Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society

Peter Hitchcock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765138342
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

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?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Parasites!
• Part One Textuality
• 1 Beyond Parasitical Logic in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005)
• 2 Leeching off the Duniya: Queer Futuresin Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
• 3 You’re the (W)hole: Parasitic Hermeneutics and Reading Against Reading
• Part Two Mediations
• 4 Fruiting Bodies, or, Nostalgia is a Form of Living Decay
• 5 (Post-) Work Lumpen: Inequality and Deprivation in Contemporary Society in Amarelo Manga
• 6 First-Contact Scenes and Parasitical Master–Servant and Host–Guest Representations in The Servant, Parasite, and Ripley
• 7 The New Parasite: Nishida Kitaro and Michael Snow
• Part Three Structures
• 8 Racial Parasites and Class Rule: White Riot and Sadist Accumulation
• 9 Olga Ravn’s The Employees and the Parasitic Form of Labor Management
• 10 Parasites, Neoliberalism, and the Death of the University
• 11 The Language of Insurrection: The Indexicality of a Parasitical Society
• Notes on Contributors
• Index