In the philosopher’s new book, he reflects on his own privileged experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in a series of metaphors that range from the bizarre to the frankly obscene
Paul Preciado became something of a celebrity in critical theory circles following the publication of Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, which was first published by the writer, philosopher and onetime film director in Spanish in 2008 and appeared in English translation in 2013. The book intersperses diaristic accounts of Preciado’s experiments with Testogel (a form of hormone replacement therapy) with a theoretical polemic arguing that the ‘pharmacopornographic’ regime – from contraceptive pills to porn – reinforces hegemonic gender norms. Testo Junkie further proposes that ‘performative and biotechnological experiments on sexual subjectivity and gender’, like his own gel experiments, could precipitate a biopolitical revolution. As Preciado declares with typical extravagance: ‘Some will read this text as a manual for a kind of gender bioterrorism on a molecular scale.’ Perhaps, he provocatively suggests, the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house.
Like Testo Junkie, Preciado’s new book Dysphoria Mundi (which is structured in three parts) switches genres, jumping between memoir and manifesto. The book’s short opening section begins by reproducing a medical document that records Preciado’s diagnosis with gender dysphoria, a diagnosis required to access gender affirming healthcare but which defines the experience of dysphoria (where a person feels a profound sense of unease and dissatisfaction with their sex assigned at birth) as a pathological condition. Pushing against this, Preciado instead ‘affirms that dysphoria does not exist as a mental illness’, a politically urgent argument at a moment of rampant and rising state-sanctioned transphobia around the world, where access even to medically gatekept trans healthcare is being eroded, especially following the return of Donald Trump to the White House this January. Rather than rejecting the term altogether, Preciado seeks to depathologise and reappropriate ‘dysphoria’ to describe the ‘contemporary planetary condition’. ‘Mutant’ subjects produced and oppressed by patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism can also resist those structures and systems.
Preciado similarly argues that the ‘unprecedented shared global experience’ of COVID-19 exacerbated forms of oppression while also pointing to ways of undoing them: ‘Thinking with the virus means abandoning dialectical and binary thinking.’ The book’s main section, which occupies almost 400 of the book’s nearly 500 pages, intersperses diaristic accounts of Preciado’s experiences during the COVID-19 lockdowns, theoretical discussions of the ‘somatopolitics’ of pandemics (ie, how the body is politicised), and a series of pseudo-Catholic ‘funeral prayers’ whose liturgical nature is never explained. These ‘prayers’ are structured as lists, seemingly governed by a private logic of free association, addressing ‘Our Lady’ of everything from NATO to petroleum, chronic pain to OxyContin, Chernobyl to the Olympics. Many chapters open in the same way:
––‘Interior, exterior. Full, empty. Healthy, toxic. Male, female. White, black. Domestic, foreign. Cultural, natural. Human, animal. Public, private. Organic, mechanical. Centre, periphery. Here, there. Digital, analogue. Living, dead.’––
If reading 500 pages of this kind of thing sounds a bit tiring, it is.
Preciado likes analogies. Similes, metaphors and metonyms abound. History is compared to ‘a very long sausage made of blood and language’; the COVID-19 virus to witches, exiles and disabled people. Sometimes his linkages are more than merely comparative, as in the argument that Fordist factories produced cars on their assembly lines, while cars as a technology produced Fordist subjects. A key refrain that recurs throughout the text is the declaration that ‘Wuhan is everywhere’. For Preciado, the city – in which the COVID-19 pandemic originated – functions as a lens through which to view contemporary ‘petrosexoracialcapitalism’ (or, fossil fuel consumption, and sexual and racial violence as these relate to capitalism).
Preciado’s playful prose style enables gear shifts, jump cuts and abrupt shifts in scale, and it might seem pedantic or po-faced to take him too literally, but as Berlin-based writer Maxi Wallenhorst argues in a sharp review of Preciado’s 2020 essay collection An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, his frequent comparisons are not only cringey, they can also be politically troubling. He often grounds his bombastic pronouncements about the world in his own experience to sometimes jarring effect. What does it mean, for example, for Preciado to declare that ‘My body is the city of Wuhan’?
Preciado’s declared solidarity with feminist, trans, queer and anti-racist activist movements does not obviously inform his discussion of the experience of COVID-19. Just over two hundred pages into the book Preciado briefly mentions that the pandemic was experienced unevenly: many people still went out to work, some people had no home in which to isolate, while others spent their time at home caring for others. Disparate experiences of the pandemic do not inform the majority of the book, however, as Preciado generally treats his own experience as a middle-class European with secure desk-based work and housing, and without dependents or serious underlying health conditions, as somehow exemplary.
At one point he compares this experience of enclosure during lockdown to that of migrants detained by the state: ‘During the crisis, the national citizens, the ‘white’, the ‘normal’ lived in detention centres in their own homes.’ The boundedness of an individual apartment in lockdown or a mask, he suggests, could be likened to a national border:
––‘The new necropolitical frontier has shifted from the coast of Greece to the door of your home. Lesbos starts at your doorstep… Calais blows up in your face. The new frontier is the mask… The new Lampedusa-Ceuta-Tijuana is your skin.’––
Later he says that homes have become prisons and ‘our portable telecommunication digital machines are our new jailers’. If some of Preciado’s analogical riffing can be fun or thought-provoking, this is frankly obscene. As American writer and gender studies scholar Jordy Rosenberg points out in reference to Testo Junkie, ‘the relation between territory and body is not exactly analogical’. Many non-metaphorical people spent the pandemic in actual detention centres and prisons, where their conditions had little in common with those with secure immigration status filing articles musing on how their body is maybe actually a bit like a violently policed nation-state for Artforum from the comfort of their book-filled apartments.
‘History is always and by definition anachronistic’, Preciado claims at one point. Books about the very recent past that address the immediate present are perhaps always doomed to feel like a sale rail of last season’s fashions but the theoretical underpinnings of the text – Derrida’s hauntology, Foucault’s biopolitics, Lyotard’s différend – seem even more dated. (Preciado, a Gen-Xer, attended graduate school in the US in the 1990s and his intellectual references seem to have been cryogenically frozen around that time.) I’m aware that criticising a trans writer for using neologisms and citing too much Derrida is something someone on the right would do but it is striking how little recent queer and trans scholarship seems to have influenced Preciado (for example, Jules Gill-Peterson’s discussions of the depathologisation of homosexuality in 1973 and subsequent introduction of trans diagnostic categories into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980).
The book’s final section takes the form of a short ‘letter to an activist’ in which Preciado with uncharacteristic humility describes how much inspiration he takes from the younger generation of radicals: ‘You are my teachers.’ Of course, there’s no reason that age should dictate someone’s political or intellectual perspectives; plenty of writers and thinkers who are of Preciado’s generation and older avoid producing the kinds of politically dubious and theoretically stale arguments evident in Dysphoria Mundi. Yet this closing section is striking because it evinces a curiosity and openness to learning from others from which the rest of the book might have benefitted. In these final pages Preciado says he will not offer advice to younger people but will instead seek guidance from them. Let’s hope he does.
Hannah Proctor is a historian of radical psychiatry at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (2024)
