slant March 26, 2020

The Losers Conspiracy

I GOT SICK IN PARIS on Wednesday, March 11, before the French government ordered the confinement of the population, and when I got up on March 19, a bit more than a week later, the world had changed. When I went to my bed, the world was close, collective, viscous, and dirty. When I got out of bed, it had become distant, individual, dry, and hygienic. During the sickness, I was unable to assess what was happening from a political and economic point of view because the fever and the discomfort took hold of my vital energy. No one can be philosophical with an exploding head. From time to time, I

slant April 21, 2019

Notre Dame of Ruins

“IT’S A SPACESHIP,” the artist Alejandro Jodorowsky told me long ago. “An astronomical technology designed to measure the power of light and of darkness. An architectural machine made to take off, destined to fly and to take our souls and our dreams beyond the Earth.” He was speaking about Notre Dame. Looking at the cathedral from its rear, Jodorowsky compared the stone buttresses to the arms that attach to a shuttle on its launchpad, meant to open one day to let the ship rise into the sky. I had a hard time understanding his theory then. But suddenly we were there, together with hundreds of

print January 2018

BAROQUE TECHNOPATRIARCHY: REPRODUCTION

THE EARTH IS TRANSITIONING. Power is transitioning. We are going through a paradigm shift that, when all is said and done, may turn out to be as consequential as the set of epochal ruptures conventionally grouped under the rubric “early modernity.” Yet we have no systematic diagnosis for the changes we’re experiencing. Before we can develop effective strategies of resistance, we have to draw a cartography of already-operating power techniques, and to forge a critical language commensurate with our circumstances. And this, in turn, necessitates a shift in the focus of our critique.

Most studies

slant May 07, 2015

Pop Quiz: Paul B. Preciado on the Bruce Jenner interview

As Diane Sawyer’s much-publicized interview with Bruce Jenner on April 24th illustrates, gender continues to be both highly individuated and highly regulated—“troubled,” to cite Judith Butler’s prescient queer proclamation—subject to a complex rehearsal of disciplinary patterns and emancipatory narratives that continue to seduce and evade pure cognition. In an effort to briefly think recent mediations of transgender bodies, we invited Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era (2013) and a curator of the controversial MACBA exhibition