Cet épisode de La Poudre a été publié en français le 30 juillet 2020. Pour l’écouter, remontez dans les archives ou cliquez ici : 🇫🇷

The philosopher and revolutionary author Paul B. Preciado is the guest of the 79th episode of La Poudre. With Lauren Bastide, they talked about bodies, monsters and joy.

Lauren's foreword:

La Poudre was thought as a women-only place to discuss sexist mechanisms through their victims’ experiences. Up to now, only women’s voices, cis or trans, have been heard in La Poudre. It goes without saying that both non-binary people and trans people belong here. Paul B. Preciado’s work is crucial to understand today’s feminist movement and to question gender representations, as we have been doing here for four years now. It is a great honour to have had him close the fourth season of La Poudre, before the new turn it will be taking with its fifth season.

Summary:

Paul B. Preciado is one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He is also the first non-binary person to speak up in La Poudre (05:40). On the eve of global lockdown due to coronavirus, he was starting a series of conferences at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, engaging with “The History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucauld to offer a new decolonial and feminist reading of this important work (11:40). At the time, he felt a revolutionary urge in the room (07:50) and encourages everyone to reconnect with it and embrace it (14:28). Born on the 11th of September 1970 in Franco’s Spain, he tightly links these early years to his sensitivity to any sign of state fascism, and feels that the current French government slips towards it more often than not (24:00). Since childhood, he implements strategies to avoid gendered injunctions (29:00), a daily exercise in political plasticity that he still practises everyday (35:55). After a PhD in philosophy, he writes several books exploring the concept of gender. The last one published, “I Am a Monster, Talking to You”, allows him to speak from this monstrosity that the heteropatriarchal and racist system has pinned on him and all bodies considered as “other”. Being at the center of the trans body experience, the use of the “I” is key in his writing (40:04). According to him, it is the only way to escape the presumed universality of Western philosophy. Situated writing is central to overcome the system’s barriers (45:15). He yearns for the end of the sexual differentiation regime (59:28) and calls for collective imagination to find a way out of it. His joy and optimism in the advent of the revolution are infectious and his next seminar will be available this fall (01:05:21).

Executive producer: Nouvelles Écoutes

Production and signature tune: Aurore Meyer-Mahieu

Translation: Lucie Plescoff

English voice-over: Raphy Wofsy

Production assistant: Gaïa Marty

Recording: Laurie Galligani

Mixing: Marion Emerit