s early historical stages are treated more thoroughly in my article ‘Parasite’, forthcoming in Political Concepts: A Critical Review (and in Hebrew in Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought). Literature and the Parasite 319 5. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the adjective ‘parasitical’ in regards to plants dates back to Sir Thomas Brown’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) (see Brown 1658: 78). As a noun, ‘parasite’ was first applied to plants in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (see Chambers 1728: 351). 6. No definite agreement exists as to the exact genesis of the new field. In his Parasites and Parasitic Infections in Early Medicine and Science (1959), Reinhard Hoeppli dates it to around 1850; Arthur William Meyer’s The Rise of Embryology (1939) suggests the period 1840–70; John Farley’s ‘Parasites and the Germ Theory of Disease’ (1989) dates parasitology, as distinct from the earlier and much smaller field of helminthology, to the 1880s; whereas Michael Worboys’ ‘The Emergence and Early Development of Parasitology’ (1983) operates with three periods: the field’s prehistory (the mid-nineteenth century to 1900), its emergence (1900–18), and finally its proper establishment (in the interwar period). 7. For an analysis of the historical reasons for the institutional divide which came to separate the study of parasites and bacteria, see Farley’s ‘Parasites and the Germ Theory of Disease’: ‘Before the 1880s, intellectual differences had kept parasitology isolated from medicine, but by the turn of the century institutional differences came to play the most significant role. Parasitology in Britain and the United States became established as a discipline outside the mainstream of medicine. It became segregated from the modern medical field of bacteriology; it concentrated on naming and describing nonbacterial parasites and their life cycles and became increasingly irrelevant to work on bacterial diseases’ (Farley 1989: 65). 8. See my ‘Parasite’ (Gullestad, forthcoming) for a more thorough discussion of this point. 9. One of the clearest examples of how the parasite comes to be conceived in ethical terms foreign to nature can be found in Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883): ‘Why does the naturalist think hardly of the parasite? Why does he speak of them as degraded, and despise them as the most ignoble creatures in Nature? . . . The naturalist’s reply to this is brief. Parasitism, he will say, is one of the gravest crimes in Nature. It is a breach of the law of Evolution. Thou shalt evolve . . . – this is the first and greatest commandment of nature. But the parasite has no thought for . . . perfection in any shape or form’ (Drummond 2008: 158). 10. In this modern conception of the parasite, man and animal come to be tied together so thoroughly that in certain cases it can be said to lead to the creation of a new creature – a Homo parasitus, so to speak – finding its most radical expression in the National Socialists’ use of the image of the Jew as parasite as a means of legitimising the concentration camps (cf. Bein 1964). As I argue in ‘Parasite’, the convergence between social Darwinism and various theories of degeneration found in Drummond’s work, as well as many of his contemporaries in the late nineteenth century, played an important role in clearing the ground for the National Socialists’ redeployment of the term. 11. As Lankester puts it in ‘Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism’: ‘Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organisation in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs’ (Lankester 1890: 27). 320 Anders M. Gullestad 12. He then goes on to add something Lankester and Drummond seem to have overlooked, namely that ‘regression and disappearance of organs are among the most normal processes of evolution’ (Combes 2005: 34). 13. Cf. Zimmer’s Parasite Rex (2000) and Marlene Zuk’s Riddled With Life (2007) for a plethora of concrete examples of why life without parasites would neither be advantageous nor possible. 14. Cf. Brian Massumi’s introduction to A Shock to Thought: ‘There is no entity to expression. There is no super-subject behind its movement. Its emerging into words and things is always an event before it is a designation, manifestation, or signification propositionally and provisionally attached to a subject’ (Massumi 2006: xxiii–xxiv). 15. On the scarcity of true literature, cf. the last sentence of ‘Literature and Life’: ‘If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers’ (Deleuze 1997: 6). 16. On the violence of thought (of which art is one form) in Deleuze, cf. Proust and Signs: ‘The act of thinking does not proceed from a simple natural possibility; on the contrary, it is the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking within thought itself. This genesis implicates something that does violence to thought, which wrests it from its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities’ (Deleuze 2008: 62). 17. Becoming less virulent in this case meaning that the parasites that cause less harm to their hosts will be more effective in reproducing, which over time will ensure that this trait comes to define the parasite population. 18. On the relationship between Serres and Prigogine, cf. Neubauer 2003; on that between Deleuze and Prigogine, cf. May 2005: esp. 92–5. 19. Importantly, for Serres the work performed by the parasite is ‘irreversible’: ‘The flow goes one way, never the other. I call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this relation without a reversal of direction, “parasitic”’ (Serres 2007: 5). This should be read in connection with Prigogine’s attempt to shift the focus of thermodynamics from reversible to irreversible processes occurring far-from-equilibrium, where there is no logical necessity connecting the initial and the final state of the process (see Prigogine 1997). 20. Good examples of the latter are the sort of reactions to works of art – involving dizziness, fainting and hallucinations – commonly grouped together as the ‘Stendhal syndrome’, as a reference to Stendhal’s description of a similar experience during his visit to Italy in 1817. The term was coined by the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini after treating numerous such cases among visitors to museums in Florence. For a brief treatment of the syndrome in regards to Deleuze, see Shaviro 2009: 6. 21. For a work that pursues the question of how we should understand this ‘broad sense’ of imitation Dawkins is here referring to, see Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999). The fundamental premise of her book – for which Dawkins wrote the foreword, and which he strongly endorses – is that it ‘is our ability to imitate’ which sets humans apart from animals (Blackmore 1999: 3). In a fairly reductive manner, this trait is then used as a basis for understanding all forms of cultural transmissions. 22. This overvaluation of content at the expense of form in Dawkins is likely linked to what Elizabeth Grosz has claimed is a widespread neo-Darwinian overvaluation of natural selection at the expense of sexual selection. Criticising the famous Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz for his understanding of such traits as bright colouring in fish as resulting from natural selection alone, Grosz points out how he – unlike Charles Darwin himself – thereby loses sight of the creative Literature and the Parasite 321 excess of life: ‘Like other neo-Darwinians, he [Lorenz] reduces sexual selection to natural selection, thereby simplifying and rendering evolution monodirectional, regulated only by the selection of randomly acquired characteristics and not by the unpredictable vagaries of taste and pleasure that sexual selection entails. For Darwin himself, however, these markings [bright colours, and so on], which he acknowledges may serve aggressive functions, are not the conditions of territoriality but the raw materials of sexual selection, excesses that are produced and explored for no reason other than their possibilities for intensification, their appeal’ (Grosz 2008: 67). 23. This resonates well with Deleuze and Guattari’s point in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), when, discussing how all becomings can be said to start with becomingwoman, they stress the importance of camouflage for the line of flight to avoid detection so as not to become reterritorialised: ‘When the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses into flight: the warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 277). References Austin, J. L. (1980 [1962]) How to Do Things with Words, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, second edition. Austin, J. L. (2007 [1956]) ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–204. Bein, Alex (1964) ‘The Jewish Parasite. Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 9:1, pp. 3–40. Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Bogue, Ronald (2003) Deleuze on Literature, New York: Routledge. Brooks, Daniel R. and Deborah A. McLennan (1993) Parascript: Parasites and the Language of Evolution, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Brown, Sir Thomas (1658 [1646]) Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths. The Third Edition, Corrected and Enlarged by the Author. Together With some Marginall Observations, and a Table Alphabeticall at the end, London: Nath. Ekins. Chambers, Ephraim (1728) Cyclopædia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences, Volume the Second, London: James and John Knapton et al. Combes, Claude (2005 [2001]) The Art of Being a Parasite, trans. Daniel Simberloff, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Culler, Jonathan (2007) The Literary in Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dawkins, Richard (1989 [1976]) The Selfish Gene, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997 [1993]) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2008 [1964]) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 322 Anders M. Gullestad Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2006 [1975]) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2009 [1991]) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, London and New York: Verso. 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Hillis (2004 [1979]), ‘The Critic as Host’, in H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. Hartman and J. H. Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism, London and New York: Continuum. Neubauer, John (2003) ‘Reflections on the “Convergence” Between Literature and Science’, MLN, 118:3, pp. 740–54. Oxford English Dictionary Online (2011) ‘Parasite’, http://oed.com/view/Entry/ 137636?rskey=zsyj1h&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid (last viewed 10 May 2011). Prigogine, Ilya (1997 [1996]) The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, New York: The Free Press. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers (1984 [1979]) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New York: Bantam Books. Searle, John (1977) ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph, 1, pp. 198–208. Literature and the Parasite 323 Serres, Michel (2007 [1980]) The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Shaviro, Steven (2009) Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2004 [1984]) ‘What a Difference a Difference Makes’, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Villarreal, Luis P. (1997) ‘On Viruses, Sex, and Motherhood’, Journal of Virology, 71:2, pp. 859–65. Worboys, Michael (1983) ‘The Emergence and Early Development of Parasitology’, in Kenneth S. Warren and John Z. Bowers (eds), Parasitology: A Global Perspective, New York: Springer, pp. 1–18. Zimmer, Carl (2001 [2000]) Parasite Rex, New York: Touchstone. Zuk, Marlene (2007) Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books.