From Social to Biological Parasites and Back The Conceptual Career of a Metaphor ANDREAS MUSOLFF University of East Anglia

ABSTRACT

The categorization of individuals or groups as social parasites has often been treated as an example of semantic transfer from the biological to the social domain. Historically, however, the scientific uses of the term parasite cannot be deemed to be primary, as their emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was preceded by a much older tradition of religious and social terminology. Its social use in modern times, on the other hand, builds on a secondary metaphorization from the scientific source concept. This article charts the history of the term parasite from its etymological origins to the present day, distinguishes its metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses, and discusses the implications of these findings regarding the cognitive understanding of the relationship between (perceived) literal and metaphorical meanings. In conclusion, it is argued that metaphorization needs to be analyzed not only in terms of its conceptual structure but also in its role in discourse history. KEYWORDS

cognitive theory, discourse history, metaphor, parasite, public discourse

Parasites, Metaphor, and Etymology Parasites have a dubious public reputation. They come in two variants, bioparasites (organisms that live on other organisms and are often held responsible for the spread of fatal diseases and even epidemics)1 and socio-parasites ([groups of] human beings who allegedly live at the expense of wider society). In the British press, for instance, immigrants, people living on benefits or social welfare, or reckless financial speculators have recently been characterized as parasites.2 Using the term parasite to stigmatize a group of people as an in1. See popular medical information sites such as http://dailyparasite.blogspot.com/; http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/parasiticdiseases.html (accessed on 19 April 2013). 2. See, for instance, Janice Atkinson, “Our Welfare State Is Just Rewarding Feckless Behaviour,” Daily Express, 8 March 2013; Willard Foxton, “The Farce of UK Immigration Pol-

Contributions to the History of Concepts doi:10.3167/choc.2014.090202

Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2014: 18–32 ISSN 1807-9326 (Print), ISSN 1874-656X (Online)

From Social to Biological Parasites and Back

ferior “race” may count as a criminal offense, for example, in the case of Trevor Hannington, who was convicted in 2010 of “inciting racial hatred” for posting attacks on Jews as parasites on the Internet.3 Employing the term against individuals, however, seems to be considered more of an insult than an offense; at least in Britain, government ministers and even the monarch do not seem to be interested in prosecuting those who referred to the government and monarchy as parasites.4 Once in a while, parasites of both types receive a kind of perverse recognition as “wonders of creation” in revisionist popular science literature5 or as symbols of the human condition, for example, in the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres,6 but such uses do not seem to be typical for public discourse. Even when the term parasite is employed in ironic self-characterization, it is usually surrounded by disclaimers that hedge their insulting force, as in an article on the phone-hacking scandal in Britain that defended the “parasitism” of investigative journalists: “I’m not a great phone hacker myself, but I feel kinship with the journalists who did it. They are parasites who use other people’s lives as material, and so am I. Journalism is parasitism. It has to be.”7 Dictionaries as well as encyclopedic websites list both main meanings,8 in some cases (Brewer’s, Wikipedia) with the suggestion that the concept of icy: Letting in Parasites, Turning Away Entrepreneurs,” Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2013; Mark Steel, “Let’s Ask Florists for a Credit Rating,” Independent, 7 November 2011. These and all following examples have been drawn from a research corpus of fifty-five British press texts containing the term “parasite” in metaphorical passages, amounting to 47,500 words, which is complemented by parallel corpora for public debates in the United States and in Germany; see also Andreas Musolff, “Immigrants and Parasites: The History of a Bio-Social Metaphor,” in Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Michi Messer, Renée Schroeder, and Ruth Wodak, eds. (Vienna: Springer, 2012), 249–258. 3. “Cardiff Man Guilty of Race Hate,” WalesOnline, 24 June 2010, accessed 10 July 2013, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/06/24/cardiff-man-guilty-of-racehate-91466-26720562. 4. See Severin Carrell, “Iain Duncan Smith Branded a ‘Ratbag’ Over Welfare Changes,” Guardian, 27 March 2013; “Labour Candidate Who Called Queen ‘Parasite’ Faces Sack,” Guardian, 17 November 2009. 5. See, for instance, Claude Combes, The Art of Being a Parasite, trans. David Simberloff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 6. Michel Serres, The Parasite (Posthumanities) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 7. Financial Times, 17 February 2012. 8. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, eds., Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2:2096; Adrian Room, ed., Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, 1999), 880; Wikipedia, “Parasitism (social offense),” accessed 19 April 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense). We leave aside further uses of parasite/parasitic in specialized technical terminology, as in descrip-

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socio-parasite is derived from bio-parasite. Recent cognitive linguistic analyses have also assumed a unidirectional metaphorization of the concept, that is, its transfer from the “source domain” of biological-medical concepts to the “target domain” of society and/or politics.9 This is in line with George Lakoff ’s statement that metaphor “allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject in terms of a more concrete, or at least more highly structured, subject matter.”10 On the other hand, historical lexicography tells us that the English “parasite” and its cognates in other European languages (French parasite, German Parasit, Italian parassito, etc.) have a much more complex conceptual historical trajectory stretching back more than two millennia. They are truly nomadic concepts and expressions, crossing varying cultures and, coming from very specialized origins of use, undergoing a stunningly successful conceptual career. “Parasite” and its international cognates all derive etymologically via Latin from the ancient Greek term parasitos (παρά-σιτος), which appears to have first denoted a class of priests “who ate the grain together”, that is, who organized and consumed communal religious meals in ancient Greece.11 This meaning was subsequently widened to denote anyone eating at the table and/or at the expense of others, and in this extended sense, the parasite-as-scrounger became a stock character in classical Greek and later Roman comedy.12 Both tions of background noise in radio transmissions, or of extra-systemic phonemes in language descriptions. 9. See Jonathan Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 182–184; Paul Chilton, “Manipulation, Memes and Metaphors: The Case of Mein Kampf,” in Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century, Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz, eds. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2005), 15–43; Bruce Hawkins, “Ideology, Metaphor and Iconographic Reference,” in Language and Ideology, vol. 2, Descriptive Cognitive Approaches, René Dirven, Roslyn Frank, and Cornelia Ilie, eds. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2001), 27–50; for the terminology of describing metaphor as a transfer between source and target domains, see George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–251; William Croft, “The Role of Domains in the Interpretation of Metaphors and Metonymies,” in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, René Dirven and Ralf Pörings, eds. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 161–205. 10. Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 245. 11. See Trumble and Stevenson, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2:2096; Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 6th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), 1193; for its archaic roots in preclassical Greek society, see especially Andreas Hassl, “Vom würdigen Gesellschafter der Götter zum servilen Hofnarren” [From distinguished companion of the gods to court jester], Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 117, no. S4 (2005): S2–S5. 12. See Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1193; Andrea Antonsen-Resch, Von

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the narrow and wider versions of the ancient concept parasite belong in the religious/social, not the biological, domain. Their relationship is not one of literal versus metaphorical meaning, but that of meaning extension. According to Andreas Hassl, the original religious meaning of parasitos was applied to non-religious contexts during the change from archaic to classical ancient Greek culture and loaded with humoristic associations in the genre of Greek comedy; subsequently, it was borrowed into ancient Roman comedy. 13 This first inter-language transfer may have involved a slight semantic change, as any remaining original religious associations from the Greek context were pushed to the background, if not lost completely. The main meaning of “someone who eats/lives at the expense of others” seems to have stayed the same. Thus, historically speaking, the socio-parasite is the (conceptual and terminological) predecessor of the bio-parasite.

Modern Receptions of an Ancient Concept: Metaphorization and Remetaphorization In English, the earliest recorded uses of “parasite” appear in the 1530s as translations of the Latin comedy term, that is, as humoristic/ironic references to a type of person that lives at the expense of others and repays his hosts with flattery and sycophancy.14 French uses appear to precede the English reception slightly (starting from 1500), while in German the term was only borrowed in the eighteenth century.15 By the early seventeenth century the character of the socio-parasite seems to have been well established in English theater language: for instance, in Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone from 1606, the role of the wily manservant Mosca (the Fly), who aids and abets the scheming nobleman,

Gnathon Zu Saturio: Die Parasitenfigur und das Verhältnis der römischen Komödie zur griechischen [From Gnauthon to Saturio: The figure of the Parasite and the relationship of Roman comedy to Greek comedy] (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Cynthia Damon, The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of Roman Patronage (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 13. Hassl, “Vom würdigen Gesellschafter,” 2–3. 14. Terttu Nevalainen, “Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3, 1476–1776, Roger Lass, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 444. 15. Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique & analogique de la langue française [Alphabetic and analogical dictionary of the French language], Alain Rey and Josette Rey-Debove, eds. (Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré, 1977), 1356; Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch [German dictionary] (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 13:1459; Duden, Das Fremdwörterbuch (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut Dudenverlag, 1982), 564.

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Volpone or the Fox, is called “a parasite”,16 and in Shakespeare’s 1608 play Coriolanus, “parasite” is used by the character Caius Martius (Coriolanus) as a synonym for a toadying courtier.17 The biological meaning of parasite as an organism that draws its nutriment from another organism is attested in English and French only since the mid-seventeenth century, at first with respect to plants such as mistletoe.18 In this case we may speak for the first time of parasite as a metaphorical term, using the domain-difference criterion: the concept of x feeding on y is transferred from the social to the biological domain. Avant la lettre parasitological studies in the scientific sense had been conducted since antiquity, for example, by Aristotle,19 and had received an enormous boost in the second half of the seventeenth century with the invention and construction of microscopes by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, which made it possible to view tiny organisms that lived in and from bigger organisms.20 However, it took until the 1720s for the metaphorical bio-parasite concept to become established, not without intellectual controversies over its compatibility with Christian creation doctrine, which lasted for more than a century.21 Nevertheless, in the context of the wider intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, the biological category parasite became so well-known that it was remetaphorized again in the last decades of the eighteenth century. One strand of this remetaphorization occurred in the context of the French revolution. For instance, Abbé Sieyès, in his rally cry for the “Third Estate” (1789), employed the idea of parasite (though not the term) when he attacked the aristocratic privileges of the absolute monarchy as being equivalent to a system of “botanical tumours that cannot live except on the sap of plants that they exhaust and deplete”.22 His socio-political 16. Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox, in Volpone and Other Plays (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 38. 17. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Philip Brockbank, ed. (London: Methuen & Co, 1976), act 1, scene 9, line 45. 18. See Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths (1646; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For the lexical history of parasite, see Trumble and Stevenson, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2:2096; Nevailainen, “Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics,” 443 (earliest recorded use for (bio)parasite: 1727); Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique, 1356 (earliest recorded use for (bio)parasite: 1721); Anders Gullestad, “Parasite,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, ed. (New York: The New School for Social Research, 2012), accessed 30 December 2013, http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/2012-parasite. 19. See F. E. G. Cox, “History of Human Parasitology,” Critical Microbiology Reviews 15, 4 (2002): 595–612; Zimmer, Parasite Rex, 2–3. 20. See Cox, “History of Human Parasitology,” 603; Zimmer, Parasite Rex, 3–4. 21. See John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1700–1860): The Origins of Parasitic Worms,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1: 95–125. 22. Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? Précédé de L’Essai sur les Privilèges [What

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interpretation of parasite is thus explicitly motivated on the basis of popular knowledge of plants. The latter, of course, cannot be held responsible for their effect on the host but, at the socio-political level, their human counterparts are viewed as willful destroyers of society. In the course of the French revolution, this new denunciation of aristocratic privilege as a “parasitic crime” was combined with “bloodsucker” and “vampire” imagery by leading revolutionaries.23 In the following centuries, the French revolutionaries’ condemnation of the “parasitic” ancien régime would serve as an ideological model for attacks on the bourgeoisie as a “parasite body” or “parasitic organism” by Karl Marx and Vladimir I. Lenin.24 As late as 1961 in the Soviet Union, the phrase “parasites of the people” (ПАРАЗИТЫ ОБЩЕСТВА) denoted a legally defined category of “persons avoiding socially useful work and leading an anti-social, parasitic way of life” who were to be punished by banishment.25 While the extension of referents in terms of targeted social groups have changed, the metaphorical meaning of parasite as a member of a “group living at the expense of another” has remained constant. Before we proceed further in following the wanderings of the nomadic concept parasite, we may summarize its semantic development as follows: 1. Originating in ancient Greece, the meaning of the term parasitos, and its Latin derivation, parasitus, was extended from first designating a religious function (and its agents) into, second, a stock character of comedy, a scrounger living at the expense of another person or group of persons. We can call these two early stages in its semantic development socio-parasite 1 and 1*. is the Third Estate? And Essay on privileges], Edme Champion, ed. (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 30. 23. See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books 1989), 72–73; Pierre Desmet, Johan E. Rooryck, and Pierre Swiggers, “What Are Words Worth? Language and Ideology in French Dictionaries of the Revolutionary Period,” in Ideologies of Language, John E. Joseph and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. (London: Routledge, 1990), 162–188; Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, “The King and the Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French Revolution,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture 3 (1996): 12–13; Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France 1770–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 85, 102–106. 24. Karl Marx, “Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte” [1852], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960), 8:149–158, 150; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The State and Revolution” [1917], in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 25:381–492. 25. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 47, nos. 1–2 (2006): 377–408; Andreas Bilinsky, “Parasitengesetze in der Sowjetunion,” Jahrbuch für Ostrecht 2 (1961): 110–145. I am indebted to Ms. Ekaterina Sintsova for pointing out these publications.

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2. In the early sixteenth century, the Latin version of the term migrated into the vernacular European languages in the form of calques while keeping its meaning of a servile, flattering courtier, with pejorative connotations based on ethical disapproval and derision. This early modern concept was applied to groups of target referents other than those found in ancient Greece or Rome, but it remained within the main meaning tradition inherited from ancient comedy. We can designate this meaning as socio-parasite **. 3. From the seventeenth century onward, the social concept of parasite was applied analogically to characterize biological entities that depend on other organisms, which led to a first metaphorical meaning unit: bio-parasite. Since then parasite was ambiguously placed between bio- and socio-parasites, as both concepts continued to be used side by side. 4. From the late eighteenth century onward, this biological meaning provided the basis of a new analogical application, that is, in the discourse of socio-political polemics, which led to a further metaphorical construction: socio-parasite . It differed from the socio-parasite ** concept in that its semantic motivation was derived from the source concept bio-parasite rather than the conceptual tradition of the Renaissance. Instead of denoting annoying but harmless individual characters in comedy or social satire, such as flattering spongers, it became a class name for groups that were deemed to be damaging the whole of society and thus needed to be controlled and ideally eliminated.

Metaphor and Racism The last decades of the eighteenth century saw not only the application of parasite status to aristocrats and representatives of the ancien régime in France but also to Jews. In his Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791), Johann Gottfried Herder described Jews as a “parasitical plant” due to their lack of national-political independence: “God’s own people who were once given their fatherland as a divine present, have been, almost since their inception a parasitic plant on the stems of other nations.”26 As in Sieyès’s attack on the aristocracy, the source domain of Herder’s metaphor was that of botanical organisms. However, its extension into zoology was only a matter of time. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the socio-parasite  concept was integrated into the domain of animal and human physiology, together with the 26. “Das Volk Gottes, dem einst der Himmel selbst sein Vaterland schenkte, ist Jahrtausende her, ja fast seit seiner Entstehung eine parasitische Pflanze auf den Stämmen anderer Nationen”: Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Ideas for the philosophy of the history of mankind], quoted in Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1998), 460; translation by author.

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equally new concept of the “national body” (in German, Nationalkörper, also coined by Herder).27 In the course of the nineteenth century, the metaphors of nations-as-bodies and Jews-as-parasites were further reinterpreted in the context of Social Darwinist theories about the human races’ “struggle for survival” and became an ideological complex that fitted the needs of racist, especially anti-Semitic, polemicists.28 The racial socio-parasite was no longer thought of as a plant that was just taking advantage of its host by drawing some nutrients but as an animal parasite on a human body that endangered its life. In the social and economic crises following World War I, the National Socialists developed these traditions further to the point where the supposed parasitical threat to the German nation was deemed to require radical therapeutic measures. Hitler spelled out this racial therapeutic vision in Mein Kampf, first published 1925–1926: “This poison [of Jewish origin] was able to penetrate the bloodstream of our people unhindered and to do its work, and the state was not strong enough to master the disease.”29 Alfred Rosenberg, in his Myth of the Twentieth Century (first published 1930), depicted the slow destruction of a crab by its parasite as the “exact parallel” to the influence of Jews on society.30 Joseph Goebbels, minister for propaganda from 1933 onward, defined Jews as an “absolutely alien race” that was characterized by its “parasitic features”31 and saw to it that this message was reiterated on a daily basis during the Third Reich in press, film, and all other media the Nazi regime had at its disposal. This parasite concept was part of a wide semantic field of vocabulary denoting disease-carrying organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, bacilli, maggots, bloodsuckers, leeches, lice, rats, and vipers, which were constantly reiterated 27. Johann Gottfried Herder, Deutsches Museum: Von der Ähnlichkeit der mittleren englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst, nebst Verschiednem, das daraus folget [German museum: Of the similarities between medieval English and German poetry, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them] (1777), quoted in Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus, 667. 28. See Alexander Bein, “Der jüdische Parasit” [The Jewish parasite], Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 13 (1965): 121–149; Richard J. Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism,” in Rereading German History, 1800–1996: From Unification to Reunification (London: Routledge, 1997), 119–144; Andreas Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 129–133. 29. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 23rd ed. (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1933), 268; English trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Pimlico, 1992), 223. 30. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit [The myth of the twentieth century: An evaluation of the psychological and spiritual conflicts in our time], 99th ed. (Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1936), 461. 31. Joseph Goebbels, Signale der neuen Zeit: 25 ausgewählte Reden [Signals of the new era: Twenty-five selected speeches] (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934), 130.

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in Nazi propaganda to denigrate Jews.32 Its conceptual source was an obsessive focus on an absolutely deadly danger that had to be eliminated before it was too late—hence the Nazi preference for blood contamination imagery as its main metaphoric theme.33 Insofar as the genocide of six million European Jews was publicly presented and even partially carried out by the Nazis as if it were a therapeutic/hygienic action, this version of the socio-parasite 2 metaphor can be said to have turned into a genocidal reality.34 It can be regarded as a variant of the more general socio-parasite 2 concept insofar as it has the same mapping direction (that is, from biological source to socio-political target concept), but semantically (and politically) it forms a much more radical and dangerous concept. Where the general socio-parasite 2 metaphor includes any mapping from the wide range of parasitic relationships (from mutually beneficial, quasi-symbiotic ones through host-neutral to host-damaging arrangements) to the social/political domain, the genocidal/racist version, as operated by the Nazis, singled out one type of bio-parasite (that is, maximally/ fatally damaging) and drew from the popular knowledge about it the conclusion that the perceived racial socio-parasite had to be eliminated under all circumstances. Furthermore, the Nazi version of the socio-parasite  source concept was “blended” with pseudoreligious ideas of devilish/demonic forces operating in world history.35 This meant that one of its central source domain aspects, the notion of bio-parasites as unintentional agents, was canceled. The conceptual blend of the Jew-as-parasite figure was instead endowed with a moral responsibility for its imagined detrimental effects on the host (in this case, the German nation). This version of socio-parasite  can still be found in racist discourses to this day.36 It enjoys, for instance, great popularity among anti-immigration 32. See Felicity Rash, The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 155–156, 174; Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust, 1–74. 33. For the category of “main metaphor theme”/“focus”, see Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12. 34. For detailed discussion of this argumentative figure in historical works on the Holocaust, see Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust, 7. 35. See ibid., 33–36; for the theory of “blended” metaphors, see Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 131–138, 299–308. 36. See Wolfgang Benz, Antisemitismus in Deutschland: Zur Aktualität eines Vorurteils [Antisemitism in Germany: The topicality of a prejudice] (Munich: DTV, 1995); Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Foreign Bodies: Migrants, Parasites and the Pathological Nation,” Discourse 22, no. 3 (2000): 46–62; George Steiner, “Das lange Leben der Metaphorik: Ein Versuch über die ‘Shoah’” [Metaphors’ long life: An essay on the Shoah], Akzente 34, no. 3 (1987): 194–212; Manfred Kienpointner, “Racist Manipulation within Austrian, German, Dutch, French and Italian Right-Wing Populism,” in Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twenti-

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activists, whether in Britain, Germany, or the United States. In Britain, the Internet discussion forum maintained by the BBC “Have Your Say” raised the immigration topic in three different debates in 2010: “Should politicians be talking about immigration?”, “How should immigration be tackled?”, and “Are immigration rules fair?”37 Responses included statements such as “If they [immigrants] haven’t been detected for ten years then they are either living via the proceeds of crime or tax dodging. And that makes them parasites and criminals”, “[Muslims’] relationship to our society is more parasitical than symbiotic”, and “[We must] eliminate all the indigenous scroungers as well as economic migrants who are here to be parasites”. In Germany, right-wing extremist websites have alleged that a Jewish-Russian “invasion of scroungers” settled as “parasites” in Germany,38 and even that supporters of migration and multiculturalism were “the worst parasites in our society”.39 One blog site gave a special twist to this denunciation by asserting that the mere idea that immigrants could possibly enrich one’s “home culture” was a “parasite that was being put into the brains of our toddlers” by those who wanted to destroy any sense of national identity.40 US bloggers’ discussions about immigration across the Mexican border focus on cases of immigrants who carry (bio)parasite-induced diseases. The blog American Renaissance starts from the premise: “The invasion of illegal aliens pouring over the borders of the United States is taking an ominous turn. They are not alone! Their bodies may carry … Chagas Disease.”41 In this way, the conceptual boundaries between bio- and socio-parasites are blurred as both labels are applied to immigrants. Another blog, MichNews.com, warned of a tapeworm parasite “Taenia solium”, which, with Mexicans “immigrating into America”, was “moving along with them and passed among people”.42 Here, eth Century, Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz, eds. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005), 213–235; Musolff, “Immigrants and Parasites,” 250–251; Bernhard Pörksen, Die Konstruktion von Feindbildern: Zum Sprachgebrauch in neonazistischen Medien [The construction of the enemy: Language use in neo-Nazi media] (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2005), 26, 67, 232. 37. See “Should Politicians Be Talking About Immigration?,” Have Your Say (blog), BBC News, 29 April 2010, accessed 10 April 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyour say/2010/04/should_politicians_be_talking.html; “How Should Immigration Be Tackled?,” Have Your Say (blog), BBC News, 30 April 2010, accessed 10 April 2013, http://www.bbc .co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/04/how_should_immigration_be_tack.html; “Are Immigration Rules Fair?,” Have Your Say (blog), BBC News, 9 June 2010, accessed 10 April 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/06/are_immigration_rules_fair.html. 38. http://unglaublichkeiten.com, 2003 (accessed 10 April 2013). 39. http://www.wahrheiten.org, 2010 (accessed 10 April 2013). 40. http://aryanmusic.net/news.php, 2010 (accessed 10 April 2013). 41. http://www.amren.com, 2004 (accessed 10 April 2013). 42. http://MichNews.com, 2004 (accessed 8 January 2012; withdrawn since 2013).

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the bio-parasite appears as the main agent that uses human carriers (who, as immigrants, tend to be perceived as socio-parasites) to spread into new countries. In these xenophobic discourses, the immigrant-as-parasite metaphor is reified into a “blended” socially and biologically motivated fantasy notion that defies logical or factual criticism. It is thus similar to the Nazi propaganda construction of the demonic Jew-as-parasite. Focusing on these extreme racist versions of the socio-parasite  meaning, we can thus distinguish a fifth stage in the history of the parasite metaphor: 5. Within extremist ideological contexts (xenophobia and racism), the socio-parasite 2 concept is reified to the notion of a biological threat to the host society that must be eliminated at all costs. In these cases, the concepts of bioand socio-parasites are blended into the mythological construct of a superparasite, which combines deadly dangerousness with evil intentionality: a devilish monster that destroys its human victims both automatically and on purpose. Cognitively, this construct is more than a “mere” metaphor or analogy, but rather a newly constructed concept that serves the purposes of a sophisticated, ideologically motivated propaganda effort. As such, it belongs to a special register (which may, however, in a totalitarian dictatorship such as Nazi Germany, come to dominate public discourse). It constitutes a derivative—not to say, parasitical—sub-concept of the socio-parasite 2 metaphor, that is, a special, polemically intended version that makes sense only in the context of a (racist) ideological framework.

Metaphor and Discourse History In tracing the history of the parasite metaphors over more than two millennia and across several European languages, we are confronted with a series of semantic motivations and reinterpretations that defies a simple model of a concrete, biological source being mapped onto an abstract socio-political target concept. Historically, the biological concept of parasite was not a new coining of a term but the target of a figurative mapping from a social source concept, which had been inherited from a long tradition of socio-parasite concepts that had originated in the terminology of archaic religious rituals in ancient Greece. The Enlightenment scientists who coined the scientific bio-parasite metaphor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not have to be aware of this etymological prehistory to apply their analogy; their starting point would have been their own and their contemporaries’ understanding of the term parasite as designating a type of person who lived at the expense of others. This sufficiently familiar notion served as the source for devising a category name for organisms that lived on (and at the expense of) other plants and animals.

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From Social to Biological Parasites and Back

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, this bio-parasite concept was remetaphorized in the opposite semantic direction to designate (and stigmatize) specific social groups: the (by now scientifically established) notion of bioparasitical dependencies between organisms was applied to social relationships, typically that of a minority group, such as a social class or an ethnic minority, that was thought to be dependent on and possibly detrimental to a majority group, such as a nation. Since then, the term parasite has been ambiguous, or polysemous, in three ways: it can denote a biological category, a socio-political category, or (in the historical, but not yet obsolete sense) an individual person. This ambiguity is not much of a communicative problem, as the co-text and context normally make it clear which of these meanings is being used. As noted above, a narrow understanding of the “unidirectionality” of metaphor (from concrete source to abstract target), as demanded by standard cognitive theory,43 is not borne out by these findings. However, if we relax this demand to a hypothesis that the coining of metaphors proceeds from what is familiar in the speakers’ living world to what is relatively unfamiliar, we can at least account for the two main metaphorization phases of parasite. The first metaphorization we found (from socio- to bio-parasite) used a popular character of stage and literature, the toadying, free-loading courtier, to categorize analogically a type of micro-organism living on other organisms, which had not been identified before. Any irrelevant source aspects, such as the flattery of the courtier parasite, would have been pushed to the background in the scientific coinage, which was meant to serve the terminological needs of biological discourse. It is testimony to the public impact of the Enlightenment that within less than a century, the scientific use had become so popularized that it could now serve as the “familiar” knowledge basis for socio-political theorists and critics to use the term parasite innovatively for designating social or ethnic groups, usually with a pejorative bias. The latter aspect may have been the effect of the survival of the derision attached to socio-parasite 1; on the other hand, the illness- and death-related perceptions, which are usually associated with the effects of (bio)parasites on their host, are likely to have contributed to the stigmatization of the new socio-parasite 2 concept. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this concept received further interpretations, some of which were designed to achieve special, ideologically motivated blends of its bio- and socio-conceptual aspects (see “stage 5” above). These two main metaphorical coinings in the conceptual career of parasite are thus explainable within a modified version of cognitive theory, but such an 43. See Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”; also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

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explanation still does not account for the term’s astonishing semantic versatility and longevity. What allowed parasite metaphors to “survive” for so long? One possible answer has been proposed by William Croft and D. Alan Cruse in their 2004 overview of cognitive linguistics, which builds on Croft’s earlier book on language change.44 In the latter publication, Croft had developed an evolutionary model of “two steps” in all types of linguistic change: (1) innovation (“altered replication”) and (2) selection (“differential replication”).45 In its application to metaphor, this distinction leads to the analytic separation of the act(s) of coining (and understanding) a new metaphorical meaning and its social dissemination in the speech community. When a metaphor “is first coined … the only way to interpret it is to employ one’s innate metaphorical strategy, which is subject to a wide range of contextual and communicative constraints”.46 These constraints make it relatively easy to pinpoint and distinguish neatly the source and target notions, as we have seen for the metaphorization phases of parasite. However, Croft and Cruse do not stop at this point, but also describe in general terms the dissemination of what they call a “durable metaphor” and distinguish three main phases: First, its meaning becomes circumscribed relative to the freshly coined metaphor … ; second, it begins to be laid down as an item in the mental lexicon; third, it begins a process of semantic drift, which can weaken or obscure its metaphorical origins. As time passes … the sense of the expression’s metaphorical nature fades and eventually disappears. … Once that happens, the expression is no different from a literal expression, and only etymologists and historians of language can recreate the path of derivation. At some point along this path of change, the expression acquires a capability to act as a literal basis for further metaphorical extensions, which is not possible for a fresh metaphor.47

Croft and Cruse’s account fits the “double metaphorization” of parasite: it makes good sense to assume that the metaphoricity of the notion of bioparasite may have faded before it could itself become the source input to a new metaphorization, that of the socio-parasite  meaning. There are no indications in any of the post-1800 data that the first mapping has remained “alive” in the sense that the old “flattering courtier” idea was in any way associated when the term parasite was used in scientific discourses to denote bio-parasites. Following Croft and Cruse’s line of argument, we could say that the scientific concept 44. William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); William Croft, Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach (London: Longman, 2000). 45. Croft, Explaining Language Change, 23–29. 46. Croft and Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, 204. 47. Ibid., 205.

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From Social to Biological Parasites and Back

of parasite has largely lost its metaphoricity, which makes it available for a second metaphorization, leading to the meaning found in socio-parasite . However, even such an analysis of socio-parasite  still does not vindicate a simple semantic motivation of the remaining metaphor as a mapping from a concept grounded in concrete experience to an abstract concept. Its bio-parasite source meaning has scientifically defined concrete referents, which can have concretely perceptible effects, but it is by no means an intuitively or directly evident category. Our popular knowledge about bio-parasites is the product of schooling and exposure to popular science information in the media. Its “familiarity” is owed not to direct experience but to the pervasive impact of stereotyped popular knowledge, which may well be erroneous or superficial from the viewpoint of an advanced scientific understanding. Even Croft and Cruse’s model still presents a highly idealized, streamlined picture of the “metaphorization–demetaphorization” continuum. While it allows for mapping directions to be reversed, accounting for Croft and Cruse’s “second step” of linguistic change, that is, the dissemination and entrenchment processes for semantic units, it is messier than even the outline of the semantic career of the parasite metaphor presented above has shown. Diachronically, it does not take into account the “nomadic” wanderings of concepts across languages and cultures, which in the case of parasite have extended over twenty-five hundred years. Synchronically, such a view glosses over the extended coexistence of several meaning versions of the same lexical unit, leading to polysemy, which, as we have seen for parasite, is a reflection of its complex conceptual history. Contemporary speakers of English that are able to understand media discourse must be able to cognitively handle three meanings of this term parasite: bio-parasite (perceived as a biologically defined entity in its literal sense); socio-parasite 2 (perceived as its analogical equivalent in society, with strong, negative evaluative associations, as a metaphor); and socio-parasite 1 (as either an independent meaning, perhaps vaguely associated with Renaissance culture, or as a special version of socio-parasite 2 applicable only to individuals, for example, in insults). In addition, the racist version of socio-parasite 2 (see “stage 5”) is apparently also used and understood, albeit as a stigmatized or even taboo meaning that is not acceptable in mainstream public discourse and is largely relegated to the margins of extremist propaganda and polemics. During the acute metaphorization phases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the awareness of a complex and dynamic meaning of the term parasite may have been even stronger than now, not least because the target notions—that is, first, the notion of newly discovered or newly understood natural entities, and then, in the second metaphorization phase, of a new understanding of society—would have been perceived as so strange as to warrant a metaphorical reference. Furthermore, even the early phases of lexical history for parasitos and parasitus in classical Greek and Latin seem to have been winter 2014

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characterized by strong semantic fluidity and a disposition of these terms to migrate between different genres, discourses, and knowledge domains. There thus appears to have been hardly any period in the past during which the term parasite was unambiguously used in one simple, unambiguous sense. The only version of the parasite concept that is, as it were, semantically self-sufficient is the special racist notion of socio-parasite , that is, the (scientifically contradictory) concept of a morally responsible parasite “race” that invades nations’ bodies and must be kept out/annihilated at any cost. In its racist version, parasite becomes an irrational, dogmatic fantasy that is no longer open to any form of criticism or doubt; in other words, a logical dead end. In order to stay “alive” as a metaphor, therefore, parasite cannot afford to “get stuck”, as it were, in this dead end, nor can its users, the political discourse participants—hence, it is in their interest to keep its semantic potential for both biological and social conceptualizations open. To answer the question put earlier: the durability, longevity, and “survival” of a metaphor such as socioparasite  depends not on any inherent semantic characteristics of its source and target inputs, but on the ability of its users to engage with its polysemy and remain open to new scientific and social insights.

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