Parasite Politics

"Parasite politics therefore defines the essence of community. Every community is a community of parasitic symbionts. This may cause us to think that we should cherish or even worship the parasite, for it is that which gives us life, vitality, a future. However as much as we should resist the vilification of the parasite, we must also avoid its romanticization. Although often benign, parasitic practices remain irritating. There is nothing ethical or good about survival; likewise there is nothing ethical or good about a community of parasites. Parasitism engages ethics on a rather different plane than that of survival. It is not the survival of a particular symbiotic community that is at stake, but its transformation, its 'becoming-other'. This relates to the deterritorialization of the assemblage. The community event is an event in passing that transgresses into other assemblages. A community of parasites that does not evolve, insists on survival and insists on protecting its territoriality will ultimately fail to engage in a more complex form of symbiosis that would enable it to enter a new type of environment. Ethics are not to be found in the finitude of territoriality, but in the infinity of becoming, a perpetual movement of symbiosis."

Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations
Joost van Loon (2000)
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780333981689_18