(..)"up until that point, the sensation had been that I was an individual subject with bounded and inviolable borders. What the parasite demonstrates is that this frame of reference is insufficient. In actuality, what we perceive as our self is only a part of the ecology. We think of ourselves as individuals operating within a static and passive environment – the parasite allows the understanding that we ourselves are the environments in which other ‘individuals’ may also operate. There’s a sense of fractalisation here – that we are Papatūānuku writ small. We are in her, parasites are in us, and (as I found when I crushed one) we are inside them. The parasite collapses these constructed borders and opens our impressions of our bodies to deep new understandings of interconnectivity – moves us into a posthuman conception of the self as ecology. Under liberal individualism, a dialectic is formed between self and environment. The parasite poses a synthesis to this model – that the self is an environment, and conversely that the environment is a self. I am not (only) in me but in everything with which I share whakapapa.
From a liberal individualist perspective, we are all distinct units, but from Papatūānuku’s perspective, or from the perspective of one embracing Papatūānukutanga, we have always been one system."
In Human – Parasites, Posthumanism, Papatūānuku
by Emilie Rākete
http://wombatradio.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/In-Human-Parasites-Posthumanism-Papatu%CC%84a%CC%84nuku-by-Emilie-Ra%CC%84kete.pdf
#synchronicityofparasites
