Language Parasites

Who speaks when you speak? Who writes when you write? Is it "you"—is it the "I" that you think you are? Or are we the chance inheritors of an invasive, exterior parasite—a parasite that calls itself "Being" or "Language?" If our sense of self is best defined on the basis of an exterior, parasitical force that enters us from the outside, then the "self" is no longer a centralized or agential "inside," but rather becomes reconfigured as the result of an "outside" that parasitizes the "inside"-as-host. Rough versions of this model can be found in several traditions of continental philosophy: in Lacan, Derrida, Serres, Kristeva, Foucault, Baudrillard, to name a few.
[Earth: 2017]

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