Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through Michel Serres’s 1980 Le Parasite: a dense, poetic, brilliant text that seeks to tear down and rebuild the way we think about everything. In reading the book I kept a running list of intertexts to which Serres refers, a document that runs to some 148 pages. I have decided to make this Reader’s Guide available to download so that those seeking to grapple with Serres’s forbidding erudition and the proliferation of references and allusions in Le Parasite can have a slightly easier time of it than I did. The document is available here.

Here is an extract from the Introduction:

Michel Serres’s Le Parasite is a foundational text not only for the understanding of Serres’s own imposing and timely thought but also for key debates in contemporary posthumanism, object oriented thought, new materialisms, ecology, ontology and politics.

However…