Abstract
The current material configurations of neoliberalism and the libidinal affinities its all-pervasive rhetoric has with certain strands of paranoid thinking would seem to suggest that certain aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s infamous diagramming of the future of global capitalism in AntiOedipus have indeed come to pass. There are, however, elements of current paranoid thinking which indicate new forms of subjectivity and resistance appropriate to the twenty-first century emerging from an unlikely source—that of the parasite and parasitism. Referring to the supposedly ‘delusional parasitism’ of Morgellons and via the work of diverse thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Michel Serres, Stephen Pfhol, and Reza Negarestani, this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which, through a re-envisioning of the concepts of hospitality, sacrifice, paranoia, and the parasite, a pedagogy of the oppressed might evolve into a pedagogy of the possessed.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the Fifth Edition DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) still defines a ‘paranoid personality disorder’, it is more vague on the issue of paranoia itself, treating it as a symptom of other disorders rather than a condition in itself.
- 2.
- 3.
See Blake and Stearns (2016). To a degree, this procedure is pragmatic: these sections had been written for an online publication that was taken down, so we reused them in a subsequent piece. However, when asked to resurrect the original for the current collection, we realised that our point would be better made through paratextual theft from our own work than any attempt to rewrite these sections. We regard such paratextualism as an instance of paranoiac pedagogy in practice—i.e. rather than allowing our recognition that we were doing something that most academics have been conditioned to be paranoid about to become an obstacle to further discussion and development of our ideas, we embraced it as a productive means of knowledge acquisition and dissemination.
- 4.
We have borrowed this device § from Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros (2017) who use it in a slightly different, albeit related, context to indicate both a diversion and an intensification of a strand of the argument being presented.
- 5.
Throughout his works, Serre s uses ‘the third’ in multiple, overlapping contexts. These various thirds (e.g. ‘the educated third’ [1997], ‘the excluded third’ [e.g. 2007], ‘the third man’ [2008], ‘third party’ [1995], or ‘third position’ [1995]) are not so much particular entities or different types of thirds as various examples of the same function. The third, for Se rres, whatever its form, does more than simply insert itself between or problematize an established binarism (e.g. teacher/student, host/guest, or predator/prey): it introduces the possibility of a ‘multiplicity’ (wherever a third may be inserted, perhaps a fourth, a fifth, a sequence may be as well) that may fill and/or transform the space between (2008, p. 77).
- 6.
‘Sacrifice’ in this sense refers to an elaboration of the notion, as used by Georges Bataille, to indicate a fundamental human category of economic excess which has been suppressed or hidden by the machinery of civilization. See, for example, Bataille (1970/1985, pp. 130–136).
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Stearns, J., Blake, C. (2018). It’s Been Getting Under My Skin: Paranoia, Parasitosis, and the Pedagogical Imperative. In: Sandlin, J., Wallin, J. (eds) Paranoid Pedagogies. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64765-4_8
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