I'm calling "paracite" a misquotation that lives on, becoming more popular than the original quotation. This is different from a misattribution, as when people think it was Voltaire rather than Diderot who said "mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest." A paracite would be more like saying that Shakespeare once wrote "gild the lily," which is more famous than what he really wrote: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily."
Here's a philosophical paracite. First, the original quote, by Deleuze, talking about Wittgensteinians, in the transcript / paraphrase of the Abécédaire / ABCs provided by Charles Stivale:
"W as in Wittgenstein"
Parnet says, let's move on to W, and Deleuze says, there's nothing in W, and Parnet says, yes, there's Wittgenstein. She knows he's nothing for Deleuze, but it's only a word. Deleuze says, he doesn't like to talk about that... It's a philosophical catastrophe. It's the very type of a "school", a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. Deleuze considers the Wittgenstein matter to be quite sad. They imposed <ils ont foutu> a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it's poverty introduced as grandeur. Deleuze says there isn't a word to express this kind of danger, but that this danger is one that recurs, that it's not the first time that it has arrived. It's serious especially since he considers the Wittgensteinians to be nasty <méchants> and destructive <ils cassent tout>. So in this, there could be an assassination of philosophy, Deleuze says, they are assassins of philosophy, and because of that, one must remain very vigilant. <Deleuze laughs>
Whatever you think about Deleuze's views, it's quite clear they pertain to Wittgensteinians, not to Wittgenstein.
Now here's Lecercle in Deleuze and Language, p. 62:
Will this become a paracite, that is, will it become more widespread than the original? It will be interesting to track this.
[UPDATE: T 19 April, 11:55 am CDT: I may be jumping the gun here and / or being unfair to Lecercle. I'd have to go back to the French video and listen to what Deleuze is saying to determine the correct pronoun and thus the antecedent: "ils sont" where "ils" refers to Wittgensteinians or "il est" where "il" refers to Wittgenstein. Does anyone have access to the video and want to make a judgment?]
[UPDATE 2: W 20 April, 9:55 am CDT: in discussion below, I did find a lecture transcript (link below) where Deleuze accuses Wittgenstein of having "assassinated" Whitehead. Although Lecercle is discussing the Abécédaire, perhaps he has the lecture in mind?]
[UPDATE 3: W 20 April, 9:55 am CDT: Jon Cogburn pushes me to include "parricide" in the series. So we could expand it to read: Paracite (beyond the [correct] citation) / Parasite (on the original) / Parricide (kills the original).]
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