This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of ‘inoperativity’ that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens’s prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben’s reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational relationship towards its formal realization can be mapped onto the self-conscious articulations of Stevens’s poetic speakers who employ poetic tropes and forms only to question and expose their claims to truth and foundationality. Rather than follow a tradition of poststructuralist readings of Stevens’s destabilizations, I argue for a framework of ‘inoperativity’ that preserves Stevens’s poetic attitude towards life, while showing how his emphasis on potentiality delineates an imaginative vigour that brings the poetic self into renewed attunement with his or her environment.
{"title":"Imaginative Capacity as Form-of-Life: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens and the ‘Inoperative’ Potential of Poetry","authors":"Ian Y. H. Tan","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0432","url":null,"abstract":"This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of ‘inoperativity’ that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens’s prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben’s reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational relationship towards its formal realization can be mapped onto the self-conscious articulations of Stevens’s poetic speakers who employ poetic tropes and forms only to question and expose their claims to truth and foundationality. Rather than follow a tradition of poststructuralist readings of Stevens’s destabilizations, I argue for a framework of ‘inoperativity’ that preserves Stevens’s poetic attitude towards life, while showing how his emphasis on potentiality delineates an imaginative vigour that brings the poetic self into renewed attunement with his or her environment.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49326453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This discussion takes up the politics of gestational labour and uterine productivity in connection with genetic self-reproduction and the family in the oeuvre of Paul B. Preciado. In his autotheoretical treatise Testo Junkie, Preciado dispensed with the standard Marxist-feminist term ‘sexual division of labour’, positing instead a ‘technogestational division of labour’ to describe the mechanism by which capitalism segments people’s bodies and constructs the capacity to make babies. Taking up that coinage, with enthusiasm for the political horizon it illuminates, I nevertheless read Preciado against Preciado. I identify moments (including in An Apartment on Uranus) of oscillation away from the earlier work’s posit of always already non-sovereign ‘politically assisted procreation’; moments which break faith with the ‘copyleft’ spirit of collective gestational anti-authorship insofar as they call for trans and queer individuals’ equal access to ‘genetic speech’ and for our reappropriation of parental property rights qua ‘confiscated patrimony’.
{"title":"Paul Preciado’s Uterine Politics: Abolish the Family or Reclaim Confiscated Queer Genetic Patrimony?","authors":"Sophie A. Lewis","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0419","url":null,"abstract":"This discussion takes up the politics of gestational labour and uterine productivity in connection with genetic self-reproduction and the family in the oeuvre of Paul B. Preciado. In his autotheoretical treatise Testo Junkie, Preciado dispensed with the standard Marxist-feminist term ‘sexual division of labour’, positing instead a ‘technogestational division of labour’ to describe the mechanism by which capitalism segments people’s bodies and constructs the capacity to make babies. Taking up that coinage, with enthusiasm for the political horizon it illuminates, I nevertheless read Preciado against Preciado. I identify moments (including in An Apartment on Uranus) of oscillation away from the earlier work’s posit of always already non-sovereign ‘politically assisted procreation’; moments which break faith with the ‘copyleft’ spirit of collective gestational anti-authorship insofar as they call for trans and queer individuals’ equal access to ‘genetic speech’ and for our reappropriation of parental property rights qua ‘confiscated patrimony’.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45522581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Looking at Paul B. Preciado’s relationship to psychoanalysis across texts, but especially the recent book Can the Monster Speak?: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, I seek to disentangle a possible vision for a new psychoanalysis from Preciado’s concerns, ambivalence and disgust with the professional field. I call this a somato-militant psychoanalysis that leans on Freud’s notion of conversion as the creation of a parasitic traumatic kernel that insists on the side of the body and shows a potential for mutuation, transference, amplified potentia gaudendi, surgical intervention and a radical exteriorization of the subject through access to desire. This somatic archival work runs against an idea of psychoanalysis as merely a privatization and interiorization of the subject, a site for upholding the colonial-patriarchal regime of gender norms and an attempt at therapeutic re-territorialization. In the end, the meeting between Preciado and psychoanalysis is given a name: terminal, meaning both at the very limit, the end point, and incurable.
{"title":"Somato-militancy: A New Vision for Psychoanalysis in the Work of Paul B. Preciado","authors":"J. Webster","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0422","url":null,"abstract":"Looking at Paul B. Preciado’s relationship to psychoanalysis across texts, but especially the recent book Can the Monster Speak?: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, I seek to disentangle a possible vision for a new psychoanalysis from Preciado’s concerns, ambivalence and disgust with the professional field. I call this a somato-militant psychoanalysis that leans on Freud’s notion of conversion as the creation of a parasitic traumatic kernel that insists on the side of the body and shows a potential for mutuation, transference, amplified potentia gaudendi, surgical intervention and a radical exteriorization of the subject through access to desire. This somatic archival work runs against an idea of psychoanalysis as merely a privatization and interiorization of the subject, a site for upholding the colonial-patriarchal regime of gender norms and an attempt at therapeutic re-territorialization. In the end, the meeting between Preciado and psychoanalysis is given a name: terminal, meaning both at the very limit, the end point, and incurable.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41914251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the idea of gender hacking, particularly as it circulates in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and places this in the context of wider discourses of both bio- and computer hacking. Of particular interest is how a hacking paradigm has come to inform twenty-first-century theories of activist intervention, and the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of political agency. Drawing out the parallels between conceptualizations of hacking and transgression, the article considers both the possibilities and the potential limitations of thinking about sociopolitical changemaking in these terms. Ultimately, it uses theories of transgression to propose a rethinking of the distinction between engineering and hacking, with a view to negotiating the conflict between micropolitical hormonal intervention and ambitions toward re-engineering biotechnical hegemony in gender-hacking projects.
{"title":"The Art of the Exploit: Gender Hacking and Political Agency","authors":"H. Hester","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0415","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the idea of gender hacking, particularly as it circulates in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and places this in the context of wider discourses of both bio- and computer hacking. Of particular interest is how a hacking paradigm has come to inform twenty-first-century theories of activist intervention, and the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of political agency. Drawing out the parallels between conceptualizations of hacking and transgression, the article considers both the possibilities and the potential limitations of thinking about sociopolitical changemaking in these terms. Ultimately, it uses theories of transgression to propose a rethinking of the distinction between engineering and hacking, with a view to negotiating the conflict between micropolitical hormonal intervention and ambitions toward re-engineering biotechnical hegemony in gender-hacking projects.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47413674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s work of autotheory, Testo Junkie, and the various processes of self-shaping that circulate through his corpus, this visual piece and its accompanying personal essay draw upon the artist’s familial and ancestral knowledge of their grandmother’s confinement in an asylum. Developing a visual methodology based on the holographic philosophy of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment seeks to offer analogous holistic technologies that harness the power of the repressed and the taboo, to transform mind, body and environment. The piece questions how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes and infrastructures, and it provides a mixed-reality approach to consciousness, asking: what types of engagement with image-based systems can subvert and transform our worldview? Utilizing a queer framework that eschews respectability or a quest for ‘positive’ counternarratives, it explores the possible synergies between Tantrik and digital technologies, to build meaningful connections with ourselves and alterity.
{"title":"On Techno-Tantrik Embodiment","authors":"Clémentine Bedos","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0418","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s work of autotheory, Testo Junkie, and the various processes of self-shaping that circulate through his corpus, this visual piece and its accompanying personal essay draw upon the artist’s familial and ancestral knowledge of their grandmother’s confinement in an asylum. Developing a visual methodology based on the holographic philosophy of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment seeks to offer analogous holistic technologies that harness the power of the repressed and the taboo, to transform mind, body and environment. The piece questions how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes and infrastructures, and it provides a mixed-reality approach to consciousness, asking: what types of engagement with image-based systems can subvert and transform our worldview? Utilizing a queer framework that eschews respectability or a quest for ‘positive’ counternarratives, it explores the possible synergies between Tantrik and digital technologies, to build meaningful connections with ourselves and alterity.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48988918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
B. Lim, A. Christianson, E. Nicholls, A. Aldridge, A. Dymock
In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back?
{"title":"The Techno-Barbie Speaks Back: Experiments with Gendered Hormones","authors":"B. Lim, A. Christianson, E. Nicholls, A. Aldridge, A. Dymock","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0416","url":null,"abstract":"In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back?","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42209846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0423","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135185893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’.
{"title":"Paul B. Preciado and the Contamination of Genre","authors":"Lili Owen Rowlands","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0417","url":null,"abstract":"This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46398299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What can be learnt from Paul B. Preciado’s ecological framing of trans* and migrant world-making in An Apartment on Uranus? How might trans* and migrant solidarities affirm life in the context of capitogenic climate catastrophe and what Françoise Vergès has named the ‘racial capitalocene’? Through these guiding questions, I connect recent calls to ‘decolonize trans* imaginaries’ with translocal hispanophone knowledges that reaffirm the plurality of gender/sexuality in las Amé ricas before the conquest by braiding together strands of Preciado’s writing with Latin American decolonial transfeminists such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. Reviewing recent debates on how ‘border imperialism’ unevenly shapes and restricts trans* and migrant mobility, I address criticisms of Preciado’s analogies between trans* and migrant experiences, by considering how his writings on these themes offer an intersectional reflection on the multiple cracks of the nation-state, the fictions of race and regimes of binary gender to reveal the cracks of capitalism.
{"title":"Rereading Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus through Latin American Decolonial Transfeminism(s)","authors":"M. Michalak","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0420","url":null,"abstract":"What can be learnt from Paul B. Preciado’s ecological framing of trans* and migrant world-making in An Apartment on Uranus? How might trans* and migrant solidarities affirm life in the context of capitogenic climate catastrophe and what Françoise Vergès has named the ‘racial capitalocene’? Through these guiding questions, I connect recent calls to ‘decolonize trans* imaginaries’ with translocal hispanophone knowledges that reaffirm the plurality of gender/sexuality in las Amé ricas before the conquest by braiding together strands of Preciado’s writing with Latin American decolonial transfeminists such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. Reviewing recent debates on how ‘border imperialism’ unevenly shapes and restricts trans* and migrant mobility, I address criticisms of Preciado’s analogies between trans* and migrant experiences, by considering how his writings on these themes offer an intersectional reflection on the multiple cracks of the nation-state, the fictions of race and regimes of binary gender to reveal the cracks of capitalism.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47561107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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