“Dysphoria Mundi” - Paul B. Preciado
Dysphoria mundi is the pain experienced by an emerging political subjectivity between the moment of the rupture of the threshold of perception of necro-political petrosexoracial modernity and the emergence of the incipient consciousness of an outside with respect to the dominant epistemology. This decentring already announces the possibility of a mutation of perception in which the destruction of the planet, the politics of war, racial, gender, and sexual oppression would become perceptible and therefore unbearable ethical events, as unbearable as cannibalistic rituals or the burning of witches at the stake seems to us today. [...] The first thing that power extracts, modifies, and destroys in our capacity to desire change. Until now, the entire petrosexoracial capitalist edifice has rested on a hegemonic aesthetic that limited the field of perception, curtailed sensibility and captured desire. It is this aesthetic of addiction that has entered into crisis. Dysphoria mundi. Now the question is: will we be able to desire differently?
This is a difficult book to explain, hoping the quote above does some of the work for me. Basically, “Dysphoria Mundi” is Preciado’s reaction and treatise to the pandemic and the way that the world changed subsequently. It’s a sprawling work, covering a host of topics as well as autobiographical elements, all in an attempt to bring these disparate elements together into one coherent philosophy.
It’s a hard and dense book to break down into a Bookstagram review, and there were parts where I simply didn’t have the prior knowledge or even vocabulary to engage properly. However, I can confidently say that this is fantastically written and very engrossing at points, especially the more personal aspects. It’s a call to arms, one which more of us should take part in, and a great read for those who want to be challenged and pushed.
My thanks to @fitzcarraldoeditions and @netgalley for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

A book that demands a response from the reader
—
In a dense and multi-faceted commonplace book, Preciado explores and questions the state of the world today as a post-capitalist, post-binary system that is yet to reach equilibrium. The dysphoria of the title is almost the antithesis of the author’s own medically diagnosed gender dysphoria, a dysphoria that auto-admits to insanity, although the it at the centre is not necessarily divisible between mind and body as gender dysphoria would have it. In this book, the dysphoria of the world is the counterbalance to the liberal, extractive, gendered, racialised and transactional economy; that there is and are other ways of being humans.

From the spine of this thesis, Preciado gives personalised and generalised examples of his Dysphoria Mundi, some which may resonate with the reader and some which most definitely will not. The very nature of this being a cross-genre commonplace, a gathering of information and philosophy, opinion and poetry, means that different passages, sections, paragraphs, even sentences, have different valences of truth and big-T Truth. Who you are will colour what you read into and what is read from you. It’s impossible for a book to respond to each individual reader as books, even in digital form, are inert, static things, but the ideas that Preciado pokes and prods about (not always to destruction for the act of seeing a thing stops it in its growth) demand the reader responds to them, and perhaps not today, nor tomorrow, but next year, the next decade, at the very end of all things.

Four and a half stars