Is dysphoria both virus and cure?

Every so often, a book comes along that knocks me off my heels and radically alters my sense of the world, even my sense of myself. This monumental work by Spanish writer and philosopher Paul Preciado is dysphoric in all the best ways, challenging the conventions of form, language, gender, culture, race, time, politics, medicine, technology, home, society, and everything else that lies in between and beyond.

In chronicling both the personal and global havoc caused by COVID-19, Preciado catalogs a world that was, is, and will continue to be “out of joint,” an ending phrase in most of the book’s chapter titles. Each composition is lyrically breathtaking and unabashed in its critique of what he calls petrosexoracial capitalism, “a mode of social organization and a set of technologies of government and representation that developed from the fifteenth century onwards with the expansion of colonial capitalism and the extension of racial and sexual epistemologies from Europe to the entire planet.” Such a concept may be difficult to grasp for those of us not steeped in critical philosophical discourses. But through each page, Preciado builds an assemblage of historical and present events, cultural critiques, familiar and new concepts, and personal narrative, making this a living and embodied “documentary philosophy”—as the author himself pronounces—rather than a purely theoretical or autobiographical text.

The book begins with a sanitized report of the author’s medical history, revealing a diagnosis of gender dysphoria since adolescence. Preciado—a trans man, in simplified terms—shares that his own dysphoria/insanity of existing psychologically, spiritually, and organically as a gender beyond binary construction is both an indictment of the world as determined by petrosexoracial capitalism and a mode of resistance that is transformative in its own right. In short, dysphoria is both the virus of our current age and the cure ushering forth liberation. For the world’s minoritized bodies, “the present has always been strange, and our future has never been anything other than a series of unanswered questions. . . . We are not mere witnesses of what is happening. We are the bodies through which the mutation arrives and takes place.”