What do you think?
Rate this book
We the Parasites
"But I’m not the fig, I’m the wasp. I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architectures, and I make them my own."
Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, it both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body. We The Parasites reconfigures how longing changes and informs our relationship with art and literature, and asks what it means to want.
A. V. Marraccini is a critic, essayist, and historian of art. She lives in London.
Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, it both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body. We The Parasites reconfigures how longing changes and informs our relationship with art and literature, and asks what it means to want.
A. V. Marraccini is a critic, essayist, and historian of art. She lives in London.
148 pages, Paperback
Published February 21, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 13, 2023
What an astonishing book.
December 28, 2023
Oh my! I was apprehensive about this, worried that a book about criticism would be filled with the names of revered theorists and references to their work. I have always managed, when so inclined, to write or edit critical reviews without such knowledge. I need not have worried. Marraconi's treatise is one that takes the self—herself—as the focal point through which to examine the nature of art and literary criticism. Writing against the backdrop of the early pandemic in London, she likens the critic to a parasite, borrowing into and feeding off of the work of, mostly dead, writers and artists, to produce a reading or a response that brings light to the spaces darkened by time. Idiosyncratic, astute and undeniably queer, this is an original and very entertaining book.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/12/28/be...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/12/28/be...
January 16, 2024
some of the writing in this book is so beautiful, and i enjoyed letting that wash over me, however it is so thick with reference that i feel i had to let it wash over me to such an extent that i was really not able to engage with it very much at all.
initially i wanted to google everything but resisted the urge (because that feels like homework and also because i was phoneless in the turkish suite at the arlington baths). at some point the author makes reference to having ~infecting~ us, the readers, with this urge to look up the things mentioned. i got excited at this point thinking that this would be an idea that was elaborated on for the rest of the book, but instead she just kept referencing more and more and more things from art and literature. i imagine it would be a very different experience to read this if ur a nerd about cy twombly/auden/greek mythology. unfortunately it is also very self referential in a way i found self indulgent. there was also a whole section talking about living thru covid times and i don’t care to read about that yet thank u.
some lovely pals gave it to me as a gift and i was rly excited cos it sounds so up my street!!! parasites!! art!! love and longing!!! i love that shit. however this just tried to be too clever i think.
initially i wanted to google everything but resisted the urge (because that feels like homework and also because i was phoneless in the turkish suite at the arlington baths). at some point the author makes reference to having ~infecting~ us, the readers, with this urge to look up the things mentioned. i got excited at this point thinking that this would be an idea that was elaborated on for the rest of the book, but instead she just kept referencing more and more and more things from art and literature. i imagine it would be a very different experience to read this if ur a nerd about cy twombly/auden/greek mythology. unfortunately it is also very self referential in a way i found self indulgent. there was also a whole section talking about living thru covid times and i don’t care to read about that yet thank u.
some lovely pals gave it to me as a gift and i was rly excited cos it sounds so up my street!!! parasites!! art!! love and longing!!! i love that shit. however this just tried to be too clever i think.
February 7, 2024
Five out of five stars, breakdown as follows:
-Introduced me to Twombly. (I don't know how I got this far without knowing about him so thank you to this book for setting me straight!)
-Author would 10/10 make out with a statue in the Glypthothek.
-Proper respect shown for Alexander the Great.
-Made an extended ero-parasitic metaphor and sustained it for an entire book. I AM PRESENT.
-Taught me cool words like boustrophedon.
-Bonus star: the book was beautifully laid out. Lovely format!!
Classics/art critic/writing nerds and fans of lush writing will especially enjoy this!! [My only criticism: the Updike love, bleh. I was like c'mon not that walking dick with a thesaurus, but all things considering...)
[Very special thanks to my friend for sending this book my way! <3]
-Introduced me to Twombly. (I don't know how I got this far without knowing about him so thank you to this book for setting me straight!)
-Author would 10/10 make out with a statue in the Glypthothek.
-Proper respect shown for Alexander the Great.
-Made an extended ero-parasitic metaphor and sustained it for an entire book. I AM PRESENT.
-Taught me cool words like boustrophedon.
-Bonus star: the book was beautifully laid out. Lovely format!!
Classics/art critic/writing nerds and fans of lush writing will especially enjoy this!! [My only criticism: the Updike love, bleh. I was like c'mon not that walking dick with a thesaurus, but all things considering...)
[Very special thanks to my friend for sending this book my way! <3]
March 20, 2024
In "We the Parasites," the critic, essayist, and art historian A.V. Marraccini really stages an entrance. She begins by explaining the pollination of figs by female wasps. It’s a form of parasitism called mutualism, Marraccini tells us, “because the fig and the wasp need each other to produce.” But on occasion, instead of pollinating the fig, the female wasp crawls into a female fig and dies there, only to be “absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig.”
“I’m the wasp,” Marraccini declares on the next page, “I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architecture, and I make them my own. I write criticism.”
And so, three pages into her book, Marraccini has let the reader know that there is a completely new kind of critic in town. "We the Parasites" reads a bit like a chatty but erudite essay that revels in the world of usually unwelcome creatures. She talks about her morning coffee and her London walks, she rants about one of her previous university professors (her Chiron), and she lets us in on her hopes for a transatlantic love affair (the Girl from Across the Sea). But she also happily name drops and quotes from the ancients, including Aristotle, Theocritus, Homer, and a half dozen others. (Let’s just say that it quickly becomes clear that she really knows her way around the ancient Greek and Roman world and medieval European history). What Marraccini does in this book is elucidate her critical platform, so to speak, and then give us some demonstrations of her work in action. Her primary interests here are the poets W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke and the artist Cy Twombly, especially several paintings he made which have, not surprisingly, themes based in the ancient world: "The Age of Alexander," 1959-60, and the ten-part painting "Fifty Days at Iliam," 1978.
What becomes clear very quickly is that there is no protective wall between her professional life and her personal life. When she walks through the park, thinks about a girlfriend, or basically does any daily activity, she thinks about the ancient writers and she thinks about poets and painters. And when she reads poetry or looks at art, she thinks about the people she knows and her memories of childhood. “I see The Age of Alexander when I close my eyes at night now, and when I am out in the small hours, supposedly running.” When she watches a Spanish heist show on Netflix, she thinks of The Age of Alexander. When her doctor advises that she take iron supplements, she thinks of Hesiod, who lived in the Iron Age. I can’t think of another critic offhand other than Gabriel Josipovici whose first instinct upon dealing with the modern is to think about the ancients.
“I cannot write a disinterested review,” Marraccini wrote in a piece about Marina Abramovic at the art website Hyperallergic. As she fleshes out her critical platform, she vectors for us the kinds of things that interest her, and establishes an ideological DNA strand for her writing. And she makes clear that she cannot and will not remove the personal from the critical. This is why so many of the pieces of writing listed on her c.v. are essentially essays.
She also wants us to know that she can be a “bad girl” type of critic. (More than once she made me think of the British artist Tracey Emin, who makes frank, confessional art about her body, her love life, and, currently, her health.) “One of my bosses told me yesterday that if I wanted him to promote me for jobs in the academy. . . I was supposed to be NICE. . . This command of niceness, of course, instead, made me want to be disgusting, untouchable, speaking dark argots in corners slick with grime.”
As the title suggests, the book is filled with references to parasites, tapeworms, mosquitoes, ticks, and a host of illnesses. Marraccini is attracted to the things that gross most people out, and she uses that to great effect, somewhat in the style of the transgressive American filmmaker John Waters.
In the final part of "We the Parasites," Marraccini puts it all together for us and gives us an extended essay that draws on Twombly’s painting "The Shield of Achilles" from the series "Fifty Days at Iliam," Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” and the eighteenth book of "The Iliad," which is mostly an ekphrastic description of Achilles’ shield. From these works, she writes about the confusion of rage, love, and sorrow that afflicts Achilles after Hector kills his close friend Patroclus in battle and strips him of the armor that Achilles had lent his friend. Before returning to the battle where he will avenge Patroclus’s death by killing Hector, the god Hephaestus provides Achilles with a stunningly decorated new shield.
She may have titled her book "We the Parasites," but Marraccini is clearly one of a kind. Last fall, she took up the position as critic in residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Media, NYU Tandon, in Brooklyn. In August, 2023, she wrote about returning to America after years of living abroad. “I am coming back to America partly because of the art criticism I write about NFTs. Are you ready to hate me yet?” I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the critic who loves parasites and the ancient world should be fascinated with non-fungible tokens, those oh-so dubious bad boys of the ultra-contemporary art world. This is a short book of only 139 pages, but each page gave me so much to think about. After a second and a third reading, I think my brain has been subtly rewired.
“I’m the wasp,” Marraccini declares on the next page, “I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architecture, and I make them my own. I write criticism.”
And so, three pages into her book, Marraccini has let the reader know that there is a completely new kind of critic in town. "We the Parasites" reads a bit like a chatty but erudite essay that revels in the world of usually unwelcome creatures. She talks about her morning coffee and her London walks, she rants about one of her previous university professors (her Chiron), and she lets us in on her hopes for a transatlantic love affair (the Girl from Across the Sea). But she also happily name drops and quotes from the ancients, including Aristotle, Theocritus, Homer, and a half dozen others. (Let’s just say that it quickly becomes clear that she really knows her way around the ancient Greek and Roman world and medieval European history). What Marraccini does in this book is elucidate her critical platform, so to speak, and then give us some demonstrations of her work in action. Her primary interests here are the poets W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke and the artist Cy Twombly, especially several paintings he made which have, not surprisingly, themes based in the ancient world: "The Age of Alexander," 1959-60, and the ten-part painting "Fifty Days at Iliam," 1978.
What becomes clear very quickly is that there is no protective wall between her professional life and her personal life. When she walks through the park, thinks about a girlfriend, or basically does any daily activity, she thinks about the ancient writers and she thinks about poets and painters. And when she reads poetry or looks at art, she thinks about the people she knows and her memories of childhood. “I see The Age of Alexander when I close my eyes at night now, and when I am out in the small hours, supposedly running.” When she watches a Spanish heist show on Netflix, she thinks of The Age of Alexander. When her doctor advises that she take iron supplements, she thinks of Hesiod, who lived in the Iron Age. I can’t think of another critic offhand other than Gabriel Josipovici whose first instinct upon dealing with the modern is to think about the ancients.
“I cannot write a disinterested review,” Marraccini wrote in a piece about Marina Abramovic at the art website Hyperallergic. As she fleshes out her critical platform, she vectors for us the kinds of things that interest her, and establishes an ideological DNA strand for her writing. And she makes clear that she cannot and will not remove the personal from the critical. This is why so many of the pieces of writing listed on her c.v. are essentially essays.
She also wants us to know that she can be a “bad girl” type of critic. (More than once she made me think of the British artist Tracey Emin, who makes frank, confessional art about her body, her love life, and, currently, her health.) “One of my bosses told me yesterday that if I wanted him to promote me for jobs in the academy. . . I was supposed to be NICE. . . This command of niceness, of course, instead, made me want to be disgusting, untouchable, speaking dark argots in corners slick with grime.”
As the title suggests, the book is filled with references to parasites, tapeworms, mosquitoes, ticks, and a host of illnesses. Marraccini is attracted to the things that gross most people out, and she uses that to great effect, somewhat in the style of the transgressive American filmmaker John Waters.
In the final part of "We the Parasites," Marraccini puts it all together for us and gives us an extended essay that draws on Twombly’s painting "The Shield of Achilles" from the series "Fifty Days at Iliam," Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” and the eighteenth book of "The Iliad," which is mostly an ekphrastic description of Achilles’ shield. From these works, she writes about the confusion of rage, love, and sorrow that afflicts Achilles after Hector kills his close friend Patroclus in battle and strips him of the armor that Achilles had lent his friend. Before returning to the battle where he will avenge Patroclus’s death by killing Hector, the god Hephaestus provides Achilles with a stunningly decorated new shield.
She may have titled her book "We the Parasites," but Marraccini is clearly one of a kind. Last fall, she took up the position as critic in residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Media, NYU Tandon, in Brooklyn. In August, 2023, she wrote about returning to America after years of living abroad. “I am coming back to America partly because of the art criticism I write about NFTs. Are you ready to hate me yet?” I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the critic who loves parasites and the ancient world should be fascinated with non-fungible tokens, those oh-so dubious bad boys of the ultra-contemporary art world. This is a short book of only 139 pages, but each page gave me so much to think about. After a second and a third reading, I think my brain has been subtly rewired.
April 18, 2023
I will agree with anything that sets out to convince me that critics are bloodsuckers and statues are sexy. I still don't want to read Updike though.
March 15, 2023
Ignited a previously nonexistent interest in the classics for me; marvelous.
January 13, 2024
A super fun book by an art critic (dunno if she welcomes that title) who has a poet’s touch and a non-dullard’s familiarity with classical antiquity, among a bunch of other stuff. I got this from a subscription to Sublunary Editions press. Verso oughta do more shit like this.
Intellectual writing that doesn’t sound stodgy & academic (despite robust theoretical underpinnings) makes me moony. Marraccini makes this whole thing feel more like a belle lettrist’s gorgeous riffing on a theme than persuasion toward a thesis— the jacket description is that critics, and all of us beholders, are scroungers & bloodsuckers, but in a sexy way.
The book’s lusty central metaphor about critics & art begetting each other is instantiated by a wasp’s conjugo with a fig— it leads to the propagation of both more figs and more wasps. The initial wasp may be destroyed in her distaff journey, but she crawls inside, lays eggs and simultaneously fertilizes the fruit. The fructified fig (a more likely crop of the tree of knowledge) is still edible, but you may have to eat around a few pollinators as they fly, born pregnant, off to other figs: all thanks to the progenitive sacrifice of one discursive wasp. 🐝
As we come away understanding that all critics are simply too unselfish in bed, Marraccini elegantly flits between artistic epochs and fertilizes each with the other. It’s great. Following along by image-searching all the discussed art definitely helped me get into it. I’ve since bought this book again as a gift for some of the people in my life who are more literate and more familiar with the classics than I am. It’s a beachhead from which we can take back antiquity from all the marble-head avi chuds seeking barefoot tradwives! Looking forward to Marraccini’s next book.
Intellectual writing that doesn’t sound stodgy & academic (despite robust theoretical underpinnings) makes me moony. Marraccini makes this whole thing feel more like a belle lettrist’s gorgeous riffing on a theme than persuasion toward a thesis— the jacket description is that critics, and all of us beholders, are scroungers & bloodsuckers, but in a sexy way.
The book’s lusty central metaphor about critics & art begetting each other is instantiated by a wasp’s conjugo with a fig— it leads to the propagation of both more figs and more wasps. The initial wasp may be destroyed in her distaff journey, but she crawls inside, lays eggs and simultaneously fertilizes the fruit. The fructified fig (a more likely crop of the tree of knowledge) is still edible, but you may have to eat around a few pollinators as they fly, born pregnant, off to other figs: all thanks to the progenitive sacrifice of one discursive wasp. 🐝
As we come away understanding that all critics are simply too unselfish in bed, Marraccini elegantly flits between artistic epochs and fertilizes each with the other. It’s great. Following along by image-searching all the discussed art definitely helped me get into it. I’ve since bought this book again as a gift for some of the people in my life who are more literate and more familiar with the classics than I am. It’s a beachhead from which we can take back antiquity from all the marble-head avi chuds seeking barefoot tradwives! Looking forward to Marraccini’s next book.
March 14, 2024
For every beautiful, thoughtful sentence in this, there’s two of the worst, most overwrought, overly purple, ultimately meaningless sentences I’ve ever read. I think I’d like this more if I was younger, when I had just read The Secret History for the first time and thought that “beauty is terror” was a profound concept.
March 18, 2023
"Except that I feel always the need to write this, to say something, to comment, to run the tip of my louse’s tongue onto the roof and soft palate of the night sky, seeking out the ribbed dome underneath."
First time reading both Marraccini (this is her debut book, but she's written essays and articles) and anything put out by Sublunary Editions. What a delight! Marraccini creates a rather lyrical mixture of criticism, theory, and memoir with this slim volume. The central idea of critic-as-parasite is explored through the writer's interest in a wide range of subjects and artists (Updike, Twombly, Homer, etc.).
" …if we’re critics, we feed on art not to live, but to feel the heady rush at the apex of the senses."And she succeeds in passing along that heady rush through most of the book (almost acting as a type of vector---a literary mosquito sucking up the blood of her aesthetic targets and passing that passion and excitement along to the reader).
Like most theory/criticism, a familiarity with the references made is helpful but not necessary; I certainly wasn't familiar with quite a few, including Twombly, who plays a central role throughout the pages. Marraccini rejoices in the role of the critic as parasite but crucially makes it personal and relevant with vulnerable anecdotes and commentary about the effects of the pandemic on her and us...
"To write or read on the precipice feels right in this moment in particular, as if it is coming into a new fullness, a wholeness which was not possibly entirely in the complacency of our living before, the city whose obverse was not at Necropolis yet. This is the moment when the skin of the fig gives into the needle of the wasp’s thorax, when the wasp breaks into the dark."
"Everything is always already historicized into tesserae and laid out. What is there to do but look and look?"
I dare say, had she not made even an iota of sense, I would have enjoyed her poetic use of language and criticism made erotic.
"I think this sometimes is our world, and the historical world of Homer too. It’s the world where the tapeworm siphons off the nutrients from children in muddy hemispheric plots until they die of starvation. It’s the malarial mosquito’s world, the flies that swell the limbs with elephantiasis. It’s a world that digs its scolex mouth into your flank until your scream in horror because you see it clearly.
But I weep still where another has wept, tears to salt a sea full of little stick-oar boats all sailing from Lepanto. If I collect my tears into a bowl, maybe my bones will change to coral."
-----------------------------
WORDS & REFERENCES ABOVE MY PAY GRADE
metope | acephale | acanthus | kissubion | argot | tesserae | architraves | Tradescantian | catkins | boustrophedon | Missa Corona Spinea | volvelle | scolex | Lepanto
March 13, 2023
There was a fig tree in front of the old SPD warehouse in Berkeley where I used to work. A fig bush, really, until one of my coworkers pruned it into more of a tree. For a few years the figs had a soapy flavor I attributed to the formerly industrial character of the neighborhood, but then they started to sweeten because, I imagined, of the deepening roots.
Readers also enter through this initial invocation of Aristotle and Theophrastus, whose erroneousness in this context Marraccini identifies and moves on from. We are not doing science—this is a natural history of a critic, and moreover one whose classical training and predilections (as a youth she kept the Fagles translation of Homer’s Iliad under her pillow) will provide a counterpoint to thinking the critic (thinking herself as critic) by considering parasites.
Read the rest here!
Here’s a weird thing about some kinds of figs: there are male and female figs. The fig is an inverted flower, which needs to be pollinated to make the fig fruit that we eat. There are male and female fig wasps. The female fig wasp burrows into the male fig, called the caprifig, and the process, in turn, is called caprification, when she lays eggs and those eggs hatch. The hatchlings are blind, flightless males and young females. They have incestuous sex. The now pregnant female wasps, the one Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation, but to be fair the actual mechanism is hard to discern such that the biology of it is still a topic now.Figs and wasps are Marraccini’s first way into describing the triangulation that characterizes the role of the critic. Both fig trees and wasps are obeying their evolutionary imperative, but in the process of what Marraccini rightly names commensualism and mutualism. And beyond this, Marraccini, who tastes the figs and kisses them onward to us.
Readers also enter through this initial invocation of Aristotle and Theophrastus, whose erroneousness in this context Marraccini identifies and moves on from. We are not doing science—this is a natural history of a critic, and moreover one whose classical training and predilections (as a youth she kept the Fagles translation of Homer’s Iliad under her pillow) will provide a counterpoint to thinking the critic (thinking herself as critic) by considering parasites.
Read the rest here!
March 30, 2024
I love this book! It sades its own masoch. It lays itself out like a white, a specifically white, sheet and then stomps its foot down and twists around its self (or several selves). A really whorling book whose referentalities (word? sp?) are multiple axises around which the moody writing reaches a kind of oration/rant while also remaining deeply insular and claustrophobic. I still know nothing about the classics. A little more about Twombly. But such a fun read.
February 12, 2024
This brilliant little book is going to become a classic. Full of references, inside jokes, antiquarian concerns, and parasitical metaphors, the reader is going to be at once repelled but then lured back in. Art criticism, philosophical reflections, and memoir-adjacent writing ensure that Marraccini will not be pinned down for her use of symbol, prose turn, or voice.
June 6, 2024
Self indulgent and painfully boring. The ostentatious display of erudition is a smokescreen for the lack of anything new or interesting happening here. Reading Dahlberg, Acker, Indiana, or just Olivia Laing, is a much better use of anyone’s time. Namaste
March 12, 2023
Picked up on whim and have zero regrets.
An excellent book, very quotable, and does not withhold its deeper meanings.
An excellent book, very quotable, and does not withhold its deeper meanings.
May 21, 2023
Interesting and well written, but my own engagement/enjoyment was stunted by a lack of time spent steeped in the arts and academia
July 11, 2024
The body and art deeply intertwined, a parasitism of sorts.
September 2, 2024
interesting writing and style but too heavy handed for me to become really invested.
December 31, 2023
what is this
I have been caprifigged
(twice) (I reread it)
I have been caprifigged
(twice) (I reread it)
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews