Because I cannot express myself independently, my host will do it for me.1 As such, it will contribute to the critique of Expressionism. Let’s leave it at that. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Taenia solium,2 but I am neither exclusively female nor of Roman origin. My appearance is elegant and elongated. My head (scolex) is shaped like a ball and comes equipped with suction cups and hooks; my body, which measures 3.5 m (11 ft. 5 in.), consists of 1,500 phalluses (male readers will justifiably turn pale with jealousy). Each phallus (proglottid) contains complex ambisexual apparatuses: approximately 50,000 eggs and the accompanying sperm. Accordingly, I accommodate around 75 million individuals within me. Indeed, I consider myself a single being and a society all at once. As an individual, I live in the constant joy of love. As a society, I follow love’s commands.

Economically speaking, I am completely satisfied. I am delivered from all such worries, because my body’s skin (cuticle) only absorbs nutrients already digested by my hosts. I am fully aware that the economic arrangement is complex (my host must labor to acquire my food from the environment, chew it, and digest it), but trustingly and without a care, I adapt to this regime. I know, too, that I trouble my hosts on occasion, but this is none of my concern. I am dedicated to love. As you may have noticed, I am fully pubescent. However, I shouldn’t try to hide my somewhat confused past life. I was born when my parent’s lowest phallus came loose from its body and was excreted with its host’s feces (non olet).3 Back then, I was as small as an egg and developed independently into a larva with a hook. I am proud to have been an autodidact. By happenstance, a pig came by (chance and destiny mesh) and ate me together with the feces. I then migrated through the body of my alternate host into its eyeball. I was well taken care of there even though I must have caused discomfort. I am grateful to my host. I grew to become a fluid-filled tapeworm larva with an invaginated head, and, after this introspective phase, I migrated into the musculature of my alternate host. My current host purchased me as pork in a supermarket. I migrated into his intestines and assumed my present form of existence, filled entirely with love. Freed of economic concerns, I became pure love.

For two reasons, I may consider myself a model for a future human society. The first is Darwinian. The well-understood goal of a life cycle is to produce a human being whose task it is to host me. Consequently, I am the actual purpose of the life cycle. The human being must emulate me. The second reason demands closer examination, as it demands of human beings an imitatio taeniae.

Human beings have recognized the economy as the substructure of sex only since they separated and redeemed sex from the economy (libido from procreation). The only justification of economic life (of platonic ascholía) consists in serving as a foundation for sex (platonic eros). It is even apparent to human beings that all busyness (business) aims toward creating leisure (scholé)—a leisure that makes it possible to devote oneself to pure, unencumbered love (just as it is stipulated in the sanctification of the Sabbath in Judeo-Christianity). In order to subordinate the economy to love it is necessary to identify everything economic as being of inferior value, that is, too unworthy of one’s existential interest. That’s how humanity began: labor is automated. The work ethic begins to yield to a new sexual ethic—a beginning still hesitant and inadequate.

Unfortunately, sex is distributed among human beings across two separate organisms. That’s why they are forced to develop technologies that allow for an encounter between these two organisms. Human sex life is bound by technologies, which means work. For humans, pure love is possible only in the form of masturbation. The disadvantage of masturbation is that self-love represents a closed circle and, consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, tends to become entropic. That’s how we must understand the Ancients’ attempts to bring about pure love by means of homosexuality—experiments that are justifiably rejected by those motivated by economics. Such approaches are doomed to fail because they differ from the heterosexual by their economic uselessness alone, not because they are freed from technology. Only when human beings have attained my own sexual complexity will they be able to liberate themselves economically and live in pure love.

Each of my phalluses can copulate with itself, each of my phalluses can copulate with another one, and each of my phalluses can copulate with another Taenia. The variability in types of orgasms is so vast that even the most advanced computer is incapable of calculating their capacity. The peristaltic movements of my host, this completely automated economy from my point of view, beat the rhythm to the creative symphony of love I compose incessantly. Thanks to this orgiastic, ever-interweaving fugal composition, I am following a self-evident command to love others like myself and to love myself like all others. This is how I honor the supreme command: “Amor muove il sole e le altre stelle.”4 Cosmic peristalsis.

It is incumbent upon you humans to emulate me by overcoming the economy, thereby moving closer toward the goal of life that I exemplify: parasitism.