Abstract

In the context of an ecological crisis which threatens the destiny of the species that populate Earth, including the human species, the pandemic caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 has come to a world hit by extinction. This obliges us to revise the contemporary discourse on parasitology, which has continued to articulate the logic of the intruder by being based on a conception of the parasite that is positive or even benevolent. Whatever the modes of parasitic infection are, an unspoken evolutionary reasoning is protecting the future of that which is living. But if we understand the intrusion of the parasite as inceptive and the parasite economy as structural, placing the emphasis on their constitutive negativity, their opening into the future must be considered as a dismissal of all that is to come. In this approach, that which is inert begins to account for said constitutive negativity in the role of a latent remainder that proceeds as a materialisation of possibility, irreversibly affecting time and its experience, and in this way constitutes a trauma for the world and for life; the trauma of that which is human, that which is mutating in order to extinguish itself.