Paul B. Preciado: An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (2019–) [FR, ES, EN]

“A ‘dissident of the gender-sex binary system’ reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. “My trans condition is a new form of uranism,” he writes. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.”

This book recounts Preciado’s transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come.”

French edition
Preface by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2019
ISBN 9782246820666, 2246820669
334 pages

Spanish edition
Introduction by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Anagrama, Barcelona, 2019
ISBN 9788433998767, 8433998765
309 pages

English edition
Foreword by Virginie Despentes
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2020
ISBN 9781635901139, 1635901138
263 pages

Reviews: Eugénie Bourlet (En attendant Nadeau, 2019, FR), Kevin Lambert (Spirale, 2020, FR), Pierre Niedergang (Diacritik, 2019, FR), Thomas Liano (French Studies, 2020, FR), Bernabé Sarabia (El Cultural, 2019, ES), Emilia Holstein (Feminacida, 2020, ES), Alexandra Marraccini (review31, 2020), Megan Milks (4Columns), Bryony White (Frieze, 2020), Kevin Brazil (ArtReview, 2020).

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Un appartement sur Uranus: chroniques de la traversée (French, 2019, MOBI, updated on 2021-4-13)
Un apartamento en Urano: crónicas del cruce (Spanish, 2019, updated on 2021-4-13)
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2020)

Lundimatin, 234: Des chauve-souris et des hommes: politiques épidémiques et coronavirus (2020) [French]

An issue of the French journal Lundimatin dedicated to the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) events and the state of exception.

Contributions by Wu Ming, Raoul Vaneigem, Sarah Mekdjian, Jacques Fradin, Lionel Ruffel, Jérome Benarroch, Philippe Tancelin, a.o.

The issue is in French, with the exception of the anonymous essay Monologue du virus [What the Virus Said] published also in Arabic, Armenian, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish.

Publisher Lundimatin, Rouen, 16-22 Mar 2020

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019)

“A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.

Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.

By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium’s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.

Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as ‘past’ and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.”

Publisher Verso Books, London, 2019
ISBN 9781788735711, 1788735714
656 pages

Interviews with author: Jadaliyya (2019), Brad Evans (LA Review of Books, 2020), Sabrina Alli (Guernica, 2020).

Reviews: Ian Wallace (Artforum, 2020), Guy Mannes-Abbott (Third Text, 2020), Louis Rogers (review31, 2020), Stephen Sheehi (Hyperallergic, 2020), Luke Urbain (InVisible Culture, 2020), Lunettes Rouges (Le Monde blog, 2020, FR, part 2), Sascha Crasnow (Field, 2022).

Roundtable: Gil Hochberg, Zoé Samudzi, Joshua Simon, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman (Protocols, 2020).

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EPUB (15 MB)