Reviews

A long time ago one of my teachers told me it wasn't enough just to write a love song to Foucault, you had to actually build on him, and I was like come on that's impossible, but Preciado totally does it here. And that is only one of several ways this book blew my mind. Crazy compelling, it is a sex/drug/philosophy page turner that will keep you up late and make you wonder if you should take testosterone too.

Before I read this, I was going to go see her at NYU but I spent so much time eating falafel and EVERY LAST sweet potato fry that I didn't get there until it was already full. Wish I had ditched some of those fries because, I feel like I have to know what she is doing NOW -- this book was already out for awhile before it was translated, and what will the next be?

inkybug's review against another edition

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challenging informative fast-paced

4.0

katellison's review against another edition

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5.0

dudes rock

"I don't recognize myself. Not when I'm on T, or when I'm not on T. I'm neither more nor less myself...I'm not opting for any direct action against representation, but for a micropolitics of disidentification, a kind of experimentation that doesn't have faith in representation as an exterior it's that will bring truth or happiness."

ralowe's review against another edition

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2.0

the consideration of the trade ethic whereby an inventor tests their invention upon themselves is inspired, with some similarities to donna haraway's thoughts on sharing suffering, you know, if we fucking absolutely have to have laboratories or something. also, i learned a great deal from the anthropology of birth control and puerto rico. but some other (polemic?) challenges and information here made these difficult to savor. (and i got distracted tripping on whether or not there was some kind of mbembe citational snub re: the term "necropolitics.") reading this i was faced continually with the question of what is produced through insisting on an absolute distinction between trans and queer (not that this is ever consistently unequivocally declared in this text as such). by a certain kind of account of trans, trans is its difference's own disappearance into the same. is there anything useful concerning this disappearance that can be drawn from similar discourses on blackness (re: assimilation)? i also wonder about (not that it is ever consistently unequivocally declared in this text as such as such) of the purported difference of particular forms of deviance. foucault (say, via haraway) seemed cautious about how deviant knowledge is formed and for whom. not sure if i'm a "deleuze person"ќ per se but i think frequently deleuze conceived time (bergson, eternal return, giambattista vico in joyce's *finnegans wake*) against descartes in such a manner that the urgent tone inflected in a lot of writing coming out of paris seems unfounded. and is there anything pressingly novel to add to foucault regarding the particularities of the technologies of subject-formation? representational instability places opportunity for interventions in an elsewhere to be designated later. this deferral elides an encounter during a talk at the university of chile with thirty-five chilean feminists where allegedly debate turned into dialogue. was the encounter transphobic? surely, such dialogic encounters are why people take the risk of publishing voices like paul b. preciado. go find someone else to be in dialogue with him about calling his cock "jimi hendrix."

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