The main aim of this paper is to discuss the presence, in colonization, of a parasitic ontology taking place in the fields of imaginary and corporeity. On one side, some postcolonial scholars highlight a crystallisation of the colonial imaginary affected by the European gaze, as well as by several European cultural categories such as the notion of individual or of national state. On the other side, a research about corporeity -and especially about the influence of colonization and of an atmosphere (...) of violence inherent in colonialism as described by Frantz Fanon -shows a parasitized “body schema”, unable to open up to the world or to constitute his own ontology. In this phenomenological and existential sense, it is possible to talk about a parasitic ontology, which always implies parasitized ontologies. The parasitic ontology is the one of colonization, while the parasitized ontologies are those of the subalterns, prevented from providing their own vision of the world and so unable to deploy themselves in the existence. Moving from these phenomenological and ontological reflections, this paper suggests some further researching paths in order to re-think our global present in the light of this parasitic ontology. To this purpose it is kept into account what Achille Mbembe calls “Le devenir-nègre du monde”, a generalisation of the“fantomal paradigm”, the violent and deadly condition that colonization was for colonized people. These paths go towards a re-thinking of economy in the light of colonial dynamics, but also towards a politic based on emotions and a relational ontology which is able to take into account the social, political, ecological questions of our global time. (shrink)

The essay addresses, first of all, the theme of the structural ambivalence of parasitic relationships, consisting in the passage, always possible, from "predation" to "symbiosis". Secondly, the essay reflects on the paradoxical and "sticky" logic of parasitism, a logic that can only be addressed through para-consistent logical theories. Finally, after talking about parasitic architecture, the text proposes the distinction between the notion of phenotypic symbiosis and that, broader and more encompassing, of hybridization symbiosis.

In this article we propose three examples where the body appears as a surface of inscription. In the first instance, starting from some Claude Levi-Strauss reflections, with reference to the tribal tattoos specific of the Amazonian and of the North-WesternAmerican regions, we intend to exhibithow writing negates the bare life and reveals itself as a powerful dispositive of qualification and production of “life forms”. The second instance, dealing with the tattooed corpse of Epimenides, drives us to the literal place of (...) birth of the body, that figures for the first time as body-sign. In the last instance we study the contemporary massive phenomenon of tattooing and we notice the ambiguous, to the extent of saturation and reversal, undertaking of the imperative toward liberty aiming at self-improving, within the theoretical frame and values of the body-capital and human resource. We conclude trying to demonstrate that the radical exposure to the seizure from the part of the contemporary reductionisms stands, basically, on the body-sign, that reveals itself to be a long duration form. (shrink)

The belief in the existence of vampires is consolidated both in Eastern Europe and is also to be found elsewhere. Romantic literature at first and cinema later have described vampires through their seductive costumes, whilst historical evidence for such a belief describes buried farmers coming back home to get their shoes, scaring people with their presence or making noises, stealing food and eating whatever they come across, sucking blood from human and animals, going back to their tombs plump and rosy (...) –to be found out when they will be dug up: at this point, on the grounds of such hints, it becomes necessary to dismember their bodies, to open them, take their heart off, behead them, burn them if needed. Vampirism tells of the difficulty of drawing a clear line between life and death, the fear that the dead will return, become parasites of the living. (shrink)

This paper looks at the theoretical practice of “critique” in the work of Michel Serres and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, focusing especially on the notion of parasitism and femininity. The co-reading shines a light on the crossings of their approaches, like a critique of “laboratory” - like conditions and a masculinist understanding of rationalism. Furthermore, it brings attention to some productive divergences. With Tsing’s approach, this paper reflects critically on Serres’s understanding of femininity and extents his philosophical elaboration of parasites and (...) fungi with a feminist, ecological and anthropological perspective. Serres, on the other hand, contributes with his multi-faceted figure of the “third” crucially to structural reflections on the relation between fungi and femininity, as well as to an understanding of “critique” from the “middle”, beyond the “battle of the two”. (shrink)

This paper aims to gain multiple perspectives on Plato’s ontology through the analysis of the Intermediates. Plato refers to them to provide his cosmos with a dynamic structure, in which every part relates to a whole. Nevertheless, this definition could reverse in an opposite: the Intermediate justifies the sensible world to reach the ideal stability, concerning a mixture of being and nothing that gets purification from the becoming by degrees. In this interpretation, the sensibility absorbs life from the Forms, living (...) as their parasite. According to J. N. Findlay, the metaxy state is parasitical because of his logical exemplification of the Ideas, lacking an ontological substance. On the contrary, the void of the half-nothing takes a different role, necessary to establish a symbolic betweenness. (shrink)

Michel Serres developed a strong core of his philosophical practice around the logic of parasitism. To illustrate this, I propose a bipartite reflection that plays on the external-internal relationship. In the first part I follow Serres in his reflection on the dynamic and unstable relationship between parasitism and symbiosis. The biological and ecological dimension of parasitism occurs in the relationship between viruses, humans and reservoirs. Serres tries to make explicit a parasitic function, irreducible in a single language, which allows to (...) relate the anthropological and sociological characteristics of the parasite to the biological and ecological dynamics. According to Serres, love, humility and a sense of limitation are the global virtues that humanity willhave to rediscover to transform parasitism into symbiosis, rewriting, after Rousseau, a new Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. In the second part I put in perspective an extraordinarily global example of parasitism of our times: the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the context of the spillove. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to ‘re-read’ the main concepts about the music crafted by Deleuze and Guattari within the context of A thousand plateaus, and make them communicate with the work of one of the most important indie-rock bands of the last years, that means, The National. On one side, we want to rethink the ontology of music that Deleuze and Guattari thought and assemble it with sound materials that come from the indie-rock scene; on the other, this (...) research aim is to reveal the undiscovered revolutionary potentialies hidden within a certain kind of music, in a way that can allow us to look from a different perspective the relation between music and politics. (shrink)

The worldwide success of the latest Bong Joon-ho’s movie, Parasite, can be explained with its stylistic solutions, that are the point of arrival of a twenty-years long career as filmmaker who worked both in his homeland and in the USA. The unusual choice of filming a black comedy full of social aspects has succeeded thanks to his enlarged experience. The frame composition and the camera movements look always appropriate to show the conquer of the inner spaces in the big and (...) luxurious house of Park family, though there has been a carelessness of the offscreen, which could perform a major function in a movie of this genre. (shrink)