ABSTRACT
A text is an object. The text fills the reader with fantasies about the author – a figure, Barthes continues, who is “lost in the midst of a text” but is neither a representation nor a projection. This chapter is about: the vocabulary, references, readability, etc., of the book Testo Junkie and the figure who is constructed in the book as “I,” but who neither represents Paul Beatriz Preciado as a person nor exists as sheer projection of oneself as a reader. This figure emerges in the process of writing and reading, into which numerous other texts and images are included. One could also say: “the author is a materialization”. Yet Preciado’s text itself is a material object, a theory book that is dirty in every respect, even in its form. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era is the protocol of a self-experiment with testosterone, a discourse history of hormones, and a postporno.
