Paul B. Preciado și conceptul de identitate ca armă a regimului farmacopornografic

Abstract

This paper represents a review article of Paul B Preciado’s major work, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, recently translated by Daniel Clinci at frACTalia. I will proceed to do so by offering a short contextualization of Preciado’s academic formation and activity, followed by a tackling of the main concepts he borrows from post-structuralist thought. Given Preciado’s fragmented manner of writing this text, which brings together theory and auto-biographical fiction, I will also engage in a type of media analysis that the reader might find atypical for a review, whose main focus is to draw on some cinematic parallels, in order to extract an account for the new emerging kind of subjectivity that the pharmacopornographic regime creates. I will present Preciado’s analysis of the pharmacopornographic regime by following three main concepts that consolidate his body of work: the deconstruction of sex, the economic analysis of potentia gaudendi (orgasmic force) and the political construction of categories. At the same time, I will evaluate Preciado’s materialist turn by offering a critique of consistency. Lastly, I will emphasize the importance of this book in intersectional analysis while criticizing some points that Preciado either fails to consider, or whose dangers he minimizes while proposing a praxis for political dissidence.