A review by ralowe
Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado

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."