Where does parasite collide?

In Greek and Roman comedy the parasitos is a stock character: a hungry flatterer who trades praise, jokes, and errands for a place at another man's table. Athenaeus, writing around 200 CE, gathered the earlier comic poets' treatment of the figure in Book VI of his Deipnosophists and traced the word to its literal meaning, one who eats beside another. Damon's 1997 The Mask of the Parasite read the type as a lens on Roman patronage and the ethics of dependence. Here the parasite is a human social role defined by flattery and the cadged meal, not a living organism attached to a host or an abstract interrupting term in a relation.[1][2]

Unit

One dramatic or social type, the dependent who flatters for board

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read through comic texts, character catalogues, and studies of patronage and social dependence

A parasite is an organism that lives on or inside an individual of another species, the host, drawing nourishment from it and lowering its fitness while rarely killing it outright. Van Beneden's 1876 Animal Parasites and Messmates set this relationship apart from messmates that merely share food and from partners that trade mutual benefit. Price's 1980 Evolutionary Biology of Parasites then treated parasitism as one of the most common ways of life on Earth and built its population and evolutionary theory, and Poulin and Morand's 2000 review mapped the sheer diversity of parasitic species. This referent is a physical organism in or on a body, counted and dissected in the field and laboratory, unlike the comic flatterer or the philosopher's interrupting third.[3][4][5]

Unit

One organism living on or in a host of another species

Recovery means

The host may clear the infection or build immunity, and its population recovers as transmission falls

Measured by

Quantified by prevalence, intensity of infection per host, and effects on host survival and reproduction

In Michel Serres's 1980 Le parasite the parasite is not an organism but a relation: the uninvited third party that inserts itself into an exchange between two others, takes without giving back, and by interrupting the channel also changes it. Serres builds the idea on the French word parasite, which names at once the biological freeloader, the social sponger, and the static or interference that disturbs a signal, so that noise in a message and a guest at a table become versions of one figure. The 1982 English translation by Lawrence R. Schehr carried the argument into media and systems theory. Here the parasite is an abstract position in a system of communication and exchange, distinct from the living organism of biology and from the single comic character of the stage.[6][7]

Unit

One relational position, the third that intercepts and feeds on an exchange

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through readings of texts, fables, and communication systems rather than measured