The Spanish thinker is not alone in shouting it: there is urgency in the house. Epidemics, climatic disasters, wars, migration crises. Time, he points out, seems out of place. On a global scale, the dissonance between the critical state of affairs and the hopeless passivity of governments, citizens and consumers — that is, each one of us — has become vertiginous.
In Dysphoria mundi“book of documentary philosophy” and prospective, a fleshy essay that immediately rejects any assignment to a literary genre, Paul B. Preciado is in turn diagnostic, combative, utopian, educational or lyrical.
A book that looks to the future, in which the 52-year-old philosopher and researcher, ex-wife — in her own words — a true rock star of trans activism who has been distilling a radical critique of gender binarism for thirty years, calls for end with what he calls “petro-sexo-racial capitalism”. And to get there, he wants nothing less than a global transformation of humanity.
“It’s a pretty exciting moment for a philosopher,” acknowledges Paul B. Preciado on the phone from his apartment in the Belleville district of Paris. “Never since the invention of the printing press and the conquest of the Americas, perhaps, have we gone through such a strong moment of reorganization. Collectively, this is an extraordinary opportunity that we must seize,” he said.
To achieve this, it seems urgent to him to identify the sensitive bases of what he calls “petro-sexo-racial capitalism”: “destruction of ecosystems, sexual and racial violence, consumption of fossil fuels and industrial carnivorism”.
Another way to see the world
Born Beatriz Preciado in 1970 in the heart of Franco’s Spain in a family where, he says, there were no books – his father was a mechanic – he was able to achieve brilliant studies. In the 1990s, a Fulbright scholarship took him to the New School for Social Research in New York (where he was a student of Jacques Derrida and Agnes Heller), before obtaining a doctorate in social theory. architecture at the prestigious Princeton University. In a few years, he has become one of the most important contemporary thinkers in gender studies. In a more social way, he was also in a relationship for a few years with the French novelist Virginie Despentes.
Diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” in adolescence by psychiatrists, Paul B. Preciado describes himself today as “trans FH and treated long-term by testosterone”. In 2015, a change of marital status formalized his new identity.
But behind these courageous acrobatics is above all a different, radical and articulated way of seeing the world. A point of view presented in Test Junkie (Grasset, 2008) or in An apartment on Uranus(Grasset, 2019), which brought together his columns published in the daily Release between 2013 and 2018.
“For me, being able to produce a speech, to have a critical voice, to be heard, from a position historically considered as without reason and without speech, is what saved my life”, says the philosopher, for whom the normality is tougher than dissent.
“It’s my experience. Trying to blend into normality often comes at the cost of one’s life power. For a long time, I didn’t feel like a man or a woman, and maybe that’s what led me to philosophy. To try to understand. Understand a world that I sometimes watched as a spectator. »
The beginning of the end of “capitalist realism”
While the house is burning, there is an urgent need to protect and make prosper what Paul B. Preciado calls the “living” in all its forms. And the question that should preoccupy us, he writes, “is no longer who we are, but what we are going to become”. Because as much “from the angle of the ecological cost, but also of the social and political cost, of racial, sexual, somatic and class oppression…capitalism is an unrealism”, he asserts in Dysphoria mundi.
“I think what is at stake now, continues the philosopher in his fluid French tinged with a slight Spanish accent, is to know if we are collectively capable of inventing technologies of government that are not technical of death: extraction, expropriation, destruction, rape, death. As a philosopher, I’m not at all sure. But I know that there are spaces in which it works differently. »
Drawing parallels with how governments responded to the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, the hypothesis that Paul B. Preciado poses at the heart of Dysphoria mundi is that on a global scale, events unfolding since the start of the COVID outbreak “signal the beginning of the end of capitalist realism.”
“Many of the techniques that I call, with Foucault and Achille Mbembe, necropolitics, already at work during the AIDS crisis or during the colonial and postcolonial periods, and which applied only to subordinate bodies or to racialized bodies, are now spreading to the entire population. I wanted to say: let’s unite in a great revolutionary transversal crossing. It is time ! »
To imagine is to act
According to him, the episodes of Covid confinement have also accelerated forced digitization, which constitutes a real threat to freedom. However, the current “unbridled technophilia” may not be the solution to all the problems. “While what we should do in a collective and determined way is to stop ourselves,” he thinks. Put an end to the permanent acceleration of capitalism. Quite simply. “We must globally recognize that a set of institutions are today dysfunctional, since they produce violence, exclusion and ultimately death. »
Somewhere between essay, diary and personal story, Dysphoria mundi also touches in a certain way on fiction. “For me, philosophy is speculative fiction. It’s a lot like art, it’s like a painting done with specific colors that are concepts. »
Because to imagine, he also writes, is already to act, and “recovering the imagination as a force for political transformation is already beginning to mutate”.
“As a philosopher, continues Paul B. Preciado, it is somewhat my mission to develop risky hypotheses. To think of new grammars, new languages. This does not mean that all will be welcomed by everyone, quite the contrary, but I think that this proliferation of new concepts is interesting. »
“I am pathologically optimistic,” he will say. While also being very pessimistic, he admits in the same breath, alluding to the war that has been going on for a year on the borders of Europe. But there are still plenty of reasons for hope. “I am very in contact with the younger generations and I see there a revolutionary power in action, terrible. »
“We have, more than ever in the history of humanity, the collective capacity to make a great planetary moratorium, to call for a great parliament of the living. Even if we are not aware of it, I think we have the strength. »