Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle

[There] is the moment when Echo traps Narcissus in a certain way. . . . Echo, in her loving and infinite cleverness, arranges it so that in repeating the last syllables of the words of Narcissus, she speaks in such a way that the words become her own. . . . In repeating the language of another, she signs her own love.

Jacques Derrida, in the documentary Derrida, 2004

The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider’s web. There is a vampirism in the letters, a vampirism that is specifically epistolary.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

Feminist Parasites

This essay asks how parasitism might articulate itself as an experimental art practice as well as a performance model for contemporary feminist politics. My thinking here is drawn from a larger critical project, which argues that by “dragging” the impositions, parodies, and caricatures said to represent feminism, by performing “feminism” back to itself, a younger generation of feminist artists have already begun to reimage feminism as a critically viable project capable of assimilating irony and equivocality for its tactical gain. By performing parasites, artists Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle model feminist tactics that feed on and destabilize patriarchal forms by seizing upon the gendered analogy of the “correspondence” between the feminized parasite and her masculinized host. “Precisely what is a parasite?” asks David Bell of Michel Serres’s study The Parasite. “It is an operator that interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of the host’s meal . . . and gives only words . . . in return” (1981, 886).

Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle’s “art book” projects explore the motif of heterosexual epistolary exchange, read here as literary performance. The role of the epistolary in the production of sexual abjection, a medium historically associated with courtship, is made explicit; in both projects, the love letter represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game (recalling a question Judith Butler has posed: “Can the exchange of speech or writing be the occasion for a disruption of the social ontology of positionality?” [1995, 441–42]). Kraus and Calle are not the first artists to mobilize epistolary and diaristic practices, traditionally seen as benign feminine literary forms, to challenge heterosexual romance’s complicity in women’s abjection. Their works tug on a thread within feminist art practices established by works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) or Adrian Piper’s Calling Cards (1986), which mobilized questions of racial as well as sexual abjection. The artists step into the role of parasite to avenge women’s (real and performed) hostility toward men, the designated “guilty agents” of their (real and performed) suffering. In both projects, women’s desire to “literalize,” to put into letters, their social revenge on patriarchy by making surrogate victims out of “actual” male subjectivities takes on a decidedly literary character, as reading and writing become conditions of possibility for turning “the law of the father” against itself, letter by letter.

What is intriguing about the parasite for feminism is how it has been overwhelmingly deployed as a pejorative term rooted in the misogyny of the supposed alien threat of femininity, a destructive and out-of-control dependence on a presumably healthy patriarch. J. Hillis Miller noted this gendering, writing that the parasite “suggests the image of ‘the obvious or univocal reading’ as the mighty, masculine oak or ash rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of ivy. English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host” (1977, 440).

More compelling is the extent to which Western feminist discourses have internalized these anxieties, warnings of parasitism cropping up in canonical texts of often white, U.S., and European feminist historical projects. In these writings, the parasite is often represented as shorthand for the perceived threats to feminism by forms of dependence upon patriarchy at various historical junctures. As early as 1792, Mary Wollstone-craft...