Paul B. Preciado
Author of Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
About the Author
Works by Paul B. Preciado
Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008) 323 copies, 4 reviews
Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts (2019) — Author — 173 copies, 1 review
Gender, sexuality, and the biopolitics of architecture: from the secret museum to Playboy (2001) 1 copy
Um Apartamento em Urano 1 copy
Associated Works
Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (2021) — Contributor, some editions — 65 copies
What Is Gender Nihilism? A Reader — Contributor — 10 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Preciado, Paul B.
- Other names
- Preciado, Beatriz (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1970-09-11
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Princeton University (Ph.D|2010)
New School for Social Research (MA) - Occupations
- writer
philosopher
curator - Organizations
- Université Paris VIII
Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona
LUMA Foundation - Awards and honors
- Prix Sade for Non-Fiction (2011)
- Relationships
- Despentes, Virginie (partner)
- Nationality
- Spain
- Birthplace
- Burgos, Spain
- Places of residence
- Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Paris, France
Athens, Greece - Associated Place (for map)
- Spain
Members
Reviews
Manifesto contrassexual. Praticas subversivas de identidade sexual (Em Portugues do Brasil) by Paul B. Preciado
Esse livro é tão bom, mas tão bom que não consegui parar de ler e o terminei em poucas horas. Ele está dividido da seguinte forma:
- Primeiramente o livro começa explicitando o que é contrassexualidade que preza pela ausência de gênero guiada por uma veia desconstrutivista, para logo depois enumerar seus princípios na forma de artigos e finalizar com um modelo de contrato contrassexual onde o indíviduo reitera sua condição de trabalhador do cu.
- Em Práticas de inversão show more contrassexual há uma série ilustrativa de práticas da contrassexualidade a partir da subversão dos órgãos sexuais e suas reações biopolíticas.
- Em Teorias há a fundamentação filosófica a partir de Derrida do que representa o dildo na contrassexualidade, além de uma genealogia do orgasmo, do dildo e da intersexualização com ecos de Foucault e Judith Butler.
- No Exercício de leitura contrassexual temos da filosofia como modo superior de dar o cu onde se explica a homossexualidade molecular de Deleuze e Guattari a partir do Barão de Charlus do Em Busca do Tempo Perdido de Proust.
- Finalmente, como anexos, temos a etimologia do dildo e um pequeno relato do surgimento da butch no pós-guerra americano.
Além do conteúdo excepcional, a edição brasileira é de um requinte acachapante por ter inserido entre as páginas um cu táctil onde você pode colocar o seu dedo ou qualquer coisa pontiaguda que lhe apetecer.
Nota: Preciado parece inclinada a tentar saber se a apreciação de fist-fucking pelo Foucault teria sido fundamental para a elaboração de seus conceitos de biopolítica. Rá! show less
- Primeiramente o livro começa explicitando o que é contrassexualidade que preza pela ausência de gênero guiada por uma veia desconstrutivista, para logo depois enumerar seus princípios na forma de artigos e finalizar com um modelo de contrato contrassexual onde o indíviduo reitera sua condição de trabalhador do cu.
- Em Práticas de inversão show more contrassexual há uma série ilustrativa de práticas da contrassexualidade a partir da subversão dos órgãos sexuais e suas reações biopolíticas.
- Em Teorias há a fundamentação filosófica a partir de Derrida do que representa o dildo na contrassexualidade, além de uma genealogia do orgasmo, do dildo e da intersexualização com ecos de Foucault e Judith Butler.
- No Exercício de leitura contrassexual temos da filosofia como modo superior de dar o cu onde se explica a homossexualidade molecular de Deleuze e Guattari a partir do Barão de Charlus do Em Busca do Tempo Perdido de Proust.
- Finalmente, como anexos, temos a etimologia do dildo e um pequeno relato do surgimento da butch no pós-guerra americano.
Além do conteúdo excepcional, a edição brasileira é de um requinte acachapante por ter inserido entre as páginas um cu táctil onde você pode colocar o seu dedo ou qualquer coisa pontiaguda que lhe apetecer.
Nota: Preciado parece inclinada a tentar saber se a apreciação de fist-fucking pelo Foucault teria sido fundamental para a elaboração de seus conceitos de biopolítica. Rá! show less
I found 'An Apartment on Uranus' while browsing Edinburgh Radical Book Fair, overwhelmed by choice and sternly telling myself You Can Only Pick Two. I had not heard of Paul B. Preciado's writing before, nor could I fully determine from the blurb whether the book was fiction, non-, or a mixture. However, a flick through looked extremely promising and I love the format of Fitzcarraldo Editions. (They are the perfect size for my hands and use particularly pleasant smelling ink.) The content show more turned out to be a collection of short articles published in France between 2013 and 2018 on a range of political and personal topics that orbit around queerness and critique of neoliberal capitalism. I found Preciado's writing style and the translation compelling and punchy. Although there are repeating themes, the short pieces never become repetitive and are filled with energy and verve. They served as a reminder of Greece's struggles with austerity, which I followed closely at the time. That feels like a long while ago, before the spectre of Grexit was succeeded by the self-inflicted idiocy of Brexit.
I was amused by this dissection of a popular mobile phone game:
That paragraph gives a fair idea of Preciado's wit and insight. Other pieces carry a lot of emotional power, notably 'The Bullet':
What an incredible extended metaphor. Preciado's essays also follow his experiments with taking testosterone and the long process of legally changing his name. I found his discussion of being trans really thought-provoking; the concepts of 'biopolitical refugee' and being exiled from gender are fascinating. I was also pleased to note connections to the previous book I'd read, [b:The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis|57331880|The Nutmeg's Curse Parables for a Planet in Crisis|Amitav Ghosh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1623551679l/57331880._SX50_.jpg|89724924], which talks of vitalism as anticolonial anticapitalist philosophy. Preciado terms it 'animalism' but his point is just the same:
Other pieces I found especially memorable concerned schools ('the most brutal and manipulative of the factories of heterosexuality') and Marx's happiness ('a kind of anti-psychology of the ego for inhabitants in a world in the process of decomposition'). Preciado's articles are essentially highbrow hot takes, slightly greater in length than opinion columns in The Guardian. Yet they transcend the ephemeral nature of most such writing thanks to erudition, insight, vividness, and originality that make them well worth reading now that headlines have moved on. show less
I was amused by this dissection of a popular mobile phone game:
Candy Crush is a discipline of the soul, an immaterial prison proposing a constant deferral of desire and action. The game is addressed to generic subjects stripped of their secondary social defences (which might explain why the largest number of players are what we socially call 'women'): the game establishes a closed circuit between the limbic brain (which manages emotional memory), the hand, and the screen. Candy Crush is not a training game that exercises the player's skill in order to improve it. It is a simple game of chance installed in one of our most accessible, intimate external techno-organs: the mobile phone. It's Las Vegas in the palm of your hand. The aim of Candy Crush is not to teach the users anything, but to capture the totality of their cognitive capacities during a given amount of time and appropriate their libidinal resources by making the screen into a surrogate masturbatory surface. In Candy Crush, the players never win anything: when they finish one level, it's the screen that has the orgasm.
That paragraph gives a fair idea of Preciado's wit and insight. Other pieces carry a lot of emotional power, notably 'The Bullet':
Homosexuality is a silent sniper who plants a bullet in children's hearts in school playgrounds, it aims without caring if they're the kids of yuppies, agnostics, or die-hard Catholics. Its hand doesn't tremble, neither in the schools of the sixth arrondissement nor in the working-class neighbourhoods. It shoots with the same precision in the streets of Chicago, the villages of Italy, or the suburbs of Johannesburg. Homosexuality is a sniper blind as love, bursting forth like laughter, gentle as a pet.
[...]
Transsexuality is a silent sniper who plants a bullet in the chests of children standing in front of a mirror or counting their steps on their way to school. It doesn't care if they were born from artificial insemination or Catholic coitus.
[...]
For those who have the courage to look straight at the wound, the bullet becomes the key to a world they had seen nothing of before. The curtains part, the 'matrix' breaks apart. But among those who carry the bullet in their chests, some decide to live as if they felt nothing. Others compensate for the weight of the bullet by acting like Don Juan or like a princess. Doctors and churches promise to extract the bullet. [...] But no-one has ever figured out how to get the bullet out. Neither Mormons nor Castrists. You can bury it more deeply in your chest, but you can never remove it. Your bullet is your guardian angel: it will always be by your side.
What an incredible extended metaphor. Preciado's essays also follow his experiments with taking testosterone and the long process of legally changing his name. I found his discussion of being trans really thought-provoking; the concepts of 'biopolitical refugee' and being exiled from gender are fascinating. I was also pleased to note connections to the previous book I'd read, [b:The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis|57331880|The Nutmeg's Curse Parables for a Planet in Crisis|Amitav Ghosh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1623551679l/57331880._SX50_.jpg|89724924], which talks of vitalism as anticolonial anticapitalist philosophy. Preciado terms it 'animalism' but his point is just the same:
Animalism reveals the colonial, patriarchal roots of those universal principles of European humanism. The system of slavery, and then of wage labour, appears as the foundation of the liberty of modern 'man'; the expropriation and segmentation of life and knowledge as the other side of equality; war, competition, and rivalry as the driving force of fraternity.
Other pieces I found especially memorable concerned schools ('the most brutal and manipulative of the factories of heterosexuality') and Marx's happiness ('a kind of anti-psychology of the ego for inhabitants in a world in the process of decomposition'). Preciado's articles are essentially highbrow hot takes, slightly greater in length than opinion columns in The Guardian. Yet they transcend the ephemeral nature of most such writing thanks to erudition, insight, vividness, and originality that make them well worth reading now that headlines have moved on. show less
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Paul B. Preciado
Paul B. Presciado is a Spanish writer, philosopher and curator. This is a collection of essays dating mostly from 2014 when Paul started his journey officially to change sex and become a trans-man. He had been taking testosterone shots since 2011 and finally was able to change his name legally in 2015. Paul says in his introduction that a gender transition is a journey marked by many borders and these essays were written during the time that he became an itinerant traveller, many of them show more concern themselves with his state of mind whilst physically and mentally undertaking a difficult journey.
In his essay Intersexicide written in 2016 he states his views :
"Male-female genital difference is actually an arbitrary, historically over-evaluated aesthetic (an ensemble of shapes judged in relation to a value scale) according to which the human has only two possibilities: penetrating penis, penetrated vagina. We are subjected to porno-scientific kitsch: the standardization of the form of the human body according to hetero-centric aesthetic criteria. Outside of this binary aesthetic, any body is regarded as pathological, and consequently becomes the object of a normalization described as ‘therapeutic’."
He puts forward forceful arguments against what he labels as "the binary sex-gender regime and reminds us that while the 1960's were the moment when new feminist and homosexual movements emerged; now the years after the millennium are characterised by the increasing visibility of trans and intersex struggles. His final essay in the collection "Letter from a Trans Man to the sexual Ancien Regime" highlights the struggles ahead and importantly links it to a political struggle, which is an underlying theme of many of these essays.
"Let me tell you, from the other side of the wall, that the thing is much worse than my experience as a lesbian woman allowed me to imagine. Ever since I have been living as-if-I-were-a-man in the world of men (aware of embodying a political fiction), I have been able to verify that the dominant (masculine, heterosexual) class will not abandon its privileges just because we send out some tweets or let out a few cries. Ever since the upheavals of the sexual and anti-colonial revolution of the past century, heteropatriarchs have embarked on a project of counter-reform – to which now the ‘feminine’ voices who wish to continue to be ‘importuned/disturbed’ are joining. This will be the thousand-year war"
It would be misleading to give the impression that all the essays are about the difficulties of being transgender, but his struggles do colour his views on many subjects. There are essays on the political situation in Spain (particularly the Catalan independence movement) and Greece (the fight against the austerity regime imposed by the EU) and struggles against fascism in many parts of the world. There are essays warning about the influence of new technology on our everyday lives; there are essays about his family life, of course essays about the human condition, but showing through much of his writing is a sense of humour and a love of being alive.
I found much of this writing to be genuinely refreshing in its outlook, much of it views life from a standpoint that is somewhat different from my own, but I found myself nodding my head in agreement for much of the time. This book was recommended in the London Review of books "100 books that you should read in the next twenty years". I can understand why this was included and I rate this as a 4 star read. show less
In his essay Intersexicide written in 2016 he states his views :
"Male-female genital difference is actually an arbitrary, historically over-evaluated aesthetic (an ensemble of shapes judged in relation to a value scale) according to which the human has only two possibilities: penetrating penis, penetrated vagina. We are subjected to porno-scientific kitsch: the standardization of the form of the human body according to hetero-centric aesthetic criteria. Outside of this binary aesthetic, any body is regarded as pathological, and consequently becomes the object of a normalization described as ‘therapeutic’."
He puts forward forceful arguments against what he labels as "the binary sex-gender regime and reminds us that while the 1960's were the moment when new feminist and homosexual movements emerged; now the years after the millennium are characterised by the increasing visibility of trans and intersex struggles. His final essay in the collection "Letter from a Trans Man to the sexual Ancien Regime" highlights the struggles ahead and importantly links it to a political struggle, which is an underlying theme of many of these essays.
"Let me tell you, from the other side of the wall, that the thing is much worse than my experience as a lesbian woman allowed me to imagine. Ever since I have been living as-if-I-were-a-man in the world of men (aware of embodying a political fiction), I have been able to verify that the dominant (masculine, heterosexual) class will not abandon its privileges just because we send out some tweets or let out a few cries. Ever since the upheavals of the sexual and anti-colonial revolution of the past century, heteropatriarchs have embarked on a project of counter-reform – to which now the ‘feminine’ voices who wish to continue to be ‘importuned/disturbed’ are joining. This will be the thousand-year war"
It would be misleading to give the impression that all the essays are about the difficulties of being transgender, but his struggles do colour his views on many subjects. There are essays on the political situation in Spain (particularly the Catalan independence movement) and Greece (the fight against the austerity regime imposed by the EU) and struggles against fascism in many parts of the world. There are essays warning about the influence of new technology on our everyday lives; there are essays about his family life, of course essays about the human condition, but showing through much of his writing is a sense of humour and a love of being alive.
I found much of this writing to be genuinely refreshing in its outlook, much of it views life from a standpoint that is somewhat different from my own, but I found myself nodding my head in agreement for much of the time. This book was recommended in the London Review of books "100 books that you should read in the next twenty years". I can understand why this was included and I rate this as a 4 star read. show less
Dildonics
Edit: okay so about 90% thru this book i was a little frustrated by how most of the latter third is purely a discussion of Deleuze which of course would have peaked my interest more if i had read him yet, but the final chapter (an addition to the 2018 edition i believe, an essay Preciado wrote in 2000) absolutely floored me. This book is one of the most intriguing, challenging, rewarding, and evocative texts i have read. It is exactly what i want from theory, if at times show more exhaustively hard to decipher. Please read it and talk to me about dildos and whether the countersexual future is one you’d like to strap into with me. show less
Edit: okay so about 90% thru this book i was a little frustrated by how most of the latter third is purely a discussion of Deleuze which of course would have peaked my interest more if i had read him yet, but the final chapter (an addition to the 2018 edition i believe, an essay Preciado wrote in 2000) absolutely floored me. This book is one of the most intriguing, challenging, rewarding, and evocative texts i have read. It is exactly what i want from theory, if at times show more exhaustively hard to decipher. Please read it and talk to me about dildos and whether the countersexual future is one you’d like to strap into with me. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 19
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 1,047
- Popularity
- #24,609
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 89
- Languages
- 12
- Favorited
- 2