Paul B. Preciado, Testo tossico. Sesso, droghe e biopolitiche nell’era farmacopornografica, 2015

One’s own body as a field of experimentation and reflection is the philosophical premise of Paul B. Preciado, which is given substance in one of the most daring and radical texts in contemporary philosophy. ‘Toxic Text’ was published in Spain in 2008, then in France and America. The Italian edition builds on these three editions with updates and modifications. ‘Toxic Text’ stems from Paul B. Preciado’s desire to self-administer testosterone outside the medical-legal protocol of sex change. The account of this voluntary intoxication is interwoven with and innervated by the theoretical and political analysis of what Preciado calls the ‘pharmacopornographic regime’ established during the 20th century, describing the biomolecular (drug) and semiotic-technological (pornographic) management processes of production of sexual subjectivity. This process of normalisation has extended to the production and regulation of gender, permanently changing the way we perceive certain fundamental nodes of human identity: sex, gender, sexuality, race. In his eloquent analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows that synthetic hormones, since their discovery in the 1950s, have fundamentally changed the formulation and construction of identities and that the pharmaceutical and pornographic industries make business out of creating desire.