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709 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 15, 2025
Our Lady of Lorazepam, pray for us.
Our Lady of Tenazepam, pray for us.
Our Lady of Alprazolam, pray for us.
You who control our cortical electrical activity,
our desire and our representation of reality,
You who make us dependent,
You who trade in our pain and our death,
Have mercy on us.
The romantic aesthetic fiction that European modernity called 'nature' is already the result of this process of tecnification, packaging, and destruction. The politics of normalisation of the senses in patriarchal and colonial capitalism creates an illusion of realism of perception. Neither gasoline, nor meat, nor heterosexuality are natural. They are the result of long processes of domestication, of transformation, of standardisation, and ultimately of stylisation of life and death.
The revolution hypothesis argues that ecological and somatopolitical domination (of living bodies, classified in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, health, disability, etc) are not exercised solely through the state institutions or industrial technologies that have characterised the expansion of patriarchal and colonial capitalism since the fifteenth century. The internet is now the new global political framework within which all forms of exploitation operate and are reactivated. Wherever you are, as you read this book, you are connected to one or more services of one of these five cybermultinationals: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon.
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?
What was once an insurrection of subjugated knowledges has turned into a radical epistemic displacement since the relationship between hegemonic knowledge and subaltern knowledges is no longer vertical and stable. Trans, feminist, anti-racist, and ecological struggles are epistemic battles, efforts to modify the historical relations between the body (male, female, non-binary, white, racialised, migrant, citizen, child, adult, parental, filial, employer, worker, etc) and power (parliamentary, legal, institutional, sexual, territorial, bodily sovereignty, etc.)
[...]
There are no longer grand narratives, but fragments of history, severed speech acts, disjointed tales, shattered fables, recodified rites, and theatricalised forms of authority. This does not imply a denial of ontology: on the contrary. It is a matter of accepting that ontology is inseparable from power relations and forms of subjectivication. An epistemic war is not the confrontation of a solid theory and a host of moving metaphors. An epistemic war is a battle between different forms of life.
During the pandemic, it was unexpectedly funny to see radical right-wingers defend their 'individual' right not to be vaccinated, standing up in rage to protect the integrity of their 'bodies' and their 'individual freedom' against the political decisions of lockdown and vaccination. Covid was their introduction to techno-necrobiopolitics for dummies. We'd never heard them before defending the right of women to decide what to do with their own gestating uterus or trans people's desire to modify their assigned gender.
I have seen you and I know now that you are more radical and intelligent, more beautiful and more hybrid than we have ever been. It is a beauty that you invent by constructing other lives and other bodies, other desires and other words. I am surprised that you are capable of such kindness in the midst of this war. If such tenderness is possible, then perhaps it is possible to make this paradigm shift.