Dysphoria Mundi / Paul B. Preciado / Graywolf Press, April 15th, 2025 – $22 (paperback)
Dysphoria Mundi by the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado is an exhaustive work. It is his attempt to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, the intensifications of structural violence it triggered, and the opportunities it presents for those interesting in building a more liberatory society. The book has a complicated form. It is generally made up of three types of chapters. The first are all titled “THE NARRATOR IS OUT OF JOIN.” These sections recount Preciado’s personal experience of the lockdown in roughly chronological order. The second type of chapters are named “[XYZ] IS OUT OF JOINT,” with each chapter providing a short analysis of how that thing was affected by the pandemic. And finally, every once in a while we get a poem entitled “Funeral Prayer,” in which some of the phenomena just critiqued are personified as saints (“Our Lady of Heavy Metals […] Our Lady of Pollution”) and are asked to have mercy on us. The effect is a book somewhere between Georges Bataille’s On Nietzsche (his diary of the end of World War II and a philosophical tract in one) and a more traditional collection of short essays.
The kaleidoscopic form aids in supporting Preciado’s central thesis: the pandemic touched every aspect of our lives, from fashion and breath to the environment and biopolitics to time. This is a bad thing, insofar as the pandemic worsened just about every structural violence one can imagine: it heightened the differences in life chances between the rich and poor, those in the Global North and in the Global South, men and variously feminine and genderqueer subjects, and so on, and so on. But it is also a good thing, insofar as it laid bare the constructedness of all those divisions and the fragility with which those divisions are maintained. Over the course of some 400 pages, in his analysis of just about every way the pandemic conceivably challenged hegemonic ways of thinking about society, Preciado insists that pandemic is still a portal, as Arundhati Roy might say. That the pandemic might still become the historical reference and launch point for a more liberatory political and critical movement.
Like with the AIDS crisis, which he frequently references, and even the bombing of Hiroshima, another frequent allusion, the terrible tragedy of the pandemic might catalyze innovative and effective movements of resistance that challenge everything we understand about our society. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and revelations of the Holocaust, for Preciado, led to a complete rethinking of the social role of philosophy whose legacy we still live under. Likewise, organizations like ACT UP and STAR, which formed to resist the AIDS crisis, dramatically shifted how many people conceive of gender, sexuality, and sex itself. For Preciado, the pandemic must be made to shift how we conceptualize our society and our activism; it must shift how we think, how we speak, how we fight, how we fuck.
This is a rhetorical gesture I desperately want to believe in. I want to believe that the crises both of our recent past and our unfolding present might represent opportunities for us to construct more liberatory futures. I want to believe that a preferable future is now more possible than ever. The alternative is too much to bear. In Dysphoria Mundi, Preciado begins the urgent task of theorizing how struggles for those better futures might shift and adapt to make use of our polycrisis.
– Mira Mason