Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado
Acclaimed queer theorist Paul B. Preciado draws on the pandemic in his new book to explore intersecting forms of crisis
Paul B. Preciado tackles the pandemic in his new book which blends philosophy with auto theory and reads in a fragmentary narrative. Citing the beginning of the 2020s and the pandemic that linked the entire globe into a singular experience of biopolitical time, he plots the intersections between transphobic thought and ecological collapse and the migrant crisis. The apparently singular experience of time becomes collective as contexts collapse in and on themselves and time begins to break.
Set out in choppy sections detouring occasionally toward a more embodied and poetic prose than traditional styles of critical theory, ideas cycle back and repeat through the prisms of time, immunity, dysphoria and genocide. Familiar to readers of his previous works, Preciado draws on a broad suite of references from Kafka to mycelium via Foucault and Arendt, reflecting on resonances between works and drawing those of the past firmly into the here and now.
The whole world is dysphoric he argues; the poly crisis we’re living through an expression of the disjunction brought on by late stage capitalism. Occasionally difficult to follow, the rhythm eventually asserts itself, drawing together threads he links over and over back to Wuhan. Though it might feel tired as a trope, the pandemic dominates and, understood through this book, is a beginning and ending of a world stuck in continuous looping crisis. This is a book of dysphoria and there is no outside.