“And yet they exist, sang Léo Ferré. Most Spaniards will know why. You have to believe that in Spain, we don’t understand it. The anarchists.” If you don’t understand Paul B. Preciado, you’ll have to get started. Born in Burgos in September 1970, a city whose existence I became aware of precisely at that time, while demonstrating against death sentences issued at the end of an unfair and expeditious trial against 16 members of ETA, six of whom were finally executed in this town of Burgos, under the torture of the garrote Twenty years and dust later, Preciado. organized the first drag-king workshop in Paris.
After half a dozen books, quantity of articles, chronicles in Released and elsewhere, curated several exhibitions, notably for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, he published with Grasset, in 2020, I’m a monster talking to you, a virulent address to the psychoanalytic institution in which we could read this: “I have not reached where I had set out to go, he confided in this brief conference. It is not easy to invent a new language.” Had he achieved it two years later, when published by the same publisher Dysphoria mundi? You will judge for yourself this species of Zarathustra of the end of genders and binarity. It’s less a book than a specter that haunts humanity today and right up to the Eurovision contest: the non-binary people are there, “their souls all eaten up by damn ideas”. They subjugate us, astound us, with these elusive bodies and “souls all eaten up by damn ideas.” But when they go on the news, they console us from Mariupol and Gaza.
At 53 years old, Paul B. Preciado, this troublemaker university professor, has already built an important body of work, not always well understood. It must be said that his style is philosophical, rhetorical, not to say emphatic. It’s all the more unfortunate since we all, if not agree, wholeheartedly agree with him. How can we not be saddened by these “gender dysphoric” boys and girls who see themselves or believe themselves obliged to resolve their discomfort by becoming girls or boys, subsequently losing the precious equivocation which made them authentic asocial tightrope walkers.
The first feel good bearable
It is possible that the film that Paul B. Preciado has just directed, Orlando, my political biography (available on Arte since November and released in theaters in Paris and elsewhere on June 5) imposes, authorizes, liberates a little more these young people with sail and steam.
Watching this film, we almost start believing in the big night again, except that it is not a revolution that is at stake here but a mutation. And it’s not an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel either, at least not as we generally understand it. However, it would be incongruous to say that Paul B. Preciado invents a genre, he who fears them all so much. But there’s that.
Cinema seems to have freed him from his university speeches. With this real job of making films, he was forced to abandon his pseudoscientific logorrhea and his ambitious certainties to join the ancient homeland of the muses, who are the simplest of humans. His exaggerated beliefs dissolved in the revealing bath of cinema. The erudition remains, but in voice-over, like in a Mankiewicz film. The herald gives way to the hero who, with beginner’s luck, creates an emblematic film with kaleidoscopic agitations, playing on all registers, fiction, adaptation, investigation, introspection, reconstruction, each of which he abuses. And always in beauty. The only concession he makes is that his protagonists are all beautiful and intelligent. But they have stories to tell, misfortunes that they don’t know how to deal with, and that gives the first feel good bearable in this degendered year.
Christophe Donner, writer
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