Literature and the Parasite

Anders M. Gullestad

University of Bergen

Abstract
J. L. Austins 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 Deleuzes concept of minor literature bring out
the hidden potential inherent in Austins claim. More specifically, the
article argues that Austins 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. Austins 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): 301323
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: 212)

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 Derridas Signature Event Context (later reprinted in Limited
Inc), where the question of parasitism was raised in order to criticise
Austins 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 Austins 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)

Searles 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 Austins 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

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303

activity (Culler 2007: 146). To say the least, if Austins 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 Austins 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 Austins 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 Austins 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 Deleuzes writings on the becomingminor of literature both in his own texts and in those written together
with Flix 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 hosts 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

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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 Millers
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 mothers 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 mothers 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

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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 ones
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, Austins 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 literatures
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

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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 Guattaris
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 Kafkas 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 doesnt 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
Deleuzes 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 Deleuzes
use of spatial imagery. For example, in Literature and Life referring
to Prousts 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 witchs 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

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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 Wolfsons 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: 201); 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 Austins 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 hosts 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 parasites 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
genes 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 memes 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
artists 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 arts 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 hosts 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 parasites perspective,
it is best not to have too obvious an effect on ones 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 Zimmers 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 Austins 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.
Austins 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, Austins 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 Deleuzes description of minor literatures
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: 17980).
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. Millers starting point in The Critic as Host is M. H. Abrams citation of
Wayne Booths 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:
Austins use of the term parasitic, I note in passing, may conceivably be the
source of Meyer Abramss 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 parasites early historical stages are treated more thoroughly
in my article Parasite, forthcoming in Political Concepts: A Critical Review
(and in Hebrew in Mafteakh: 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 Browns Pseudodoxia Epidemica
(1646) (see Brown 1658: 78). As a noun, parasite was first applied to plants in
Ephraim Chambers Cyclopdia (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 Meyers The Rise
of Embryology (1939) suggests the period 184070; John Farleys 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 fields prehistory (the mid-nineteenth
century to 1900), its emergence (190018), 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 Farleys 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 Drummonds 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 naturalists 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 Drummonds 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. Zimmers Parasite Rex (2000) and Marlene Zuks Riddled With Life (2007)
for a plethora of concrete examples of why life without parasites would neither
be advantageous nor possible.
14. Cf. Brian Massumis 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: xxiiixxiv).
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. 925.
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 Prigogines 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 Stendhals 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 Blackmores
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 Guattaris 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).

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