AN APARTMENT ON URANUS: CHRONICLES OF THE CROSSING
Foreword by Virginie Despentes
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
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. An Apartment on Uranus is a bold, transgressive, and necessary book.
“Paul Preciado has the magic ability to fire off imperatives that don't feel bossy, but rather incite us to join him in whatever crackling energy, urgent curiosity, and dynamic nomadism is flowing through him. Reading these chronological missives offers the real pleasure of Preciado's company in time, and inspires us not just to stay with our trouble, but to greet it with unstoppable speech, complex solidarity, glitter, and defiance.”
—Maggie Nelson
“Paul B. Preciado's New Novel Longs for a World that May Never Come. An Apartment on Uranus is a book about horizons, possibilities, love, desire and alternate spaces of gender-dwelling, written in a time, as the foreword puts it, ‘that has not yet arrived.’”
—FRIEZE
“An important philosopher-theorist of gender and sexual politics for more than two decades now, Preciado is an electrifying writer: capable of packaging damning analysis, utopian vision, and flamboyant drama into one fell swoop.”
—4Columns
“Preciado engages complex ideas from a number of ancient and modern-day philosophers and theorists, which might challenge the uninitiated, but the dreamlike quality of the work is sure to resonate with readers of the great French writers Jean Genet and Albert Camus. Highly recommended.
—Library Journal
Paperback, 264 pp.
Published January 28, 2020